Anon said:

You could probably get by with a large solar concentrator for heating (and solar hot water actually does make a lot of sense).

Oops, of course. I should have read the earlier post properly, when it said the propane tanks would be for [i]cooking[/i].

        George Carty said:

Indeed, you can’t really do heating with wind and/or solar power alone.

You could probably get by with a large solar concentrator for heating (and solar hot water actually does make a lot of sense).

Probably a very high percentage of them (of course a lot of the people who aren’t connected to the grid are off the grid because they live in a place too remote to have a transmission line, not because they have any problem with the power grid although even the most of people who are doing it for ideological reasons probably have that kind of backup).

The otherpower people (who are pretty close to being the experts on this topic) certainly seem to use fossil fuels.

        Anon said:

I wouldn’t be all that surprised if most of those off the grid houses have a bunch of propane tanks out the back to run the stove along with a bunch of firewood stockpiled.

Indeed, you can’t really do heating with wind and/or solar power alone.

But even in the field of electricity, I wonder what percentage of off-gridders have a backup generator running on some non-renewable energy source (most likely an internal combustion engine using petroleum-based fuel)…

Some of the other articles on his blog, such as The Future Stinks (he’s talking about The Future as depicted in science fiction, rather than the real future), Let’s Take A Trip to New York City, and What Comes After Heroic Materialism? are attacks on the aesthetics of industrial society.

He makes the point that the Heroic Materialist aesthetic of industrial society is a very macho one (perhaps that’s why currently men are more pro-nuclear than women). On your Wishing You A High Energy Future page (which in my view is pretty much textbook Heroic Materialism), I looked at the sequence of images after your line:

(Note. Some of these images are real. Others are conceptual. All are entirely possible with enough energy)

the first 7 consecutive images (and some of the later ones) were of big machines that go fast — “boys’ toys” in other words. The 20th century variant of Heroic Materialism was largely defined by its love of speed.

Another interesting article by Nathan is Let’s Kick Around the Sustainability Types, which attacks the back-to-the-land predilections of many Green types, and argues that the most truly environmentally-friendly way of life is to live in a densely populated city (largely because it eliminates the need to own and drive a car).

I wouldn’t be all that surprised if most of those off the grid houses have a bunch of propane tanks out the back to run the stove along with a bunch of firewood stockpiled.

Though industrial and commercial users are a much bigger problem for the energy efficiency fanatics.

Still, looking through the rest of what that guy wrote (instead of just what you quoted) he might be open to reason about whether the general public would be willing to live with that little energy.

Well, there was another post on that blog called “A Bazillion Windmills“, where he made the argument that those Americans who live “off grid” consume only 10% as much electrical energy as the general population, which is about the same as the amount of electrical energy already generated from renewables (including hydro).

Some people are prone to take, let’s say, the present total electricity generation in the U.S., and try to figure out how many windmills it would take to replace that. The result is typically quite absurd, at which point there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Behind this is a sort of metaphor: that the economy is like a machine, like a laser printer for example, that takes a certain amount of electricty and doesn’t work unless you give it exactly that amount and no less. Actually, an economy is nothing of the sort. You could think of an economy as being the aggregation of however-many-hundred-million households (and commercial enterprises), which implies that the flexibility of the “economy” is comparable to the flexibility of households and the other enterprises that make up the “economy.”

We already know the way forward regarding “renewable” energy because we have been making these experiments for decades now. This was done by the “off grid” types beginning in the 1970s. When you disconnect from the grid, what do you do? An off-gridder has some basic decisions:

1) Install solar panels/microhydro/windmills etc. to replace the on-grid electricity that an average U.S. household would use (about 30 kwh/day.)

2) Use less electricity, which means less need for solar panels/microhydro/windmills etc.

When you do the math for a single household, it is just as ridiculous as it is for the economy as a whole. To generate 30 kwh/day, you would need about 10,000 nameplate watts of PV solar, or about eighty full-size 125 watt solar panels. That is a LOT, and at $800 per panel (not to mention chargers, inverters, batteries, etc. etc.) it adds up to serious coin.

So, the typical off-gridder relies overwhelmingly on the second option, which is to use less. Many families get by very happily on 3 kwh/day (1,000 nameplate watts), and 6 kwh/day (2,000 nameplate watts) would be rather cushy. The hardcore types sometimes cut their usage down to 1 kwh/day, which is really impressive but not necessary.

They do this primarily via the technique that I refer to time and time again, which is to introduce new systems, rather than taking the existing system and trying to wring small efficiencies out of it. For example, a tweaking of an existing system would be the Prius, which gets 45 mpg instead of 35 mpg for one of the better normal-engine cars. A “new system” would be to live within walking distance of work. We saw last week that there are colossal differences between transportation energy use in various cities, not because one city is populated by self-flagellating green-living maniacs, and another is not, but because the inherent design of the city.

The off-gridder, in their efforts to live within a 3 kwh/day “budget”, will first forego the most obvious low-value electricity-consumers like electric heating, air conditioning, and water heaters. High-efficiency lighting is next, possibly followed by low-energy computers. Electric clothes dryers also get the heave-ho, along with electric stoves and ovens. Chronic energy-users like refrigerators get replaced with low-energy models, which can use as little as 20% of the electricty of the standard models but are just as cold on the inside.

The result of all this is that the off-gridder accomplishes 90% of his goal by Method 2 (using less), and only 10% by Method 1 (generating energy by alternative means.)

One obvious howler in his argument that we already have enough renewable energy capacity (and more than enough if you add nuclear as well) is that he only took into account residential usage, and not industrial and commercial uses where large savings are much harder to achieve, but I was wondering what the readership here thinks of this article…

Think those beds have been cut to shreds by the shipping in from Asia by now.

See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/langswitch_lang/sw

Water vapor does keep heat in, but clouds (microdroplets of water) reflect the sun.

I’m not sure what the net change is, but any info would be appreciated.

Water vapor is a huge component of the burning of hydrocarbons, and water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.