from the keep-doing-the-wrong-thing-until-it's-right dept.
IEEE Spectrum has an article on the necessary technologies for renewable energy to reverse climate change.
This article is particularly noteworthy, as it's written by Ross Koningstein and David Fork, two of the engineers on Google's RE<C, which ran from 2007 to 2011, and reviews some of the data they worked with and the conclusions they came to, which have interesting implications for the viability of renewable energy programs.
At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change.
However after reviewing the work done and the data available they come to some interesting conclusions:
Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change.
A good article with some hard numbers, and interesting conclusions for how to handle the realities of the energy market which essentially pushes for a change in the approach to renewable energy research.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:34AM
see all
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:24AM
In the submission, Tony said he was having problems with the markup and Slashcode. [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday November 20 2014, @02:43PM
[NOTE: I am an editor on this site, but was not involved with the original publication of this story.]
Yes, there is a known problem with character entity processing that is currently being worked on. Using the asterisk (*) here to represent an ampersand, it seems to manifest with the combination of previewing a story/comment along with *lt; or *gt; though it may also appear when using *quote; or *amp;
Side note: the slashcode (which SN is based on) was developed over time with numerous extensions and enhancements "bolted on" after initial development and deployment. I suspect that there never was a complete review of all the user-visible text-entry fields and how they propagate through the code and out into user-visible areas of the site. This review was performed to a large extent during the development and test of UTF-8 character support. Unfortunately, there are some other edge cases which slipped through. With that cleanup as a foundation, we are now trying to track down the remaining places were character translations go wrong.
I have managed to update the story to now show the formerly-mangled text. Please accept our apologies and know that we are working to get this fixed.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:35AM
Looks like the "<" signs in the quotations caused them to look truncated.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:46AM
1990 97% of climate "scientists" at a luxury holiday resort said man made global warming is real.
2014 100% of climate scientists say the temperature of the planet stopped warming 18 years ago.
I think we need to catch up with the emperical evidence and start counting how many cold records are broken this year in the US ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:09PM
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:48AM
The summary gives not a clue of what this whole post is about.
Surely the submitter could provide just a few hints as to what this story is about, and why anyone should follow those links.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:15AM
Seems like the inclusion of the less than sign in the body of the text has totally messed up the story, and truncated the quotes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:46AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:51AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:33AM
Annoyingly I spotted this, fixed it, and put a note in for the editors when doing the submission:
http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=4826 [soylentnews.org]
So the blame here is somewhere between Soy's article handling, and Google for picking an annoying as hell name :)
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:24AM
not they did.
(Score: 3, Informative) by buswolley on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:16AM
Cool article though
subicular junctures
(Score: 1, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:49AM
If you really believe in AGW theory there is only one answer. Forget the hippie crap and embrace the power of the atom. Alt energy might indeed replace dead dino eventually but it can't now and nobody really thinks it can do it soon enough to matter. We know nukes work, we know how to make them much safer than the old rusting deathtraps we are stuck with because of the enviros who seem to think that if they refuse new ones to be built the old ones will just go away. Fusion can work NOW and entirely eliminate the need for coal in a generation. It would seriously reduce NatGas use as well.
Hold a bakeoff and encourage a dozen or more innovative reactor designs. Evaluate the prototypes and pick a half dozen to start replicating. That way if there is an unexpected flaw in one of the designs it won't cripple energy production while they are taken offline and reworked.
If were were really serious we would be putting Apollo levels of funding into fusion, because once we have that the energy problem really is solved. That gets so much excess energy we can afford wild schemes to sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Instead we futz around with green energy schemes that go nowhere, government subsidies to cronies, we keep dreaming of vast new government boondoggles like Cap and Trade to aggrandize the State and redistribute wealth but do precious little to lower CO2 levels.
(Score: 1) by Gravis on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:34AM
If you really believe in AGW theory there is only one answer. Forget the hippie crap and embrace the power of the atom.
why not use our natural fusion reactor via solar panels with battery assist?
solar panels + battery has huge advantages.
Even if you want the grid for large complexes (e.g. apartment buildings) solar farms are still a good option.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tonyPick on Thursday November 20 2014, @01:12PM
why not use our natural fusion reactor via solar panels with battery assist?
Well, partly because you'll have to resurface a large chunk of the country (about a quarter) to support consumption - like most renewables the energy density of solar in terms of W/m^2 is actually low, so you wind up with a massive impact the instant you try and scale that up for general consumption: it might be a good idea, but it's still a big job.
See https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables [ted.com]
(or to paraphrase slightly - if you think wide-scale solar is viable without massive impact on the way your country works then you aren't pro-renewable, you're anti-math)
completely decentralized making it more reliable than the grid
Maybe. Unless it's cloudy for longer than the available battery capacity where you are, in which case you need the grid for baseload... And it's cloudy for several days at a time more often than the grid goes out... I suspect that would be an interesting number to run though to see how that works out (i.e. power area versus battery capacity versus independent run times for weather variations and how often that gives you blackouts or usage restrictions.)
doesn't have the "not in my backyard" issue of nuclear reactors and wind turbines
Except for the people who get to live near the battery manufacture/reconditioning works...
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:37PM
I don't think there's enough lithium in the world to build the battery capacity you're talking about.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:51PM
Batteries are NOT:
1.) Cheap to manufacture
2.) Low-impact to the environment to manufacture, especially including all the eco-damage from mining relatively rare elements
3.) Low cost to maintain, especially with the number of partial charge/discharge cycles you'd be talking about to maintain an electrical grid with constant power
4.) Low-impact to the environment to dispose of. Used batteries are full of nasty stuff, and recycling them is expensive in both money and energy terms.
Don't create one ecological disaster to prevent another - a battery network capable of powering the US (which from the numbers I've found uses around 100 TwH of energy a day) at night (when usage is less, but hardly zero) would require 20 TwH of battery capacity.
To put that in perspective, a Prius has a capacity of around 1.5 kWh, so we're talking 10-15 billion Priuses (Prii?) of battery capacity. And with an average battery useful lifetime of 10 years, that means replacing/recycling enough batteries to make at least a billion Prii (GigaPrii?) every year. That's a spicy meatball.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Thursday November 20 2014, @01:00PM
I have emailed the admins to notify them of the incorrect down-mod applied to your post. I disagree with you on several points, but that is irrelevant to the moderation - as I hope we (almost) all agree. (See also this [soylentnews.org].)
Anyway, what points do I disagree on?
(Score: 1) by jmorris on Friday November 21 2014, @07:00PM
I have emailed the admins to notify them of the incorrect down-mod applied to your post.
Thanks, but it is the price ya pay for being a heretic in the Church of AGW. Happened every time at 'the other place' too but never stopped me keeping the posting bonus for over ten years straight. It was when the admins got into the act that I had to leave. My fixed work IP is still ghostbanned and haven't logged into my old account in over a year.
"Fusion can work NOW" - I'm not convinced.
There are multiple research reactors at or close to positive. We are MUCH closer to the goal than WWII where a few Chromedomes like Einstein thought fission might be possible and saw the terrible possibilities and in a few years we solved obtaining fissile materials, creating new ones like Pu-239, solved the huge engineering problems of actually weaponizing the theory and finally deploying it into an actual war zone. How long did all that take? Apollo was how many years from the V-2 rocket?
In actual fact I had intended to say 'fission' in the first paragraph in connection to the line about our current rusting deathtraps. But I'll stick with what is there, sometime the fingers know better. :) I actually like it. Fusion could be producing electricity in commercial production in a couple of test facilities in a decade. IF we really went at it like the fate of the world depended upon it. That is the difference, our current pace is suited to scientists going at it to learn how it works, keep the funding levels up and maybe pick off a Nobel or two.
And like I intended to say, fission is well understood and modern reactors could be built pretty darned safe right NOW. Again, if we really believed the fate of the world was hanging in the balance we would be shooting to have 80% of the US grid powered by the atom within a decade and solving the problems of load variability that currently prohibit going to 100% and spreading safer and more controllable (from a weapons proliferation pov) to the whole world. Fission would hold everyone while the fusion comes online, gets productized and deployed.
"green energy schemes that go nowhere" - Doesn't seem to apply to Germany:
You have Google. Look up how much they pay for a KwH or a liter of gas/diesel. Reality check time, do you really think the U.S. consumer would put up with that? Would our few remaining productive industries? Look at Europe's economy tottering on the edge of oblivion and despair. Germans are almost holding their own despite the burdens... because well, Germans. But if you want to sell a diminished energy poor world be honest about it. Good luck with that.
As for Cap and Trade, yes I understand enough economics (have my Nook full of it, deep in the weeds on the topic currently) to know the externality problem is real. But if taking Trillions from the productive and sending it to third world dictator's Swiss accounts is the answer it was a really stupid question. The problem is while making emitters of CO2 pay some fee based on distributed harm might work on that side of the equation but where the money goes is supposed to remain unexamined by the 'stupid Americans' until they fall for it. Sorry, I knew about Grubering long before the practice had his name attached. I always look where the other hand is, never the one with the cards, I always assume that if their lips move they are lying or at minimum deceiving. With that attitude it didn't take long to figure out what the game really was.
Which brings this long post into a dead thread to a conclusion. The point isn't global warming. The 'believers' don't actually believe it either or they would act differently. If they really believed DOOM! was fast approaching they wouldn't be grubbing for a few dollars to fund dictators (to assuage their White Man's Guilt) and other pet programs. They wouldn't be preening over who is Greener than Thou. They would be undertaking desperate measures, they would be proposing Cap and Trade as the only way to raise the Sagans required to build nukes fast enough. They tell us the seas are rising fast... and buying huge beachfront mansions; you can call me a fool for believing their actions speak louder than their words but we will just have to disagree. I'm not a climatologist, nor do I play one on TV. But I am a student of politcs and public policy. I know politics when I see it and I see it and little actual science. Science doesn't give a damn about consensus but politics is based on it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:52PM
Fusion can work now? That's news to me. Other sources always mention something like 20 or 30 years.
But yes, I'm all for more money into fusion research. It's just that I don't expect miracles from that.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:14PM
If you really believe in AGW theory there is only one answer. Forget the hippie crap and embrace the power of the atom.
Well, we can do both.
It is an interesting example of humanity's basic inability to perform risk analysis, though. At worst a Nuke accident is a regional environmental disaster. Global warming could become a global environmental disaster. But that is future Homer's problem...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 21 2014, @02:06PM
"Believe" is not the best word. That word makes it sound like we are taking it on faith that Global Warming is real. No! Science does not take anything on faith. We come up with testable ideas, and test them if possible. I accept that Global Warming is testable, has been tested, and found to be real. The scientific evidence and conclusions show that we are indeed experiencing Global Warming, and that we are causing it.
Hippie crap? You think coal industry executives aren't even more full of crap?
And what's with this wild claim that fusion is the only answer? How narrow. There are so many ideas to explore. There are so many places we could be more efficient, without sacrificing anything. A lot of improvements would require changes that would actually be healthier for us. That's perhaps the craziest thing of all, that some of our current customs kill both ourselves and the environment.
What customs are these? How about this fanaticism about mowing the lawn? What for?! And, we use gas powered equipment to do it! You know what else can mow lawns? Goats! Then there's artificial lighting. We've become such cowards, afraid of the dark, like little children. We should go to bed when it gets dark. Instead, we fire up the lights, and deprive ourselves of sleep. Very unhealthy. We drive around at night, and feel safer that street lights make it harder for criminals to conceal their crimes, overlooking that driving is the most dangerous activity we do on a regular basis, and that doing it at night makes it even more dangerous. Another thing, about which "smelly hippies" are regularly mocked, is that daily shower. It's now mandatory to take a shower every day to beat down your "offensive" body odor. Now we're learning that perhaps we've been excessive about the cleanliness. The regular washing kills off beneficial bacteria, some of which actually reduces that B. O. we fight so hard to smother with deodorants and perfumes that contain toxic chemicals. It may also be the root cause of the epidemic of deadly allergies. Takes a lot of energy too, heating up all that water. And speaking of heat, we're too rigid with our indoor climate. We've anointed a small range of temperature, 70F to 79F, or perhaps the even narrower 72F to 78F, as "comfortable", when it is both healthier and less energy intensive to accept a little wider seasonal swing. We're also far too conservative about automobiles, particularly the shape. They could be so much more aerodynamic, but we don't do it because so many of us think such shapes are "ugly", and refuse to acknowledge that's being purely subjective. Finally, there's food. We waste a third of the food we produce. We also make a lot of junk food. There's so much more to say on food, but I'll pass on the rest for now. In sum, we're full of irrational prejudices, and some of our relatively recent advances in technology have only succeeded in allowing us to assault fears and dislikes that were better left alone.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:57AM
Instead, I would say that the very difficulties that caused the RE < C effort to fail is another indication that renewable energy is not the economic slam dunk that it is often presented to be.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday November 20 2014, @07:24AM
another indication that renewable energy is not the economic slam dunk that it is often presented to be.
How many such indications do we need to actually infer that renewable energy is a bunch of hippy-dippy stuff backed by science?
Of course, your point about adaptation may be the more relevant position to take, since there seems to be total denial on the part of, well, some people. On the other hand, once we admit that global warming is in fact anthropogenic, if we heated her up, we can cool her down! One the the insights of the Hippy "Whole Earth Catalog" was by Stewart Brand, who said: "We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it." Or words to that effect.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:00AM
How many such indications do we need to actually infer that renewable energy is a bunch of hippy-dippy stuff backed by science?
What does it mean to be "backed by science"? How is renewable energy "backed by science" in a way that coal power isn't?
On the other hand, once we admit that global warming is in fact anthropogenic, if we heated her up, we can cool her down!
Well, I agree we can do that. But I disagree that we should. Global warming isn't the only consideration ever, else we could just kill off 90% of the world's population and solve the problem as quickly as it can be solved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:42AM
The insurance companies can see the damage done by ever-stronger storms and rising seas in some places yet they are still taking the payments from their customers and investing that in dirty energy.
Until -that- changes, I don't see things improving.
Was the point of the IEEE guys that, without any mitigation efforts by humans, the problem will cure itself?
...or that we're all going to Hell so just sit back and enjoy the ride?
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:58AM
Admitting that you pushed someone off a cliff, does not inherently mean that you are able to make them fly back up it, or that they will be in any kind of recognisable state if they do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:24PM
The notion that global warming, especially AGW, is in any way analogous to falling off a cliff is one of the arguments that make proponents seem crazy to outsiders. AGW is important, in that is shows human activity can, in fact, impact planet-scale atmospheres and ocean-scale bodies of water. If human activity can change the composition of the air, then we can change the composition of the air. It's taken, literally, hundreds of years to effect the tiny changes already made, and it will doubtless take scores or hundreds of years to revert (assuming you believe that reversion to 1700AD or earlier levels is "the right thing"). Planets change on an incredibly slow time scale.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:24PM
In a word: conservation.
Maxing out renewable energy doesn't immediately allow the ridiculously high levels of energy use we currently have to continue indefinitely. The solution to that is really simple: use less energy. And there are ways of doing that with existing technology that Americans in particular are just not embracing:
1. Re-insulate homes, and put in more efficient heating systems than what is currently out there.
2. Have employees that don't actually need to be in the workplace telecommute instead. (There are all sorts of other side benefits to this policy.)
3. Build up a public transit infrastructure that people will actually want to use as an alternative to driving. Subways, light rail, regional rail, better bus systems, etc.
4. Replace trucking with freight rail and cargo ships as much as possible.
5. Use timers to run energy-using devices during off-peak hours, e.g. having your dishwasher turn itself on at 1 AM.
6. Repair rather than replace.
Americans use, on average, about twice as much energy as a European, and with not much improvement to quality-of-life to show for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.