Every now and then I take the time to put pen to paper and calculate for myself what problems look like. Today lets take a look at what it would take to replace a coal fired power plant. China has been putting new coal fired plants on line like crazy, and in the US talking heads like to promote a green solution... whatever that is. Going "green" has a lot of knock on effects.
So let's just take this example. Brandon Shores is a coal fired power plant in Maryland. It will be decommissioned in a couple of years leaving a 1370 mW deficit in power supplied to the grid. If we went green on the replacement and used let us say an average 200W solar panel... it would take 1370000000 / 200 or 6,850,000 of these panels to replace it - during a sunny day. Oopsie.
A footnote on the energy sink called PV. Read carefully and consider the end to end creation to disposal analysis. LOL, real world data suggests a useful life far shorter than OEMs suggest. If you give a weasel room to twist and bend, the weasel will wiggle out every time. IE partial truths and outright lies in the absence of real data can tell you a very different story from reality. Meh, what else is new? Use your big brain and you can figure it out. Just stay focused on real data not slick pitches. PV can, if thoughtfully applied, extend the decline. It cannot replace oil, gas or coal.
After the sun sets, well you'd have to go to the very resource dense finite life battery bank - which would be the size of a small farm. If we used wind turbines we would need 456 3mW turbines to do the job and hope the wind blows. Or just like night time on the solar array, not much happening.
So just one, plant - and not a large plant - is really hard to replace with the technologies we know and understand.
My point is, the green transition as envisioned and promoted today is not possible. Sorry, I hope something else comes along but there really is no substitution. Green is kind of baloney. So is counting CO2 - a second order problem. Unless of course CO2 is a euphemism for fossil fuel conservation. In which case it appears that several geopolitical boundaries have decided to play this game in very different ways. We have global energy depletion, a first order problem, in our future and we have no realistic plan or solution and a lot of ideologies marching on as business as usual. That will eventually bring us headlong into conflict for what's left. Not tomorrow, but this current graduating cohort will hit this like a buzz saw. In 20 years - just one generation - the world will be a very different place.
But moving to micro grids could create jobs, drive economic stability and morph us away from utility companies into local decentralized solutions. A modern day REA. But sadly, that is not what politicians or bankers seem to be fascinated with at the moment.
Art Berman has a great explanation...
The other side of the coin on energy alternatives are facts like it takes 500,000 lbs of ore to make a single 1000 lb lithium ion battery pack for one car that has maybe a 15% utilization of it's energy application. A much more rational use of this limited strategy is to put batteries at sub stations along with connected wind and maybe cheap solar farms and evolve regional micro grids. Way better utilization of finite resources and although replacing residential demand with alternatives isn't a long term solution it's a great fossil fuel life extender. Might even be energy neutral. Mining for example, creates a total value of the mineral matter in the world that has increased from 465 billion USD in 2008 to 845 billion USD in 2011 (i.e. grown by 45.55%). The minerals extracted from mines take an important part in the growth of GDP and hence the economy of different countries. This ain't free. Over 471.48 GJ are consumed to transport the minerals. excluding lithium the new kid on the block. Why rip up the planet to make millions of batteries to make EV's? Could you even do it? NO, even copper supplies are not scalable for any of this at this point. Not to mention the electrical phase loads effects on the shortened fatigue life of current transformers and sub station designs. Knock on stuff that is huge. Yes, the exact numbers of any resource can and usually are obfuscated. Yes people and countries lie about this stuff, investors and fund managers make claims that there are limitless resources (recycle) but nobody shows an energy balance that supports the business case. If it takes more energy to recycle than you recover you only slow the downward spiral - or ironically accelerate the depletion depending on the energy overhead. Nobody wants to discuss the fact that the Earth's known reserves of copper (for example) are now less than 1% pure. Have you noticed the price of copper wire these days? It takes more and more energy to crush, refine and smelt that ore to keep up with the voracious consumption of 8 billion people. (to be honest the top 5% of the economically wealthy countries consume a disproportionate amount) As any ore quality gets poorer in grade the energy required to do something with it rises in an asymptotic way. Eventually the growth game will end - this is a certainty. Physics doesn't care about hopes, ROIC, money in vs energy out or slick sales pitches and it will see to that. The core problem is that 8 billion people consume everything at an astounding rate that is simply not sustainable without a logical roadmap that strives to be energy neutral. Micro level solutions similar to a plant organism make a lot of sense. That might mean it's not going to be possible to support 20 million people in a giant city but rather a dispersal of population into a sustainable distribution like we had in the 1800's might be an outcome. Ooooh, boy what about all that real estate value? The dream of the corporate farm and the genetic modified patented seed? That's the stuff that keeps us from solving this epic problem in a timely manner. Not how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (second order stuff my friends). Arguments around that topic are a waste of precious time and take us to profitable for very few dead ends with dire consequences for all.
All of these problems get easier to solve with less people to worry about (read: consume), but solutions are doable even today with ethical, moral and unfettered logic and planning. IF we can get the politicians, lobbyists, and oligarchs out of the promoted solutions debate (some of which are not so ethical or moral), we can get on with testing and developing solutions that are demonstrated to work. To this regard I suggest patent law should be suspended for all factors and technologies involved in the multitude of solutions that work. That ownership of energy resources be community co-ops, and that solutions that work be openly shared and published. Our first steps should be extension, then independence from the depleting fossil fuel feedstocks. Let alone halting eco-toxicity aka "climate change" which in my mind is not only industrial process waste, it is also for example, genetic seed manipulation and the plethora of pharmaceuticals and their waste stream as imparted on humans and the environment. Somehow the effects of reckless exploitation are now being connected to climate change. Go figure...
My 2 cents, tik, tik, tik
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