In the long run I can see only 4 currently viable energy generation schemes. These are hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind. Hydro is about maxed out for all practical purposes and the remaining expansion of hydro can come nowhere near our collective needs. Nuclear, while the largest in installed base currently, has multiple issues attached that range from successfully managing waste to proliferation of weapons to safe operation of dangerous facilities and others as well.
That leaves solar and wind as the possible safest and most responsible energy gathering solutions we have and solar is, again in my personal opinion, going to be more reliable than wind.
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all. Biofuels are either a pipedream or for very limited specific applications only.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett Into the Grey Zone
I can see biofuels or other synthetic liquids for specialized uses like airplanes/heavy equipment but 90%+ of our transportation/heating/lighting demand can be electric.
People point to our liquid fuels delivery system. that may be difficult to replace in the 3rd world but the 1st world has a electricity grid even more widespread than the gas station network.
It's been said a few times, but to keep it aloft, so to speak.. I have to imagine we'll see a new surge towards Lighter-Than-Air transport. Someone linked a proposal for a sort of hybrid between a Blimp and a Plane. We'll see.
I truly loved the 'Huge Manatee' the other day.. forget compassionate conservatism, I'm advocating 'Absurd Aerial Altruism with Animals' (It's still essentially legal in Maine)
my favorite flying marine mammals are the dolphins in "A hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" singing "goodbye, and thank's for all the fish". That's also my favorite apocolypse-some days I'd vote to demolish the earth too!
Marine mammals are protected , though. I wouldn't try to fly any bottlenose dolphins around Galveston.
There was an Army blimp base across West Bay in Hitchcock during WWII, used to scout for submarines attacking the tankers of oil and gasoline going to Europe. My father told me that it was rumored that German U Boat crews would row ashore for leave getting drunk at the houses of prostitution on Post Office Street. The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
Bob Ebersole
I think the most appropriate way for us to decide to demolish the earth is through an overlooked rider on a committee energy bill.. but that's just me. (Or is that how it is already playing out?)
Ok, I'd better go play with my action figures again and regain some control of my universe!
Hey, another poster asked me if I'm going to ASPO-Houston, and while the irony of traveling from Maine is too harsh (Unless I get tix on the Graf Zeppelin Mach Zwei).. are you going to it?
I'll be there, its only 50 miles from my home to the hotel. I've known Jim Baldauf at ASPO for about 35 years, and he has no problem imposing on his friends for grunt work, so I'm sure I'll be helping.
I'm think its going to be a great conference. Awareness has really grown in the media, and they have some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up. I'd love to see peak oil and energy policy become a campaign issue, and there are going to be some big guns there. The Houston Mayor, Bill White is a former secretary of energy and a top fund raiser for the Democrats and is speaking.
Ok guy's, here's the real scoop. Thelma's Bar Be Que has the most awesome brisket sandwitch in the southern U.S.. Her pork ribs are so succulent and beautiful they belong on the wall of the Contemporary Arts Museum. Its that East Texas black-style oak smoked meat, a great homemade sauce-and cheap. $5 or $6 bucks is guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level about 100 points and leave you grinning a greasy smile, and its only about 10 blocks from the hotel.
I'm one of Texas's great experts in cheap ethnic food. I know it sounds a little immodest, but ask my friends. Houston has at least 6 different ways to purchase goat, my infallible indicator of a town's ethnic food potential. Admittedly Chicago has better pizza, New York is the king of hot pastrami and stuffed cabbage rolls-but Houston has at least two all-you-can-eat Indian food places with great goat cury, numerous Mexican food restaurants selling cabrito(roast goat) and birria (steamed baby goat) tacos, guisado(stew) and burritos, and Vietnamese and Thai coconut milk goat curry.
So diet before you come, I'll be happy to guide anyone. Or, if you'd rather, seafood, boudain, and gumbo, soul food, or just steaks.
I grew up near Hitchcock and had seen the blimp base columns all my life. In Tillamook, there were the exact same columns, and next to them was another set with the hangar intact - it was cool to get to see what it originally looked like. It's now the Tillamook Air Museum
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today. You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
Solar and other renwables are our only future but only for a very reduced stable population size. Regardless of how much energy we can produce there are is only so much space, water, air and soil. No matter how clever we are in providing for our energy we still have a very bumpy road ahead as we reduce our population levels.
Another thing I wonder about is when do we pass the point with technology that the majority of the population is required just to service the technology for an ever decreasing number of individuals who can afford not to be concerned about it breaking down.
This is just ridiculous - the projected population of 9 odd billion people in 2050 will be perfectly capable of living prosperously once our energy and industrial production systems have been reconfigured.
Solar and wind aren't the only large scale clean energy options - there is a lot of power to be captured from ocean (tidal and wave) and geothermal sources as well.
Thanks guys - glad you still find time to keep track of what I'm up to.
I'm slowly re-emerging from hibernation, though I may take a week or two off this month to write a long post I promised the Alpha Male Chimp Who Can't Drive a long time ago...
As far as time taken to write my stuff goes, I usually find 2 hours a day is sufficient. Basically I don't watch much TV, so that is usually possible most evenings.
I find it takes 2 hours for me just to read through the flame wars in a single TOD post, and then I find myself to be just like other humans and reptiles, merely having wasted another day without preparing for the coming apocalypse. :-)
Well - when I'm posting regularly I rarely have time to read through comments (at TOD or elsewhere) which is why I rarely comment here myself.
I certainly waste more time on the blog than I should - I've got lots of real world things to do as well, although I've decided its best to work towards avoiding the coming collapse of civilisation :-)
I should note some of my larger or more complex posts take a lot longer than 2 hours - something like "The Shockwave Rider" or "Bright Green Buildings and Dark Green Buildings" can take months to slowly assemble. Then some minion of big brother goes and bans it (The Shockwave Rider) anyway without even telling me which bit is annoying...
The idea that Children Of Men is a religious movie is an interesting one - I hadn't noticed it was a Christmas release, but given the prime spot occupied by the baby in the movie that makes a lot of sense...
Well, probably not. I've been putting together the numbers on all the options, and tidal, wave, and geothermal are pretty limited -- see this on tides and geothermal, and the links there to previous summaries of hydro, solar, fission, etc. options.
Basically the only large scale options (more than 10 times present world energy use in total renewable resource - of which we could only ever harness a few percent globally, or hundreds of millions of years worth of non-renewables) are:
* "water" - hydro + if we could somehow capture the latent heat energy associated with water vapor in the atmosphere, total about 3000 times present use
* solar - total about 13,000 times world use, or more if we go off-planet
* fusion - about 150 billion years of present world energy use from D+D fusion
* fission - about 600 million years of present world energy use from U-235.
bah humbug. If we're all going to die, why are you wasting the last few years blogging?
I can buy enough solar panels to make my power bill prettymuch go away for roughly $30K. That's <5% of what we have invested in the house. Obviously that's a net metering system (no batteries) so we do have to solve the storage problem for night/cloudy days, but we'll find a way and it won't take 100 years for it to happen. $100/bbl+ oil will concentrate a lot of minds over the next decade or 2.
May I suggest a mix, PV and small wind, if the economics of the two are close. Especially true if you plan to add batteries and develop off-grid capability.
30-35 cents a kilowatt hour? Where's that, an oil platform in the north sea? Sun+Windmill have synergy. Most places, it is either sunny and clear, or cloudy and windy.
May I suggest you (1) look at your state program for solar energy. If you don't have a solar energy program in your state or country, jump to step (4). (2) Do a financial analysis of the payback, ROI, or other metric including incentives and tax credits and deductions. (3) Contact your local solar installer and get a bid, or dial-800-SunEdison (or whoever), and find out what price you would pay per kWh-per term and repeat step (2). (4) Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
If this doesn't work, please let me know. I would be happy to help see that someone gets solar on your property.
Thanks, and I'm not good w. sarcasm, so I'm (possibly) missing some of this (anyway, I'm not a TV person, so...?) I was just kind of wondering if he/she had ideas for conversion on a larger scale. Anyway, point well taken, otherwise.
Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
That always seems the last step: write your reps. Why not kiss their asses too? Will it work better or less well?
There are a number of good ideas down thread. Those will go nowhere if we think they must pass the gate of our so-called representatives - because they really represent the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
The system is too ossified. It has to be broken apart to increase reslience and diversity - let 10 thousand flowers bloom because the culling will be terrible. Raytheon and General Dynamics will be of no help. How do we build a photovoltaic factory in Maine with Maine capital and Maine workers that cannot be sold out?
The corruption at the state level - at least here in Maine - is just as bad as at the federal level if not at the same dollar scale. Who gets to privatize the state pier? The Governor's brother or Maine's dear ex-Senator George Mitchell?
Point is, our (mis)reps won't help. If they could, they wouldn't be (mis)reps. It's structural.
Maine's PV program is a tax credit. We end up with rich people getting tax credits for PV systems while everyone else is stuck. It would be a mistake to think that was "broken". No, that is the way the legislature wanted it; it's all about class, who wins and who pays.
cfm - Sounds pretty bad up there from what you're saying.
But your rebate up to $7,000 for a 3 kW system is not chump change, and you have a pretty good loan program: $15,000 at an interest rate as low as 1% to homeowners with incomes up to 115 percent of the area median income.
You can't sneeze at the time value of money, and maybe more than the rich people, or at least those earning less than 115% of the area average, can install solar in Maine.
BTW, please feel free to post the letters you've written to your representatives, so we can out them right here for no actions taken. Who knows, maybe they won't get re-elected.
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
It's also why I mention nuclear. I don't particularly like nuclear because it does have its issues but as Dezakin noted, it has an installed base that can (at least theoretically) also be rapidly expanded. What we need to be doing is expanding the four categories I mentioned before with probably the least emphasis on hydro. Personally, and while it is not what I really want, I end up envisioning a future (if we can even get there) that has a nuclear baseline generating capacity heavily supplemented for peak by solar and wind.
I'm still a doomer because I don't see this occurring at a pace that I think is adequate. In fact it's not really happening at all yet. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am at least so far. 2007 is already showing declines and most of the peak oil crowd were not counting on real decline to start til after 2010. Is 2007 an aberration? Let's hope so because if it is not and we are on the downslope right now and it is already above 2% decline rate then 10 years out may be true hell if we aren't preparing right this minute.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett Into the Grey Zone
The other elephant in the room is that many high grade metallic ores are showing signs of peak.
So even if we're smart enough to take the road electric, eventually society will still have to grapple with the question " what types of devices are worthy of manufacture?".
Somehow HDTVs and IPods don't fit that criteria IMO.
IPods or even better miniture generic computers are an exellent use of resources in utility and hapiness generated per kg raw material or kWh. And the innards can be built to last for decades wich of course only is usefull if the technology plateus or lots of people becomme poor.
Large displays such as HDTV:s are also usefull, especially if they are long lasting.
Voice and data communication is only slightly less important then water, food and shelter since they make all kinds of efforts easier and gives access to culture.
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
GZ - agreed about the crisis (but drop the redundent serious). Can you point me to the contributors or sources at TOD about adoption rates of energy technology? ASAHP if you can.
I think some of the animated slides were destroyed in the PDF conversion. But page 31 was clear text.
Here is the basic idea:
Say you have a nuke plant that will provide power for 40 years with an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of 10. So that means it takes 4 years of nuke output to provide enough energy to build a new nuke.
If you reinvest all energy produced from each nuke, there is exponential growth. But it is limited to 10 new plants from each plant built. If you try to build faster, then society must pay in energy and your nuke plants are a power sink.
This means the exponential growth is strongly limited by EROI.
Just a quick spreadsheet example. If you assume all energy is reinvested, and the nukes are constructed instantly once enough energy surplus is availiable, then you get these results
EROI of 5 gives 11 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 10 gives 70 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 20 gives 2216 total nukes in 20 years.
Cleaveland gives nukes an EROI of less than 5. Meadows says 10 or less. Odum is 4. Those are the middle of the road answers.
You can see why EROI 100 oil and coal was so wonderful for growth. The last value would end up getting constrained in growth rate by slower building or materials shortages, etc. And these rates are just break even. Society gets no power from this scenario. If you bleed off energy for the rest of us, the growth rate is lowered. And you can get a big jump on growth by taxing other energy sources, hence the nuke buildout in the 60-70's when energy was cheap.
Bravo, Robert!
In the long run I can see only 4 currently viable energy generation schemes. These are hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind. Hydro is about maxed out for all practical purposes and the remaining expansion of hydro can come nowhere near our collective needs. Nuclear, while the largest in installed base currently, has multiple issues attached that range from successfully managing waste to proliferation of weapons to safe operation of dangerous facilities and others as well.
That leaves solar and wind as the possible safest and most responsible energy gathering solutions we have and solar is, again in my personal opinion, going to be more reliable than wind.
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all. Biofuels are either a pipedream or for very limited specific applications only.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Amen.
I can see biofuels or other synthetic liquids for specialized uses like airplanes/heavy equipment but 90%+ of our transportation/heating/lighting demand can be electric.
People point to our liquid fuels delivery system. that may be difficult to replace in the 3rd world but the 1st world has a electricity grid even more widespread than the gas station network.
It's been said a few times, but to keep it aloft, so to speak.. I have to imagine we'll see a new surge towards Lighter-Than-Air transport. Someone linked a proposal for a sort of hybrid between a Blimp and a Plane. We'll see.
I truly loved the 'Huge Manatee' the other day.. forget compassionate conservatism, I'm advocating 'Absurd Aerial Altruism with Animals' (It's still essentially legal in Maine)
signed by my alterego,
Jetpig
( www.home.earthlink.net/~jetpig )
jokuhl,
alias Jetpig
my favorite flying marine mammals are the dolphins in "A hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" singing "goodbye, and thank's for all the fish". That's also my favorite apocolypse-some days I'd vote to demolish the earth too!
Marine mammals are protected , though. I wouldn't try to fly any bottlenose dolphins around Galveston.
There was an Army blimp base across West Bay in Hitchcock during WWII, used to scout for submarines attacking the tankers of oil and gasoline going to Europe. My father told me that it was rumored that German U Boat crews would row ashore for leave getting drunk at the houses of prostitution on Post Office Street. The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
Bob Ebersole
you said: The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
where exactly is this? I'd like to see it. can you post a map of it or something? I may have seen and never noticed. thanks!
At the intersection of highway 6 and 2004 in hitchcock, head south on 2004. It will be a few miles down on the left.
I found them on google earth. Pretty cool.
I think the most appropriate way for us to decide to demolish the earth is through an overlooked rider on a committee energy bill.. but that's just me. (Or is that how it is already playing out?)
Ok, I'd better go play with my action figures again and regain some control of my universe!
Hey, another poster asked me if I'm going to ASPO-Houston, and while the irony of traveling from Maine is too harsh (Unless I get tix on the Graf Zeppelin Mach Zwei).. are you going to it?
RF
I'll be there, its only 50 miles from my home to the hotel. I've known Jim Baldauf at ASPO for about 35 years, and he has no problem imposing on his friends for grunt work, so I'm sure I'll be helping.
I'm think its going to be a great conference. Awareness has really grown in the media, and they have some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up. I'd love to see peak oil and energy policy become a campaign issue, and there are going to be some big guns there. The Houston Mayor, Bill White is a former secretary of energy and a top fund raiser for the Democrats and is speaking.
Ok guy's, here's the real scoop. Thelma's Bar Be Que has the most awesome brisket sandwitch in the southern U.S.. Her pork ribs are so succulent and beautiful they belong on the wall of the Contemporary Arts Museum. Its that East Texas black-style oak smoked meat, a great homemade sauce-and cheap. $5 or $6 bucks is guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level about 100 points and leave you grinning a greasy smile, and its only about 10 blocks from the hotel.
I'm one of Texas's great experts in cheap ethnic food. I know it sounds a little immodest, but ask my friends. Houston has at least 6 different ways to purchase goat, my infallible indicator of a town's ethnic food potential. Admittedly Chicago has better pizza, New York is the king of hot pastrami and stuffed cabbage rolls-but Houston has at least two all-you-can-eat Indian food places with great goat cury, numerous Mexican food restaurants selling cabrito(roast goat) and birria (steamed baby goat) tacos, guisado(stew) and burritos, and Vietnamese and Thai coconut milk goat curry.
So diet before you come, I'll be happy to guide anyone. Or, if you'd rather, seafood, boudain, and gumbo, soul food, or just steaks.
Bob Ebersole
There's another one at Tillamook, Oregon.
I grew up near Hitchcock and had seen the blimp base columns all my life. In Tillamook, there were the exact same columns, and next to them was another set with the hangar intact - it was cool to get to see what it originally looked like. It's now the Tillamook Air Museum
http://www.tillamookair.com/
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all.
I'll take "the world doesn't go at all" for $800, Alex.
It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today. You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
Solar and other renwables are our only future but only for a very reduced stable population size. Regardless of how much energy we can produce there are is only so much space, water, air and soil. No matter how clever we are in providing for our energy we still have a very bumpy road ahead as we reduce our population levels.
Another thing I wonder about is when do we pass the point with technology that the majority of the population is required just to service the technology for an ever decreasing number of individuals who can afford not to be concerned about it breaking down.
This is just ridiculous - the projected population of 9 odd billion people in 2050 will be perfectly capable of living prosperously once our energy and industrial production systems have been reconfigured.
Solar and wind aren't the only large scale clean energy options - there is a lot of power to be captured from ocean (tidal and wave) and geothermal sources as well.
Big Gav,
Didn't know you were back from hibernation.
Some solidly good new posts on your web site:
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/
p.s. IMHO, the movie, Children of Men is a religious piece, it was initially released last Christmas
p.p.s. How do you have time for doing all that research and posting?
Big Gav was very kind in the early days of The Oil Drum...hell of a thinker and aggregator that guy.
Thanks guys - glad you still find time to keep track of what I'm up to.
I'm slowly re-emerging from hibernation, though I may take a week or two off this month to write a long post I promised the Alpha Male Chimp Who Can't Drive a long time ago...
As far as time taken to write my stuff goes, I usually find 2 hours a day is sufficient. Basically I don't watch much TV, so that is usually possible most evenings.
I find it takes 2 hours for me just to read through the flame wars in a single TOD post, and then I find myself to be just like other humans and reptiles, merely having wasted another day without preparing for the coming apocalypse. :-)
Well - when I'm posting regularly I rarely have time to read through comments (at TOD or elsewhere) which is why I rarely comment here myself.
I certainly waste more time on the blog than I should - I've got lots of real world things to do as well, although I've decided its best to work towards avoiding the coming collapse of civilisation :-)
I should note some of my larger or more complex posts take a lot longer than 2 hours - something like "The Shockwave Rider" or "Bright Green Buildings and Dark Green Buildings" can take months to slowly assemble. Then some minion of big brother goes and bans it (The Shockwave Rider) anyway without even telling me which bit is annoying...
The idea that Children Of Men is a religious movie is an interesting one - I hadn't noticed it was a Christmas release, but given the prime spot occupied by the baby in the movie that makes a lot of sense...
Well, probably not. I've been putting together the numbers on all the options, and tidal, wave, and geothermal are pretty limited -- see this on tides and geothermal, and the links there to previous summaries of hydro, solar, fission, etc. options.
Basically the only large scale options (more than 10 times present world energy use in total renewable resource - of which we could only ever harness a few percent globally, or hundreds of millions of years worth of non-renewables) are:
* "water" - hydro + if we could somehow capture the latent heat energy associated with water vapor in the atmosphere, total about 3000 times present use
* solar - total about 13,000 times world use, or more if we go off-planet
* fusion - about 150 billion years of present world energy use from D+D fusion
* fission - about 600 million years of present world energy use from U-235.
bah humbug. If we're all going to die, why are you wasting the last few years blogging?
I can buy enough solar panels to make my power bill prettymuch go away for roughly $30K. That's <5% of what we have invested in the house. Obviously that's a net metering system (no batteries) so we do have to solve the storage problem for night/cloudy days, but we'll find a way and it won't take 100 years for it to happen. $100/bbl+ oil will concentrate a lot of minds over the next decade or 2.
Just curious. Are you? Installing panels, that is.
maybe next year. I'd prefer a windmill and want to get a small wind gauge to collect data for a year first.
we pay 30-35 cts/kwhr here.
May I suggest a mix, PV and small wind, if the economics of the two are close. Especially true if you plan to add batteries and develop off-grid capability.
Best Hopes for Renewable Energy,
Alan
30-35 cents a kilowatt hour? Where's that, an oil platform in the north sea? Sun+Windmill have synergy. Most places, it is either sunny and clear, or cloudy and windy.
You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
And the driving force for Hydro is?
What was the initial energy input for coal and oil?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today.
One of them you will not discuss the failure modes of, and the other you love brining up as having a 'costly' failure mode.
Hi gr,
Yes, exactly.
"It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?"
So, then what do you suggest? Who does what? (Say, for eg., now, us.)
Yeah yeah yeah. I want my MTV too.
May I suggest you (1) look at your state program for solar energy. If you don't have a solar energy program in your state or country, jump to step (4). (2) Do a financial analysis of the payback, ROI, or other metric including incentives and tax credits and deductions. (3) Contact your local solar installer and get a bid, or dial-800-SunEdison (or whoever), and find out what price you would pay per kWh-per term and repeat step (2). (4) Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
If this doesn't work, please let me know. I would be happy to help see that someone gets solar on your property.
It takes a vill...oh forget it.
Hi John,
Thanks, and I'm not good w. sarcasm, so I'm (possibly) missing some of this (anyway, I'm not a TV person, so...?) I was just kind of wondering if he/she had ideas for conversion on a larger scale. Anyway, point well taken, otherwise.
That always seems the last step: write your reps. Why not kiss their asses too? Will it work better or less well?
There are a number of good ideas down thread. Those will go nowhere if we think they must pass the gate of our so-called representatives - because they really represent the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
The system is too ossified. It has to be broken apart to increase reslience and diversity - let 10 thousand flowers bloom because the culling will be terrible. Raytheon and General Dynamics will be of no help. How do we build a photovoltaic factory in Maine with Maine capital and Maine workers that cannot be sold out?
The corruption at the state level - at least here in Maine - is just as bad as at the federal level if not at the same dollar scale. Who gets to privatize the state pier? The Governor's brother or Maine's dear ex-Senator George Mitchell?
Point is, our (mis)reps won't help. If they could, they wouldn't be (mis)reps. It's structural.
Maine's PV program is a tax credit. We end up with rich people getting tax credits for PV systems while everyone else is stuck. It would be a mistake to think that was "broken". No, that is the way the legislature wanted it; it's all about class, who wins and who pays.
cfm in Gray, ME
cfm - Sounds pretty bad up there from what you're saying.
But your rebate up to $7,000 for a 3 kW system is not chump change, and you have a pretty good loan program: $15,000 at an interest rate as low as 1% to homeowners with incomes up to 115 percent of the area median income.
You can't sneeze at the time value of money, and maybe more than the rich people, or at least those earning less than 115% of the area average, can install solar in Maine.
BTW, please feel free to post the letters you've written to your representatives, so we can out them right here for no actions taken. Who knows, maybe they won't get re-elected.
waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
It's also why I mention nuclear. I don't particularly like nuclear because it does have its issues but as Dezakin noted, it has an installed base that can (at least theoretically) also be rapidly expanded. What we need to be doing is expanding the four categories I mentioned before with probably the least emphasis on hydro. Personally, and while it is not what I really want, I end up envisioning a future (if we can even get there) that has a nuclear baseline generating capacity heavily supplemented for peak by solar and wind.
I'm still a doomer because I don't see this occurring at a pace that I think is adequate. In fact it's not really happening at all yet. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am at least so far. 2007 is already showing declines and most of the peak oil crowd were not counting on real decline to start til after 2010. Is 2007 an aberration? Let's hope so because if it is not and we are on the downslope right now and it is already above 2% decline rate then 10 years out may be true hell if we aren't preparing right this minute.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
The other elephant in the room is that many high grade metallic ores are showing signs of peak.
So even if we're smart enough to take the road electric, eventually society will still have to grapple with the question " what types of devices are worthy of manufacture?".
Somehow HDTVs and IPods don't fit that criteria IMO.
IPods or even better miniture generic computers are an exellent use of resources in utility and hapiness generated per kg raw material or kWh. And the innards can be built to last for decades wich of course only is usefull if the technology plateus or lots of people becomme poor.
Large displays such as HDTV:s are also usefull, especially if they are long lasting.
Voice and data communication is only slightly less important then water, food and shelter since they make all kinds of efforts easier and gives access to culture.
Reading you I could figure out that hey everything is important.
...
GZ - agreed about the crisis (but drop the redundent serious). Can you point me to the contributors or sources at TOD about adoption rates of energy technology? ASAHP if you can.
Dennis Meadows relates energy return to rate of transition here (slide 31).
http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Meadows_ASPO...
He also gives some scope to the current infrastructure size that will need replacement.
It's best to just drink the water.
gTrout - thanks but did you look at the viewgraphs??? Do you know WTF you're talking about?
Consider seriously either a large shot of Russian Vodka. or
plain old peristoika and cheers.
I think some of the animated slides were destroyed in the PDF conversion. But page 31 was clear text.
Here is the basic idea:
Say you have a nuke plant that will provide power for 40 years with an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of 10. So that means it takes 4 years of nuke output to provide enough energy to build a new nuke.
If you reinvest all energy produced from each nuke, there is exponential growth. But it is limited to 10 new plants from each plant built. If you try to build faster, then society must pay in energy and your nuke plants are a power sink.
This means the exponential growth is strongly limited by EROI.
Just a quick spreadsheet example. If you assume all energy is reinvested, and the nukes are constructed instantly once enough energy surplus is availiable, then you get these results
EROI of 5 gives 11 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 10 gives 70 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 20 gives 2216 total nukes in 20 years.
Cleaveland gives nukes an EROI of less than 5. Meadows says 10 or less. Odum is 4. Those are the middle of the road answers.
You can see why EROI 100 oil and coal was so wonderful for growth. The last value would end up getting constrained in growth rate by slower building or materials shortages, etc. And these rates are just break even. Society gets no power from this scenario. If you bleed off energy for the rest of us, the growth rate is lowered. And you can get a big jump on growth by taxing other energy sources, hence the nuke buildout in the 60-70's when energy was cheap.
gTrout - my apologizes. The presentation material is excellent and your EROI comments are pretty interesting. Boy was I off the mark.