Renewable Revolution

The era of energy dinosaurs 🦕🦖  is coming to an end

By David Roberts

Working in clean energy can be frustrating. Tons of exciting things are happening, but elite conventional wisdom isn’t keeping pace and nobody listens to bloggers like me shouting about it.
 
One of the few outlets in the mainstream energy world to consistently stay ahead of the curve is Bloomberg New Energy Finance. (I have interviewed its chief executive, Michael Liebreich, before.) As Exhibit A, I offer this new “VIP brief” written by Liebreich and his able colleague Nathaniel Bullard. It’s a big old chunk of brain food, slightly dense and buzzwordy in a few places but chock-full of insight about dynamics of the energy world in the coming decade. Let’s take a look, shall we?
 
Like too few writers and analysts in this area, Liebreich explicitly takes a systems approach:
 

What happens when you saturate the system with wind or solar depends on what you think is going to happen next with power storage, demand response, electric vehicles, mandated back-up and dozens of other factors. These are all highly dynamic because, of course, they are part of a complex system, and systems exhibit emergent behavior. You can spend a lifetime studying the construction of a single neuron, yet know little of what drives a nematode, let alone a human. Real-life systems exhibit unexpected population surges and crashes, periods of equilibrium punctuated by periods of shattering change, tipping points, phase changes, extinctions.
 
… The value of a solar rooftop in a world of electric vehicles is very different from the value of the same solar rooftop in a world without. The value of demand response is negligible in a world optimised around “baseload-plus-peak” generating capacity. The value of energy efficiency is negligible in a world of fuel subsidies. And so on.
 
You will note that this echoes, somewhat eerily, my widgets vs. systems language. Naturally I agree!
 
Here, in capsule form, is the shift in perspective Liebreich urges for those making decisions in today’s energy markets:
 

This is the reality of the world’s energy transition: it is dynamic, complex, unpredictable and fraught with risk. And it is among these shifting sands that energy decision-makers must plant their feet. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some choose to cling to old certainties, heuristics that worked fine during a long period of strategy stability: demand stimulation, baseload-plus-peak, centralisation, scale, vertical integration, dispatch management, control, confidentiality. But a shifting environment means increasingly replacing dinosaur heuristics with mammal heuristics: efficiency, flexibility, responsiveness, open data, transparency, coalitions.
 
I am stealing “mammal heuristics.”
 
Liebreich is describing the same trend I wrote about the other day: decentralization, the shift from a few big players and technologies (dinosaurs) to a profusion of small, networked ones (mammals).
 
Liebreich breaks this mammalian approach down into three “strategic elements.”
 
1. Resilience
 
The energy world is now subject to more shocks, from more directions, than ever before: “Technological change. Commodity price spikes. Climate-related extreme weather. Financial instability. Policy change.” And so on.
 
These kinds of changes can creep along for years and then suddenly become disruptive. So decisionmakers need to ask themselves not just about the desired or expected outcome of their choices, but about what can go wrong. (I wrote a post about risk management that is consonant with this theme.) From that point of view, certain kinds of solutions suggest themselves:
 

Distributed beats centralised. Diversity beats a mono-culture. Consensus beats confrontation. Local beats distant. Resilience means power storage, to build in tolerance. It means smart grids, to match supply and demand. It also means future-proofing the design and location of assets.
 
Where the old mentality was about optimization, the new one will be redundancy and fault-tolerance.
 
2. Optionality
 
This is about utilities hedging their bets, leaving themselves options rather than locking into a few huge, capital-intensive, one-way bets (like, say, a $6.85 billion nuclear plant). By diversifying investments and breaking them into smaller increments, they can hedge their bets against unexpected changes in “technology, policy, regulation, economics, or environment.”
 

… an electric utility or a fuels distribution company is fundamentally a provider of energy and related services, and not just a coal generator or a gas burner. Optionality allows a company to embrace new opportunities first at the margin, but eventually at the heart of operations. Most century-old firms know this already, as do all technology companies. Today, IBM is a services company; Apple a consumer devices and services company. Asking the counterfactual “what would they be if they still made only mainframes or iMacs?” gives a simple answer: they would be out of business. Energy is a service to meet a need. As technical and societal needs change, so must the service, and that means portfolio options.
 
As I’ve said before, this shift is going to unleash powerful market forces. One electron or gallon of fuel is like another; insofar as energy providers compete, it is purely on price. But when it comes to energy services (heat and cooling, emergency backup, transportation, etc.), there’s much more differentiation possible, and thus much more competition. Where there is more competition, there is more innovation.
 
3. Intelligence
 
This is not only about getting the best information — which is harder than you’d think for energy investors — but about the many ways now possible to get more information and pull meaning out of it.
 

Intelligence is also about collecting, analysing and harnessing data that is several orders of magnitude beyond what was available to energy companies in previous decades. GE chief executive Jeff Immelt recently referred to the emerging world of connected, sensor-imbedded machines and the processing power to analyse it as the “Industrial Internet”. Energy efficiency software applications are allowing building owners to optimise consumption and control costs with greater granularity than ever before. Smart meters make possible the use of detailed information on which consumers use electricity when, and offer the opportunity to shape their consumption habits over time. Smart grid sensors and analytics software allow utilities to pinpoint and correct faults, and optimise energy networks in response to real-time conditions. Opportunities for new intelligence range from managing grid losses to predicting renewable and distributed generation performance, from pricing strategies and maintenance schedules to arbitrage opportunities. Ultimately, new connected and intelligent capacities allow us to, in Immelt’s words, to “find meaning where it did not exist before”. And not only meaning: value.
 
That the key: To pull meaning from data, and value from meaning. I am reminded of something Bill Gross — inventor, entrepreneur, and head of eSolar among other companies — is fond of pointing out: The cost of almost every industrial commodity is rising. Copper, steel, aluminum, concrete, you name it. The one thing that’s steadily getting cheaper is computing power. So they key to getting ahead in the market is substituting computing power for other commodities by making systems smarter and leaner. The more you can do that, the more you can get off the downslope of the Hubbert curve and onto the upslope of Moore’s Law.
 
Anyway, to conclude: As we move from the era of dinosaurs to the era of mammals in the energy world, some players will cling to the old ways and perish; others will diversify, focus on resilience, keep their options open, gather intelligence, and thrive. One thing’s for sure: by the end of the century, there won’t be any dinosaurs left. These are exciting times.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-era-of-energy-dinosaurs-is-coming-to-an-end/

100%, 99%, 80%, 70% — How Much Can & Should The World Be Powered By Renewable Energy?
 
February 24, 2013 Zachary Shahan

How much can/should the world be powered by renewable energy? Or how about your country or region? A number of studies have tackled this question, and I recently realized that we hadn’t stuck them all together in one easy-to-find place.

So, I created this page specifically for that purpose: 70%, 80%, 99.9%, 100% Renewables — Study Central.

Keep that page bookmarked — it will be updated with new major studies on this topic as they are.

Full article here:

http://cleantechnica.com/

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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Nuclear experimentation killed free power part II

Jimmy Midnight
Activist Post

Ethan Indigo Smith is my son, and I did help him with some scientific issues in the previously released, Nuclear Experimentation Killed Free Power Part I. I’m writing to defend on scientific, technical, statistical, rhetorical, and political grounds, his basic thesis. Allow me here to paraphrase: “To understand that nuclear experimentation is The Rabbit Hole of Death requires only minimal scientific knowledge.”

Thanks to Tom Bedlam for his attentive reply, and for pointing out that, as far as anyone knows, there are no magnetic field disruption issues peculiar to nukes. The name Bedlam serendipitously highlights the fact that nuclear experimentation has always been, is now, and will forever remain, a bedlamite way to boil water.

Bedlam attempts to quantify the accidents at Simi Valley, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Let’s step back just long enough to notice that the first three were meltdowns at large facilities while Fukushima is a meltdown of at least three such facilities, with the impending compromise of a spent fuel pool. So if Chernobyl, a nuke built with marvelous hubris but without secondary containment, really is worse than Fuku, it has to be with the modifier, “So far.”


The relative size of TMI in this regard is also problematic. In view of the secrecy inherent in nukes, and inconsistencies in measurement, a difference of at least five orders of magnitude in admitted total radio-releases would clearly be significant; of three or less, maybe not. The data from Simi Valley, about a 1959 mishap, is actually the most telling because it’s down the great American memory hole; for instance nowhere to be found in a list of “nuclear plant accidents” that contains incidents going back to 1957 in my 2002 World Almanac, a generally reliable source of factual information.

Which highlights the secrecy aspect of nuclear experimentation, spawned in secrecy, born in secrecy, (because it was nuclear weapons related) raised in secrecy, nurtured in secrecy, alive in secrecy, and really dependent on secrecy for its continued existence. An example is the continuing secret, (well, it’s public information, but de-emphasized until it functions as a secret) that, thanks to the good ol’ Price-Anderson Act, nuke operators don’t have to carry liability insurance, like ordinary Americans of modest means would have to in their businesses. Well, operators do have to have a not-adjusted-for-inflation-since-1957 $560 million dollars worth. Extrapolate what they’re paying for that coverage to what rendering a 10? 15? 30? 60?-mile radius of uninhabitable area would cost, and get an idea of the size of one form of nuclear subsidy.

Bedlam’s also partial to serving up figures for the release of Iodine-131 and Cesium-137, which symbolize the problem Ethan points up in The Matrix of Four. As two of the three known isotopes whose devastating health effects are well-documented (the other is Strontium-90) these are the known knowns of nuclear experimentation (well, some of them.) There are also known unknowns; for example, how much radioactive oxide dust is being plumed and blown around? How much steam? Cadmium 115? Tellurium 127, 129, 131, 132? Neobium, Molybdenum, Zirconium, Niobium 95? Barium 140? Etc. etc.?


Reactors operate on fissions that break Uranium down into myriad radioisotopes, most of which finally stop emitting their alphas, betas, gammas, neutrons, and occasional antineutrinos after at last becoming the stable Pb-208, Lead. What about the water/chemicals used to fight the meltdown fires? And of course there are unknown unknowns, a concept that speaks for itself in an industry run by people who think it’s all just dandy to use extremely dangerous metallic Sodium as a circulating coolant around superultrahyper dangerous nuclear fuel, and to place spent fuel pools on the roofs of reactors. (Talk about being analogous to a two- or three-story outhouse! ‘cept what’s likely to dump on you is more than just rather disgusting.) In response to Bedlam’s critique, I researched other industrial uses of metallic Sodium. All of those I could find take advantage of its chemical reactivity; only in nuclear experimentation is it used as a circulating coolant.

Which brings us, at last, to the unknown knowns. These are the secrets kept through conscious silence or obfuscation on the one hand, and the lies that people tell themselves about the secrets they possess, and the unexamined assumptions they carry around, on the other. Reactor operators are sure it’s safe, which is why I’m sure they’re insane. F’rinstance, Bedlam has somehow convinced himself that a nuclear experiment station is no worse than a fossil-fuel burner. But it is. Even in the case of a coal-burner, fueled by mountaintop removal, vile as that is, at least the greenhouse gasses and toxic ashes and immediate environmental damage are about the limit of its destructiveness. Choose a legacy of ashes, which can be stored safely on an indefinite basis given a watertight roof; or of spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for a longer time, going forward, than from here back to the dawn of recorded history. Add that to the cumulative effects of ever-increasing levels of nuclear radiation.

Unknown knowns are also an important dynamic in the whole American political system. Any little group of people who get a certain level of public privilege will eventually become its own special interest group, with interest in preserving what’s already been gained. Part of what got the nuclear experimentation industry really going was the possibility of reprocessing spent fuel to make Plutonium, a better material for nuclear warheads than the “old fashioned” Uranium-235. Now, there are way too many warheads, but the spent-fuel headache just keeps growing—a disposal problem as insoluble as polyethylene in water. When the best available solution might be to put it aboard nearly useless ocean vessels and scuttle it in the Arctic, as the Russians are doing, the situation speaks for itself.

Another industry byproduct is “depleted Uranium,” some of which is used in munitions. These are pretty terrible weapons that burst into flame when penetrating armor, spewing oxide dust all around. And only about two-thirds of the original highly radioactive U-235 has been removed. Yet even this use leaves a huge surplus of U-238 and/or depleted yellowcake and/or Uranium hexafluoride that no one really knows what to do with. Some of the Fluoride, stripped of Uranium, ends up in municipal water supplies, so that two super privileged industries get to work together momentarily.

There are about 400 nukes in the world, and six of them (counting three at Fukushima) have already had disastrous accidents. Or maybe we should multiply by years of operation. Say they’ve been running for an average of 25 years. So that would be ten thousand reactor-years, and six major accidents. Not a terrible record for, say, an experimental aircraft, but imagine a passenger jet that crashed six one hundredths of one percent of the time. There’d be disasters every cussed day! And of course with these nukes, everyone within a radius of some double-digit number of miles is necessarily on board for rides with this six one hundredths of one percent chance of crashing.

Ethan’s piece had a secondary thesis, the idea that: “Nuclear experimentation also prevents the development of better, safer, cheaper, more sustainable alternatives.” Though I remain without an advanced academic degree, I am pretty fluent in the language of mathematics and the natural sciences. Areas in which I have more extensive knowledge are Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and maybe Statistics, rather than Nuclear Physics. In Chemistry, orbital electrons (which we now understand is a quaintly inaccurate term) are the only subatomic particles with which we generally are dealing. Also in Chemistry, we know that mass action really makes the wheels turn and the (chemical) world go around. The mass action concept is also a very useful notion in economic analysis. Applied in the field of energy production, it means that all subsidies to these dinosaur sources, these Eisenhower-era methodologies, because they are thus artificially cheapened, necessarily also suppress the renewables upon which all humanity must someday depend. Fossil fuels and nuclear plants also get a free ride on the environmental and health problems which their operations entail.

What’s clearly needed are the reggae song energy sources, “I and I and I and I,” in which imagination, invention, ingenuity, and innovation are unleashed to work with wind, solar, tidal, ocean current, cultivated diatoms, geothermal (and here I’m talking about drilling holes deep enough to get down to magma, to produce high-pressure steam for electric turbines) and also exotic, eccentric schemes, typified by various notions for Hydrogen generators. I came up with one of these myself, of course just at the imagination level, noting that if the Higgs boson had a wave nature, it might be possible to render large objects weightless, or drastically reduce their weight in some temporary way, by generating a counter-wave.


Yeah, I know there are possible conservation of energy problems with such a scheme, but there’s no thermodynamic difference between particle nature and wave nature as far as anyone knows, so if an anti-wave could be generated, there might be a way to get a net energy gain from this sort of method, just sayin’. In Chemistry, we imagine “energy hills,” which have to be climbed, to start certain reactions.Typically this is achieved by applying a lot of heat. But sometimes, instead of climbing the hill or tunneling through it, a way around it can be found. For example, some chemical processes can be catalyzed by light, using   less energy  than the heat that would otherwise be required, and in certain instances, just the addition of a catalyst can bring about spontaneous chemical changes, some even exothermic.

The poor Bedlamite also manages to repeat canards about how windmills will mess up migratory birds, or that ocean currents could be adversely affected by current power; and also casts doubt on the discovery of the Higgs boson. There is a chance that the recently-trumpeted data point isn’t Higgs. It is a chance in something like ten billion. Contrast this probability with the chance that all radio-release data from nuclear meltdowns are accurate and reliable.

Meanwhile, let’s get the rumor going that all these chain reactions are making fissures and fractures in the time/space continuum that are making the free power we could get from anti-Higgs wheels impossible to obtain. It’s no more dishonest than the idea that atomic energy can have peaceful uses. And you can’t prove it isn’t so, because you can’t prove a negative. Furthermore, we know that the law of energy conservation can be violated at sub-photon levels for very short periods of time, and this speculation is all about some sort of light beam or time beam. So if electromagnetic pulses from detonations also cause cracks in time/space, and controlled chain reactions little fissures, that could easily mess up such a beam. Just sayin’.

Jimmy Midnight is a blues musician and an organic farmer in Maine. Find out more about The Maine Blues Society HERE:
http://www.mainebluessociety.com/?attachment_id=95

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/09/nuclear-experimentation-killed-free_20.html

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Now that you have become a bitter and hateful person like so many others here, you have are quickly ruining your chances of ever exposing the truth about renewables. Good job!

Ashvin,

You appear here to believe that fossil fuels and the manner of their dissemination is a lie. Isn't the point of guys like agelbert to do the heavy lifting on such isssues, so the rest of us who are better at making it "digestible" will? Why is it all on him?

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it has become even more clear that Eastern countries such as China and India will not only suffer from financial, energy and environmental collapse, but it will probably hit their populations just as hard as it hits Western populations, if not harder. And I dare say that the DD Admins, and especially RE, are even more extreme in their Doom on these issues than we are at TAE. Agelbert may be right about EROEI methodology and current developments in renewable energy, but I doubt even he believes that it will ultimately scale up and be a feasible alternative for global society. We don't have anywhere close to 50 years for this stuff to get going in earnest, let alone an entire century.

What does this have to do with telling the truth, that renewables would be better for the health of the earth and people, and fossil fuels and the monsters who control them are dragging us toward dystopia at least, even mass extinction? Why don't we have 50-100 years? Because good men and women won't stand up and say "enough".  Do you deny his numbers? Do you have any critique of them, or are you simply throwing them out, with a message precisely as the fossil fuel conglomerates would have it.

F u c k the "global society," if it can only come at the expense to destroying the biosphere. You know what the "global society" means to me? The Japanese beetles devouring my grape and bean leaves. The zebra mussels that have inundated the lake of my birth. The Asian carp that are soon to infest that lake, having been introduced into the lower Mississippi only a decade ago. To HELL with global society. Global domination, more like it. You want to travel around the world? Learn how to sail.

William Hunter Duncan,

I agree with your summation of our situation. Ashvin assumes that, lacking scalability, no Renewable energy system will replace the current system.

Ahem,

From the article Renewables, why they work and why fossil fuels never did:

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I believe that scalability of an energy source, unless it is a government utility (i.e. fully socialized and nonprofit), will lead to unscrupulous short cuts and new externalized costs for the populace for the benefit of private power corporations. The promise of renewables must go hand in hand with decentralized power sources. The authors discarded alleged low EROI renewables for consideration because of their scalability bias. As I stated early in this article, biomass ethanol, if properly used, has an EROI of at least that of gasoline without the environmental baggage of gasoline. And other biomass products like Lemna minor (Duckweed), that grow eight times faster than corn without heavy industrial chemical fertilization or pesticides will certainly produce EROI numbers far above 10.0. Passive geothermal (also discarded by the authors because it isn't scalable) and other renewable heat sources such as e.g. placing mirrors a short distance from the north side of house in winter to reflect sun onto the north facing wall to  drastically lower heating costs will play a very important role in the picture of total sustainability. In addition, decentralized renewable energy infrastructure provides jobs, not in the feast or famine pattern of ethics free, dog eat dog, vicious predatory capitalist “business” model, but in a sustainable, predictable and humane way.

Scalability is NOT a desired outcome but Ashvin feels it is. I've gone to great lengths to explain why it's a bad deal. Tao Jonesing, in his posting on economics also pointed out that scalable manufacturing and "economies of scale" are not necessarily a valid model for improving the overall welfare of the populace. Alan agrees also that decentralization will be important in renewables. Ashvin is the guy that wrote the FUBAR article that I agreed with and now he doesn't want to admit just how FUBAR things are.

I am writing this, even now, because I don't want anybody out there getting the idea that, if we could just scale up renewables, we would solve our energy problems. This is backwards thinking and I have explained why.

What Ashvin doesn't seem to get and you, myself and many others clearly see, is that when you are in a hole, you are supposed to stop digging! You don't need a degree in environmental engineering to see that what we are doing is killing us.

This is a matter of the heart. Thank you william, for expressing your passion and care for humanity. I get pretty damned depressed with the immense difficulty involved in convincing people out there that the paradigm must be changed, not tinkered with or fine tuned. Comments like yours and EndisNigh's straight talking honesty keep me motivated.

Here's a nice video for everyone here to watch. It explains much about how deep the level of dysfunction we are saddled with is in our economy and mindset. Even Ashvin might like it.  

https://youtu.be/HR2HrHXSuYM

EIN,

Nice try, but that passage is clearly talking about judging the Faith of others in Christ and condemning them for what you perceive to be their lack of Faith, which is exactly what agelbert did.

It is not saying that a person should never state his/her opinion about the characteristics of other people...

Ashvin,

The only person you're fooling is yourself.  You twist the meaning and interpretation from one post to the next to fit your POV.  Stop wasting my time with your BULLSHIT!

According to the following, Luke 6:37 refers to criticizing other people.  You've thrown around so much bullshit that you just stepped in some of your own. 
 
http://www.makingchristknown.com/daily-verse/luke/criticizing-others.htm