18 comments on Electricity: How Much? From Where? What Fuel?
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I must admit that 2 things formed my quite negative attitude towards your initial post. First of all for thousandth time I see the proposed solutions to our energy woes summurized in the words "efficiency, conservation, renewables" without mentioning or analyzing the limits and problems associated with each one of them.
Like I said conservation and efficiency have their limits. More importantly they can not be relied upon. You can make an estimate how much you would achieve by implementing this and that but you can not enforce everybody on the other end of the generation-consuption line to implement the measures you want. IMO you will be surprised how many people just don't care - even don't care what their bills are.
For the wind & solar generation I also see about 20% as a practical limit. Again question is what happens next?
The second thing that disturbed me in your post were the questions you quoted, which IMHO are a little below the level of this blog. What do I want, where do I want it... this is a typical case of questions asked in order to get politically correct answers. Such questions are the same type of crap the media is giving to the public to feed its constant immature "I want, I want" attitude. Of course if you ask the average person what he/she wants he/she will tell you that would very much want windmills located some 10 thousand miles away from his house. Or in the back of the Moon - even preferable. This is self-evident and asking it in the form of a poll to people, most of which understand little to nothing of electricity generation is a very shallow trick IMO. What if I wanted a hydroelectric plant near my house - does this mean that I can demand utilities to create an artificial river and a lake by my neighbourhood?
Regarding the solutions I defend, if I were given a hypothetical budget I would spread it out the following way:
- 50% for nuclear
- 30% for renewables
- 20% for encouraging efficiency and conservation
Like I was defending until now, points 2) and 3) are partial solutions and presenting a partial solution as an end-point is very dangerous IMO. Therefore we need something else as an energy source for the future, and nuclear is the obvious choice for me.This is not true, as ericr voiced as a comment on the previous post, who would not like windmills near his home. However, future energy needs will need to be met somewhere. "10 thousand" miles was not a choice in this hypothetical. Living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant is more common than people would think. I live within 50 miles of two nuclear plants.
I agree, it is staggering the number of people that are ignorant of conservation and the energy crisis this nation faces. However, the same way that you state that you cannot enforce everybody on the other end of the line to implement conservation measures, you cannot force the idea of new nuclear plants to be constructed in their neighborhoods either. It would be political suicide for a government official to propose new nuclear in their district.
I think this is a legitmate poll to ask "Joe Everyman":
would you rather see rolling blackouts (a form of forced conservation) or new nuclear power built within X (50? 100?) miles of your home. I don't know how the public would judge or answer this question, but it may be a situation that the country faces in the short term.
You propose 50% of your hypothetical budget for new nuclear, half of which will have to be spent convincing residents of the proposed area that it is a necessary to build it where they live.
So it is not a poll, but a poll with argumentation. I appreciate that of course, but my experience in arguments tells me that you can defend any thesis if you accept a given set of assumptions. I definately could not accept the assumptions layed out in the initial post and even in the question asked and I don't think it is correct or fair to continue on that basis.
That's why I used the exaggerated figure of "ten thousand miles away", because the instictive desire of everybody is to pick the option that least affects him/her and benefits him/her mostly, without balancing it with the consequences or even with the reality in general.
If I had to make a questionarie to Joe Everyone (whom I personally do not separate from) I would ask:
- Would you rather live by a nuclear plant and accept the minimal risk (hundred times lower than you to die in your car or from nose bleeding) for it to fail and emit radiation. The risks from radiation are... (btw much lower than it is percieved)... the waste will need to be stored which will cost... ta da ta da
- Live by wind mill farms, and accept with almost certainty that you will have to face power shortages in the near future, becoming ever worse with time going by. 99%-100% certainty of drastically increased energy costs (ok, now you will have to pay double or triple what you pay today, possibly rising with time). 90-95% certainty you will be subject to rationing or other forms of restrictions... A very great certainty your children will live worse than you etc. etc... (btw personally I dismiss the sound/landscape argument, as being too evaporative in face of shortages)
- Coal... also becoming more expensive... carbon dioxide... global warming... ruined landscapes... radioactive and other heavy metals emitted in the atmosphere, water and soils etc. etc.
An informed choice, that's what I'd try to offer. Anything else are half truths which are much worse than a complete lie. Like the good journalists very well know - answers are not that important, it is the question that matters.A) Conservation and efficiency gains can't reset our demand at a much lower level.
B) Taken together, a number of alternative energy projects (wind, solar, tidal, unconventional hydro, biomass, etc) can't get us past 20% of our needs and handle peak capacity issues.
C) Re-localizing energy production through distributed energy systems / batteries can't smooth out peak demand and reduce waste over the transmission lines.
Until we try these ideas in earnest, it's hard for me to support building additional supply. Specific to Nuclear, NY already gets about 30% of it's supply from that. Adding in conventional hydro and other renewables gets you to just about 50% from non-carbon sources. If we can reduce demand significantly and ramp up renewables, we could lower NY's dependence on fossil fuels from 50% to 20-25%. That's a much better place to start an analysis of how we would switch the remainder over to non-fossil fuels.
But I'm glad you've stated your affirmative case on what you would do besides conservation and renewables:
This post was meant to stir discussion on this and see what the full range of ideas are out there. I am willing to put forth my ideas and I welcome other constructive ideas. The negative attitude you met was that you were simply tearing down ideas without affirming your own. The point of this post was basically "pick your poison".
IMHO we should try to do as much as possible with conservation and renewables before adding more capacity on any non-renewables, including nuclear. In particular, we should try to shave off peak electrical demand during the summer months.
In my posts I tried to challange your assumptions, and of course this looked "distructive" for all people sharing them. I'm sorry but if we are going to discuss, first I need to know that we are on an even ground.
Regarding your point - I've thought about that too. It is beyond doubt that we can try and maybe succeed to patch things for quite a while. Probably by massive investments in wind mills and solar panels, by down-sizing and using more efficiently the energy we have, we could be able to meet both ends for a couple of decades (give or take) of declining fossil fuels.
In this 2 decades though, we will have to pray (and pray very hard) that somebody will finally come up with some breakthrough that will make renewable energy scalable enough, or with some other energy source that is better and less enviromentally destructive than the choices we have today.
I can not predict the future - we may or may not reach this breakthrough. Several points though:
First it is much more likely to happen if we are not in an emergency situation, and we live a little bit at large. Already resources are being redirected from research for the future to maintaining the status quo - a shining example - renewable energy funding now goes for maintaining our presence in Iraq. If we go for tightening the belts the same will start happenin on ever larger scale.
Second, even if someone in 20 years discovers room-temperature radiation-free cold fusion, there is a great chance that we will not have be able to build it, because all our efforts and resources will be directed at keeping up with our current needs.
And third if we don't reach this breaktrough this would mean that Olduvai was right and we will start descending with unpredictable consequences. Having a certain opinion about the nature of Homo Sapiens though I don't expect it to lead to anything positive... there are simply too many of us and I see us burning every bit of carbon, cutting every tree (and every neighbour's throat we can reach) on the way down. I don't want this to happen.
Of course I could be wrong with the timing. It is possible that it is too early (or too late?) for making this choice but... here I have to rely on my gut feeling which tells me it is never too early.