Fossil Fuel LOVES Renewables
November 14th, 2009
|
| Share |
Sure, wind and solar don’t actually seem to work very well for providing grid energy. However, they do one thing that seems to be popular: provide a great smoke screen to hide the enormous amount of actual smoke being blown out of coal stacks.
The US Coal industry would like to remind you that coal and wind make a great pair. Coal provides the power and wind makes it seem palatable. In reality, using wind in combination with coal is about the same as using coal alone. Even if you do manage to build enough turbines to create a non-minuscule amount of power, it always has to be backed up by reserve totaling the full generating capacity. When used in a spinning reserve capacity, coal fired plants don’t actually consume all that much coal than when they’re running at full tilt. In order to allow for the kind of instantaneous dispatch required, the plant must maintain full steam pressure and cannot allow the system to slow down or cool.
However, the coal industry would like to point out a couple of things: Coal is plentiful and cheap. It’s as plentiful as dirt and as cheap as dirt. It’s also as dirty as dirt, if not dirtier. They would like to assure us all, however, that new “clean coal” plants are not quite as filthy as the older plants. Unlike the old coal plants, that dump all the filth into the atmosphere, the new plants only dump some into the atmosphere and dump the rest into ash and precipitate ponds.
The natural gas industry would like to point out that it is not quite as filthy as coal. When it comes to dirt burners coal is king and gas plants only produce a nominal amount of filth in the form of sulfur, nitrous and soot emissions.
Gas plants do also have some advantage over coal in terms of load-following. Although keeping a gas fired plant in spinning reserve mode does use a significant amount of gas, it’s not quite as bad a break as coal. That said, there has been some debate over exactly how much you really can save by paring wind and gas. Forcing a gas turbine to throttle up and down tends to impact the effeciency of the system and if the plant is forced to go to full power after a period of low activity, it may have to operate in “simple cycle” mode, until it is able to generate enough heat to get the steam turbines spun up – this can cut the effeciency in half.
While simple cycle gas turbines (the less effecient kind) are capable of providing reasonable fast dispatch, the only form of power generation that is proven to not be extremely lossy when used in a reserve capacity is hydro electric power. A hydroelectric plant can go from idle to full power almost instantaneously and without wasting huge amounts of energy like gas and coal plants. But the gas industry would like to point out that natural gas is really cheap (today), and they hope you won’t remember that a few years ago it was really expensive. Also, they prefer not to talk about the fact that it will likely go up again.
Contrary to what these ads say, there’s nothing “new” about coal or natural gas, other than their newly found partner in deception, the “renewable” sector.
So there you have it, dirt burners or fart burners. Which will it be? Either way, both are more than happy to add a few wind turbines or solar panels for window dressing if that is what it takes to allow them to continue what they do. But hey, natural gas plants don’t usually blow up (okay, they do once in a while, but more often than not, they don’t.) And as for coal, sure it indirectly kills tens of thousands a year, but most years it only kills a dozen or so directly, in mine disasters or massive ash spills. Of course, both have the issue of producing large amounts of radioactive waste. (yes, you read right)
Can anyone think of any other power sources that are actually clean and don’t need a dirt burner or fart burner to keep them backed up? Anyone? Anyone?
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
November 14th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
The situation with natural gas backup for wind is somewhat worse than supporters would have us think. I had a long exchange with an old school chum that arbitrages gas in Alberta and he mentioned that they mechanics of the gas delivery system is such that having several large volume users, like gas generating plant load follow too tightly would cause the system to break and at any rate would necessarily mean spot, rather than forward pricing on the fuel. Consequently he suspects that even if a plant was being used to back a wind farm, the operator would be running his jets very close to dispatch speed, not idling waiting for the wind to drop.
First spinup would need to pull a lot of gas that may not be there (Because it wasn’t scheduled, or it belongs to someone else at that moment) Second it will be priced through the roof because it wasn’t bought on the futures market. It would probably cost less just to keep the turbines at speed.
Yes these plants can load follow, but they were designed to load follow over a certain band and backing wind the way it is assumed they can (or implied they can) is well outside their working envelope.
Not that he gives a damn, what with his collection of antique spots cars, and his trophy wife….
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Since so many people seem to be emotionally attached to renewable energy, wouldn’t it be a good idea to skewer wind and solar THROUGH gas and other fossil fuels? (To use a chess analogy…)
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 9:37 am
George Carty said:
Well George, insn’t that what we have been trying to do of late?
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I wasn’t talking about us, but rather the nuclear industry itself, and anyone pro-nuclear who has access to the MSM…
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
The notion that natural gas is cheap and plentiful has been pushed recently a lot, despite the fact that it’s blatantly false. Oh how short a memory we have! The market for natural gas is at least as volatile as that of petroleum. Anyone here remember that gasoline was about twice what it is now about three years ago? How about that gasoline was less than a buck a gallon in 1999? Look at the price of natural gas and it is no better. Not to even begin to mention that it flows through the overtaxed pipeline system and if a single major pipeline ruptures it could mean regional shortages within hours and lasting for weeks. (Hope you have flashlights and plenty of batteries because the lights might not stay on).
Then lets consider that the US is a net importer of natural gas and Canada is a net exporter, but put together, you find that the North American gas situation is that we just barely meet our own needs between the two. If you consider that we’re hanging by a hair over importing gas into North America from elsewhere, take a look at your options for where it can come from: Qatar, Russia, Iran.
No thanks, No thanks and No thanks! Those are three countries which have plenty of gas to sell on the open market and three countries that you don’t want to be totally dependent on. Western Europe has dug themselves into a deep hole with their building natural gas plants, vastly increasing their demand and now giving Russia control over their destiny.
I will go so far as to say natural gas is a reasonably clean fuel for circumstances where you need fuel for something where electricity might not do the job. It’s good for heating and industrial furnaces etc, but it should be left to that. We have better ways to generate electricity.
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
George Carty said:
Well, George, who exactly is the “nuclear industry”?
Is it the utilities, who own fossil fuel plants as part of a balanced portfolio?
In fact, the utilities that are the most heavily invested in nuclear are the least bullish when it comes to building new plants these days. For example, just take a look at last month’s testimony of John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Rowe’s opinion, as the director of a company that owns more nuclear capacity than any other utility in the US, is that his best bet is to avoid building new nuclear plants, by instead uprating the plants that he already owns.
Is it the vendors, like General Electric, who sells gas turbines and wind turbines?
This company makes far more money selling gas turbines than it does selling nuclear reactors, which is why you never see the ESBWR in any of their “ecomagination” commercials.
Even the most pro-nuclear of reactor vendors, French-owned AREVA, is dabbling in the “renewable energy” business these days. The pragmatic French might not believe in the technology, but they realize where the easy money is, and it is in milking ill-devised energy policies such as those in Germany, which are costing the German people a fortune.
I find it interesting to note that, just as with their nuclear reactor designs, the French don’t think small. Not only do they offer one of the largest nuclear reactors available on the market, the 1650 MW EPR, but they are also in the business of offering one of the largest wind turbines available on the market as well, a 5 MW off-shore behemoth.
If you’re going to mine subsidizes, you might as well get more bang for the buck.
So who is this “nuclear industry” that should be skewering renewables through fossil fuels?
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
BMS said:
I could see how a company like GE would just as soon sell fossil fuel units as nuclear reactors. There are some exclusively nuclear companies, however. For example, the United Enrichment Company. Areva is primarily nuclear but they realize that wind energy, if all but useless, is profitable, but they do not really do much with fossil fuels and I don’t see wind as a competitor with nuclear anyway.
If anyone really “wants” nuclear energy from a buisiness point of view it should be the utilities. They need more capacity and they understand the economic problems with gas, the issues with building more coal plants and the fact that, in the long run, nuclear is even cheaper than coal. If you actually look, it’s companies like NuStar and Excelon that are really looking to get reactors built. Of course, more would want to if we didn’t make it so difficult from a regulatory point of view.
As I was told once by someone at a company that owns a number of power plants, both nuclear and coal and gas “We would love to build more nuclear plants, but after what happened at Shoreham and Seabrook, we just can’t take that kind of a risk.”
Quote Comment
November 15th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
The problem of course is that the utilities have to answer to ratepayers and shareholders first, it’s not really a question of what is wanted, as much as it is what is needed to keep those parties happy. I have no doubt that given a choice, most utilities would select nuclear for new generation, circumstances may force their hand in other directions.
This is where the legislation is necessary to change the rules of the game and make nuclear the best option.
Quote Comment
November 16th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
If we had enough wind and solar we would either not need coal and gas or we would only need it on very rare occasions. The plan is working beautifully in Germany where it has created many new Green jobs and soon most power there will be wind/solar. They still need a small amount of coal for the occasions where there is no wind blowing and no sun out either, but that is not a big deal because they have the only working carbon free coal plant and will soon do carbon capture for all coal. If you ask me this is the way to go. Wind and solar are infinate and clearly the best kind of power in the long run. Germany also used to have nuclear power but they are working on getting rid of it. They tried it and decided it was not safe enough.
Maybe you people should read occasionally. The Sierra club says that Germany is the perfect model for what other countries can do. It is not that they are smarter or better than everyone else, they just decided to do it. We can do it too and I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t follow their lead. Spain is following their lead too, but not enough others are!
Quote Comment
November 16th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Tell me again how you’re going to make the sun shine and the wind blow 100% of the time.
Oops? Is that a strange silence I’m hearing?
Any form of power generation that works for random intervals at random times (well, solar is *a bit* more predictable than wind, in that at least you know when it ISN’T going to work) is a nuisance and a distraction, not a viable source of energy. As soon as you have a city-size energy storage device that doesn’t require wholescale destruction of hills, mountains, and valleys (e.g. pumped hydro), works in flat areas, stores at least 168 hours of the peak hourly load and the cost per kilowatt (including externality and carbon costs) and energy density is competitive with nuclear (yes, and that includes the cost of the “renewable” energy production and the cost of the energy storage device), give me a call.
I will then be the first to invest. (Somehow I think I’ll be waiting a long time, though.)
Carbon-free coal? Isn’t that kind of like “we bury the carbon dioxide underground and hope it doesn’t leak out and asphyxiate a few hundred thousand people coal”, by the way?
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 1:10 am
MBB said:
So those dozen or so huge coal plants they’re building are actually tennis courts or something? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
You might also want to check Germany’s own published numbers for wind generation (I believe Drbuzz0 linked to them in a posting a few months back). Simple math indicates that while there is indeed an impressive amount of installed capacity, they only get about 20% (that is, every 100Mw installed gets you 20Mw actually generated). It’s simple, really – take the Mw installed, multiply by 24 (hrs/day) * 365 (days/yr). That is how much installed capacity you have, in terms of MwHrs produced per year. Now take the published MwHrs produced and divide by this first number. It comes to something like 0.20.
It’s also amusing how “free” wind turbines have no construction costs, no maintenance costs (and 100+ windmills cost much more to maintain than the single large generator they replace). Solar cells tend to break down before they have paid back their cost.
As for the Sierra Club, I stopped paying attention to them years ago when their recommendations showed that simple arithmetic was beyond them.
You’re right about one thing – the Germans certainly aren’t smarter than anyone else. They’ve engineered a dependency on Russian natural gas, which is not remotely a bright move, given that Russian gas pipelines have been known to have “accidental stoppages” and “technical difficulties” at diplomatically opportune times.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 1:23 am
DV82XL said:
The power companies do want nuclear energy as is evident by many filing for licenses and most nuclear plants looking to extend operations, but they are not as popular as other generating methods for a lot of reasons mostly related to the clerical side of things. Time is money and you really want to get plants built quickly because of the interest and the fact that markets change fast. You can’t necessarily predict the economics in ten years, but you can be more certain about two years. Short term forecasts are more reliable.
The fact that a nuke plant takes a good five to eight years to get approval is unacceptable to the time tables that many utilities work with. This is especially true if the supply is getting crunched now. Also, the risk that a license will be denied. That’s an unacceptable risk. You can’t plan ahead for a power plant and then find out years in the future that oops, turns out you can’t build it. Then you’re up the creek. The recent announcements by the NRC about the AP-1000 are the kind of thing that give utilities nightmares.
There’s no time to drag your feet.
Utilities want to be able to build their power plants and put them into service fast and they want to know the schedule ahead of time. If there are unknowns that is very bad. If a permit can take three to eight years, then that is not good enough. Which one is it? Three? Four? Eight?
That is where gas has a HUGE advantage and it is why most new plants are gas. You don’t need as much approval. You can sign the contracts now and start moving dirt in a few weeks. It doesn’t have that uncertainty or delay to it. You can get it in service in a reasonable time period.
Nuclear has better long term economics, but if you say to an executive at a power company that you have a plant to offer them that has great capacity factor and low fuel costs, BUT it will take them several years to get approval, and after spending those seven years there’s no assurance that they won’t fail to get the approval and that it will not be up and running for 10-15 years at the soonest and that on top of all that, there’s a high probability of injunctions or other issues causing delays, then they will tell you to take a hike. They don’t want to deal with that.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Renewables are the future and will be the power source that powers everything. You can only try to delay it, but the game is over for fossil fuel and for nuklear it has been over for a long time. People don’t like their cities blowing up, you know? That and plus the waste are why it is so gone.
Listen to Greenpeace for a change and you’ll get it. The enviornmentalists are starting to finnaly win. Good thing because maybe there is still hope
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 4:20 am
Lynn said:
Greenpeace, FoE, WWF and their fellow-travellers are not environmentalists. The true environmentalists are the supporters of nuclear power. Read through this and other pro-nuclear blogs, and you’ll possibly get it.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Finrod said:
It depends on how you define “environmentalist”. If you mean “someone who wants what is best for the environment” then you’re right of course, but not if you mean “someone who wants to rein in human aspirations in the name of protecting the environment”.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 5:46 am
MBB said:
Wrong. Wind and solar barely have any impact on CO2-emissions.
MBB said:
Broken window fallacy. You see the “green jobs”, because the subsidies are very concentrated, but you do not directly see all the jobs lost(which necessarily outnumber the green jobs created) because the expropriation of wealth from productive industries is diffuse.
CO2-emissions in Germany dropped a bit in the early 90’s due to the collapse of the Soviet union. You can’t do economic calculation under socialism and property rights to whatever extent they existed where very weak; as a consequence east Germany had a lot of extremely inefficient, filthy coal plants. CO2-emissions haven’t dropped since.
Germany has some of the dirtiest power in western Europe. Not only because of it’s high per capita CO2 emissions(higher than Sweden, France, Norway, the UK, Greece, Austria, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Portugal. Basically only better than Finland and Belgium); but because such a high proportion of it is from lignite coal, which is about the dirtiest form of coal there is.
MBB said:
You’re insane. They consume 4% of the entire worlds coal production. The only redeeming factor is that they’re beginning to reconsider the nuclear phase-out; it’s either that or building 26 new coal plants like they were planing to do a few years back(none of them CCS). They’ve manged to displace a small amount of coal with imported russian natural gas; that’s a catastrophy waiting to happen.
MBB said:
Yes, it was a triumph for boneheaded ignorance and fossil fuels.
What do you mean _used_ to have nuclear power? Germany is producing as much power from nuclear energy today as it did 25 years ago, ~160 TWh per year.
Dirt-burners decreased a bit in the early 90’s, but they’ve been bouncing back from a low of ~330 TWh per year in the mid nineties to ~360 TWh per year today. That’s not installed capacity, but actual production of electricity. In the same time frame non-hydro renewables have grown from ~20 TWh per year to ~50 TWh per year.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 5:56 am
Soylent said:
“Property rights” weren’t the issue. The issue is that East Germany was a totalitarian state which could afford to ignore or crush any popular anti-pollution protests. This is also why the Soviets were able to use dangerous RBMK nuclear reactors (banned in the West), and why Victorian industrialists were able to get away with such massive pollution (because in those times working class people were denied the vote).
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Lynn said:
Renewables are an anachronism. The finest clipper ships can’t even compete with the most inefficient dirt burning steam-driven ships.
Lynn said:
Nuclear power is producing more power today than it ever has. The US nuclear industry is restarting. China is planning to install 70 GW by 2020 and 200 GW by 2030; India is planning to build 470 GWe of new nuclear by 2050; Europe is being forced to reconsider ill-concieved phase-out plans(the UK and Sweden already have, Germany looks like it will go next).
It is physically impossible for a nuclear reactor to blow up and the waste issue is a red herring by the coal and gas humpers(such as yourself). Even if you dump spent fuel in the ocean, even if you assume it instantly disolves, even if you assume it distributes evenly in all bodies of water including fresh, even if you assume the LNT model you still will not manage to kill as many people as coal power on a per TWh basis. Since it’s trivial to devise disposal methods many orders of magnitude better and since the worst imaginable disposal method is no worse than coal, it’s simply not a problem and it never was.
Germany has many coal Chernobyls every year. It’s not an accident. Nobody is evacuated. You don’t seem to have a problem with this; nor do you seem to have a problem with advocating an environmentally and economically ruinous pro-coal and gas policy.
Lynn said:
Go pound sand. Greenpeace are pathological liars. What few rational, honest people who ever belonged to that organisation are long gone(including co-founder Patrick Moore, who left the organization in disgust and started advocating nuclear energy).
Lynn said:
Actually, the fossil fuel interests seem to be winning and they’re playing you and your soft-headed friends like a fiddle.
Hope for what? A self-imposed Morgenthau plan? Starving a couple of billion humans and destroying the environment(they’ll slash and burn all land that can be farmed, kill and eat every animal that can be eaten; humans don’t go quitely into the night)?
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 6:31 am
George Carty said:
Not having your person or your property subjected to pollution that can be shown to be detrimental is a property rights issue. You cannot take on the state and expect to win anything other than an all-expenses paid trip to a gulag in the Soviet union.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Soylent said:
In a democracy you can vote the bastards out – the problem is that East Germany wasn’t a democracy.
Pollution could in theory be dealt with as a property rights issue, but wouldn’t this fail in practice because polluters tend to be hugely wealthy corporations, while the victims of pollution do not have the same sort of concentrated wealth at their disposal to contest the lawsuits?
Concentrated power is bad, whether it be the purse-power of multinational corporations or the sword-power of authoritarian government.
Quote Comment
November 17th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
East Germany is was interesting situation, historically. The country always was playing catchup with the West and with the rest of the world. The country really wanted to show the world (and its own people, who were not very happy there and had a tendency to try to escape) that it could provide a lifestyle as good as capitalism could. In trying to do so, many corners were cut in terms of production.
Then there’s the fact that in the 1980’s the East was just plain dirt poor. They were hemorrhaging money hand over foot and the Soviet Union stopped really providing much help (the Soviets were having their own major problems by the 1980’s).
If you want to see how bad things were economically, consider that by the 1980’s, East Germany started basically ransoming their own people. Political prisoners and those who had tried to escape to the West were given their freedom to leave the country and migrate to the West, but for a cost. Approximately $50,000 worth of West German Marks was the price of bringing someone over. The government of West Germany paid the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to free Easterners and families in the West paid to free their relatives. This source of income kept the regime going for a few more years.
Given this and the fact that labor was cheap, there wasn’t a whole lot of concern for effeciency or the enviornment. If labor is cheap enough there’s not much reason to install more effecient boilers at the coal power plants – you can always hire more miners to dig more coal to feed them instead.
Quote Comment
November 18th, 2009 at 5:40 am
Finrod ……….you are a gem
Quote Comment
November 18th, 2009 at 9:47 am
What can ordinary people do if they suspect that beneficial policies (in this case, an expansion of nuclear energy) have been blocked by massive cross-party corruption?
(I don’t think popular activism had much to do with it, as I didn’t see much nuclear expansion during eight years of Bush, despite the fact that the vast majority of anti-nuclear activists are on the Left…)
Quote Comment
November 18th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Of course one must also consider the large amount of opposition coming from entrenched fossil fuel interests. Ironically, many of these fossil fuel companies might actually be funding various “green” activist and protest groups. Also, a large part of the Republican party is in bed with oil, coal, and natural gas lobbyists and see nuclear power as a threat to the status quo as well as their soft money stream. When compared to how a large part of the Democratic party listens to the doom-filled braying of organizations like Greenpeace, I do not know which side is worse.
Quote Comment
November 19th, 2009 at 2:59 am
Neurovore said:
One example of this from here in Britain — the Greenpeace “Stop Esso” campaign (Esso is the British trading name of ExxonMobil) received funding from rival oil company BP.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
A question for those critical of “renewables” here:
What energy policy would you advocate if nuclear fission WASN’T a practical energy source? (Imagine a world where there is no naturally occuring uranium-235, because it’s half-life is less than 1 million years…)
I’d be interested in the reactions to this gedankenexperiment of mine…
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
George Carty said:
Given this would almost necessarily mean a planet without a molten core, thus no magnetic field and consequently no atmosphere, I would suspect any form of life on this world would not have evolved at all. If it had, it would be so strange that the question you ask would not be germane to its energy needs.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
DV82XL said:
Why would no U-235 mean no molten core? Is the effect of other radioisotopes not significant in comparison?
Anyway that wasn’t really the question – I was wondering “how would you deal with the limitations of fossil fuels and renewable energy sources, if nuclear fission wasn’t available as an alternative?”
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Let’s revise the question then, to say that the uranium is there, it’s just inaccessible (down deep, and not present in significant quantities in seawater or coal)
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
George Carty said:
This is one of those life-boat questions, which are framed as to restrict the answers to one or more bad choice.
I consider these invalid even as gedankenexperiment, because they set up such an artificial set of circumstances, that there is nothing of value to be derived from the discussion.
If it wasn’t you George, I would treat this question as an attempt at springing a dialectical trap, to force ‘those critical of “renewables”’ to admit that these would have to be the only other option.
Well I am answering this question by rejecting the premise major, as impossible – and the premise minor as unlikely, thus rendering any conclusion logically invalid.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
George Carty said:
breed uranium-233 from thorium or plutonium from U-238. You’d have to start off with a non-fission neutron source to irradiate a sample for a while, but eventually you’d get enough to sustain a critical reaction which could produce neutrons to breed even more.
But I assume what you’re saying is nuclear fission is basically off the table…
Whew… I suppose I’d be more enthusiastic about funding fusion research. I’d definitely be all for a lot more hydroelectric. In North America, there’s quite a bit of untapped hydro capacity in Alaska and northern Canada. It’d be expensive to build and there would have to be some very long and very high voltage feeds to bring it down.
Other than that, methane is the least offensive of the hydrocarbon fuels, but there’s a limited supply of natural gas, so I suppose I’d advocate gasification of biomass and coal, although that would be messy, it might be necessary.
Possibly also more geothermal. Very deep geothermal in stable areas of the earth’s crust is possible, but it’s extremely expensive and difficult to get down that far.
I think mostly I’d be for doing a lot more with hydro even if it meant some big sacrifices. For example, we could almost double the output of the plants at Niagara Falls if we accepted diverting 100% of the water and thus eliminating the falls. Victoria Falls could power much of Africa, but it has a highly variable flow-rate that becomes very low in the dry season. This could be remedied by a combination of digging out and putting an embankment where the falls are to create a large reservoir. It would completely flood some very unique areas of Africa and possibly wipe out species that only exist in a small area. A lot of power could be derived from the Mississippi at the expense of turning much of the flood plain into another great lake.
Pretty much all the water falls of the world would be diverted. All the major rivers would have very large dams on them. Places like Yellowstone National park would have to be dug up and drilled out to divert the geyser steam to turbines.
That would pretty much be what we’d have to do. I mean, I would never want to see those things happen, but it could be a no-choice situation.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
George Carty said:
Easy … natural gas, all the way. Not that I’m convinced that it is a practical solution … I’m in it for the fireworks.
A hundred years of this? Hell yeah!! Bring it on!
Seriously, however, if we are considering hypothetical situations, then I’m putting my vote for fairy dust, for if we can envision a world where nuclear fission does not work, then we can easily envision a world where fairy dust does.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
BMS said:
If natural gas is as plentiful as they make it out to be, why is it that most countries import the stuff and that the price of gas was about five times higher a few years ago and that the current market price, although comparatively low, is still higher than it was last year when it was at the low point?
That kind of volatility is no better than the oil market.
Quote Comment
February 7th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
George Carty said:
Since renewables aren’t sustainable unless embedded in a larger energy economy with a mainstay of power sources which can pay their way, I would expect the ultimate situation (once the planet’s scarce supply of fossil fuel was exhausted) to resemble a pre-industrial peasant society with one important difference: Knowledge of the possibilities of high technology applied to industrial and military affairs would still exist, so the peasants would be burdened with energy production duties for the local state as well as food production duties. There would not be sufficient power for use by peasants, but there might be a small supply of sysnthesised fuel for military vehicles, enough juice to keep a modest communication system going, and possibly enough to support a small aristocracy in something like a frugal industrial level of luxury.
Quote Comment