Okay energy experts - what's the answer?

I've visited this discussion forum for, I don't know, maybe a year or more (that means roughly two dozen times), and I have read a lot of ideas posted by optimistic but apparently ignorant people who are trying to get on board with ways to use less energy and save the planet. I have also read replies to those threads by the "energy experts" - those who are clearly more knowledgeable than most about energy on this board (and I'm not throwing quotes in there to be a jerk or anything) - and the replies are usually pessimistic, probably because the replies are realistic and the fact is this whole energy problem we're dealing with is ugly and pessimistic by nature.

Anyway, I'm as ignorant as anyone on this stuff. About the only thing I know is I'm in the process of destroying the planet right now by using this computer and driving a regular gasoline car in rush hour traffic all week long, but I changed all my lightbulbs to fluorescents, so I pat myself on the back a little, I suppose. But if the self congratulation I am doing after buying all these lightbulbs and trying to minimize or combine trips in the car, turn the thermostat down, etc. is making as much difference as bringing a bucket of sand to the beach, then what's the answer?

Here's what I've learned so far: Wind won't work and solar won't work. Ethanol from corn is terribly inefficient. Coal is a big polluter. And we can't keep using oil (or can we?).

Which solution to the energy demands of the world will work? What is the proper balance of consumption of energy per person (compared to what we use now) and what is the best source? Aside from turning off the heat in the winter and walking to work (which is about 20 miles one way), what else can I do to move toward the solution? And what should we, the laypersons who aspire to be conscientious energy consumers, get behind with our support to solve the energy crisis we face?

First, let me say that I'm hardly an "energy expert." I'm an ecologist by training. Nonetheless, everything I've learned about the topic of human energy consumption leads me to believe that we have benefited enormously from an easily available, concentrated energy source in fossil fuels that cannot be replaced by any currently available alternatives, not by an order of magnitude or more. At present there is no replacement source. There are alternatives that might slightly slow the decline in available stored energy, but none that can replace fossil fuels.

I don't think there really is an answer to this problem.

Probably about 5 billion too many. Getting the numbers down is going to be an incredibly painful process.

Denmark gets 20 percent of its power from wind, Spain is
close behind.
It's currently the lowest cost source of new installed
capacity in the US, some may quibble a close second to gas
turbines, but only if you can predict the price of gas..

The overwhelmingly important action that you have already taken
is to change out your bulbs. 22 percent of US energy is used
in household, industrial and municipal lighting, and these
bulbs can save 50 to 90 percent of that, potentially
avoiding the need for 120 new power plants.

Biofuels are currently in their 1.0 iteration.
Phase 2.0 has already begun (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/ethanol.html)
with the introduction of
closed cycle integrated ethanol producing feedlots,
such as the new one in Mead, Nebraska, Cow poop -->methane-->
process heat-->corn fermentation-->ethanol + corn leftovers-->
cattle feed-->cow poop-->

for the longer term liquid fuels, think algae,
thousands of times as productive per acre.

advise you listen to someone with a real track record in
predicting energy futures, Amory Lovins, here in a BBC interview.
you'll feel better.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4989662.stm

also, read this
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid1237.php

household electricity, per kilowatt-hour, converted to USD
US, .095
Denmark, .295

not sure how they managed that,
most other countries would go bankrupt with those rates

go here if you don't believe me

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

the middle class and poor already are struggling

My home has been powered by the sun for 5 years with a grid tie, simple photovaltaic system. When I produce excess, it goes to my neighbors, when the sun does not shine, I rely on my large negative bill.

I'm wondering how long it took for the initial investment to pay off. May I inquire?

It will take the rest of my life in electric bills. It added more than 10,000 to the value of my home. I did it to invest in the future of the Earth.

the money back.

"I did it to invest in the future of the Earth."

I know, I was just wondering about the economic benefits also. It helps if we can sell this technology to the American people by telling them the ecological benefits and the economic ones.

There is no single answer to the energy problems we face. Every potential future energy source is, on it's own, either insufficent to meet demands, or polluting, or as yet just a gleem in researchers or science fiction authors eyes.

Given that, I see 2 options:

1. We combine a large scale program of energy use reduction with multipronged new energy source development. By multipronged I mean we develop solar and wind and geothermal and biofuels (ethanol yes, but bio-diesel makes so much more sense,) and use nuclear and coal to cover the slack until the alternatives can meet demand.

or

2. We continue making believe that there is no problem, relying 95% on a lot of coal and a little nuclear, allow alternatives to continue being a fringe contributor until our supplies of coal and radioactives are depleted. At that time, our infrastructure collapses, we have massive die-off (billions of deaths) and eventually reach an agrarian society level population equilibrium, that is assuming we haven't destroyed even that chance by the continued pumping of GHG's into the environment.

Now, admittedly, Option 1 may just turn into option 2, should none of the alternatives pan out. But I'd rather give it a go, rather than just surrender to our own societal stupidity.

www.homepower.com

Supposing some grad student discovers the secret to the legendary "Mr. Fusion" next week; a fusion source that sits on a desktop and puts out 4-5 kw of electric power from tap water and no unwanted waste heat. We will still exceed or ecosystems carrying capacity relatively shortly and face unmitigated climate change. The human race must reduce our demands on the ecosphere.

Solar works if what you want is space and water heating and you are below the arctic circle. Solar can also be used also for cooling with a stirling engine or adsoption cooling system. Wind power is great where the wind blows enough to make it useful. Ultimately the best strategy will be to rebuild our houses, business and public buildings so that they use as little energy as possible. There are many experimental buildings out there with drastically reduced power usage.

As for industrial power needs. That will demand massive reductions in consumption and equally massive advances in recycling of materials. The concept of "trash" needs to be eliminated. Everything needs to be redesigned so that each consumer item provides the feedstock for something else when it's current incarnation and functionality are no longer viable. Shoes would be a good example. Good shoes cost more but last 3-4x as long as cheap shoes; they can also be resoled and repaired by a skilled craftsman. Instead we all buy cheap shoes and the people who make them live in poverty.

Of course we can all sit around and watch the Die-Off on CNN and shake our heads until it's our turn.

I'm partially optimistic and partially pessimistic. When it comes to stationary energy, we're good; we just have to start using the other technologies that we can be using. When it comes to liquid fuels, however, I don't see anyway out of our problems.

Wind certainly works, especially offshore, and it's cost competitive. Solar helps a lot, too. Its cost is coming down as well. If people buy solar panels for their houses, it's an investments that will pay off in a few years. We can start to tap tidal power, essentially the same technology as wind turbines but with tons of potential. If we can find a way to use geothermal more easily, that would be the holy grail, because it's the one renewable technology that does not require storage, which is really the only problem with the other ones I just mentioned. If all else fails, we can still use nuclear, which sucks because there are a lot of ecological problems with it, but it does NOT contribute to global warming and we have fissionable material for hundreds of years of increasing energy use. In the real long run, we can look at solar panels in outer space that beam down energy via electromagnetic radiation, which would be very efficient and would not require storage. Also, there are possibilities to nuclear fusion. So, as far as stationary energy, we're good.

Now, our real problem is in liquid fuels. Peak oil is really not an energy crisis, but a liquid fuels crisis. That is a major problem. I just don't see anyway we can replace oil as a liquid fuel.

It is the ultimate answer. And you can guess what one of the first things Newt Gingrich & Co. did back when they took over Congress in the '90s.

Yup, they dragged federal money for nuclear fusion research out behind the woodshed and shot it deader than King Tut. Another thing the Europeans or Japanese will develop first, up there with stem-cell research.

So what is the current solution?

Well, one answer is wind-powered ethanol plants. Ethanol plants currently burn either natural gas or coal to distill the alcohol formed by the fermentation process. Which, of course, releases greenhouse gases. However, if ethanol plants were build in windy states like North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and the like, the plants could have a couple of dedicated wind turbines and use the electricity generated by the turbines to boil off the alcohol with high-powered heating elements. This would export the wind energy of the prairie in liquid form. While it would be more pollution-controlling to simply directly replace coal-fired power plants, such an electrical grid does not exist in these windy, rural states, and building one to export the power to more populated areas would be very expensive. Plus, it directly reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

In other places where wind is plentiful, the wind turbine power should be utilized whenever possible instead of the older coal-fired plants. Older plants should only be fired up when demand is high and the wind is light. Last to turn on, first to turn off.

In places where there is a lot of wave action, like on the East and West coasts, the Gulf Coast, and the shores of the Great Lakes, wave-action generators can be used, entire fields of them at anchor, bobbing up and down and creating energy. There are some technical problems that might make it expensive at first to start, mostly because the power output of each generator would have to sycronized to a common standard, but mass production of such systems will drive down costs.

Solar power can also be used, in two ways: solar cells and focused mirrors. In the former, roof-mounted solar cells can add to the power system, reducing the drain on the power grid. In the latter, vast arrays of computer-controlled mirrors focus their solar energy on a single point, superheating water into steam to drive a turbine, which in turn operates a generator that makes electricity. This would obviously only work during the daytime, but while it was operating would make emission-free power.

If the federal or state governments make enough guarenteed loans and other regulatory changes, we could have a lot of domestic-rooftop solar panels kicking around. Thom Hartmann (Air America Radio) described how the Germans did it a few years ago. It was, IIRC, a guaranteed long-term loan program to the homeowner combined with a law stating that any power that flowed to the grid from your solar-cell array was bought by the power company at nine times the rate they sell it at for a set number of years. So, if, while you were work and your house was turned off, your solar array pumped a few kilowatts into the grid, you got money on your bill for it. If you array was big enough, your power bill could be virtually zero, or possibly negative, because for every kilowatt-hour you pumped into the grid you could draw out 9 kWh before you started owing money.

However, the building of more power plants that burn fuels is both necessary and inevitable. What should be done is make no more natural-gas-buring power plants, as most of that is imported from foreign countries, but instead only licence clean-coal technology, also called coal gasification. They emit very little besides carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide is pure enough to be captured and liquified for commercial use, such as welding gases, as aerosol propellents, and carbonated beverages.

Another possibility is of storing the carbon dioxide underground, sealed up in played-out oil fields or old mine shafts. A third possibility is converting the carbon dioxide into some form of carbonate solid, like limestone.

The problem we are going to have is the increase of electric vehicles over the next couple of decades. While these will reduce emissions overall, it will strain the electric grid somewhat. Much of this can be mitigated by having your home charger for your electric car on a timer, so that it only starts charging after 7pm or so, after peak power consumption passes, but the power plants will have to run at full capacity 24/7, powering businesses in the day, homes in the evening, and recharging cars at night.

If we ever get our priorities straight, we would build a space elevator. Not only could we launch nuclear and other toxic waste into the Sun, but we could cheaply and quickly build massive arrays of solar cells in orbit and beam that power to a collection grid.

Once we have nuclear fusion, we are good to go. It's fuel is filtered from everyday water, and is no more dangerous to store than propane. It's only pollution is helium. And once we have it, not only can we power the entire electrical grid off of it, we can also recharge our electric cars AND split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This would allow us to go over to a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered transportation system. With no batteries to recharge and the only emission water vapor, a fuel-cell car has all the advantages of a battery-powered car with the quick-refueling capacity of a conventional automobile and thus unlimited range.

Is making hydrogen from water efficient? No, not really. But with ultraclean and plentiful nuclear fusion power, it no longer matters.

and we can choose whether to hit the wall going 80 mph or hit the wall going 10 mph.

There's no panacea. I think every country and even every state will have to figure out their own way on this. California has huge resources, with solar, tidal, wind, biomass, geothermal, and all these other technologies here for us to use.

Conservation works and helps, but a lot of people are ignorant and/or lazy about how to conserve energy. The power companies are doing a pretty good job of educating people, but there's a lot more to be done.

I believe there is no solution or set of solutions that will preserve business as usual for any large fraction of humanity at this point. The scale of the problem we face is enormous, the technologies available to mitigate it are inadequate, and the industrial civilization we depend on for survival has become incredibly brittle. I believe a decline in population and the overall level of civilization is now unavoidable.

There will be enough energy of various kinds available in some places during and after the decline to keep pockets of civilization running. They will of necessity be relatively disconnected pockets, though. The emerging theories of complex adaptive systems say that as such systems grow they gain in integration, efficiency and brittleness. That brittleness plus the diminishing marginal return on complexity that Tainter described conspire with resource depletion to eventually push all such systems into a decline. In the decline they lose the qualities of integration, efficiency and brittleness in favour of inefficiency, modularity and resilience. Such a transformation will permit some portion of humanity to survive, along with some portion of civilization, but I don't think the fraction will be very large. Our overshoot has damaged the resource base enough that the inefficient extraction methods that will be achievable following a decline will not be able to supply large numbers of people in the future.

Garrett Hardin says that not every problem has a technical solution. I agree with him, and think we are facing such a crisis now. By all means take prudent personal measures, as they will maximize your chances of being one of those who makes it through. But don't expect such measures to have a major impact on the trajectory of humanity at large.

The seeming ecological situation is due to material dependance, excess, overconsumption and lack of care and consideration. As a Christian the solution always starts and revolves around a full and complete understanding of God and Man. Less materiality, more spirituality.(see www.spirituality.com) Simplified lives are required which share out the abundant resources of the Earth.
Initially, for example, lets look at Solar power, it is abundant, concentrated solar power could easily supply vast amounts of our requirements at low cost, making it available to poorer developing countries, the German government have invested heavily in a project in the Sahara Desert which could provide almost all the electricity requirements of Europe and North Africa, for peanuts! Lets lobby our governments to follow suite and adopt other alternative energies, which are free and carbon neutral.
Another example is what we eat. Stop eating meat, the Earth has enough resources to feed us all if we don't eat meat, it's cruel, is not needed, wastes resources and creates other greenhouse gases needlessly. We need to set pesonal examples and lobby for change.
We need to make big business change it's wrong activity by changing the way we spend our money, this will lead to changes.
I think the changes you have made are a great start, low energy bulbs make a difference, so does thoughtful use of the car. We can all take further steps, even with limited resources there are often government assistance available in the country in which you live.
But most importantly we need to change our thinking from not what we can take from but what we can give to, enjoying this beatiful world and adopting the attitude of guardians and preservers.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003861.html

...though I would say one critical factor is getting enough capital to those companies seeking to apply mass manufacturing cost reduction strategies to home energy products, be they conservation or renewable. Most of the solutions would be great but for being priced out of the reach of many who are otherwise willing.

A few years ago, in the mail-order catalog Seeds of Change, Peter
Bahouth provided an ecological accounting of the typical North
American supermarket-bought tomato. Here's an abbreviated version:
The tomato was grown in Mexico from a hybrid seed patented by a
genetic-engineering firm. The farm was fumigated with methyl-
bromide, one of the most ozone-depleting chemicals in existence, the
doused with toxic pesticides; the toxic byproducts of manufacturing
the pesticide ended up in the world's largest toxic waste dump, in
Alabama. The tomato was packaged in a plastic tray covered with
plastic wrap, and placed on a cardboard box. The plastic was
manufactured with chlorine, a process that produces extremely toxic
byproducts, in Point Comfort, Texas, while the cardboard originated
in an old-growth forest in British Columbia, was manufactured in the
Great Lakes, and was then shipped to the Mexican farm. The entire
process was fueled by oil from the Gulf of Campeche, Mexico. The
packed tomatoes were artificially ripened through the application of
ethylene, then transported in refrigerated trucks cooled by ozone-
depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons to consumers throughout North
America. At several points in the process, workers and nearby
residents risked potentially harmful health effects through exposure
to various toxins. And needless to say, a tomato thus produced
doesn't offer much in the way of flavor, especially when compared to
a mouth-watering `Brandywine' tomato grown organically in the
backyard."

can in your own life, and work on convincing others to do so. Vote for politicians who GET IT with respect to the environmental issues we face.

Buy carbon offsets.

Evaluate everything you buy and do through the prism of environmentalism. Weigh the true costs of your actions.

with the electrical output of more than twenty five 1000 MW nuclear power plants.

That's a lot of "don't work"...

Last year global installations of PV systems alone were >1400 MW - with 837 MW installed in Germany alone.

That's a lot more "don't work"...

Global wind and PV production/installations are growing by 32% and 34%, respectively.

US solar thermal shipments in 2005 were >16 million square feet (those are the units the DOE uses) and grew by 25% compared to 2004. Germany (which reports solar hat water capacity in MW) installed 1050 MW of solar thermal capacity in 2006.

That's a lot of "don't work" too.

Claims that "wind and solar don't work" are indeed based on ignorance.

are made in the context of the world's primary energy consumption. That 74 GW for wind is nameplate capacity, so should be discounted by about 2/3 for actual production - about 25 GW of actual contribution. That comes out to about 200,000 gWh/yr. The world's primary energy consumption is around 115,000,000 gWh/yr, so wind makes up 0.2% of our primary energy. Even a 30%/yr increase, assuming that rate can be maintained for an extended period of time will not come close to replacing the global energy losses we are about to see due to oil depletion.

Wind and solar do work, but they're far from being a general humanity-saving solution. While they will never be able to maintain the level of social complexity we have come to depend on from oil, they are essential technologies to keep the civilization lifeboats going in its absence.

and the only hope for humanity.

period

The Greenpeace line of taking 50 years to tackle half the problem with renewables is suicide, and we'll take a million species with us.

tax on jet fuel for international flight, zero,not a penny.
for US domestic blight, jet fuel tax is four cents a gallon
four cents.

that effective subsidy - by tax avoidance,

encourages frivolous flying, probably 90 percent unneeded.

and on the other end, results in lower end jobs like...
cooks, cab drivers, maids, etc.

for the record, there is nothing wrong with those jobs,
those people work hard for their money.

I just don't want the whole world to turn
into Disneyworld.