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Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

I'm back.... just kidding

Here are two more relevent articles on energy solutions.

climateprogress.org/20.../

climateprogress.org/20.../

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

Other things to consider.

One of the issues with natural gas, that Joseph Romm pointed out in one of his articles, is that it's about 50% more efficient to burn NG in power plants than in cars. Whether this is outweighed by the ability to have, at least, a transitional transportation fuel for the near and intermediate term is a good question. The argument that it also helps with energy independence, compared with oil, is another factor in NG's favor.


T Boone Pickens was talking about using NG in cars instead of in power plants. It makes much more sense to phase out coal plants, which are much dirtier, and let the gas plants run at least for the foreseeable future. Even aggressive energy transition plans like the Google plan, or the Repower America plan, allow for letting NG plants run while other cleaner renewable sources are developed.

Also, Pickens wanted to replace gas plants with wind farms. The wind farms are a good idea, but not for replacing gas plants. Gas can produce power immediately on demand, something even coal or nuclear can't do, as others here noted.

We need to start turning gas fired plants into cogeneration plants. The heat that goes up the stack is an enormous waste of energy.

Gas plants can also be converted to fuel cell plants or fuel cells can augment the burning of the gas. Fuel Cell Technology (FCEL) does this.
The same fuel cells can operate on methane.
And the fuel cells are combined heat and power.
Fuel cells have much less emissions than burning the same fuel.

Some of the problems with new nuclear is that it will be expensive compared with solar or wind and will take much longer to build. Estimates for electricity from new nuclear plants are twice as much as solar and wind will be in ten years. Wind is already half the price. S0lar CSP will be half the price in ten years. So will PV solar.
And all three can be built two to three times faster than nuclear. While I don't know a lot about nuclear tech, what sounds most promising to me is thorium based nuclear. But again, it is decades away from commercialization.
It takes a decade, at minimum, to get a nuclear plant built. New nuclear technology is more likely a mid term solution, not something we should throw money at the commercialization of now. Research and eventual pilot plants sure.

My main opposition to nuclear is that it's a stepping stone to nuclear weapons. Think Iran. Now imagine thousands of more nuclear plants all over the world in many more countries than now. Nuclear fuel and waste would be spread worldwide on a massive scale. They would be much more accessable to terrorists and rogue nations.
The guy in Maine who got caught trying to build a radioactive dirty bomb yesterday is another example, and he was stockpiling thorium, which we're told is safe. Ok, I guess you can't build a real nuclear bomb with it. This individual case may not be related to the existence of nuclear power plants but that doesn't mean future attempts won't be.

Nuclear plants are dependent on enormous quantities of cooling water, which may not be so available in the future, with the exception of plants built on the seashore.

France which is held up as the example of what can be done with nuclear energy has enormous nuclear waste storage problems and has had repeated leaks and accidents. Areva, their nuclear authority, has big problems in Africa where they mine uranium.

www.beyondnuclear.org/...

www.everythingnuclear....

"France's decision to reprocess reactor fuel has contaminated the seas as far as the Artic Circle and may have led to leukemia clusters near the reprocessing plant. Its decision to try breeder reactors was an expensive failure. Its plutonium fuel program has not reduced its surplus stockpile of plutonium which is calculated at greater than 80 metric tons sitting in tens of thousands of vulnerable containers and with no disposal option. France has no radioactive waste repository."

"In the summer of 2008, France experienced a cascade of accidents at its nuclear facilities. While leaks and spills, including uranium that contaminated groundwater, caused a ban on drinking and bathing and local vintners to change the labels on their bottles, Areva downplayed the gravity of the releases. But the black summer of radioactive leaks and spills shed doubt on the nuclear industry's - and in particular Areva's - ability to uphold fundamental safety standards according to an article in the International Herald Tribune."

"Read here about Areva's 40-year uranium mining track record in the Niger and support the collective"Areva Shall Not Make the Law in Niger" of which Beyond Nuclear is a member."
www.beyondnuclear.org/...


We import 90% of our uranium and have signed up to have Russia supply 20% of our future needs.

I'm sure nuclear will be part of the energy mix but is not the silver bullet many imagine. We were promised electricity too cheap to meter about 50 years ago. After 50 years and about $500 billion in subsidies it has failed to make good on that promise. And now it will be among the most expensive sources of energy. And it isn't as green as the renewables. In fact, it only has low emissions at the final step, when the fuel rods are used in the reactor. Everything up to that point has high emissions, plus the negative effects of mining and milling uranium with it's radioactive tailings.

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

Wind has the lowest carbon footprint and land footprint. It is also quick to build and inexpensive. In the U.S. wind energy increased by 8.3 GW last year, or a 50% increase year to year. That's the equivalent in kilowatt hours per year to 3 nuclear reactors of average 1 GW size, or 5-6 coal plants of average 600 MW size. Jobs from wind increased 70% to 85,000 last year.

"Wind power's ecological footprint is so small — a million times smaller than ethanol's — that if all the cars driven in the United States were battery-electric, they could be fueled by wind turbines whose total land footprint, not counting spacing in between, takes up less than 1.2 square miles, Stanford University environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson found."

[wind turbines only use about 2 1/2% of the land where they are sited, allowing them to coexist with agriculture]

"To fuel the same number of battery-electric vehicles with cellulose ethanol would require an amount of land equivalent to eight Californias – literally a million times more land and equivalent to the amount of land harvested in the U.S. in 2003."

solveclimate.com/blog/...

As for the fears of government intrusion and massive efforts to solve the global warming problem, which is what is behind much of the denier opposition, you might want to consider the following ideas presented by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress.org. Romm is a physicist who did his doctorate on the physical oceanography of the Greenland sea and is a former assistant secretary of energy.

".....Well, if we follow the talk-much do-little climate strategy of conservatives, then we are all but certain to end up at 1000 ppm by century’s end, and that would be economically ruinous and socially destructive ."

"If you hate government intrusion into people’s lives, you’d better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and depravation."

"Here is where the conservatives have it backwards. The solution to global warming — the strategy needed to avoid 450 ppm — does not require rationing food or energy. It primarily requires a government-led strategy to aggressively deploy clean energy technologies . That strategy preserves the energy abundance that has made modern civilization possible."

"But if we hold off today on government action that focuses for several decades on preventing catastrophe, we will almost guarantee the need for extreme and intrusive government action in the post-2030 era, perhaps lasting centuries. Only Big Government–which conservatives say they don’t want–can relocate millions of citizens, build massive levees, ration crucial resources like water and arable land, mandate harsh and rapid reductions in certain kinds of energy–all of which will be inevitable if we don’t act now."

"The scarcity and deprivation of 1000 ppm could last for hundreds of years. Conservatives can’t stop 1000 ppm by their anti-science anti-government rhetoric. But they can prevent progressives and moderates from stopping 1000 ppm by blocking aggressive climate legislation. How ironic — and tragic — it would be if conservates’ short-term quest to avoid a bigger government led to a permamently huge government."

He's being conservative. 1000 ppm would most likely end civilization and possibly the human species.
It would guarantee that all the ice in the world melts, which would mean sea levels 250 feet higher than now. And that's only one of the problems it would create. More than half the species on earth would be extinct, the ocean would be dead, and a third of the world would be in a drought for 1000 years. Temperatures in the American heartland would be 10-15 F hotter than now. One sixth of the world population would have no fresh water because there would be no snowpack or glaciers that they now depend on.
Food production would cease to exist over much of the globe. An enormous amount of food is grown in coastal areas that would be impacted by rising sea levels.

And his 450 ppm is probably too high. Many climate scientists now think it is imperative that we bring CO2 concentrations below 350 ppm by mid century. Romm uses the higher figure, mostly because he doesn't think we have the political will do do more. Based on the poll I mentioned in my previous post, he's right.

Here's an article at Scientific American on the conservative nature of the IPCC

www.sciam.com/article....

And more on the prospects for renewables/verses coal.
climateprogress.org/20.../

Romm is very knowledgable in terms of climate science as well as energy. He's a prolific writer at Climate Progress, and while you might not agree with everything he says, he has a lot of valuable insights in regard to the problems and solutions.

Of course this assumes one is interested in real science and analysis and cares enough to be informed.

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

The dumbing down of America never ceases to amaze me. Judging by the responses here, I agree with the author. People are so blinded by their prejudices and political ideology that they have completely lost the ability to think.
On global warming, a recent poll of scientists found that 80% of scientists in general agree with the AGW theory, and 97% of active climate scientists agree. But a poll of Americans found that over 75% of republicans think they are smarter than the world scientific community, and what's worse they actually believe the absurd conspiracy theories concocted by the denier propaganda campaign. And they call the scientists alarmist! Even among Democrats only 59% think the theory is correct.

That means less than half of Americans agree with the scientists. Ok, how many believe the theory of gravity? According to some of these luddites, Al Gore dreamed up the whole thing. My God. I'm sure the 50,000 members of the AGU and every major scientific organization in the world, and the earth science faculty of every major university in the world are all just following Al Gore's lead.

People aren't keeping up with the science, which gets stronger every day. Climate models that were questioned ten years ago have gotten more and more accurate and in fact are proving to have been far too conservative. Without exception, every new observation or bit of scientific data shows that the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report which came out just two years ago, is proving to be far too conservative. Estimates for global temperature increase by 2100 have doubled from those estimates, based on more recent data and observations.

Those are the facts. Opinions are worthless.

Most deniers, are not what science calls skeptics, who they give a bad name. When you repeat every skeptic argument which has ever been thought of, which is typical strategy in denier land, even though they often contradict each other, you are not dealing with reality. Most of these arguments were disproven 10-20 years ago. No matter how many times scientists show that they have been disproven, deniers bring them up over and over again, hundreds if not thousands of times a day on the internet as if they were ALL true. They have become urban legends believed religiously by some. That is scientific skepticism?
Hardly.

Actually they have all been discredited in the scientific literature but deniers assume they are all true. just amazing.

The most popular myth currently, is that we are now cooling. This is another urban legend with absolutely no scientific foundation. Every bit of data says it is wrong, but deniers repeat it endlessly. Then they make up another phony argument that says scientists changed the name from global warming to climate change because the warming has stopped. Scientists actually have been using the two terms interchangably since the mid 70s. And the IPCC or (Intergovernmental Panel on CLIMATE CHANGE)
was named in 1988, twenty years ago. Somehow they missed these small details in their headlong rush into stupidity.

If you want to actually know something about climate change, rather than just cling to your false and politically motivated assumptions, then I recommend going to the websites of actual climate scientists. You could start with

www.realclimate.org

www.skepticalscience.c.../

www.logicalscience.com/

gristmill.grist.org/sk...

environment.newscienti...

greenfyre.wordpress.co.../

scienceblogs.com/delto.../

tamino.wordpress.com/

Unless of course you want to stay comfortably in your fairy land world of opinions and prejudices.

If a skeptic mentions Al Gore, you can be sure they don't have a clue what they are talking about. These are ad hominem attacks on the messenger, and have absolutely nothing to do with scientific skepticism. It's the kind of argument someone makes, who has nothing else to go on.

Others offer factually unsupported statements about how alternative energy can't do the job. More disinformation. Do your homework. These are largely empty talking points that you repeat because they fit your political ideology and prejudices about environmentalists.

We can build hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind in the next two decades. No fuel ever, to pay for, mine, transport, store, refine, prospect for, burn, clean up the mess from, or fight wars over. In ten years, all forms of solar will be competitive with fossil fuels, and wind already is.
In five years PV solar will be directly competitive, or at grid parity, over 40% of the country.
In ten years it will be there nationwide.
Same is true for solar thermal.

Technology may solve the problem of how to produce hydrogen on a large scale, in an economically and environmentally sound way.
In the meantime we can use the tools we have to transition to cleaner energy.

I recommend the new book "The Carbon Age"
by Eric Roston. It puts what we are doing with fossil fuels in the larger perspective of the history of the earth and it's atmosphere and lifeforms, and the delicate balance of the carbon cycle that makes life as we know it possible. Read it, and then come back here and explain how global warming is just a natural cycle.