To those clamoring for new implementation of renewable energy sources

[darkstar3]

I have only one thing to say:

Emergent technologies do NOT get deployed into country-wide infrastructure. And for good reason. Why should anyone invest the capital and time necessary to deploy an emergent technology when it will be vastly obsolete in a decade? Why should we even consider deploying an infrastructure that will have to be refitted within such a short time frame?

Solar, wind, and other types of intermittent power sources are not yet ready for prime time, and that has nothing to do with their cost or their current energy production capacity. Both of these technologies, and the storage technology required for their successful use, are undergoing fast turnover. Each year, better batteries, better turbines, better solar cells are developed. Some are better because they are more efficient. Some are better because they are easier to manufacture. Some are better because they have a smaller up-front cost in both dollars and carbon atoms. But the bottom line is that constant, fast-paced improvements are being made.

Infrastructure thrives on stability and distributed uniformity. How are you going to acheive that with a technology that changes so drastically in 3-5 year periods? How can the government sign a standard 5-year contract with anyone to deploy solor or wind farms at strategic sites around the US when it's possible that next year's breakthrough could save the taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars?

I'm all for renewable energy. I think it's required at this point that whatever energy policy the US has going forward invests in some serious R&D for renewables. But we are NOT ready for deployment. We need to stop treating solar and wind energy as some sort of panacea for our current energy problems, and certainly we need to stop with the heavy anti-non-renewable rhetoric. Nuclear, petroleum, and coal power are still absolutely necessary for the immediate future, and rabidly railing against them helps no one.

(It also wouldn't hurt for people here to realize the vast difference between industrial power and residential power, and drop some of the myths about current solar capabilities. But that's another story...)

[bbinacan]

1. Companies in TX

are building a vast new grid for wind power.

[darkstar3]

13. Small-scale compared to country-wide, as I was talking about in the OP.

Greenfield deployments are necessary to continue research, but you're not going to see nationwide adoption of wind and solar power until the technology stabilizes.

[Scruffy1]

20. Is this a joke? Is it April fools Day already.

Just disconnected a computer system that's been running since 1975. They didn't wait for the next improvement-just went technology at hand. It was still doing its job. The same thing applies here. when you need something you build it with the tech you have and you usually update as new stuff comes along. A lot of the evidence I've seen indicates we could be at over 60% renewables in less than twenty years with a minimal investment. Ten per cent off of the pentagon would do it nicely.

[hulka38]

26. Did it sing "Daisy" for you?

[slackmaster]

2. I'm biting the bullet and investing in a rooftop PV system now

I expect it to hit break-even in no more than seven years.

[Thunderstruck]

3. And how long will your system last?

I realize you may need to replace a component during the life of the system.

[slackmaster]

5. I'm 53 years old. I expect the system to last 20 years without replacing major components.

I bought a bigger inverter than is required for my initial deployment of panels, so I can add capacity pretty easily if, for example, I buy a plug-in electric car and need more power.

All of the pieces can be replaced or upgraded as they fail or deteriorate. I'm not worried about that.

I'm taking a big risk of course: San Diego Gas & Electric may be on the brink of discovering a previously unknown, practically limitless source of inexpensive power that will result in electric power rates for consumers being drastically reduced.




































:silly:

[darkstar3]

12. And this rooftop PV system will allow you to live completely "off the grid"?

[slackmaster]

38. No. That would be ridiculously expensive and impractical.

I'm getting a grid-tied system that allows me to sell power to SDG&E, but only to the point where my bill is zero. (A larger system would cost more and result in me giving away power for free.)

[KittyWampus]

4. You are wrong. Waste to Energy is already being done. It requires a municipality to sell bonds

and can be built quite quickly and cost-effectively.

It's being done in Europe and in some very spots in the USA. Long Island is doing it.

[darkstar3]

14. Waste-Energy systems are not solar or wind, and they cannot hope to provide

more than a bare percentage of the power currently needed by our country. It may serve as mildly supplemental in future, but it cannot be considered a primary source with its current production rate.

[RC]

6. Apparently the truth is not what the anti-nukes, wind,solar and incinerator people

want to hear. I rec'd this and it is still zero. The point about industrial power vs household power should have really hit home hard. But it will have been forgotten by the time they start reading the other posts.

[Modern_Matthew]

7. I see nuclear fusion in our future. No long-lasting waste. No meltdowns. nt

[darkstar3]

15. A laudable goal. It may be reachable long after renewables stabilize.

[Snotcicles]

8. Accurate username.nt

[Luminous Animal]

9. Portugal went from 17% to 45% renewable sources to generate electricity in 5 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/earth/10portugal.html

[joeybee12]

16. Facts! How dare you wreck this wonderfully misleading OP with your damn facts!

[darkstar3]

18. Misleading how, exactly? Show me where I have misled anyone.

[darkstar3]

17. And that's great for them, but the US has 2 orders of magnitude more land than Portugal.

They have an infrastructure that works for a country roughly the size of Maine. That's not going to scale to US needs.

[Luminous Animal]

25. That is why it is wise to work on local and regional solutions. You are never going to get

anywhere if you apply in Rhode Island what works in Los Angeles.

[ljm2002]

10. Damn those renewable-energy clamorers!!

And also: Get off my lawn!!!

Puhleeze. Many renewable-energy technologies are already proven: solar, wind, geothermal, methane conversion, to name a few. No, none of these by itself will solve all our energy needs. But neither will nuclear. Furthermore, renewable-energy technologies have another virtue, namely they can be deployed in smaller installations, not just big centralized deals that require highly trained people to run them and are tempting terrorist targets and produce lethal byproducts.

As for being emergent technologies: all technologies are emergent at some point. It's the nature of the beast: technologies emerge and then they evolve. Your argument could be made against nuclear, in that it appears it was put into large-scale production when it was really still emergent. Judging by the way it has evolved over the last 40 years, and by all those who point out that the Fukushima design is "old" and "less safe" than newer designs, I'd say that argument has some merit. And with nuclear, the downside was a lot greater than it would be to deploy renewables while they are still emergent. But it's a gray area anyway: "emergent" often just means, not yet widely deployed. It has nothing to do with the feasibility of wide deployment.

What's the downside to wide deployment of renewables? The fact that there will be better versions 10 years down the road? So what? Show me a technology where there WON'T be better versions 10 years down the road? Should we just quit doing new stuff, because there will be better options in the future? Not hardly.

Renewables have already been shown to be feasible. Look at Germany and solar, look at Portugal as another poster in this thread has mentioned. With the will, we can make it work. No we can't retire all nuclear plants tomorrow -- although we probably should look at retiring the older ones post-haste. In the meantime, we can ramp up on renewables and start to do both large-scale and decentralized installations, thus keeping a grid as well as having more localized sources, making people and communities more self-sufficient while keeping the grid for redundancy and leveling.

Why do people fight this so much? Why do people want to keep going nuclear? I guess it's sexier in a way, it certainly represents a triumph of scientific and engineering accomplishment. Until there is catastrophic failure -- then the risk assessments don't look so good as they did on paper.

Seems that we here in the USA have lost our taste for innovation. We are fighting renewables, we are fighting high speed rail, and at the same time we are allowing our infrastructure to crumble and decay. We lack any sort of vision of the future. It's tragic, really. The rest of the world is starting to pass us by. And now we are watching our world-class education system be dismantled, leaving only the rich to have access to first-class education anymore. It's a downward spiral.

[darkstar3]

21. And you purposely ignore the point.

The following are indisputable facts, and were not in question when I wrote the OP.

1. Renewable energy sources, specifically wind and solar, are proven to be effective in generating energy.
2. All technology evolves.
3. Renewables are feasible on a small scale, which is why countries roughly the size of single US states have begun deploying them.

What you purposely miss are the following very important points.

A. There is a difference between emergent and evolving technology. As I said above, all technology evolves, but there are curves in the graphs of development speed, innovation, adoption, and price-based feasibility. The bottom line on wind and solar is that we are still on the left, or steep side of the curve. Only people willing to be "early adopters" are going to move to this kind of technology. Those early adopters help us all, because they provide testing for these new technologies outside of the laboratory. But any business owner will tell you that early adopters take huge risks, and usually end up losing more money than they believed they were going to save.

B. Smaller installations of renewable energy sources distributed across the US constitutes a management and maintenance nightmare. It makes redundancy more difficult and expensive, and it increases the number of people required to specially train for maintenance. We already have problems with our infrastructure, especially bridges, rail, and in certain areas our electrical grid. Why would anyone in their right mind want to create a whole new layer of complication there? We need to simplify our infrastructure in the process of improving it, not make it more difficult to handle.

Finally, just because I'm trying to inject some practicality into the energy debate going on here does not mean that I specifically "want to keep going nuclear". I'm not "fighting renewables", and I'm certainly not against innovation. In fact, I'd like to see that innovation continue, until such time as it generates a real solution to our infrastructure needs, and that includes long-lasting tech outside the early-adopter curve that can be manufactured and installed en masse. Solar and wind are just not there yet.

[ljm2002]

39. So how is it that Germany, the 4th-largest economy in the world...

...is looking to SCRAP nuclear technology in favor of renewables? They seem to think that renewable technologies are past the emergent stage. So I would question your curves. In any case you did not provide them and it's hard to refute hand waving.

Furthermore I could not disagree more with your contention that "Smaller installations of renewable energy sources distributed across the US constitutes a management and maintenance nightmare." That is only true if your model is one of centralized command and control. All of those so-called "economies of scale" are used as an excuse for further consolidation and centralization, whether it be of factories, large companies, what have you. When in face we really need less centralization, and more distribution, which will lead to people being closer to the sources of their energy, food, etc. and thus having more control. Note I am not arguing there should not be larger systems, only that they should not be the only systems that we use. Larger, centralized systems mean that when something fails, the failure is larger and affects more people. With decentralized systems, failures are more local -- and again, I would say optimum is to have both the grid and more local systems. Also, it does not make it more complicated to maintain infrastructure with a more distributed model. Finally, employing more people is a good thing in my book.

Your claim of injecting practicality is really an excuse for refusal to think outside of the narrow boundaries of conventional wisdom IMO.

[darkstar3]

41. Again you ignore the most important point of the post.

Germany is a far smaller patch of land than anything we have to deal with here. You've simply restated the idea of Portugal, but tried to avoid the appearance of that by using economy size vs. land mass. Infrastructure is much more influenced by the amount of land to be covered than it is by the size of the economy.

As for your claims about distribution, you have obviously never attempted to work on distributed vs. centralized systems. To provide the exact same level of service, centralized systems are cheaper to install, cheaper to maintain, and more simplified in general. Centralized systems can be given redundancy for a fraction of the cost and effort of distributed systems, meaning that failures don't have to affect anybody in large OR small areas.

Employing more people is a good thing in my book, too, but if taxpayers are going to pay for it then we should go for the most efficient use of money possible.

BTW: People, as in the general public, having more control over infrastructure services is a bad thing. It leads to bad decisions, problems, and failures. And where do you get the idea that a distributed system, with an order of magnitude more parts and pieces, would NOT be more complex than a centralized system??

[ljm2002]

42. Germany and Portugal amount to say 2 or 3 Western states...

...or 10 or 15 Eastern states, area-wise. Now the last time I looked, energy is not produced in some massive centralized place for the entire USA; rather there are hundreds if not thousands of plants of various types dispersed throughout the USA.

In fact, there is no one way to produce electricity in this country. Coal-fired plants, hydroelectric and nuclear are three big ones right now. There are already new solar installations being built in the desert areas, and wind farms have been around for a long time now.

If one state can provide its own energy then I see no reason why 50 individual states cannot do so. If one country in Europe can produce its own energy with renewables, then it stands to reason that a similarly-sized state in the US can do so. And by the way the Internet is a very large distributed system, with redundancy built in, that makes use of both centralized and distributed systems -- each doing the same tasks on a different level, e.g. DNS services. While there are standard protocols (e.g. tcp/ip), the systems that deliver the packets have a wide variety of architectures. Yet it all works very smoothly together, and having the management of the various systems distributed serves to simplify the overall task. If the Internet were centrally managed down to the content-producer level it would be a disaster, not to mention that its fail-safe and self-repair mechanisms would not work so well.

Similarly with electricity, there are standards for voltages, types of currents, etc. that are specified; how the electricity is produced is immaterial -- that can be managed at a more local level.

Finally, you say you don't want the "general public" to have more control over infrastructure services. Yet when cities own their own utilities, citizens often pay less for the services. Personally, while I do agree there are risks, are they really greater than leaving policy decisions to corporate greedheads, or DC powermongers? I don't think so.

[Bluenorthwest]

11. Hilarious! Computers were emerging technology not long ago

The US electrified swiftly, plunged into television years ahead of the pack, created the roads to carry the cars that rolled off the first production lines.
Constant, fast paced improvement is a thing to be desired in any field, and the idea of waiting for stagnation to actually use a technology is, among other things, a new one one me.

[darkstar3]

23. I think #21 answers this, too.

[wickerwoman]

19. Innovation won't happen in renewables unless there's a market for them,

both now and down the road.

Let's say the next big breakthrough in solar power is ten years down the track. Research companies can't afford to pay employees for ten years with nothing coming in in the hopes that eventually they will produce the perfect solution. They need a market for their intermediate products and really only the government is in a position to provide that market on the scale we're talking about.

We don't need widescale deployment, but we do need pilot programs, especially ones that lay the groundwork for later innovation.

[darkstar3]

22. I think I've answered that in #21.

[DireStrike]

24. "Obsolete" technologies still produce energy.

They don't suddenly go bad when a better one comes out.

[darkstar3]

27. No one suggested otherwise.

The point, however, is that it is incredibly easy and likely to waste taxpayer money in the early adoption stage, which is where we are with solar and wind power. Moving to these technologies is a good goal, but right this moment we need development, not deployment.

[DireStrike]

32. It's not a waste as long as the technologies pay for themselves in terms of energy production.

If it becomes too expensive to service them because other, better technologies have been developed, we'll stop servicing them, while they continue to provide energy until they break.

[JackRiddler]

28. This is nothing other than an argument against letting privately owned capital make the decisions.

All you are telling us is that if we let capitalism continue to operate as it has, a transition necessary for species survival will be delayed by further decades, with catastrophes and possible extermination as a result.

Your argument tells us why we should be seizing the massive windfall profits the oil companies will once again enjoy this year (better yet, seize the companies).

Your argument tells us why we must stop burning tens and hundreds of billions on the corporate subsidies and war costs that the public sector already spends to maintain the present energy system.

It tells us why we must instead put these funds into massive, war-level efforts to develop and to deploy the technologies (including the grid improvements) we need ultimately for species survival. Mindful of the problem that new generations of the technology are still coming, of course. With a rational, 20 or 30 year transition plan in mind, of course.

But that means having a plan for the transition... not waiting for the magic moment when the present holders of capital decide it will profit them to start switching away from the death technologies of hydrocarbon and fission.

Just as you manage to avoid thinking outside the capitalist, endless-growth box, you also left out the most important source of ecologically sustainable energy, which is: To stop wasting so much of it.

It is equally important and demands just as many efforts and investments and changes in attitude to develop and implement new heating systems for buildings, to build a new transport infrastructure based on light rail, to build mass urban transit as well as high-speed railways, to put in bike lanes and bus lanes on all streets, to cover those lanes so that people actually start biking in poor weather, to create the infrastructures for more local agriculture at a lower energy cost...

And to stop burning all that energy on wars and bases and F16s and aircraft carriers and the sheer insanity of the military machinery!

Never has the choice been as stark: a future for the people, or the continued exterminationist pursuit of profits for the few owners of everything?

.

[darkstar3]

29. Actually, I'm talking specifically about government investment.

My OP has little to do with private companies, and a lot to do with reasonable investment of taxpayer money. I also made this OP in the hopes that people would realize that the infrastructure of one of the biggest countries on the planet requires quite a lot of informed and careful deliberation that doesn't allow for the early adoption of emergent technologies.

As to your point about conservation, I didn't miss it, I left it out on purpose. I wanted to see how long it would take until someone actually bothered to mention one of the more important steps we can take toward a feasible future energy plan. I've been reading a lot of posts about energy here lately, and the idea of conservation just doesn't seem to show up much...

[JackRiddler]

30. Well I'm glad to have won that little contest about who would mention reducing consumption.

It could be we agree on more than it seems.

Because if your point is really that the transition is nothing simple, requires careful planning over many years, and itself fraught with potentials for wrong turns, well no doubt.

However, the point about capital must be confronted head on: it's where the investment power currently lies, and the owners are making singularly irresponsible and dangerous use of it. Also lobbying the alternatives to death. Like mad Neros. (Well, the Nero of the fable; real Nero didn't actually fiddle.)

And I daresay nothing happens without a very big & loud clamor! The more clamor, the better.

No issue really is more important, no issue is more distorted and/or ignored in the media.

(Some may be strategically higher priorities: like dislodging the money out of politics and freeing up the media for all points of view, without which change is nearly impossible.)

.

[darkstar3]

31. It's off-topic, but we do agree: Money must be divorced from politics. It must no longer be speech.

[MadHound]

33. Except these technologies aren't emergent,

And they are ready to handle the load. After all, nuclear is now more expensive than solar and wind.

Here, educate yourself.
<http://stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf>

Keep arguing your limitations and guess what, soon enough they're yours!

[Courtesy Flush]

34. While I appreciate your can't-do attitude...

What do you offer as a solution? You remind me of my engineer friend. He works in the oilfield, and tells me that anything other than petroleum is a pipe dream. Yes, petroleum is the dominant energy source, but how may stories have we heard about Big Oil buying patents to keep them off the market. What do they have to feel threatened about?

There are answers out there. We just don't like the idea of change.

[Shagbark Hickory]

35. Here's what I have to say to "emergent technologies"

Thousands of wind turbines "emerging" all over NW indiana.

[TBF]

36. Oil is a finite resource. We'd better have other plans in the works

because it is being used up quickly.

[Ikonoklast]

37. Germany seems to ignore that, and is moving forward.

We need to stop dithering, or very soon, we won't have to worry about it as the rest of the world moves on without us, as we stay under the thumb of fossil fuels, those that distribute them, and the countries that export them.


Koch brothers sre a prime xample of thirty years of planning to keep us on the oil teat as long as possible.

They don't control other countries energy policy, but they and their friends control ours, and that's why we are fighting wars.

[Marrah_G]

40. "clamoring"