Powering Civilization to 2050
Posted by Stuart Staniford on January 28, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: 2050, agriculture, climate change, globalization, peak oil, photovoltaics, plateau, relocalization, renewable energy, solar power [list all tags]
Global marketed primary energy production 1970-2050. Expressed in thermal equivalent of millions of barrels/oil day (ie electricity streams such as hydro or photovoltaic are treated as if they had been converted from fuel at 38% efficiency). Source: BP for fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear data, EIA and IEA for renewable data, and author's calculations as described in the text for projections. This is a scenario not a forecast.
Since it's not possible for me to entirely solve this problem in a week of part-time work, I put this out as a hasty straw-man. Feel free to point out the parts of this that don't work, or where my ignorance of some of the relevant issues shows particularly badly. Of course, I don't make the claim that I can predict what will happen forty years ahead. Nor do I expect the global population to pay much attention to what I think they should do. Instead, the value of a scenario is to try to think through the general issues that society faces, and the value of an integrated scenario is that we can think about how all the parts fit together holistically, whereas usually they get projected separately by specialists, and even the obvious interconnections get missed by decision-makers (if we try to solve our fuel problems by converting food to fuel, perhaps the price of food might go up).
With that said, for the remainder of the piece I'm arrogating to myself sole authorship of all relevant international treaties and implementing legislation at the national level. Here's how I'd go about it. In this first piece, I've analyzed the overall requirements for the problem, but only fleshed out any detail on the population, economy, and energy sectors; I did not have time to write up my analysis of transportation and agriculture/land issues. I will do so in a future piece.
Requirements
In engineering, there is a saying "requirements before design", which indicates that you should think through as comprehensively as possible what you want the system to do before you start trying to figure out how to build it to do that. Otherwise, there's a tendency to think of a subset of the requirements and then rush into a design, only later realizing that some were forgotten, which then must be added at much greater expense. So here are my list of requirements:- Population: The global population is able to grow and go through its demographic transition with death rates continuing to go down. No die-offs.
- Economy: The world economy is able to grow on average over the period - modestly in developed countries, faster in developing countries.
- Carbon emissions: The global energy infrastructure will be mainly replaced with non-carbon-emitting energy sources by the end of the period, and residual emissions will be rapidly diminishing.
- Fossil fuels: I assume that peak oil is here about now but that declines will be governed by the Hubbert model (and thus will be gradual). I assume natural gas and coal are globally plentiful enough that climate policy is required to prevent their full use.
- Technology: I do not assume any massive breakthroughs - no technological miracles that solve problems in ways completely unknown or untested today. However, where technological sectors have long established rates of progress in key metrics, I extrapolate the metric to continue improving at the historic rate (eg the economics of solar power, or the yields/acre of agriculture are assumed to keep improving on the historical trajectory).
- Impact on wild ecosystems. Developed countries are assumed to maintain the protections they currently have in place (for national parks, wildernesses etc). Developing countries are assumed to exploit their unused land up to the point of best current practices for developed countries. Whatever impact on ecosystems arises from climate change due to past carbon emissions and the tail of emissions to 2050 is viewed as unavoidable.
- Conservatism Other than the above, I use the overarching principle of trying to assume as little change in the way the world works as possible - I assume it remains a more-or-less free market world, in which national governments regulate their own countries to temper the worst excesses of the free market and periodically enter into treaties on the more pressing global problems. I assume it remains full of highly imperfect humans mostly struggling to improve their own circumstances. I assume people are willing to come together and take collective action for the common good, but only when the need for that action has become so overwhelming and immediate as to be irrefutable.
The carbon emission requirement seems essential to have some hope of stabilizing the climate. There is a considerable possibility that the climate is already destabilized to an important degree. Nonetheless, it's likely possible to make it much worse by continuing to emit exponentially increasing amounts of carbon. The best we can hope for is to start now, as energetically as possible, substituting our energy sources and sinks as best we can, until we don't emit carbon.
On fossil fuels, I have explicated my best guesses on peak oil timing (here and here) and on decline rates, and will let those stand for now.
On technology - of course, it's not likely that 40+ years of human ingenuity will pass without some big breakthroughs (think of what has happened since 1968 - personal computers, the Internet, statin-class drugs, mobile phones, etc, etc). But there is no hope at all of predicting specifically what those breakthroughs will be, or whether we will make one important to our climate/energy problems. So I assume nothing here - any breakthroughs will hopefully serve to offset whatever negative surprises the world may pose to us. However, I think it would be unduly pessimistic to assume that well established trends of technical progress will not continue, unless there is a clear game-changing theoretical barrier in the way of further progress.
As everyone knows, the rest of nature has taken a real beating from humans, and it's going to get worse. Climate change means that species must move, and habitat fragmentation means they can't in many cases. I recognize the tragedy in this, but I do not see what can be done about it given the other requirements above. I don't think it's realistic to assume that developing countries will do any better than the examples that developed countries have set in terms of set-asides - I certainly support efforts to conserve as much as can be conserved.
And then, finally, I am still a liberal on the contemporary American political scale, but a rather centrist and very independent one. In particular, at this point in my life I have a very strong sympathy for the strain of thinking in the Anglo-American conservative tradition which says that humans are complex and highly imperfect, that it has taken a long time to get society to work as well as it does, unsatisfactory as that may be, and that radical experiments to improve the way it works are dangerous. One should attempt change by making improvements step-by-step on the most pressing issues of the day, and one should be prepared to accept that society will never be utopia. In this case, we have no choice but to make some radical changes in where we get energy from, but let's at least not try to change any more things than we have to. I'm more than happy to settle for a world that will be a minimally acceptable place for my children and grandchildren to grow up and live out their destinies. I take the requirements above to be a description of that minimal level. The world will not become a utopia (whether you prefer your utopia agrarian, socialist, libertarian, spiritual, or transhumanist).
Outline of Solution
My basic approach is as follows. Over the next fifty years, we're going to phase out most burning of fossil fuels, but they will still be used for petrochemicals and fertilizer (manufacture of which will be mainly in the Middle East). We will cope with short term energy problems by efficiency improvements, but in the long term we will power society predominantly by massive amounts of solar PV, with smaller amounts of wind, and legacy hydro. We will use a global transmission grid to balance supply and demand between the nighttime and cloudy areas and the areas in the sun that generate power. Nuclear is avoided in the long term out of proliferation and waste concerns but is used in the short and medium term. Owners of fossil fuel infrastructure will be compensated at fair market value.Ground transportation will be by a mix of electric cars and electrified public transport (in areas of high enough density). The car fleet will be moved through hybrids to plug-ins to full electrics as storage technology slowly improves. Developing countries will be encouraged to urbanize and develop as rapidly as feasible to reduce pressure on remaining wild ecosystems and to build public transport systems in their very dense cities.
Building heating and cooling will be transitioned predominantly to ground source heat pumps powered by electricity instead of burning fossil fuels.
Agriculture will remain predominantly industrialized, and ongoing yield improvements, particularly in the lower-yielding poor countries, are assumed to be able to feed the world. The residual oil production and modest and regulated amounts of biofuels will be used for certain applications where the advantages of liquid fuels are indispensible (predominantly heavy construction and agricultural machinery, shipping, and aviation). There is considerable scientific uncertainty on the extent of soil depletion, but the assumption here is that at-risk areas will be placed in conservation reserves, and that, later in the century when energy becomes cheap again, restoration and remediation will be attempted.
The overall economic approach for implementation will be a hybrid "markets-within-a-plan" approach. A pure free market approach is likely to be disastrous (eg starving the poor to make biofuels for the rich, which will result in riots and revolutions). However, markets are very powerful drivers of innovation and efficiency when well designed. We will set general goals with binding targets by treaty, and then use a combination of subsidy auctions, rights auctions, and reverse auction retirements of fossil fuel infrastructure to meet the binding targets. Market competition will improve the technology and drive down the required subsidies over time.
In general, this will require a massive global infrastructure project. It will be expensive, but it's not impossible. It seems very cheap compared to further uncontrolled experiments with the climate, or to allowing the world to descend into starvation and chaos by adopting dysfunctional approaches to our energy challenges. It will place civilization on a tolerably sustainable footing for the longer term.
With that, let's turn to looking at the major sectors of the global economy in a little more detail. Again, I'm going to go through population, economy, and energy sectors this time. The rest will have to await future pieces.
Population
Here, from an old piece of mine on population, is a graph of the various UN population scenarios:
UN population projections through 2050. Click to enlarge. The medium scenario (dark green) is the UN's best guess as to what will happen. High and Low represent their best estimates of the range of reasonably likely outcomes. The Constant Fertility line is their estimate of what would happen if world average fertility did not decline any further. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision.
In this piece, we will take the medium population scenario as our goal to be supported by the planetary economy. It's worth looking for a moment at the assumptions the demographers are making in the less developed countries (where most of the population growth will be occurring):
Birth and Death rates for UN less developed countries (excluding least developed). The lines through 2000 are data, and after that the lines are the UN's medium projection. Source: World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision.
As you can see, death rates have been falling, and they are assumed to fall further as countries continue to develop and get wealthier. Birth rates follow death rates down, but with a lag (this is the demographic transition). Least developed countries are following a similar trajectory but are not as far along. The assumption I make here is that if the economy and food supply are allowed to grow at reasonable rates, then population will follow the UN's assumptions.
Economy
The way the economy develops in my scenario is as follows (I'm going to summarize it here, but some of the justification comes later). This graph shows global GDP on a $2007 purchasing power parity basis. The data through 2007 are from the IMF. My scenario basically has global growth dropping sharply for the next few years due to an assumed US recession caused by the credit collapse. Then growth starts increasing again, but slowly due to high energy prices. Finally, as our energy problems get thoroughly solved around 2025, growth returns to about the current long term trend in developed countries. Developing countries are assumed to gradually slow down until by 2050 they are not growing much faster than developed countries (since they will be fairly developed by then).
Actual and projected global GDP 1980-2050. Expressed in $2007 dollars on a PPP basis. Source: IMF for historical data, and author's calculations as described in the text for projections.
The global economy, about $72 trillion in 2007, will be several hundred trillion dollars by 2050 under my assumptions.
In addition to GDP data, the IMF has also kept track of the level of investment in the global economy. I show this data, and also how much investment there would be in the future, assuming that the fraction of GDP invested averages the same in the future as in the past. I place this graph here to give some idea of the world's investment budget for when we start spending some of it on a new global energy infrastructure.
Actual and projected global GDP 1980-2050, broken out into investment component versus immediate consumption. Expressed in $2007 dollars on a PPP basis. Source: IMF for historical data, and author's calculations as described in the text for projections.
Total investment is about $17 trillion in 2007, and rises to somewhere around $75 trillion/year by 2050. This includes spending on houses, factories, offices and infrastructure of all forms, but excludes current consumption.
Again, left alone with a sufficiency of resources, a capitalist economy will tend to grow. Inventors will invent more efficient ways of doing things and more desirable end-consumer goods; entrepreneurs will bring them to market; people will get more productive; bigger and better houses, factories, cars, etc will be built, and the whole thing will be bigger next year than it was last year. Thus the basic analysis to justify my scenario consists in showing that none of the apparent resource bottlenecks are necessarily fatal to growth. By far the most important of these is energy.
Energy Sector
There are basically three choices for non-carbon-emitting, non-biofuel, energy production technologies that are already in practical commercial use and have potential for major expansion: nuclear, wind power, and solar. Let me briefly discuss the trade-offs.Nuclear is the furthest along in that it already provides a material fraction of global primary energy (about 5.6% of marketed energy on a thermal basis). See Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs? for a good summary of the case for nuclear. Nuclear has a high energy return on energy invested and there is sufficient uranium for a long time (though there are short term price issues associated with the ending of the burning of the stockpile of uranium from old nuclear warheads). New nuclear energy will probably be reasonably cheap as long as interest rates aren't too high (since most of the cost is the upfront capital to build the plant, the cost of finance is critical to nuclear economics).
Nonetheless, I do not favor nuclear power as the long-term major solution to powering the global economy. Pervasive presence of a nuclear power industry throughout all or almost all countries of the world has three major issues: developing countries are frequently corrupt with a tendency for their building subcontractors to do things like leaving the rebar out of concrete to save money. Nuclear power is an industry were mistakes and short-cuts cannot be tolerated. Furthermore, the nuclear fuel chain always has the potential to be diverted into weapons use by its owners (the basis for western concerns about Iran). Nuclear weapons remain the only way humanity has come up with to not just end our civilization but end our species and most life on the planet and they ought not to be proliferated further. And finally, after fifty years of operation of the industry there is still no commercially demonstrated permanently satisfactory solution for what to do with the waste. I share these concerns with many members of the public, and, even if I didn't, the presence of broad political objections to nuclear power would make its future problematic.
That said, the issues with nuclear power seem to me somewhat less pressing than climate change, and in scenario building it turns out to be very valuable to allow the nuclear industry to grow for a while, and then buy them out at fair market value in due course. In my scenario, I allow global nuclear to grow until 2025 (at the historical 5.4% annual growth rate that obtained globally from 1980-2006 according to BP data) and then start buying out older and less-profitable plants to reduce the nuclear contribution by 3% per year.
See The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Wind Energy for the case for wind. Wind power is already cost-competitive with fossil fuel power, emits no carbon in operation, and has a very satisfactory EROEI of around 18 on average. Wind power delivered has grown on average 23.7% annually from 1990 to 2005 according to the IEA, and the new capacity delivered has been growing 30% - 40% annually in the last couple of years, suggesting that the growth rate is accelerating. I feel wind is an excellent option.
However, many people differ as soon as someone tries to put a wind turbine near them - objecting to the noise, visual impact, and harm to bird-life. Local political opposition to wind plants has frequently been very strong, and because wind is extremely diffuse, one needs to put an awful lot of turbines in place to garner it's full potential. For this reason, I assume wind continues to grow, but eventually saturates the politically acceptable sites. The two countries that have the most wind are Denmark with about 1.1 TWhr/year per million people of wind production in 2005, and Germany with about 0.33 TWhr/year per million people. New wind installation in Denmark has largely stopped, and it appears to be slowing in Germany. I treat the global politically acceptable maximum as around 0.5 TWhr/year/million people, and grow wind up to that point at the historical 23.7% growth rate. (This threshold is highly uncertain and my calculation should only be treated as qualitatively indicative. If I'm wrong, we'll end up with more wind and less solar, but the issues are basically the same either way). Wind power still produced only 0.2% of global marketed primary energy in 2005 (treated on a thermal oil equivalent basis with an assumed power plant fuel efficiency of 38% - what BP does for hydro and nuclear electricity statistics). Thus it will take a long time still for it to grow to providing an appreciable fraction of our power.
My feeling is that photovoltaics are the right answer for the long term future. They don't harm wildlife, don't pollute, people around them don't seem to object to them much, they don't critically depend on anything in ultimately short supply, and they have outstanding energy payback. For example, Nanosolar claims payback of manufacturing energy in less than one month for their state-of-the-art product, but more conventional options still have energy payback in the single digit years, implying an EROEI in the tens to hundreds as we go from current to future PV products.
There are two major issues to overcome: economics, and intermittency. PVs are not yet economically competitive with fossil fuel energy, but there is a long cost history that lends itself to a fairly stable extrapolation that is quite encouraging:
Left panel shows cost of PV panels versus versus cumulative installed capacity. Right panel shows a sensitivity analysis for the learning rate (the percentage drop in the cost due to a doubling of the installed capacity). Source: Fig 3 of McDonald and Schrattenholzer, Learning Rates for Energy Technologies.
The learning rate is the percentage by which some technology drops in cost per doubling of installed capacity. Solar has been dropping at about 22% for each doubling, and this is fairly stable, give or take a few percent. If anything, the learning rate is improving slightly over time. According to the IEA, the installed base of PVs grew at a combined average growth rate (CAGR) of 34.9% from 1990 to 2005. Thus we would expect costs to drop by about 9% per year, which would correspond to halving every eight years. At current costs of about $4/peak watt, unsubsidized PV power costs about 10c/kWhr in sunny places like Los Angeles and about 16c/kWhr in a cloudy place like Seattle (from Solar Revolution, p 110). Thus it is probably already competitive with retail electricity in many sunny places, and will become competitive with wholesale prices of about 5c/kWhr in less than a decade in sunny places and in about 15 years in cloudy places.
With serious policy help, PV installed capacity can grow much faster than the 35% global average. Eg in Germany, PV has grown at a CAGR of 61% over the same 1990-2005 period. However, the global installed base of PV is miniscule - in 2005 it only comprised 0.0033% of marketed primary energy (on a thermal equivalent basis).
The effect of all these trends - tiny current installed base, rapid growth, very fast learning curve, high EROEI tends to mean that PV can be of almost no meaningful benefit to the global situation in the short term, but in a couple of decades from now reaches critical mass, and then will potentially be in a position to provide almost all of society's power within a couple more decades from that. Since PV can be readily fit into all kinds of otherwise unused surfaces on buildings, and also spread out over otherwise low-value desert, and can be applied in installations from a single panel up to thousands of acres or more, it can be ramped up very quickly - there are few barriers to deployment. This is the basis for my selecting it as the backbone of long-term sustainable power for society in my scenario.
The remaining problem that needs to be solved is the intermittency (PV provides no power when it's dark and not much when it's very cloudy). There are basically two possible approaches to this. The first is that we would install enough storage everywhere that the energy stored during the day would be enough to power usage at night. I have not been able to construct a believable story about how current electric storage technology can scale to the required magnitude in a timely way, and thus this approach, as far as I can see at present, faces a critical bottleneck. It's one thing to have a battery that will power a plug-in hybrid for an hour commute. It's another to have enough batteries to get a region through a week of clouds and rain.
The second approach is to construct a global electricity grid. As far as I'm aware, this approach was first proposed by Sanyo under the rubric Project Genesis. Their idea was to install PVs throughout the world's deserts, and connect them up via superconducting cables to the world's cities - they estimated 4% of the world's desert area would be required. To get some feel for the issues, you might want to stare for a while at this screenshot of the planet:
View of the earth as of about 11pm Pacific time on Friday 1/25/08. Source: Screenshot of OS X Planet.
Obviously, half the planet is dark at any given time, and about half the rest is under cloud. We would have to be generating enough power in Africa, the Middle East, and the non-cloudy portions of Asia to power the globe, and then shipping it from those sources to wherever it was required all over the world. 12 hours later, those areas would be returning the favor. Nighttime electricity use is only about 30-40% of the daily peak, but it's still a lot of energy to move. The worst case seems to be early evening here in California in the northern hemisphere winter:
View of the earth as of about 6:30pm Pacific time on Saturday 1/26/08. Source: Screenshot of OS X Planet.
In that case, Asia and Australia have to power their own daytime use, as well as evening use in the Americas, and residual night time use in Europe and Africa. I imagine that the Australians would clean up financially with big PV arrays in the interior.
I have two changes I think are required to Project Genesis. One is that most PV already is being installed on buildings in the urban environment, and I expect this to continue (albeit supplemented by utility scale plants in waste areas). The second is that I don't want to rely on superconducting cables, since they are still on the drawing board, which violates my "no breakthrough" requirement.
However, existing technology for high energy transmission lines appear to be able to do the job, albeit with significant losses. High voltage direct current lines lose about 3% per 1000km. The earth has 6378km radius, so it's 20,000km to go to the exact opposite point on the other side. However, if we figure the average electron only needs to go about 2/3 of the way around the planet to get to its customer, then average losses will be 1- 0.97^13 = 33%. In short, by shipping PV around the world, we lose about a third of the part that's shipped. However, if we figure on average two thirds of PV goes locally to the awake/bright side of the earth with little loss, and one third goes to the asleep/dark side at 1/3 lost, overall losses are a fairly manageable 1/9 of total power generated. This is in the same ballpark as the losses of natural gas in LNG shipping (about 15% of the natural gas). In short, existing technology appears able to get the job done - it's an enormous global infrastructure project, but doesn't require breakthroughs. Any breakthroughs in electric transmission can only make it better.
Before I analyze the costs required to build a global renewable electricity grid, let me summarize my total energy generation scenario as it stands at present (I reserve the right to improve it over time). I assume PV capacity grows at the historic rate of 35% until 2012, when the replacement for the Kyoto treaty comes into force. Since I will be writing the treaty, in my scenario, it will call for a much accelerated rate of growth in renewables, and so PV then grows at the German rate of 61% until 2025. At that point, it is reaching critical mass and will then slow down and just grow overall top line societal energy usage by 3%/year. But after about 2025, energy will get cheap again and it's not clear how fast usage will grow - it will be constrained by demand, not supply.
Fossil fuel usage is assumed to be impacted in the near term by a significant US recession and global slowdown, and in the medium term by strenuous conservation efforts inspired both by high energy prices and the ongoing legislation/regulation process responding to climate concerns. From 1979 to 1983, overall primary energy consumption dropped as a result of the second set of 70s oil shocks. I assume that, this time around, developing country demand growth is too robust to cause an actual drop in overall energy consumption, but I assume it essentially stays flat until the renewable energy explosion starts to really hit with wind making increasing contributions after 2015, and solar PV starting to completely swamp the situation from the early 2020s on. After 2025, we can easily grow PVs and we can begin to aggressively retire the remaining fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure.
This graph summarizes the scenario at present:
Global marketed primary energy production 1970-2050. Expressed in thermal equivalent of millions of barrels/oil day (ie electricity streams such as hydro or photovoltaic are treated as if they had been converted from fuel at 38% efficiency). Source: BP for fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear data, EIA and IEA for renewable data, and author's calculations as described in the text for projections. This is a scenario not forecast.
Of course, I wouldn't claim for a moment that my back of the envelope calculations will actually be the way things play out quantitatively. However, it does seem to me that the qualitative features of this graph are likely if we do the required international public policy groundwork to install a global renewables grid. The qualitative features I mean are a period over the next 15-20 years of high energy prices and slower global growth, followed by a period after that when renewables take off and become the main power source for society and energy becomes cheap again.
The remaining questions are around costs - can we afford to to do this? Well, if you look at my scenario, we need about 550mbd of primary energy capacity, which under my assumptions corresponds to about 125 PWhr/year, or about 14 TW of electricity. Of that, we probably need worst case capacity to move about half of it around the globe. So we need 7TW capacity cables circling the globe in a roughly east-west arrangement, but let's add 50% for path deviations due to the complexity of land topography. Therefore, we need 7TW x 60,000km of cable capacity by 2050.
Now, the cost of HVDC lines is ballpark $1m/km/GW. So given that we need 7000 GW x 60,000km, we will have to spend about 400 trillion dollars ($2007) between now and 2050 to achieve that. That's a lot (learning curve may reduce it somewhat - I'm not assuming any). However, if by this means we keep economic growth going, then the system will certainly be affordable. Recall that above I gave the IMF investment data and a projection of it. In my scenario, GDP from 2008 to 2050 totals about $7700 trillion, and investment at the historical ratio is $1700 trillion. So the cost of the renewable grid is about 25% of investment, or 5% of GDP. However, we save on all the fuel. For example, in 2006, the global fuel bill for oil, coal, and natural gas (at commodity prices) was about $3.6 trillion, which was 5.4% of 2006 global GDP according to the IMF. Presumably fuel prices going forward are not likely to be much better than 2006. Thus, although a global renewables grid would require a major investment over the course of the next forty - fifty years, it's only comparable to what we would be spending on fuel if we stick with our current course of action. And our current course leaves us with no idea what kind of climate we'll be living in, and whether it permits civilization or not.
Well, with that, I'm about out of time for this piece. Next week, I'll try to flesh out what some of the other sectors of the economy might look like. In the meantime, feel free to poke holes in this in comments.
I will leave more technical criticism to the more qualified posters here. My overarching objection to this plan is simple - human nature.
If we were all born with the intellect of Einstein and the personality of Ghandi then you could probably make this work. But with a world full of Joe Sixpacks (or their national equivalents) and national leaders of the calibre and character of GWB (and there are many) we are NOT going to see the kind of global cooperation and long term investment needed to face up to the limits to growth which the human race currently faces. Also, I do not see any realistic opportunity to avoid global population overshoot. Yes developed nations do reduce childbirth rates to below replacement when income levels, female emancipation and childhood death rates improve to a certain level, but we can never improve the lot of the poorest people fast enough to keep ahead of population growth. We are not smarter than yeast.
I have been thinking about possible solutions as well and they generally match this article. Ideally we need a zero growth model for economy and population as well.
But human nature is such that we cannot get a "blueprint" (to quote the Shell memo) to be accepted until there is a consensus one is needed, and there will not be a consensus until things get really really bad first.
All we can do is put out potential plans and hope that at some point in the near future leaders will finally wake up and use one -- hopefully while it is still possible to implement.
Maybe we should genetically engineer differant humans. ;-)
Genetically engineer engineers instead of humans,
Smaller humans. That's how electronics has gotten so efficient. If humans were only a half inch tall the planet could easily feed six billion of 'em...
The thread is not entirely facetious. Nutrition issues used to keep humans much smaller. Which aided survivability in famine time. Which was often every late winter/early spring. Large specimens tended to be leaders, but also had to somehow justify their much larger appropriation of foodstuffs.
Social cohesion and teamwork also aided survival on a smaller resource footprint. As a trivial example the 1920's 3-flat I'm sitting in was built in a season. Replicating all the detail in this structure today would be most likely a 3 year project - even though it would be power tools, not hand tools, deliveries by phone call, not by teams of horses, etc. We have lost even the idea of teamwork.
And I'm quite sure this bldg was produced with an order of magnitude less waste than construction sites generate now.
Isn't human nature to want have and use energy? Or is it human nature to want to shiver in the dark?
I don't understand the argument here. I think the problems we face are that people will have to learn to adapt; they will have less energy; they will need to be creative or they will perish. There isn't going to be a 'Joe Sixpack' when the beer is too expensive and that money is better spent on potatoes. And if electricity is precious, sitting around watching TV may not be the best way to spend one's time?
The original Staniford article was much too long. Excuse me if I read it wrong by only skimming it.
My impression is that he is presenting a supply side scenario for energy production based on assumptions of economic gowth requiring growth in the use of energy.
I too am cynical about the intelligence of the majority of humans and the inability to reach them and their "elected" (I quote elected because the candidates are bought and therefore beholden to the interests of the economic elite) representatives.
The trouble with focusing on supply side economics and energy is that they both ignore demand. In relation to economics, the lack of effective demand for the plethora of consumer products will prove to be the downfall of this past generation's experiment with supply side economics. With respect to energy, we must recognize that demand side management is critical to any possibility of a sustainable future. I don't think that liberal economics (laissez faire, the so-called free market)can deal with the problem(s). We need a planned economy to effectively retrofit the infrastructure with regards to increasingly scarce energy supplies and to rebuild our communities to be walkable, therfore eliminating the terrible daily waste of oil/energy resources for transportation purposes.
I have to differ with Staniford's rosy scenario regarding the contributions tha photovoltaics will make. I'm not an electrical engineer or an electrician, but it is my understanding that PVs don't have the oomph (be it voltage, amperage and/or wattage) to contribute very significantly to the current and recommended increased usage of electricity. Sure PVs and wind might be able to contribute to lighting applications, but I doubt they can power our transportation, our industrial and home heating, hot water, agricultural inputs,refrigeration, drying, and cooking needs.
We could go full throttle to the building of nuclear power plants, but I am highly leary of their toxicity and safety issues. Even if we pursued the path of electrification with the maximization of nuclear power, it will require a tremendous overhaul of our transportation infrastructure and all the other applications currently met by oil products and natural gas.
First of all, nuclear is not a "free market" technology. Most of the resources for development of this technology were paid for by government programs. Then, there is the waste issue. Is it not the Federal Government who is going to or proposing to pay for the waste depository at Yucca Mountain (Nevada)? Then there is the issue of bringing back the so-called Price-Anderson legislation. This is legislation to insure the power plants and related operations. No private insurer will touch them, thus the government had to step in to provide such insurance.
I am cynical and believe that in the next generation or two we are heading toward a massive die-off. As a matter of understatement it will be ugly and messy. Those few who survive will need to be self-sufficient. Thus, under such a scenario, what Staniford calls historical reversalism, a relocalization of sorts will be realized.
A much better scenario could be realized (go ahead, call me Pollyanna)if we started very soon with a planned economy that focused first on demand side management and also the retrofitted infrastructures with respect to very scarce and relatively clean (I view carbon resources, if appropriately used to be cleaner than nuclear) energy applications.
Relocalization is part of the plan (and not just for food). Instead of reversalism, let me offer the following re words for your consideration, response, and suggested action.
Reformation
Little to no beneficial changes will occur without an almost religious change from the paradigm of economic growth and standard of living to one that emphasizes community redevelopment and quality of life. This is an educational component of an alternative ecological economic plan.
Reorganization
If we can be successful and realize the educational/reform component, we need concurrently to reorganize our economic systems to one of cooperative (i.e. economic democracy, or at least partially so - we will probably need to compromise with relation to the divide between the one dollar/one vote and one person/one vote structure of economic organization) communitarian local and regional economic entities.
Reallocation
We need coordinated regional planning agencies that agree on the fundamental mission of a global ecological economy that has the two basic pillars of sustainability and equity. These "planning" agencies would work together to determine and facilitate how resources are allocated to and within communities based on the relocalization paradigm and other governing principles.
Restructuring
Communities will need to be physically rebuilt to make them walkable (i.e. new urbanism, building community centers making necessities and reasonable wants available to all within walking distance of all homes).Included in such a plan would be neighborhood work stations where office workers could telecommute in their occupations that are involved with the transition from an entropic Capitalist system to an ecological Socialist one.
Reduction
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
You can get more info. about my plan by going to: www.culturechange.org/Morin.html .
Workin' for peace and cooperation,
Mike Morin
Transportation: Solar powered bike and many similar
Home Heating: Solar heating via annual energy storage
Hot Water: Plenty of solar hot water systems on the market
Refrigeration: Solar powered refrigerators
Drying: Clothesline
Cooking: Solar cookers
A lot of what he is describing in his article is possible but not probable.
All we ( as a country ) have to do is build all this alternative power supplies , but we are not doing it, nor will we. I tell people and explain too them that we must make our houses solar and alternative energy heated, and they just say it cost too much.
We do have solar powered things that we can use, but I have been trying to get the peak oil message to others, and the few that agree that there will be a problem, have no interest in
doing any preparing. This means they do not take the problem seriously.
I started telling people in 2004.
In the last few years since 2004, absolutely nothing in the scale needed has been done.
It appears that nothing will be done, until it is too late.
I can assure you that when people realize that they must do something, all these alternatives will be too expensive, and only the richer people can afford to do anything.
We are headed for a depression in unprecedented scale.
The resources needed to build all the alternative infrastructure will be not be available in quantities needed, when energy shortages start.
All we can do is keep spreading the message and making our own preparations.
.
DocScience
http://www.angelfire.com/in/Gilbert1/tt.html
The trouble with this objection is that for some time now anthropologists have decisively rejected the idea that human nature is simple. It ain't!!
And they are the ones whose field is the science of people including 'human nature'.
Here's what an anthropologist will tell you these days:
From page 145 Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction 2000, John Monaghan & Peter Just
Why is it that so many who pride themselves in their scientific thinking are profoundly unscientific when it comes to human nature??
Here's someone writing about Human Nature from a Marxist viewpoint
"Q. What About "Human Nature"?
A. The question of so-called "human nature" is one of the most commonly raised arguments against socialism - but it is also one of the easiest to debunk. Many people believe that the way people think has always been the same, and that we will always think the way we do now. But a few examples will show that nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, like all things in nature, human consciousness and society are always in a state of change. Marx explained that "conditions determine consciousness". In other words, our environment determines to a large degree how we think. We know what rap music, Hollywood movies, and a Boeing 747 are because they exist in our world. For example, if we were born 5,000 years ago as peasants in China, our world-view would be very different! If we were born as royalty in China 5,000 years ago, we would also have a very different view of things than if we were peasants."
And he goes on at some more length here : http://www.newyouth.com/content/view/117/60/#humannature
And, yet, when tried Comunism failed due to the same factors that those "human nature" critcs were pointing.
Agreed. the writer of the article confuses human nature with perceptions and attitudes. The latter change the former does not. For example the reason we don't burn witches anymore isn't because we are better than we were but because we no longer believe in them. If we believed certain people had the power to cause us great harm by magic you imagine what our response would be. We might percieve things differently to the ancient chinese but basically we are the same.
Human psychological nature may be complex, but there is a human psychological nature (just as there is a "human physiological nature"). The authors of the textbook to which you are referring are "social constructionists." The bane of cultural anthropology is has been the search for the culturally exotic while ignoring the underlying commonalities ("human nature") between cultures. The blank slate, human-natureless "Standard Social Science Model" is being gradually replaced by the nature-nurture interactionism (the "Integrated Model"). So human nature is relevant.
Moreover, "life nature" is relevant. All life is a competition to replicate genes (genes that didn't replicate just are not here anymore). Thus, the competition for resources. Evolution does not occur for the "good of the species" -- unfortunately, there is no brake to stop replication and resource consumption just before reaching overshoot levels.
As I have mentioned elsewhere here, inclusive fitness is not absolute, it is always relative to the inclusive fitness of competitors. That is both the "life nature" and "human nature" we are up against.
It may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, but that is what we need to do to avoid overshoot. I wrote about this in a previous post: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3375#comment-277043
Cheers, Mike
http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm
A really thought provoking post! Thanks!
Now to try to pick holes! ;-)
Since not consistent pressure has been applied via advertising etc, why did not populations in the developed world continue to expand at a great rate, since there is such a reward for competition?
I've probably pinched the thought from somewhere else, but I would suggest that the evolutionary pressures are in fact rather different on men and women, and that in patriarchal societies the pressures are great for more children, but in an environment with more control to women and without very harsh stimulation from the environment, they feel secure in passing on their genes through fewer offspring.
The case is different for men, as there is also the risk of infidelity which may leave them childless.
On the whole though, it seems to me that modern conditions simply fool the reproductive drives of people, and that since we have not evolved with conditions of plenty the system of carrying on until overshoot is just not triggered.
Warfare with other tribes to obtain maximum reproductive rights is more the male style - but I suppose we may just be having a lull until that reasserts itself.
The point that I am trying to make is that if reproductive drives can be diverted under the right conditions, perhaps other forms of overshoot are not inevitable.
Yes -- I agree with you.
Overshoot in humans is not inevitable -- IF we can exploit the mis-match between ancestral conditions and modern ones to our sustainable advantage. Humans are not "reproductive maximizers," we are "adaptation executors." We need to understand what those psychological adaptations are, and how they work, in order to "fool" them.
That is, we need to find out how to trigger psychological adaptations such that there is more psychological pleasure derived from engaging in sustainable activities compared to non-sustainable ones. Politically, I'm fairly libertarian, but, to avoid ecological overshoot, we really need some serious social engineering, social marketing and advertising, etc. There are no libertarians on a sustainable Easter Island.
memills said:
'Politically, I'm fairly libertarian, but, to avoid ecological overshoot, we really need some serious social engineering, social marketing and advertising, etc. There are no libertarians on a sustainable Easter Island.'
I think I will take my chances with a stone axe and a bit of radioactivity, thanks! :-)
All an elite, such as the ones who control things like the social engineering, ever choose is what is best for them, not anyone else.
For instance, in the Edo period in Japan which someone referenced as a period of social stability, that stability was predicated on peasants producing rice which they were not allowed to eat, and having their children tortured if they fell behind in rice-taxes, even in times of famine.
A lot of the talk of 'no growth stability' here sends something of the chill of those times down my back.
What about the Meiji period, after which Japan had completely adapted to industrial times.
Actually come to think of it, looking at that period of Japan's history has some important lessons for today. Unfortunately in order for it to happen, Japan needed the Meiji Restoration and civil war to over-throw the old ways...
Maybe.... we can expect resource wars and for government to obtain more control over a country with the excuse of war necessity and use it to force a change to alternative energies using the energy from the resources their wars have obtained...
This would sort of echo the way Japan did it, ruthless dedication to modernisation, become an industrial power or be a servant of the west and kill anyone who wants to do otherwise.
I would say this possibility is consistent with human nature. ;)
No. The authors are definitely willing to discuss human nature in general and do. The difference is the complexity and provisional quality of the generalizations.
You give the impression that a kind of darwinian neo-mathusianism is taking over anthropology. LOL!!
It's like a mantra or liturgy. It's repeated on TOD every day, day after day like some kind of doom-dirge. But it's only partially true -- more of a caricature actually. Definitely an imperfect characterization.
Are you really saying that there are no species (even us!!) that adjust their reproductive processes based on perceived scarcity of resources??
Shame on you! :-)
I'm absolutely convinced that the overshoot meme has taken on theological qualities in the peak oil community.
For instance:
I wonder how often in the history of our planet, a species has been introduced into a new environment wherein it proceeded to multiply rapidly until it reached a relatively stable population that persisted for a very long time. I would wager it's happened more than once!!!
One, show me just one. That is all I ask...
(Other than those with populations stabilized by predation and/or cyclical starvation).
Basic Population Biology 101. Over time, reproduction increases exponentially, but the carrying capacity does not.
Human population growth rates are already slowing, with many studies predicting population will flatline at just over 9 billion around 2050.
Can you prove this won't happen, and that 9 billion is greater than carrying capacity ?
I think not.
Anyway - great post Stuart.
The global grid idea was also something Bucky Fuller pushed for - with the GENI organisation still in existence trying to popularise the idea (I didn't see a reference to this above - apologies if I missed it).
I think its worthwhile looking at a scenario with a larger mix of renewables than primarily solar (a post I've been working on for a long time, so don't feel the need to go down this path). If you have a global grid, then you can plug in large scale wind, tidal and geothermal power as well, cherry picking the best spots around the planet for each.
That reduces the solar intermittency problem (although us Australians would be happy to get peak energy prices during the northern winter with our huge solar energy farms in the desert under your scenario).
Big Gav, I checked back on the population growth estimates from past versions of the CIA World Fact Book since 2000. Here is what I found:
2000 1.3%
2001 1.25%
2002 1.23%
2003 1.14%
2004 1.14%
2005 1.14%
2006 1.14%
2007 1.167%
Now that doesn't suggest to me that the human population growth rate is slowing. I wonder if this is one of those "facts" that gets ingrained in people's consciousness because it was true at some time in the past? It certainly doesn't seem to be true for the last 4 years.
From 1.3% to 1.167% over 7 years is actually a very significant drop.
Saying it has increased once in that period does not a trend make...
If you look over a 50 year period, the drop is even more pronounced.
All this is true but you said that the growth rate is already slowing. Well it was slowing but, for the past 4 years it has been stagnant or growing. Of course, a few years doesn't make a trend but the figures appear to show that the decline has, at least, stalled. I don't think it's reasonable, at the moment for people to keep on using the figures up to 2004 to state, categorically, that population growth is slowing and will reduce to zero. At least not of its own volition.
That happens all the time; google "invasive species". However, in that case it generally out-competes the existing species for the niche. Kudzu, zebra mussels, etc. No magic, just the tunneling past barriers in fitness landscapes.
There's a reason the "yeast in a wine bottle" metaphor is often used: humans have, as an approximate description, learned to eat oil and natural gas, and thereby increase the total population in a yeasty way. Not only is that "food" going away, but the wherewithal for metabolizing it into food (soils, fresh water, stable climate, intact ecosystems, etc) is being degraded.
Belief that arbitrarily high human population levels may be maintained with no clear mechanism is what I would call a 'memememe' (pronounced mee-mee-meem! as by Curly of the three stooges), a nonsense meme, with heavy theological overtones. Loaves & fishes, be fruitful & multiply, etc. We'll see how that works out.
George,
I wasn't going to 'stick my oar in' as my granny used to say, but after reading Stuart's interesting speculations and attempts to weld positive solutions together; and then to see his work dissed so quickly, almost like a reflex, and the hoary 'argument' about 'human nature' dregged up, I couldn't contain myself.
Why do people casually assume they know anything about 'human nature'? What is 'simple' about the concept of 'human nature'? What's so simple about 'nature'? What's simple about being 'human'? Is it because they consider themselves unequely qualified in some way to comment? Is it because they are human? Is it because they are natural? Or a bit of both? Or perhaps neither of the two?
I confess I'm sick and tired of hearing about human nature. Every time I hear the phrase, I feel lik reaching for my pistol, to paraphrase another self-confessed expert on human nature - Hermann Goring.
'Human nature' is a cultural construct. It changes constantly, both in time and place. Therefore it isn't constant, not 'natural', and put simply it's a myth. Much like God, we created our 'nature', and we can change it if we so desire.
Coincidentally I was chatting to friend of mine who is a professor of anthropology just the other day, and the subject of 'human nature' popped up, we'd both heard some asshole politician using the phrase relating to the current the meltdown of Capitalism. My friend also rolls his eyes every time he hears somone pontificating about 'human nature'.
Let's say human civilization is around six or seven thousand years old, that is people we recognize as human like us culturally. They had streets, houses, temples, writing, maths, fields, kings, poets, soldiers, armies, wars, schools, religion... On the other hand humans like us have been wandering around for about 150,000 years. Six thousand years, contrasted with 150,000 years. One figure is considerable shorter than the other. What does anthropolgy tell us about the way these humans lived for the overwhelming period of human existance? Well they were hunters and gatherers for well over 100,000 years, long before agriculture came along and settlements of any duration. What does anthropolgy and archeology tell us about the main characteristic of hunter-gatherer groups/societies? That they had an extraordinary level of solidarity and co-operation, they were forced to work together for the common good and survival of the group, or they would simply disappear. Life was hard and tenuous. Work together or die was the rule that kept our species alive for over a hundred thousand years. This was our culture. This was our 'nature'. Our culture defines our 'nature'.
Of course once we moved into perminent settlements, civilization and culture really took off and our 'nature' adapted accordingly, but that is another, larger, and more complex story.
The idea that human nature is a cultural construct is what communists believed, and constructed a society on that precept, and look what happened. All the Worlds great tyrannies have been based on the idea you can alter human nature. Tell your friend to stick to his ivory towers.
This chart shows the year over year change in net oil exports (Total Liquids, from most recent peak to zero net exports) for the ELM and two real life examples, the UK and Indonesia. Note that the vertical scale is 10 percentage points. I would think that virtually every net oil exporter in the world would fall somewhere between Indonesia and the UK in terms of per capita income, rate of change in energy consumption and energy subsidies/taxes. A fourth critical factor would be the monetary values of oil exports as a percentage of GDP. Of course many oil exporters in 2006 and 2007 showed increases in cash flow from export sales versus declining export volumes.
I have slightly modified our terminology--talking about approaching zero net exports, rather than hitting zero net exports, but I think that whether a net exporter actually hits zero or continues to export minimal volumes at some point in the future in not terribly relevant at this point.
In any case, I expect to continue to see an accelerating net export decline rate, especially by the top five. In fact, if we use 2005 (so far, the net export peak year) as the beginning point, it is 45 years from 2005 to 2050. Our middle case for the top five is that they will collectively approach zero net exports only about halfway to 2050, around 2031. This is the biggest problem that I see with the total energy graph.
Quick question westexas, do your expectations on net exports take account of countries like Saudi building chemical and highly energy intensive industries onshore and then preferentially servicing them with hydrocarbons before exporting the rest?
It looks like what they are doing and would speed up the net export decline rate of those big exporters.
Some have argued that a portion of net oil exports will show up as petrochemical, plastics, fertilizer exports, etc. And I think that they are correct, but I think that it will not be a major factor in reducing the demand for oil imports. However, as you suggested it would probably cause the rate of increase in consumption in oil exporting countries to accelerate.
I am aware of a report that Saudi total liquids consumption by the end of 2008 will probably be at or above 2.6 mbpd, because of a shortfall in NG production, and Rembrandt put early 2007 Saudi consumption up at 10% over early 2006.
I think that the idea of moving solar energy around the world is not really doable. Electrical energy will have a hard time passing through any territory, reliably, that a guy on a motorcycle cannot. By that, I mean that if the area is not safe enough for a guy on a motorcycle to ride, alone, over time the infrastructure will be damaged, destroyed, or held hostage by the same powers and people that disrupt the movement of people.
My favored solution is conservation, relocation of energy intensive industries to energy generating countries, nuclear for base load, and solar and other renewables for daytime peaking. Some things will have to change; for example, the power spike in Britain at 6pm every day when people make their tea. We may have to assign tea times, just like they do at Saint Andrews.
You need to justify the part where you jumped from solar energy to electrical energy.
How shall the car gain solar cachet?
Stuart's asserted that "in the long term we will power society predominantly by massive amounts of solar PV".
Also, olepossum is talking about moving solar energy. Is there a feasible alternative to the electric grid for doing this?
Producing hydrogen is the usual alternative proffered, but it is not nearly so efficient as moving electricity, in fact it is staggeringly inefficient - those little hydrogen atoms are tricky little devils, and escape form pipelines easily, as well as the losses in producing them and generating electricity from them at the end, if that is the required use.
You could also maybe produce fuels like butanol, although I don't think much serious work has been done on it - no point whilst there was cheap oil.
As I understand it its pretty simple to produce diesel fuel if you have hydrogen and CO2 over cobalt catalysts.
That would be a darn sight better than fooling around transporting and using hydrogen - I wonder what the energy loss is though, by the time you have made the hydrogen than converted again to diesel - in my limited understanding I believe that any attempt to go to one of the higher carbon chain fuels carries quite large penalties.
You also still have the fact that electric engines are very efficient, combustion engines horrid.
So if you were planning on using it for transport you would be loosing shed loads at both ends.
I suppose if the more wild dreams of the solar buffs come about though, without Stuart's grid you would have to vastly overr-produce most of the year anyway, so you might as well make diesel.
I think the required investment of $10 trillion/year for the next 40 years for a global electrical grid is a deal breaker.
Even 1 trillion/year would be tough to drum up.
I agree that a world wide grid will be difficult. Imagine all the trouble we have now even as energy supplies are growing (Iraq, Darfur, Chechnya, etc.)? It's only going to get worse when energy supplies begin to decline and tensions are aggravated by global warming.
Perhaps the high voltage DC lines can be run mostly in the ocean, instead of through countries? It makes maintenance more difficult, but the lines would be more difficult to sabotage. There are precedents with transocean data cables.
I've heard that pressurized air in underground caverns and in old gas and oil mines could provide night time electricity. What's the limitation with these and how much energy can they store? Could they store a week of electricity? I'm guessing not...
You have to heat the air when you release it,usually using natural gas.
A recent proposal in Scientific American for providing a large grid for solar PV postulated this technology to store the energy - when we broke the figures down in discussion the amount of NG they were planning on using was massive!
Here is the discussion:
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
And here the article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1
DaveMart -
There is a tendency among some to view renewables such as solar and wind power as being capable of being directly substituted for conventional fossil fuel-fired power generation. It is somewhat glibly assumed that the inherent intermittency and variability of solar and wind power can somehow be relatively easily smoothed out. That is not a very good assumption.
The issue of what is the most cost-effective means of energy storage for wind and solar power has not even begun to be resolved. The various energy storage alternatives all have serious drawbacks that generally translate into high costs.
Coming up with a cost-effective means of large-scale electrical energy storage will increasingly become the holy grail of renewable energy, for without it the inherent drawbacks of wind and solar power will be self-limiting with regard to the possibility of their widespread application.
Then there is also the issue of energy centralization versus decentralization, or concentrated versus distributed systems. Both wind and solar fit very well into a decentralized scheme, and both technologies lend themselves very well to modularizaton .... again, provided that the storage problem can be solved in a cost-effective manner.
On the other hand, a worldwide 'super grid' would be the antithesis of decentralization and would raise some very serious political and societal concerns, i.e., he who controls the grid controls the world. My own personal view is that a world-wide grid would be a step in the wrong direction and would only increase the leverage of those playing the game of energy power politics.
I think we will have economic collapse if we go along with some of the 'ecological' suggestions on offer - the costs are staggering.
I had a recent discussion here with MDsolar , who kindly corrected a decimal I had misplaced, but using his (correct figures still came to the result that for solar energy at the latitude of Germany you are talking about around a sixth of the energy in the middle of winter from a given PV system compared to the middle of summer - when you actually need around 4 times the energy in the winter compared to the summer!
That factor of 24, although it can be mitigated by different strategies, including the one Germany has actually adopted, burning coal in the winter and having the PV as eco-bling, means that any serious consideration of PV for power in the northern regions is essentially ludicrous with anything like current levels of technology, and super grids and so on, together still with massive over-production at some times, are the only way it works even as a fantasy.
As for wind, the UK government reckons it will cost them £76billion for an 11GW energy flow (nameplate 33GW) which would still need substantial backup.
Maybe something can be done for day-time peak for Los Angeles with solar, but for most places at the moment non-carbon dioxide emitting energy which can be made to last for long periods of time is spelt n-u-c-l-e-a-r.
Actually, for Germany, I think that they are currently establishing market share to be able to expand into the broad region in Stuart's graph. The are unlikely to do 100% of winter generation with solar, but they may go to 100% of summer eventually since the cast off batteries from EVs can cover night time. Pesumably they'll use their excess wind at that point to help out France which has trouble with summertime generation. They may also run some cooling using excess heat from Fischer-Tropsch jet fuel production using wind power. At a pinch, they could keep renewably produced hydrocarbon fuel for wintertime use rather than using it only for aviation. Presumably fuel cells will have advanced by then yielding 80% overall efficiency. But, buying Spanish solar power in the wintertime would also be an option.
Chris
Solar power is better in Spain, but not that much better. During the winter Spain will be using all the solar it can get, not exporting it, if it ever reaches any substantial proportion of output.
France is also rapidly building up it's wind power, so likely would not need anymore from Germany.
It's the cost issues though, Chris - all these measures would be great if we were all billionaires.
I do like some of the things Germany is doing, the Greenroof initiative, cut and cover for urban roads, passivhaus, and in those respects Germany is really leading the way.
It may also be argued that some of it's vast expenditure on solar power will help some others at more favourable locations - Los Angelinos, for instance, for their peak cooling needs.
On the actual energy generation front though they are having to go to more, very dirty, brown coal plants, to the tune of around 6GW.
In my view they are simply in denial, and have been convinced that nuclear is the big bad, when that is the source which can economically and with little risk provide low-carbon power for them
Here is a comparison of actual carbon emissions for Germany and France:
'“Germany has spent billions of euros subsidising wind and solar, marching to the greens’ drum. They have not succeeded in reducing their CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, which remain among the highest per capita in Europe [10.4 tonnes/capita/ year, up from 9.5 in 2,000. That is because wind and solar are intermittent and unreliable. Every solar panel and every wind machine must be backed up by reliable power for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing,” he said.
Moore said Sweden had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in Europe (6.3 tonnes/capita/year) and France had the second lowest (6.8 tonnes/ person/year). Sweden is 50% hydroelectric and 50% nuclear. France is 80% nuclear, 10% hydroelectric and uses only 10% fossil fuel. Denmark has the highest CO2 per capita at 11.0 tonnes/capita/year “because their mix is 18% wind and 82% fossil fuel. It is clear to see that the more hydroelectric and nuclear in the mix the lower the carbon emissions will be. Wind has a minor role to play and solar is not even worth the investment,” said Moore.'
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_...
And here are cost comparisons for different energy sources:
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_Generation_C...
Nuclear is by far the cheapest low-carbon energy source.
I won't go into other issues such as fuel availability, proliferation and waste, since they have been covered over and over again, including in this thread, but suffice it to say that in northern Europe is you do not have cheap power, people die of hypothermia, and this real and demonstrable death rate has to be weighed against the very small demonstrable risks of nuclear, and the lethal effects of coal emissions.
You're going to need to provide a reference for that, since it's very, very different from the available data for other western countries. The USA, for example, uses 8.5 +/- 10% quads per month, so it seems dubious that Germany would be so vastly different.
I don't understand your quads reference - I was trying to refer to the power generated by a given system in winter vs midsummer.
The figures I am using for Germany were taken from a discussion I had with MDsolar in this thread and I am using his figures - he is a solar advocate (naturally with a handle like that!) and has a set-up in Germany, the figures correlated closely with those I had sourced elsewhere.
Forgive me if I leave you to look through tht thread yourself - it is pretty cumbersome when you are in the middle of a post here to locate the quote elsewhere in the thread!
Someone in North Virginia made the same point of you, that he was only 10 degrees further south and did far better than that, but apparently according to MD the difference is due to the greater cloud cover in winter in northern Europe - areas by the great lakes in America also apparently suffer form the same effect.
I was surprised to learn that even in the Mohave you only get around 25% as much sun in the depths of winter as in mid-summer - this from someone who is involved in the solar thermal energy industry - it was a discussion in the 'Energy Blog' but I did not keep the reference, but that figure should be easy to check as it is mainly a matter of latitude rather than cloud.
The multiplication factor for winter peak use is based on the UK, where minimal use in the summer is around 20GW, and peak in the winter is about 75GW, so my factor of 24 is over, but it was just intended to give the right ball-park and indicate some of the engineering difficulties and the scale of the problem, in practise many mitigation strategies would be followed, but just the same the fact that you are generating in Northern Europe most of your energy when you least need it and would have to grossly over-supply that to make a significant dent in winter needs is a tough one to crack.
It's a whole different ball-game in areas like LA, where cooling needs are important, so at any given cost for a solar panel it is many times as cost-effective.
Just to note, I was using this tool:
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps3/pvest.php#
I don't have a system in Germany. I took the default system loss, which is high, but did optimize the panel orientation. For the US I use static maps from this page:
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html
Chris
Sorry for the misunderstanding, Chris!
Given the potential danger of a world wide grid, some thought should be given to a gird that is world wide but largely powered on a distribute, localized basis. This would involve installing grid tied systems with some backup. This would increase the cost of the system, thus reducing the advantages of a grid tied, net metered system, but might be done anyway as an insurance measure.
But, yeh, the world is not becoming any less dangerous. Think of an oil embargo on steroids with a world wide super grid.
Each block of people gets a different tea time, enforceable by the local gestapo. Yes, that's the ticket!!! If the British have to change their tea times, we are clearly doomed.
And how many nuclear plants is that?
Cheers
Ridiculous, we already have a world wide network of cables that connect the whole world.
It's called the internet, you are currently using it.
These are mostly fibre optic links that span the globe, with the US as the hub. I live in sydney australia, and I am sending this message to you guys through the long fibre optical links that span the whole pacific ocean to the US east coast, if any of you are in europe, this going further through the entire US and over the Atlantic ocean as well! In near instant speed. It's all cables, satellite has latency issues that make it unusable for a pleasant to use internet. Yep, the communication industry laid cables across the world's largest oceans, because people were not willing to wait an extra second for a satellite. It is also constantly upgraded as need for bandwidth keeps increase.
Some maps of the internet:
Ocean links http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/images/cable_map_wallpap...
Capacity map http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_internet/images/internet-map-2...
Router links http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/
It's a real nice piece of work. If we can do it for data, can we not for electricity?
PS here is a rather interesting article. Sometimes cables get cut, but they can route around it 'degraded performance' will result though.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7218008.stm
HV DC ocean lines require insulation effective for a half million volts. Fiber optic lines need protection from mechanical forces found on the ocean floor.
HV DC lines require aluminum cables 6 or 10 cm in diameter, fiber optics require a bundle of hair thin glass fibers.
A MAJOR delta in costs, and resources !
Alan
Well done Alan! I was considering chiming in, but you have done the job.
An additional point is that you need to have converters for the power for AC-DC and back again for the long distance lines, and they aren't cheap.
BTW, I have found authoritative figures form the Department of Trade and Industry ( a branch of government here) on on-shore and off-shore wind costs for the UK:
http://www.renewables-advisory-board.org.uk/vBulletin/attachment.php?s=0...
attachment.php
I put them at the relevant place in the thread, but repeat them here for your convenience, as they contain all the detail you wanted.
I would like your input on whether I am reading this right,and the costs are for name-plate installed capacity, not actual output, because if they are then although lower than the original figures I gave are very high indeed, even for on-shore, and some of the discrepancy may be due to the report being 2006, and I believe that there has been inflation since then
It is also not entirely clear, to me at least, whether connections to the shore are fully costed.
Back-up capacity, though you would not need that for all the output, is not included in the price, nor of course is any supergrid to reduce intermittency.
It seems to me that many of the low costs quoted elsewhere as a price per kilowatt already include subsidy.
I await your comments with interest.
Submarine Fibre optic cables have copper power cable in them to power the repeaters, as well as thick steel cables to withstand stress and forces. So what you actually have is fibre optic lines inside a copper tube, far from being just a bundle of hair thin glass fibres.
http://www.naval-technology.com/contractor_images/nsw/minisub_cable.jpg
Stuart,
Some random navel gazing thoughts:
Whichever way you cut it, we need to expect a discontinuity in our future - hopefully more like the reformation or enlightenment than like the decline and fall.
"Any solution that doesn't explicitly recognise our future being in space has problems. We've just got to face it, the world's too small for us and we need to get out. If we aren't serious about this before 2100, we're dead from the good ol' limits to growth."
I agree with this. It is a vital necessary part of the long term picture if our decendants are to have any quality of life and our species is to survive in the long term.
Jon Kutz Minnesota USA
"Tinkerer and Dreamer"
Defination:
Politician - A marionette running for public office
On the space thing. Growth in beyond earth orbit space flights 1970-2007 = -100%. Proven business models for beyond earth orbit - none. Size of the space exploration sector funded by commercial venture capital, $0. I think we await breakthroughs and it would be unwise to bet on it soon.
We need an economy some 10-100 times larger really. Sure, if you have lots of spaceflights the price per launch goes down and you can research more low cost high volume launch infrastructure. We'll get there someday.
We'll only get there if we recognise the limits that the earth currently imposes on us. If we keep pushing those limits and expect them to disappear, it will be a very long time before humans again have the technology and energy to try some space enterprise.
You underestimate the limits of the earth and the avaliability of energy. 10^17 watts from solar insolation and 160 trillion tons of fissionables go a long long way.
Not at all, there are all sorts of limits, not just energy. Just where are the full life-cycle analyses of harnessing this abundant solar resource? We usually think that there cannot be any side-effects of any "solution" that might get proposed and that there are plenty of resources in which to build and operate these solutions.
But the human species doesn't seem to be very good and contemplating limits.
Or being bound by them.
We have no evidence of that. Daily and annual limits have been extended by the use of cheap abundant energy. As that fades, natures limits will start to become critical factors and humans will undoubtedly bump into them.
The notion that cheap abundant energy will fade just strikes me as a bit silly. Wind and nuclear are nearly competitive with coal today, and the exhastion of hydrocarbon resources wont significantly change this.
The most expensive thing we'll run into is inflationary lull in the economy as we switch from liquid fuel based infrastructure to electric (wind and nuclear immediatly and solar eventually)
Even if we can make available enough resources to harness enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuels as they decline, how can you be so certain that this will enable us to continue harvesting finite resources at increasing rates, avoid catastrophic environmental damage, conserve fresh water supplies enough and continue to feed a growing population indefinitely? If you don't think we can do all that indefinitely, then my case rests; we need to figure out other arrangements before that unsustainability catches up with us.
Exactly.
World economic growth: 3% annually (U.N.)
Rule of 72:
72 / 3 = 24 years
Can the planet survive a doubling of our impact in just twenty-four years?
I think not. Our ecosystem services are already starting to fail.
Here is just one of many, many examples.
-Andre'
Most of these resources are functions of energy. Fresh water is a clear example.
Let's take the remainder after "most" is taken out. Then we are unsustainable. Let's take the most. The amount of energy goes up exponentially, as the quality of the raw resource declines. There may be some cases where this is not true but it is generally true. If the ore grade declines, for example, it take more energy to extract the growing amounts needed to fuel growth. If we're not unsustainable now, then we will become so at some point, if we continue to worship economic growth.
As I said, if you don't think we can sustain growth indefinitely (and just by the word "most", you imply that's true) then economic growth will have to stop.
Let's take the remainder after "most" is taken out. Then we are unsustainable.
That logic chain isn't complete. It only works if the the resources that aren't functions of energy are at least as limited by energy. They're not necissarily. Other limits are labor and technological advancement.
This 'you're ignoring limits' strawman has got to stop. Everyone knows in a finite universe you run out of steam eventually. We disagree on when.
I say its well after the stars have been strip mined.
It should also be noted that unmanned robotic spacecraft have preceded every step humans have made into space. In fact, the gap is increasing, maybe exponentially. While we are still stuck in the earth-moon system (and haven't even been back to the moon in a quarter-century now), unmanned robots have gone to fly by or orbit every planet (with the demotion of Pluto) and have explored the surface of Mars. They have even traveled beyond the outer reaches of the solar system.
There is probably some law that should be formulated to the effect that for each linear step of manned space exploration, unmanned robotic spacecraft extend their space exploration exponentially.
It really makes a lot more sense to send unmanned robotic spacecraft. Eliminating life support makes the engineering considerably easier. The longer the distance from earth, the longer and more difficult the trip becomes for humans. All sci-fi speculation about humans tooling about space even at anything close to the speed of light are pure fantasy, it just won't happen. The best we can ever hope to do is to launch slow robotic probes to nearby star systems that might take decades or even centuries to reach their destinations. Presumably we'll eventually advance to the point where we can build self-controlling (too distant for real-time communications) and self-repairing robotics, for that is what it will take to explore other star systems.
The good news is that if we forget most of the nonsense about trying to put humans where they don't belong, the energy requirements for sending robots into space to do what we want them to do are not nearly so high. It is definitely worth trying to maintain a modest capability to build robots and send them into space occasionally.
(BTW, this is also why I discount any and all accounts of sightings or encounters with "aliens". If another species on another world ever contacted us, it would be with their robots first.)
That is the most sensible thing I have read on space exploration in a long time! Thanks.
There is also an issue of relying too heavily on one option. What happens if a shortage of a critical material occurs? What about cost? A pure PV solution must build an infrastructure on a scale similar to generation for storage/world wide distribution. Will it all scale? He is betting on technology that currently does not have almost any market share for generation and storage or global grid technology that is not even at the drawing board stage. PV certainly seems benign right now but would it still if it were built up to the extent Stuart recommends?
Stuart also dismissed nuclear without giving convincing arguments. That is surprising coming from him. As Dezakin has demonstrated repeatedly here, the storage issue is not urgent and vitrification is certainly a good short term option. Reprocessing shows much potential to nearly completely resolve the issue over the mid term (not to the satisfaction of the anti-nuclear activists, of course). Maybe there are risks to building nuclear plants in unstable third world countries, but in the developed world, the industry has the best safety record of any significant energy source. His idea that most of the world’s future growth will be in the undeveloped parts of the world seems utopian. Those are the parts of the world where the population problem is most acute and certainly there will have to be some serious coming to terms with that in those areas, which calls into question his growth projections.
Man, you don't want Stuart. You need Hari Seldon.
The technology to populate space (stations, the moon, other planets, etc.) with any meaningful number of people at any reasonable cost is hundreds of years away. Given that we're facing energy and resource shortages that we must focus on and overcome, that timeframe is pushed out further. We need to focus on managing this planet's energy, resource, climate, and population first. Without doing that, technology will reverse and you'll never get there.
No matter how lousy this planet gets, it will ALWAYS be a trillion times better than living on a space station, the moon or another planet. When the lake gets polluted, maybe the fish should just try living in the trees.
Really, you think it would be any worse than living in a dense modern city such a new york, where there's so many man made sites that you don't even need to see nature to be happy.
If we don't do it within the next hundred years then we never will as high quality energy sources are used up sustaining populations that live in worse and worse situations.
Its one of those steps you have to take at the right time, miss it and you die off as a species.
Has there been a successful experiment in which people enclosed in a completely self-contained system managed to survive for an extended period of time?
-Andre'
Yep, its called the planet earth - a few billion years and counting.
(laughing) Ok, that was good.
Please insert 'artificial' in the appropriate spot.
-Andre'
Yes, there was. It was called biosphere 2. Seven scientists lived for two years on about two and a half acres sealed off from the outside world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Theres the more pedestrian example of nuclear submarines...
As I recall, the Biosphere 2 had some really serious problems with maintaining energy and gas balances, the latter believed to be closely linked to microbial activity in the soil. While the earth does this quite well, it's had billions of years of practice to achieve a state of near equilibrium. Plus, something the size of the earth has a huge amount of thermal, chemical, and biological inertia to help absorb short-term excursions, something the Biosphere 2 did not have.
If we've learned anything from Biosphere 2 (and many people think it was one big self-indulgent boondoggle), it's that a small, completely closed ecosystem can be very unstable and difficult to maintain.
It was linked to somehow forgetting that concrete absorbs CO2 as its sets...
It was a lot more than that. The soils were acting funny: absorbing gases when they shouldn't have and desorbing gases when then should have. Some sort of poorly understood biochemical reaction was the most likely culprit.
I know from personal experience that soils can do some rather odd and unexpected things when kept in a confined space.
There is much we don't understand.
dupe
If we figure out how to harness fusion, we'll be able to start. That might happen in 30 years or 300 years. Remember that the Renaissance started pre-fossil fuels and there were many inventions and scientific theories during that time. Granted that we were able to exponentially increase our knowledge with fossil fuels, but scientific knowledge and learning will continue without them more slowly.
We know how to harness fusion now, we're just not nearly desperate enough. You mass produce teller-ulam bombs, drop one a minute into excavated caverns where heat is reclaimed from molten salt waterfalls on the chamber walls. Now theres the whole proliferation issue of mass production of H-bombs along with dumping enough heat in one spot of the ocean to make it boil, but the engineering of it works if we really were desperate enough to need it.
We sure aren't now.
Are you serious? I've never heard of that before. Do you have a link for further reading?
The technology sounds feasible. I wouldn't like to see it implemented though.
How about a Project Orion engine connected to a generator? Could probably power the entire world-wide HVDC grid with one of these things
Maybe Not In My Back Yard though!
External pulsed propulsion such as this would work (not any better for power than good nuclear power plants). But you can just seed it by making mining facilities on the moon (lift enough robotics and factories to the moon with chemical rockets). The moon has thorium and uranium. Can make the bombs and metals for the super-orions. Million of tons anywhere in the solar system. 30-50% cargo for nuclear rocket. Can start plucking near earth and other asteroids for materials.
I'm surprised to hear this from a presumably numerate TOD poster. If by "our future being in space" you mean mining for raw materials, this is one thing, with it's own set of problems. But if you mean actually offloading population (...the world is too small for us...), this is sheer nonsense.
Right now earth's population is growing at ~250,000 per day. One doesn't have to be very numerate to see the no-brainer flaw in trying to move even a tiny fraction of these to ....where? Even in the 'demographically transformed' post 2050 world, moving 'excess' people to a non-existent space colony doesn't remotely make sense in any of my frames of reference.
In terms of solvable problems, this one is IMO obviously a non-starter.
....besides which, there are more than a couple of TOD posters who insist that there's "no problem" with the earth supporting 50 billion or more human beings. Who needs space??
/irony off
I mean the future of the human race depends on getting out of the trap of a finite and limited planet. Population is just numbers - its never been the point.
And as far as numeracy is concerned, the same point was made by Prof Stephen Hawking - so I think I'm safe enough.
Yeah.
It's an infinite universe. There are an infinite number of planetary systems and an infinite amount of resources in the universe.....
If we could just get there....
High centralisation is a requirement of the technologically advanced kind of civilisation that we want to keep building. Complex technology requires many people working together and therefore good transportation infrastructure.
Nuclear powered rail is probably the best solution for this, electric goods trains.
I think you have made things unnecessarily tough for yourself in your provisions, chiefly in looking at a worldwide solution rather than a more regional one, but also in the selection of technologies.
Intermittency is a major problem, but it varies enormously from resource to resource,and importantly from area to area - in the winter months in Germany a 1kw PV panel will generate around 30watts! - and that is for months at a time. Intemittency of the same source in the tropics is of an altogether different order, of often being only a matter of days or even hours, although of course the details will vary according to the climate, with very cloudy areas doing worse, and also according to the precise technology, as some are a lot better under cloud cover.
I will try to conform to the criteria for selection of technologies that you have set up, to keep some sort of shape in the debate.
The first comment I would make is that most of your reservations against nuclear are much reduced exactly where you most need it - areas like Northern Europe,and the Northern parts of the US , with comparatively high levels of technology and security.
I do not really see the waste issue as being in any way critical, as after reprocessing all the waste form several decades of French production only fills up an area of around 3 baseball courts.
Areas where security etc may be more problematic, by and large have much higher solar incidence, and more importantly less extreme swings from winter to summer, and so PV power is much more suitable and economic.
The first additional technology I would call to your attention is solar thermal, where rapid progress is being made and storage for a period of hours due to diurnal variation much easier.
Some systems are talking about using compressed air storage, which is used in other contexts but may fall under your stricture of unproven technology.
Recent proposals in Scientific American envisage using PV power from the Southwest for the whole of the US, again without a world grid.
You could certainly use pumped water storage to compensate for diurnal variation though.
Another which has much lower variability is hot rock geothermal, of the potential of which MIT recently spoke highly:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=517E9954-E7F2-99DF-36C206BCA2...
I'm not sure if that is 'present day' enough for your requirements though!
Calculations of the intermittency of wind also indicate that very high levels of penetration would also be possible with the provision of grids of around 1500km or so, far less than a world grid.
For the States at any rate, with proven technology you could also burn shale, taking up the carbon equivalent with agrichar - these methods would not strain existing technology too much, I believe.
For diurnal variation it seems to me that use could also be made of lead acid batteries incorporating ultracapacitors, which again we can do now.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/01/ultrabattery-combines-supercapacitor.html
So to sum up, for most areas in the tropics and subtropics solar energy is likely to be the most important source, although it might well take the form of solar thermal, enabling easy compensation for diurnal variation.
For northerly latitudes with wide variations between winter and summer needs and abilities to generate power then more constant sources either nuclear or geothermal are more attractive, and you could also possibly use resources like wind with a regional grid, or import power form more southerly locations, but still without a world grid.
Here are the European proposals for such a system:
http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/
You still don't need a world grid, as diurnal variation is relatively easy to store power for - it is annual variation that is the difficult one.
Dave, you wrote:
"in the winter months in Germany a 1kw PV panel will generate around 3watts! - and that is for months at a time."
This doesn't make sense. Somewhere you got bad information or made a calculation error. 1) There is no such thing as a 1kw PV panel. Did you mean 'array'? 2) Solar insolation is not that bad on a cloudy day! But the loss of the day-to-day variation is critical since the design and performance of a system with, for example, 5 kWh/day nearly every day is quite different than one with 8 kW/hr/day on some days followed by several cloudy days with 2 kWh/day.
Absolutely correct! I lost a decimal place! I have since corrected it, using the edit function, but didn't know whether to bother noting that up
I used 1kw of power not because I believe that most panels are that size, but to try to show how much of the rated power you would get in winter on average per hour over the 24 hours - and that should be around 30watts, not 3 as I said.
A more usual installation is around 2.6 or 5kw, so for the bigger you should get around 150watts average energy flow during Nov, Dec and Jan - not a lot for a fairly pricey installation however you slice it.
I got the figures which I subsequently cocked up from an Irish installation, which gives around 3% of rated power during those months, but of course it may be a bit cloudier or whatever than Germany, but I should finally be in the right ball-park for Northern locations! :-)
This misses the point of the scenario which states that the solar arrays would be placed in desert locations with plenty of sun. You are describing some other scenario.
I was suggesting instead of a world grid that different solutions should be implemented in different areas according to the resources available, so considered how suitable solar PV would be for Northern areas, using the example of Germany.
On that basis a number of other resources would seem to me more suitable than PV in those sort of areas, although residential solar thermal has got a good contribution to make even at those latitudes.
Most measurements total in kilowatt-hour (kWh) over the particular time period they are interested in. From what I surmise is that you are saying that a 5kw array would produce an average of 24*150=3.6 kWh per day. Ok, I have a 2.8kw installation in Northern Virginia, and I am averaging 12 kWh per day in January, even with our cloudiness. Sure it is 10 degrees to the south, but that is a lot of difference. On New Years day I produced 15 kWh.
I based my figures on a fpost in another thread where MDSolar kindly corrected my original error:
'Also, I think that you have a factor of ten error in your estimate of what PV produced in the wintertime. For a rather lossy system (24%) 1 kWp system located in Hannover, Germany I get 24 W average daily output in December, not 3 W. Ignoring losses gives a value a little above 30 W. You need to go to the middle of Finland to have latitude affect solar output so strongly.'
Once my decimal place was corrected (!) this was in broad agreement with the figures I had.
I rounded up to 30w for 1kw.
Unless someone with more expert knowledge can help, I can only assume that the 10degree difference in latitude is indeed that critical, or perhaps your set-up is better optimised for winter sun-angles.
You should always adjust the panels for the seasonal angles, that makes sense. Tracking on the other hand is expensive.
You are getting just about what you should for January:
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/us_pv_january_may2004.jpg
Northern Europe gets more clouds owing to the evaporation from the Gulf Stream. You can see Lake Effect in NY in the map which is similar. I sould say that to read the map you need to know that at peak we expect about 1 kW/m^2 so the numbers can also be read as peak equivilent hours of Sun per day.
Chris
I second the nomination of solar thermal, because it can store heat for overnight use, using molten salt.
The seasonal variation problem still would call for a north-south grid.
Maybe not, or not a huge one, if you use wind power, geothermal or nuclear as the basic power system up North.
As I pointed out, you could also use shale oil as long as you did not affect the carbon balance - more easily achieved in my view by agrichar than industrial sequestration.
Solar thermal panels and heat pumps do a darn good job anyway of minimising overall energy requirements.
Your point is a good one though - but is we use other resources you don't need to engineer the absolutely vast systems that would otherwise be needed - my original critique of Stuart's world grid.
There is a lot of difference between sending a supplementary 50GW of power north in the winter and trying to run the whole of Northern Europe by cable from the Sahara.
It all helps to keep the engineering on a reasonable scale.
Dave,
I second most of your thoughts, although I line with Stuart on nuclear issues. For me the possibility for proliferation from a fuel chain is too big. It is too much fire to be played with. Maybe it can work safely enough in a few chosen countries, but as a global solution nuclear is not safe enough. In principle it would be possible to keep the dangerous parts of the fuel chain in few countries, but in practice it might be impossible. Also we can't continue very long with once-through uranium cycle. I also like to think that we should keep the planet free of long term waste as a principle: this includes non-degradable plastics, many chemicals and nuclear waste. I hope that there will be many many future generations of humans and as many other species as possible. I understand that people can have high enough confidence in storage solutions to say it's a non-problem, but I remain to be convinced.
At high latitudes it's also possible to use heating as a source of flexibility for variable power production from wind. When wind is blowing one can push part of the electricity into heat pumps or electric boilers. They can be connected to heat storages. This is a cheaper energy storage solution than compressed air or dedicated pumped hydro. Naturally, there will still be times when wind power production is low, although this can be partially mitigated with larger power grids as you suggest. I guess in principle it would be possible to use stored heat as a source of electricity with Sterling engines, but I don't know how economics would play out. It's more likely that the power capacity needed for low wind periods is cheaper to cover with gas turbines and maybe to some extent with (used) EV batteries.
While I like Stuart's technological scenario, I think it's more likely that wind will take a considerably bigger share, since it is easier to deal with wind's variability than with solar's. Global grid is a nice concept, but I wouldn't want to rely on it for my electricity. Concentrating solar thermal is also a great option, but it requires clear skies and is therefore a geographically limited option without super grids. Stuart's reasons for limiting wind are not very convincing. He sets a limit based on Denmark, which is quite densely populated country. Wind didn't stop expanding there because they ran out of space, although there certainly was also issues with that. It had much more to do with change in government and a reworked subsidy program, which meant that it wasn't any longer profitable to build wind power plants in Denmark compared to some other countries in Europe. Still, Danish government has plans to increase the share of wind up to 50% of electricity from current 20%, although bulk of the increase would be offshore. Germany is also planning on about tripling their wind production. While there is often news that wind power developments have had NIMBY resistance and some projects have got cancelled, a lot of projects have gone through and are continuing to do so. There is plenty of space available, even to power the whole globe if necessary. That said, it's impossible to guess how cheap solar is going to be in 20-30 years and of course the solar resource is much more abundant than the wind resource.
JohnK,
The nuclear genii is well and truly out of the bottle. making nuclear weapons is not the cutting edge proposition it was in the 1940's, and the plain fact is that you won't be able to stop any nation that wants to from acquiring nuclear weapons.
the West's ability to control countries in that way is a thing of the past.
The trouble with wind is the insane costs. If you look at actual figures, and take out politically motivated subsidies which are only to any extent viable when renewables are a small part of overall production, and even then result in Germany and Denmark having some of the most expensive electricity in Europe, then you confront massive costs.
Here are the actual, Government projections of costs for their planned expansion of wind in Britain:
'The most prominent proposal is that which will require Britain to build up to 20,000 more wind turbines, including the 7,000 offshore giants announced by the Government before Christmas. To build two turbines a day, nearly as high as the Eiffel Tower, is inconceivable. What is also never explained is their astronomic cost.
At £2 million per megawatt of "capacity" (according to the Carbon Trust), the bill for the Government's 33 gigawatts (Gw) would be £66 billion (and even that, as was admitted in a recent parliamentary answer, doesn't include an extra £10 billion needed to connect the turbines to the grid). But the actual output of these turbines, because of the wind's unreliability, would be barely a third of their capacity. The resulting 11Gw could be produced by just seven new "carbon-free" nuclear power stations, at a quarter of the cost.'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/27/nbook127...
I have just e-mailed Stuart with links to how much energy in a system could theoretically be generated with wind, and it is very high.
My guess is that if you talk to the guys who would actually pay, so is the cost.
Solar is much, mush worse.
I have to disagree on the cost approximations from Carbon Trust. They don't look at actual realized costs of past projects. Their estimate is based on offshore wind and current market prices (not costs). First off, there's more than enough capacity in UK onshore, even to power whole Europe. I understand that UK is land of NIMBYism, but the resource is just so huge, that with reasonable siting those turbines could be built onshore. Currently building onshore costs around 1.5€ million per MW, which is about half of Carbon Trust figure. Once steel prices get back down to reasonable numbers and wind power manufacturer's are once again able to meet the growing demand, wind turbines will again cost less than €1 million per MW. Steel prices will come down, the massive building operation in China is finally slowing down. It might take some years before manufacturing capacity reaches demand, but with the time-scales we are talking about, I don't see that as a problem. Meanwhile, there will be technological progress on the turbines and more economies of scale, so I suspect that onshore wind will be in the range of 0.7-0.9 M€/MW, once the conditions are favorable once again. Before current price spikes, cheapest wind farms in Spain had a turn-key delivery price of about 0.8 €M/MW. So, a cost for the 33 GW will be around 27 000 M€, which is equal to 20 000 M£. I don't want to predict which year this will be, but wind power manufacturer's have been able to pull out quite impressive growth numbers for more than a decade now.
Nuclear costs are not so rosy either as current experience in Finland is showing. There is also lot of past bad experience, especially in UK, where nuclear program has cost some serious money. Granted, there have been costly mistakes, but who's to be sure they will be avoided next time around. With a CF of 0.9, one needs 12.2 GW of nuclear capacity. My estimate for average nuclear cost (also assuming that there's no more steel and labor shortage) is 2.5 €M/MW. This yields 30 500 M€. Of course another person might assume that nuclear industry will finally be able to deliver consistently cheap power plants, maybe with help of modularization. Wind integration costs at modest penetration levels (10-20% of electricity) are quite low, maybe 2-5% of production costs. At higher levels costs will certainly increase, but there's no good research on how much. My personal view is that there are plenty of ways to accommodate wind variation up to quite high penetration levels with minimal cost increase.
In any case, the cost of building a nuclear or wind system is very comparable. Solar PV is currently around 5 times more expensive than conventional power, but that picture might change (and might already be changing if some of the solar company announcements are true). Solar PV is different, because it relies so heavily on manufacturing and materials. These have lot more room for improvement than more conventional mechanical engineering. There's a good chance that solar can bridge the cost gap - however it remains to be seen.
If you don't fancy the British Governments renewables guys, who for the life of my I can't think why they should seek to inflate the costs, how does the Royal Academy of Engineering grab you?
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_Generation_C...
With respect, I find both rather more persuasive than your statement:
'Meanwhile, there will be technological progress on the turbines and more economies of scale, so I suspect that onshore wind will be in the range of 0.7-0.9 M€/MW'
You also predicate this on demand for steel and so on dropping, but I fail to see why it should since the pressure is on to build m ore wind farms, however expensive.
A drop in the price of inputs would also benefit wind's competitors, coal and more particularly nuclear, since costs for that are up-front too.
You might feel that 33GW could be built on-shore, but the British Government does not feel so sanguine and is not even going to attempt is, so we are certainly dealing with the much higher cost of off-shore wind.
Much of the costs of nuclear was also due to having one off designs and seeking planning permission at every stage.
This is not going to happen, as all permissions will occur before the first in the series.
Many of the learning costs are already dealt with by the construction of the Finnish plant.
I find your estimates for wind costs to be consistently optimistic.
Wind turbines don't get built without subsidy, and they eat up huge amounts of that.
Royal Academy of Engineers paper is unfortunately very misleading piece of paper. Most glaring mistake is here (page 12 of the original 2004 report):
They are referring to an article by Milborrow, where this 35% presents capacity credit of wind power. That is a measure of how much conventional capacity can be replaced by each MW of wind power capacity. There is no need to have 65% back-up for the 'non-firm' part of the capacity. Wind power plant produces at average around 30% of it's capacity, so in this case 1 MW of wind power will actually give more capacity to the system than energy on average. This will certainly decrease with increasing penetration, but the point is that the totally wrong methodology used by the RAE shows just how ignorant they are about how wind integration studies are really made. Their false assumption leads them to build lot of additional conventional capacity to backup wind and putting the cost fully to wind power investment costs. Please, use better sources. How about IEA (not notorious for supporting renewables), World Energy Outlook 2006, page 145: Nuclear 47-58 $/MWh, CCGT 50-66 $/MWh, Coal steam 41-54 $/MWh, IGCC 44-57 $/MWh, Wind 51-77 $/MWh. In World Energy Outlook 2004 p. 195 numbers were better, but I guess they got some comments about it from certain special interests (CCGT 32-40 $/MWh, Coal 34-43 $/MWh, Nuclear 46 $/MWh, Wind 42-44 $/MWh; Indicative Mid-Term Generating Costs of New Power Plants). These are approximate numbers, since I had to estimate them from graphs. They do not include any subsidies or CO2 costs.
The numbers from my previous post were numbers that I remember seeing in articles or wind power journals. To be more precise I'll quote some numbers from an article by David Milborrow ("Annual Power Costs Comparison", Wind Power Monthly, Jan 2007, p. 47-50). They are actual costs from realised projects and do not have any subsidies included. Average cost for turn-key wind power was 1.0 M€/MW in 2004, 1.2 M€/MW in 2005 and 1.175 M€/MW in 2006. Since then costs have escalated due to material price hikes and increased manufacturer margins in seller's market. At 1 M€/MW, 8 m/s winds and 5% discount rate, wind power plants produces power at €42/MWh At 7 m/s it's €52.5/MWh and at 6 m/s it's €71/MWh. Somehow I trust a lot more numbers from real projects than from RAE exercise with obvious flaws and outrageously different estimates than what one can see elsewhere in the literature (and back-of-the envelope calculations).
When it comes to steel, rest assured that only a small fraction of world steel is going to power plant production and would remain so even if all new power would come from wind. It will not dictate steel prices.
Hmm - you seem to be feeling I have some sort of agenda.
I don't. I just want reliable energy at some sort of cost which is not ruinous.
Neither am I an expert on energy costs, either for wind or nuclear, but if I am told by the British government which is the one who is in charge of it that we have to pay £76bn for 11GW of not-entirely reliable energy, then I get alarmed.
Maybe the cost will be less, but in my experience estimates are rarely undershot, but often exceed their target figure.
I agree that there is no need for one for one back-up, but the RAE report is given in a form where you can quite easily see how much of the cost is for back-up, and adjust accordingly, and they still look high.
In addition, the 30% utilisation figure you give is also higher than anything I have seen, and applies only to the very best wind resources, not the average site, in Europe at any rate.
The figures given in this article, although from someone who is not fond of wind power, accord more with those i have heard for average wind power in Europe - about 24%:
http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/features/eco/illwind1.html
Some feel that the figures have been heavily adjusted so that even that figure is very optimistic:
http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/opinion/energy/debate_wind_power_confiden...
The fact is that without subsidy, often at outrageous levels, no wind plants have been built anywhere.
Odd if it is so cheap.
You would do rather better for the hours the wind blows off-shore, as the wind resource is better, although it should be noted that the UK plans to build close-in to minimise transmission costs and so on.
However, you are in a totally different ball-park for costs, with high and difficult maintenance problems, robust structures needed to cope with the weather and so on.
Lest it be felt that I am a 'nuclear - right or wrong' kind of guy here is a link to the actual costs and delays in building the Finnish nuclear reactor:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/05/bloomberg/bxnuke.php
the costs of this are obviously high, but one would at least hope that getting into a run of building the things would lead to cost reductions.
We have to get our act together, whatever we build, and certainly there is also great potential to make a mess of building an ambitious fleet of wind turbines.
Considerable problems with reliability have also impacted the program in Germany, with some wind turbines needing maintenance after only 4 years, when 20 was budgeted for.
In the stressful sea environment maintenance, especially for the huge wind turbines they plan to build, is largely unknown.
Because of the way industry calculates returns, then production after 20 years does not greatly affect costings.
That is the estimated lifespan of wind turbines anyway, but design life of the Areva nuclear plants is 60 years, so you get 40 additional years of very cheap energy.
I do not have access to Milbarrow's study, so I cannot comment on his costings.
I accept your point about steel prices not being determined by use in power generation, but see no signs that they are about to turn down soon.
It boils down to who you believe - and if the people who are going to give me the bill tell me it is going to cost so much, in this case £76bn, I tend to believe that I will be handed a bill for at least this much.
That price is crazy, and I will take my chances on series production reducing nuclear costs, which from the Finnish example look as though they should still come out cheaper than the off-shore proposals, although we have not got final figures.
The way you pick your sources makes it seem like you might have an agenda. But I guess that's what you get in UK, lot of anti-wind articles in newspapers or government sponsored research with questionable assumptions. It's up to you to pick what you believe in, but I'd suggest that before you run into conclusions take a look elsewhere. You don't seem to pay any attention to the numbers I presented. They should at least make you think whether your sources are correct, in case you don't have an agenda. You might also consider whether the group in Royal Academy of Engineers, which has made the paper, has an agenda. I don't claim they do, but their numbers and mistakes make me wonder.
Anyway, 30% capacity factor for onshore wind in UK is very reasonable. Future turbines will be bigger than what has been built in the past and they'll reach better winds, which means that CF will get higher. I think your number of 24.1% is for UK, not for Europe, although your newspaper quote is not clear on that. It's only for one year and there are yearly fluctuations, so we can't really know how representative it is. Furthermore, there's lot of wind power being built, which means that during any given year the additional capacity will not be functional for the whole year. However, CF is usually calculated as [annual production]/[capacity at the end of the year] and therefore gives you lower number.
Many of the issued that I'm trying to get across here have been discussed in the OilDrum before, so here's just two posts that you should look into:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3342
This details what is different about offshore compared to onshore and answers many of your concerns about offshore difficulties.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3528
In the latter one Jerome makes good sense why there's a need to subsidize wind. The last 4-5 paragraphs of hist post.
Just a quick addition: a paper by Sinden (which one of your sources was pointing to) says that long-term average CF for UK wind has been 27%, varying between 24-31% in different years. This is calculated from yearly Digests of UK Energy Statistics, Department of Trade and Industry. 30% for future onshore turbines is probably on the low side.
The answer to why I do not comment extensively on some of the links you provide is simple John.
Not being an engineer I am in no way qualified to properly assess the different claims, or evaluate the sources much beyond noting if they appear to be 'respectable', so I am pretty well restricted to popularisations rather than the nitty-gritty of data shoots and so on.
I will however make sure that I have a read of the different links you kindly provided.
I do know though that in the UK the costs of even present land based wind power require, or at least get, vast levels of subsidy, and in spite of the higher wind resource off-shore the costs for that AFAIK look like being a lot higher.
Part of the problem may not be with wind per se, but with the way it is subsidised in the UK.
Here are a couple of links to that:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3257728.ece
And in another post the critical link is to the Auditor General:
http://www.countryguardian.net/ROC%20Etherington%202006%201.htm
Again, I would not be able to professionally assess the basis on which the auditor general makes his claims, but I do take it he knows what he is talking about!
Nothing I say should be taken as commenting on the exploitation of the excellent on-shore resource in the States, for instance, but I don't think we should just build regardless of cost.
As you say, you need to build something at some time to generate power, but my own priority at the moment would be conservation and insulation, moving on to nuclear power which could start to contribute in around 10 years.
Not that that is without it's costs:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nuclear-cleanup-bill-16312...
but we are more or less stuck with that anyway, mostly from the arms program.
In short, with an incompetent administration we are stuffed with any option, but I am chary of blank checks.
I will read the links to the posts you gave with interest, but as I said properly critiquing technical data would be outside both my competence and the time I have available, particularly since the whole energy field is a mess of subsidies.
I would be interested in your comment on the link I gave that seemed to indicate that power generated from wind is typically overstated by a factor of 2 - as I said, my knowledge of the industry and technical knowledge make it difficult or impossible for me to assess.
Dave,
Newspaper sources are not very good sources. Often newspapers have a mission or are affiliated with a political party. Furthermore reporters can have their personal agendas. Reporters are not usually experts on the area they write about and this results in additional mistakes and misinterpretations. Naturally there are problems with research reports as well. Peer reviewed articles are better, but even there one has to be careful, since peer review is not perfect and the quality of journals varies.
Anyway, let's open up the subsidies in UK. Your first link tells that subsidies for UK onshore wind have been large and the developers are making huge profits. Well, if we just take that to be true, it only means that the subsidy system has not been good. Make the system better and you'll have less money going from tax payers to developers. Or better, less money from electricity consumers to developers. In my opinion any subsidy system should be financed by consumers in relation to their electricity consumption. However, consumers are not only losing money, they are also getting electricity, which means that big part of the sum is a payment for commodity and not a subsidy, although it is often portrayed as a subsidy. One has to be careful when reading these articles. For consumer wind power has the additional benefit that it lowers the price in electricity markets, because it pushes out production with highest variable costs. Wind power has approximately zero variable cost. When market prices are lower electricity producers will get less money for their production and consumers will get cheaper electricity. It won't show right away in their bill, but their retailers are able to buy cheaper electricity and retail competition should bring the money to the consumer.
I had a look at the UK subsidy system and at the prices they'll yield. After some googling, a presentation by Iberdrola and Scottish Power seemed to give a good and trustworthy picture. It seems like there's a whole lot of onshore wind power projects in the pipeline in UK. If there is no major disturbance, there should be enough renewables to fulfill the obligation, which would mean that the price for the obligations will hit the floor (somewhere around £33/MWh). When one adds wholesale price and climate change levy, a producer gets about 105 €/MWh. As the presentation repeatedly says, it's an attractive price. However, this is different from cost. The difference between price and cost is paid by the consumer. There needs to be a profit for the developer and the producer, otherwise nothing will happen. Assumed profits has to include risks associated with building the project, including risks related to the subsidy system. UK system has more risk involved than feed-in tariff systems used in many other countries in Europe and therefore there needs to be more profit. There's also more development risk, since the process of getting permits in UK is onerous and has higher risk of failure. On the other hand the profit is high and therefore you see a lot of activity setting up new projects. One could ask at whether there would be enough activity with considerably lower subsidy level. I think so, if the system was reliable and low risk. In my opinion the current wholesale price in UK is almost high enough to get projects started without any subsidies. However, there are risks related to the wholesale price, it's not very stable and people with money don't want that risk especially if they have higher returns available elsewhere. For example building wind power in Spain.
In my previous posts I've been quoting costs, also for other production forms. One needs those profits with other forms of production as well. Current whole sale price is probably not high enough to make coal or gas power plants viable, especially since they currently have a considerable fuel price and CO2 cost risk. Nuclear might be on the verge, if they can keep the risks really low with help of government backing (maybe loan guarantees, etc). I think merchant nuclear without subsidies in any form is not viable at that price level. A publication here might shed some light on that. Take a look at the editorial board before reading.
So, my two takeaways are that costs and prices are different thing and that your government could get onshore wind cheaper than what they are willing to pay. Consumers need electricity, why make producing it more risky business than necessary and pay for the risk premium. Also profits are not away from the economy, usually they are reinvested or paid to the shareholders, which then go on spending or reinvesting the money. Some of it will certainly leak out of the country. The expertise gained from building wind power can also be a source of future gain for the home economy, but this certainly depends on many things. Danes have done a really good job out of it. Economics is a funny thing and it's probably impossible to get everything included in such a way that real long-term costs and benefits would come out of the mess. There are too many uncertain assumptions.
Funny that your figure of £76 billion for developing 33 GW of wind (might be the price in current scheme, but not the cost) is the same as the bill for the nuclear clean-up in the above Independent article. But, once again, it's a newspaper article; I don't have the time to check on it.
I don't know which one of your articles is proposing that power generated from wind is typically overstated by a factor of 2. Anyway, who might do that? Not developers for sure, their money depends on accurate estimation. It's also very easy to get caught with those kind of claims. Doesn't make any sense to me, it much more sounds like the newspaper article has an agenda.
Here is the link where I really could not follow the calculation, John - it uses cubic calculations, so I certainly would not trust myself to figure it out, as I notoriously mislaid a decimal point in a simple mathematical calculation the other day!
Still, at least it is checkable by those with the mathematical wherewithal, and does not rely on authority:
http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/opinion/energy/debate_wind_power_confiden...
I can't spot the flaw in this , if there is one, but don't know what the P50 part of the critique is about - I did Google but did not come up with anything which really helped.
I know what you mean about newspapers, and even I catch out some of their errors - for instance, neither the BBC or any of the 'heavies' when discussing the plan for off-shore wind distinguished the 33GW was name-plate.
For that reason, I usually discount newspaper sources which are not referenced, but the original blurb in the telegraph did reference to a source, which is into renewables so presumably has nothing against them, as giving the £2m MW for off-shore wind, which it does, but to my surprise after Alan questioned it they do not seem to show how they arrived at that figure.
When I look properly at the links you gave, I intend to give them a good read and some thought, and the last couple of days have not been conducive to such an undertaking.
To be clear I would be against on-shore wind in much of the UK, for similar reasons to David Bellamy, as I think they are destructive to our few remaining more-or-less wilderness areas, but would not be against it in other , less crowded parts of the world, as long as it is reasonable economic.
Nor would I be against off-shore wind, if it came in at the right price- ie, perhaps more expensive than conventional power, but not outrageously so.
That particular article is probably the worst out of all the ones you have pointed to. Let's see, he quotes: "...the capacity factor in the UK is 27 per cent which is another way of saying that wind turbines in the UK produce no power at all for 73 per cent of the year." That's a pretty stupid interpretation. Wind power plants are not producing at full power for 27% of the time and at zero power for 73 %. Wind power from an area like UK will never produce at nominal capacity, since it will never blow hard enough in all parts of the country at the same time. That's the way weather patterns are. It's also unlikely that you'd ever get a moment where there's no wind power production in a country size of UK. All this means that wind is actually more stable source than people think. It's not intermittent, it's variable within limits and this variability can be dealt with in a power system quite easily. It's designed for it, because consumption is also variable. Naturally one needs to increase ways to deal with the variation, when the variation in wind power production starts to dominate over the variation in consumption, but current systems can take at least 10-20% of electricity as wind with no major issues. It seems likely that there will be low cost ways to go much beyond 20%, but can't give you research results for that yet.
Your Shetland news guy is somehow interpreting capacity factor to mean the time when power plants produce at full power. This is not the way capacity factor is calculated for any power plant. It would be a quite close approximation for nuclear power plants, which usually are either at full power or off, but it would not work for hydro power plants. Either he does not have a clue what he's talking about or then he's deliberately misinterpreting the quite nice peer-reviewed article by Sinden.
When it comes to your £2m/MW quote, I tried to find that number from BWEA website to no avail. I would have been surprised, if it was there. I don't think BWEA would say a number that's not in the ballpark where actual project costs have been or where future costs are estimated to be. UK subsidy system might result in those kind of numbers for offshore wind when prices are converted to investment costs, but that's climbing up the tree backwards. CapEx numbers should not include the price of the subsidy regime.
Why you have to build the onshore wind to your remaining wilderness areas? I have to confess, I don't know much about UK geography, but I know that the wind resource is many times over your energy consumption, it's probably close enough to cover the whole energy (not electricity) consumption of EU-25. You don't need to cover the whole country to get a very large contribution to your electricity from wind. Do big enough projects, so that you won't end up having one or two turbines always in sight. I wouldn't mind that, but I understand some people might. I don't think wind power plants destroy wilderness areas, British Isles is already destroyed in that sense. It used to be forest. Wind power plants with access roads (not necessary everywhere) take up 1-2% of the land cover and it's relatively easy to convert things back to more natural state, if wind power is not required any longer in the future. Nuclear sites are little bit trickier. Furthermore, if you do a big project in certain area, it's much more viable to pay the community enough compensation than from a small project.
I didn't think that it was a particularly good article - I was just trying to figure out where the mistake was in the figures, and I still can't place quite where the mistake is, although I am confident that there is one.
On the issue of costs in the wind industry, I am in close agreement with you on the costs now, as far as they can be ascertained, and as I explain a couple of posts down the error in the site I was quoting seems to have arisen due to their getting confused between name-plate and actual output, so they simply overstated the figures by around three times.
Anyway, you will see that I have now sourced figures which support yours which are about as authoritative as you can get, short of records of historical build costs which I can't seem to locate.
So thanks to you and Alan for helping me to clarify, and I am relieved that it appears that it is much cheaper than I thought, as the first figures shocked me.
My dislike for on-shore wind is based on the geography of these islands.
The subsidy system means that they are sticking turbines in all sorts of daft places, but the real wind resource on land in these isles, not country note, is in the North and West, in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
None of these areas would be happy to cover too much of their country with turbines for the benefit of the English, and in my view, nor should they.
All of them are not only windy but very wet, with large areas of peat bogs, which would be disrupted not only by the turbines themselves but by access roads, transmission lines and so on - many of these areas are irreplaceable.
You would not think David Bellamy impartial, and he is not, but he is a biologist and purely hates wind turbines for these reasons.
So I am not a NIMBY, more of a 'Not In Their Backyard!'
So either off-shore or nuclear would be fine by me, although I have my doubts about costs still on wind, not to do so much with build costs as we have got at least the likely figures down a bit, but to do with the cost of the transmission lines needed to make wind a very reliable resource - so you need a big grid.
It also seems that if you build wind turbines you have to take their power when you can get it, so you have a kind of intermittent base-load power, as if you have not financed a truly huge grid then you have to turn something else off or it is wasted and you are paying twice.
That is fairly OK if you still are using a substantial proportion of coal or gas, although efficiencies drop, but it is pretty naf if you are using nuclear, where your costs are up-front and so you want to keep it fired up to get your money back.
So I would wonder whether inn practise a lot of wind power might not lock-in heavy use of coal and gas.
I am not sure how much of a problem that is in practise, as it tends to be a lot windier here outside the summer, and minimal use happens then in this country- I will have a closer look at grid costs, as a bigger grid would help a lot, but wind itself is not cheap, and loading it with more grid costs might again make the numbers silly.
Still, it is all a lot more viable than it was according to the first figures I had, so many thanks to you and Alan.
Yikes! I have found the actual Department of Trade and Industry costings for off-shore wind, and they are awful:
http://www.renewables-advisory-board.org.uk/vBulletin/attachment.php?s=0...
attachment.php
They run from about £1.6m MW now, rising to £1.75 in 2011 when we would be in the middle of our build program before falling to around £1.28 in 2020 after a learning curve, but as far as I can make out they refer to name-plate installed capacity rather than output, so we are back to not that far off my original figures.
Alan, all the breakdown of figures you could desire there, I believe!
Hold your horses. That's offshore with a better capacity factor. Still, the cost is higher than what I'd have expected. They also have a projected onshore cost which seems quite reliable at £0.9 M/MW. Both costs includes current high material prices and high manufacturer margin due to supply not keeping up with demand. You don't need a learning curve to bring the costs down to £1.3 M/MW for offshore. But onshore will still be cheaper, unless the hopefully steeper learning curve of offshore can compensate.
You were hoping for historical Capex costs for actually built projects. The Milborrow article that I was referencing earlier is based on those. Unfortunately the article is not in the web and you just have to take my word for it or go to a library that carries the journal.
As far as I can see the costs quoted are for installed capacity, not output, so the costs are still vast- over £40 billion for 33GW- do you read it the same way?
As for the England and Scotland thing - there is simply no way that the Scots will build over huge areas just for the benefit of the English.
It is rather unfair of you to call David Bellamy a hypocrite, or at least botanists who oppose wind farms hypocrites, as you are entirely mistaken on the grounds that he does so.
I have provided the link, so his actual grounds are there for you to read if you choose to.
In this country at least, we value some of our wonderful countryside, and many of us will not allow it to be pillaged when there are perfectly acceptable alternatives.
Doubtless in America they despised the NIMBY attitudes of the American Indians towards their plains, when they so plainly stood in the way of progress in the view of the settlers.
Bellamy's arguments are not very convincing. Some of them are not biological, but have to do with the issues that we have covered here and are not true. Eats on his credibility. At least some of the biological arguments are plain wrong as well. If you put a large solid block in the ground, you will not affect the water table of the area, but only for a short while. Archimedes law: it will push out water and the outflow will increase to make water level same again. Anyway, while the blocks are quite big, they are nothing compared to the volumes of normal water sheds. He's trying to present problems which are not problems. I don't have enough background in chemistry to comment on his vague claim that water chemistry will be seriously altered. It's just a claim with no backings. Humans have built enormous amounts of concrete blocks all over the place and I haven't heard that it has been a problem for groundwater chemistry. We have talked about birds already, but his claim about the mechanism of bird deaths shows his ignorance. Birds don't usually fly into wind turbines on broad daylight, when they can see something moving there. Bird deaths for the most part happen in bad weather conditions: when it's dark and foggy. These events are rare and therefore are bird deaths as well. Once again, bird deaths caused by wind turbines are very minor compared to buildings or traffic and would remain so even if all power was produced with wind. Their movement makes birds avoid them.
While best wind resources in UK are not in England, it still has an excellent wind resource onshore. It's also possible to compensate to some extent by having higher turbines. So, whether it makes sense to build the wind farms in Scotland and Ireland and transmit the electricity to England or to produce the electricity in England (onshore or offshore) depends on relative economics. I don't have an answer to that question, but I'd guess bit of both, since it also smoothes out the resource.
When it comes to grid, most of the required power grid is already there. While it's true that wind will need more grid building than other power sources, it's still usually relatively small part of the overall bill. There is not going to be more electricity going to customers, it's just going to wave little bit more in the transmission side of the things. For the most part it'll happen in the existing lines. One will need to make connection lines to wind farms (preferrably in a planned manner) and strengthen some bottlenecks that would not otherwise be bottlenecks. It'll help the power grid in other ways as well, which means that not all the cost should be dedicated to wind. Normally a new power plant does not have to pay for the grid reinforcements that are done to accommodate it. That's in the transmission/distribution part of your bill. Wind should get the same amount of benefit and pay only for the additional part.
Your electricity bill should be about half and half electricity and transmission/distribution. Only the transmission part will be affected by wind power and it is smaller of the two (at least that's my impression, it was hard to find a source for that and can't ask my colleagues right now). So multiply a small cost share (most of the electricity will use old grid) with a moderate cost share (transmission is smaller of the two components that make up half of your bill) and you get a quite small additional cost. However, when you put more wind into the grid, you'll need to do more and more reinforcements. Sometimes they are cheap sometimes not so. You can also try to balance things by having more local controllable load like those heat pumps with heat storages. Then you can push extra power into those instead of having transmission lines for the whole nameplate capacity.
Wind power in a large area will be mostly producing in the 15-60% range of the nominal capacity. It's rare that it goes above that. This means that it's not impossible for nuclear and wind to coexist in large amounts, although there can be moments when one of them has to lower production. How much natural gas you'll need to use in a system with very large share of wind will depend a lot on other options you have. A small share of reservoir hydro power can help you long way, especially if it's possible to include a pump beside the generator. Above mentioned heat measures can also help a lot and maybe electric vehicles in the future. Gas turbines will still probably provide cheapest capacity, but they will be used only rarely, which means that CO2 emissions are going to be low.
I always think it's hypocritical for a biologist to hate wind turbines. It's a very good truly long term solution to make energy in a way that will a have minimal effect on wildlife. Furthermore, it won't threaten species like climate change does (some individual birds might get killed bit too soon, but it's minuscule compared to other sources of bird deaths that humans cause). In any case, I'm much more concerned about species than individuals. Lastly, wind park transmission lines are almost always put under access roads.
John, perhaps it would be helpful if I indicated the sort of things I would rather spend the money on at the moment rather than off-shore wind.
There are around 25million households in the UK, may of whom live in very poorly insulated houses, usually heated by a gas combination boiler.
£76 billion, if that figure is in the right ballpark, would therefore give you around £3,000 per household to spend.
You could increase the leverage of this because many, around half, are fairly comfortably circumstanced, and if incentivised could certainly pay to have their house upgraded.
There are several possibilities:
One is good old-fashioned insulation!
The second would be heat recovery systems on waste water - this is a pretty economic measure.
Then you can install air-source heat pumps - especially appropriate for the 5 million or so households off the gas grid - you don't really need the more expensive ground-source in most of this country, as it rarely drops below freezing.
Lastly you could install solar thermal heating panels, which are far more cost-effective than PV.
I feel that a combination of these measures would do more to reduce consumption and prevent CO2 emissions than spending the money on off-shore wind - I'm betting the cost per kilo of CO2 saved would be way lower! - not that I am intelligent enough to work out the figures properly! :-)
You could then spend the remaining billion or so 'chump change' on a small program aimed at cost reduction for off-shore wind - perhaps some of the tethered ideas, with the aim of reducing costs, hopefully to the area of about £0.5MW, where they would not require subsidy.
I am not a great fan of feed-in tariffs and so on, which argue that if only you can go to mass-production you can reduce costs vastly - in my view you are more likely to lock in an immature technology.
True R & D spend on energy has historically been very low - I think it is that that needs increasing, not more hugely expensive money for subsidy.
Well, to my knowledge your figure is not in the right ballpark, but go ahead. I certainly agree that there are more economic options to reduce CO2 emissions before building any power production. Better insulation is a very good and economic thing especially for new buildings. It gets bit more complicated with existing buildings, since people live in them and the structure is not often very good for adding insulation. However, after you've done all possible reductions in heating energy, you still need electricity. Some of your options actually will increase electricity use while decreasing natural gas for heating (heat pumps). It will not be enough to reduce emissions only from heating if we are to keep climate change reasonable.
Offshore wind can provide you with reasonably priced electricity, but I still hold the opinion that UK would be better off building onshore, since it is cheaper per kWh and I think it'll remain so even though offshore costs will likely come down more than onshore. It might be that nuclear would be marginally cheaper, but to me that's not enough since nuclear has lot of issues that are not in the cost (proliferation, waste and accident possibility). It might also be that nuclear won't be cheaper, but that's very difficult to know beforehand. We don't know the future technical costs of either, but I believe they'll be quite close. There certainly are places where winds blow so strong and steady that it beats nuclear costs, South Argentina, some parts of Sahara coast, New Zealand for example. However, those places are unfortunately far away from current consumption.
I think what has happened is a confusion between installed capacity and output - I think the source which I quoted took their figures from here:
http://eeru.open.ac.uk/natta/renewonline/rol49/6.htm
In the parliamentary answer £650,000MW installed is quoted - multiply that by a factor of 3 to get around the cost for an actual output of 1MW and Viola! You have about £2million.
Interestingly the source I quoted did not differentiate between on-shore and off-shore, and neither does this answer.
The fallacy is of course that you have already accounted for that loss in the 33MW nameplate capacity figure, so you come out to a much more reasonable £22billion plus connection,although some of that is accounted for in the Parliamentary answer, but this does not allow for inflation in costs since 2004 nor for the extra costs from the off-shore location.
It doesn't seem that you get a lot of benefit in practise in terms of higher wind speeds by locating off-shore:
http://stats.berr.gov.uk/energystats/dukes7_4.xls
I guess this is because many extrapolations of resources are looking at deeper water locations, and UK ones hug the shore to keep costs down, and that is not going to change.
These figures are certainly a lot more hopeful - my only objection to off-shore wind is that I don't see that it is sensible to pay daft prices - I am going to check more thoroughly into back-up costs, but hopefully they would not be too excessive.
Taking the latest cost projections for the Finnish reactor, of around $5billion for a 1.6GW installation, then for the same actual output you would be looking at around $36billion, in sterling slightly cheaper than the wind alternative, but of course costs might rise still more, although series construction might also decrease costs.
So the wind project sounds a lot more hopeful than I had thought.
One of the sources that has taken a longer look at wind is George Monbiot in his book Heat. He puts a number of the studies you've been looking at up side-by-side. One thing I've been noticing is that turbines are expected to last about 50% longer off shore because the air is less turbulent. A thirty year life without a lot of maintenance could be a plus. You should be careful if you hear of one turbine that breaks early. The question is: are the breakdowns normally distributed around the expected lifetime? If the RMS is 5 years, then out of 100 turbines you'd expect one to have trouble in the 15th year. Out of ten thousand, having one break in the seventh year should be expected.
Chris
The stuff I was looking at was indicating that some manufacturers seemed to have dropped QC standards in the rush to build a lot of wind power, and that some designs of gearbox were problematic.
I did not keep the link and a quick google now does not turn up anything too horrid, so presumably these are just pretty normal engineering hassles.
The problem is, really, that it seems that a lot of responsible bodies have drastically different estimates for costs, and subsidy structures and differences between installed capacity and average generation often mean that it is difficult to get a clear picture.
Although reduced turbulence may be a plus, although as I said UK plans are for turbines fairly close inshore, everything I have read indicates that salt water does pretty horrid things to most engineering equipment, and maintenance is certainly more difficult.
I suppose I am just naturally suspicious, as I have found that any new technology tends to cost more than even the high estimates, and off-shore wind is fairly new.
You're right that there has been problems with gearboxes. Manufacturer's have mostly paid for replacing bad gearboxes and drive trains. It's been a problem for some wind turbine models, which were probably designed with too thin margins. The fact that manufacturer's have to bear the brunt of the costs due to warranty means that they don't want to repeat the mistake. Of course it remains to be seen, but if you want to be sure, you can buy turbines which have very reliable track record. Many of them don't actually have gearboxes.
Salt water is an issue that's quite easy to predict beforehand and offshore turbines use materials accordingly. Of course they might make mistakes in the heat of the things, but there is a incentive to built them to last. However, it might be come up as a problem if they try to extent the lifetime to 30 years for turbines that have a design lifetime of 20. On the other hand it seems to be a very common practice in power production to extent lifetimes, since it's cheaper than to replace, but only time will tell how wind turbines will fare on this account.
I would like to make a more detailed reply, but I have two deadlines ATM and Mardi Gras is warming up (Krewes of Babylon, Chaos and Muses tonight, 2.5 blocks from my home) with out-of-town guests, etc.
Hopefully before Mardi Gras, but afterwards if not.
Best Hopes for Mardi Gras,
Alan
Get out and shake it! :-)
Your TOD link is a clearly anti-wind opinion piece.
Where is the link to the Carbon Start data itself, with related assumptions ? Quoting a screed and their interpretation of data from a 3rd source is not convincing.
It is clear now that you support a "Rush to Coal" with some nuke later "bye and bye" and a long term balance of nuke and coal, with increased use of electricity. You also seem to place no value upon Kyoto and carbon reductions. Economic costs are, in apparently your opinion, the primary factor in public policy.
You should have been clearer in your postings,
Best Hopes for More Truth and Clarity in Postings,
Alan
Your post is both absurd and offensive.
Since as you posted in another thread contrary to normal courtesies you at times can't be bothered to look anything up to justify your arguments, but still reserve the right to disagree, I fail to see why I should act as your researcher.
However, here is further links to data indicating costs of around £2m MW for wind offshore:
http://www.naturalchoices.co.uk/UK-offshore-wind-farm-development?id_mot=2
the obvious fact that offshore wind is a lot more expensive seems to have escaped your attention.
You then try to specify what I value, as you seem to be unable to distinguish between a prediction of what events are likely to take place, and a desire that it be so.
You had sought to argue previously that shortages would ensue leading to real hardship if the wind option was not pursued; should the shortages that you presume occur, then Kyoto would be abrogated, and coal plants would be built.
To say so does not make me an advocate of disguarding Kyoto.
Your inability to reason clearly as well as your very ill-informed state (see posts on peat bogs previously) mean that it is not really worthwhile bothering to reply to you.
As for the economic costs being primary, in this country many people die each year due to hypothermnia, and were I uncharitable I could infer that you disregard those in favour of whatever bee you happen to have in your bonnet.
Cost are always important, and money wasted on windfarms could be far better spent on insulating some of the many millions of homes with inadequate standards, IMO.
You should be clearer your thinking and less impertinent in your postings.
When you bother to find out the basics of the subjects on whihc you wish to pontificate, and learn a civil manner of address, then perhaps a dialogue would be worthwhile.
You then try to specify what I value, as you seem to be unable to distinguish between a prediction of what events are likely to take place, and a desire that it be so...To say so does not make me an advocate of disguarding Kyoto.
What lead me to the conclusion that you supported a coal-nuke grid is your statement that newly built coal plants should not be scrapped after the initial emergency (or put into inactive reserve/mothballed) but be used as first base load and then load following plants for their economic life. No consideration given to further improvements in WTs or even a nuke-pumped storage-hydro-EU exchange grid.
If you mis-wrote this statement, or have rethought your position, I am willing to retract my conclusion and apologize. Pending that, I stand by my conclusion.
I found your initial position here to be a bit misleading and not revealing the entirety of your position.
After extensive back and forth discussions (but not at first), you talk of throwing the Kyoto Treaty into the fire to be burnt at the first shortage and making good the shortage with the new coal plants. You advocate building a lots of coal plants to fill the immediate need and then keeping them in service (with lower load factors, as commonly happens with older plants) till their end of life (in 30 to 40 years) for a coal-nuke British grid for several decades.
[Incidentally, the environmental damage from operating new coal fired plants till they are worn out dwarfs any damage to peat bogs.]
I fail to see why I should act as your researcher
The posted rules of TOD state that positions should be supported by links or other references. In practice, this often means that not every statement made has to have a link attached, but when challenged, it is the duty of the one challenged (i.e. you) to provide credible links to support your position.
So yes, it is your duty to "be my researcher" on this particular forum. From a practical POV, this reduces the number of wild claims made.
Your position depends on a statistic that comes from a screed, purportedly taken from a quasi-governmental body (a body with some credibility I will admit).
I went to Carbon Trust, the purported source, searched their web site and read a bit and downloaded 3 pdf files. To date, I have not yet found the source of that claim.
As is common on TOD I wanted to find the details. The date (since WT costs vary over time), the assumptions (is financing included in the costs or is this a cash price ?), the offsetting expected power factor (Jerome (per my memory) has previously indicated about 40% for offshore wind turbines not far from British shores and this is a crucial statistic upon which his job depends, so I find him credible, supported by his reputation on this board)
Your second link quotes the BWEA (another credible primary source) but also indicates that they consider the BWEA numbers too high and substitutes a lower #.
Simply applying a 40% capacity factor would significantly reduce the cost of offshore wind.
Cost are always important, and money wasted on windfarms could be far better spent on insulating some of the many millions of homes with inadequate standards, IMO
A false choice ! Both better insulation in old and new structures (homes & commercial) and more non-GHG energy are clearly desirable. This is very clearly the policy of the German Gov't, which strongly supports both goals, so Her Majesties Gov't should be able to do so as well.
As for the economic costs being primary, in this country many people die each year due to hypothermnia, and were I uncharitable I could infer that you disregard those in favour of whatever bee you happen to have in your bonnet.
For the small minority of the citizenry exposed to this risk, there are many other, and better alternatives than killing wind to keep the bills down by 10% or 25% (with rising NG prices, they will likely rise anyway). The best policy IMVHO would be subsidies to insulate and weatherproof their homes followed by a modest fuel cost subsidy for minimal use (a "Life Line" rate for those in constrained circumstances).
you at times can't be bothered to look anything up to justify your arguments
I clearly stated that I was time constrained, which is a simple fact of life. That is quite different from "can't be bothered", which is a mis-characterization of my statement.
As for the rest of the ad hominem comments, I will consider them written in the heat of the moment and let them lie. I too write sometimes in the heat of the moment and occasionally (in my specific case) later regret my choice of words.
I will also mention that TOD is a meatgrinder, that I have criticized people for whom I have the highest personal regard and friendship if I thought their position was in error.
Best Hopes,
Alan
My reply to you seems to have got lost somehow.
Briefly, no harm done - I always reply in the same tone as I feel I am spoken to, but always leave water under the bridge where Jesus flang it.
Most of the response is contained in my reply to JohnK above - I am just a guy without technical training trying to fight my way through a mass of often contradictory data.
I have got some cost and works accounting training though, and some errors are obvious, but have to take a lot of the serious technical analysis basically by it's source, and often haven't got access to the basic data sheets.
I gave my sources, but you didn't like them! - that is your privilege.
You still seem to be confounding my statements of what seems inevitable to an advocacy of them - I feel once coal plants are built, they are unlikely to be scrapped but that does not necessarily mean it is my preference.
As for wanting both wind power and insulation, bear in mind that there are tiny programs for improving insulation in house at the moment, and in my view if the £2m MW is anything like correct then no monies will be put to anything much else.
I think we have to get the most bang for the buck, and my own preferred solution would be simple- instead of targets and feed-in tariffs and so on which provide endless scope for scams and make it so complicated to compare costs, I would simply have a carbon tax, and also a tax so that the emissions of the coal industry were not uncosted, or it's waste, then we could start making rational choices between different energy sources, and between them and conservation.
Where there has not been subsidy, windturbines have not been built.
That is not a unique criticism of the wind industry, as the whole of the energy industry is a maze of subsidy.
It does mean though that I see on-shore wind at the moment as pretty expensive, and the costs on off-shore could be horrendous.
I am not a NIMBY, as there is no prospect of wind turbines in Bristol, but may be a NOMTB - Not On My Tax bill! :-)
A national grid of windfarms spread across the country and connected by high voltage DC could provide a minimal "baseload" at all times, since the wind is almost always blowing somewhere. This is also complimentary to solar since the wind blows more when it's colder so would seem to do better during winter and in northern climes where solar is at a disadvantage.
I like the idea of heat storage, then using that to fire turbines at night. Night usage is usually off-peak, so less electricity would be needed. Underground heat storage can last for months, so perhaps this is a partial solution for the "rainy week" scenario.
Check out the costs, given by me in the post directly above.
And that is just for wind, without fancy storage.
Unless you are a billionaire then wind in many places if just lunacy.
Solar residential panels are a whole different ball-game, and work fine - so of course they are not being emphasised in Britain.
Underground heat storage is used a lot in Sweden, but is pretty expensive. Maybe OK for cold climates - I don't know if the subsidies are so vast in Sweden that they are basically just encouraging a daft idea, I haven't looked into it.
Bear in mind that most Swedes live in flats,which makes it more economic to heat the block - it's a different ball-game in suburbia.
Stuart, this is potentially very interesting, at least as a model against which one could test other variables, or consider the consequences of failure in one system.
But I do think that some of your presumptions may be troublesome - perhaps as you go along, you may find this not to be so. But, for example, the Stern report's estimates of the cost of climate change, which are the best we have, but based on the notion that we won't see rapid climate change or the early feedback loops we're seeing a la the Big Melt Report, suggest that the costs are already increasing. If anything, the data on climate change suggests to me that we have underestimated the costs.
I'd also be interested to see how your agricultural assumptions take climate change and water issues into account. For example, the GISS estimates suggest that the Southwest and potentially S.CA may have to come completely out of food production. Estimates are that food production in Northern Africa may halve, while the population doubles. Presumably, we aren't using biofuels , but also, you imagine some methods of price stabilization and equitable distribution, since death rates are going down, not up. I think you run into some trouble in agricultural production if you don't posit either a change in practice (that is, a shift to emphasis on output per acre rather than per human laborer ;-)) or a biotech breakthrough.
I assume you are also positing the energy for massive desalinization and deep water pumping - given the UN estimates that even at the present rate of climate alteration almost half the world's populace will experience water shortages. And a strategy for compensating for the loss of irrigated agricultural land (which is 17% of all arable land but produces 30% of all food).
I admit, I'm something of a skeptic about the global electrical grid, but it does interest me, in part because if while you are in charge of everything, you could cut back on corporate abuses, it represents the possibility of moving wealth southward in some fascinating ways - a truly intriguing theory for balancing the inequities between the global south and north. Not holding my breath, but I like it.
On the economics, I think you certainly haven't made your case for continued growth, but you know that. So far, this adds up to "we really want growth to continue, therefor we postulate it will." Again, you know that, but I think it is worth noting that this I think tracks several assumptions you haven't made explicit. They seem to be (you will, I hope, correct me if I'm incorrect) this:
1. That we cannot permit the Global north to have any reduction in standard of living other than a light recession. Your preference for conservative solutions might suggest otherwise -given that we are entering a recession and period of economic contraction, it might be possible to continue this tightening of belts and reallocate wealth elsewhere a la a world wide New Deal, but you seem to presume otherwise.
2. That the standard trickle-down theory of neo-liberal developmental economics actually works and will continue to work - that is, if we make a lot more money, even though it concentrates in the hands of really rich people, some of it will finally make its way into the hands of poorer people and the net effect will be everyone getting richer.
Again, I'm not claiming these are wrong (I do not agree in some places, but that's not all the truth that ever was), just that they merit a more explicit articulation.
As you perfectly well know, this all hinges on the big question of us getting richer, which hinges on the big question of us having the energy to power growth, which hinges on us having the money to build the energy to power growth, which hinges on us being able to create renewable energy fast enough within the limits of carbon constraints, which depends on funding and exactly how much carbon we're willing to put into the atmosphere in the short term for long term reductions, which, of course, raises the cost of mitigating existing climate change, which, of course, gives us less money for building renewables...
You know all this, but I point it out because I still think that the passage I quoted from _The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update_ several Mondays back may be the issue here (and yes, I know you don't think they are necessarily modelling correctly) - that the system doesn't fail because of any one or two factors, it simply runs out of ability to cope.
I do not share your faith in comparatively unfettered markets, but I have to say, if I had to give someone the power to determine the course of the world, despite our disagreements, you'd be on the list.
Sharon
But, if I understand Stuart correctly (and I think he was clear), he is liberal according to the American definition. And they aren't trickle-downers....
Hi, Stuart. Thank you for getting this started. I'm sure the conversation that follows will be a good one.
I'm not going to address the details of your plan (specific EROEIs, future price of PV, transmission costs, etc.) because I think the whole model is flawed. One requirement of your model is that "The world economy is able to grow on average over the period."
Since it assumes that ever-expanding growth is possible on a finite planet, it mathematically can't occur. If that doesn't make immediate sense, try reversing it. Keep the economy the same size then keep shrinking the planet. See? Both are equally impossible.
But you don't claim to allow it to grow beyond 2050 so that's not entirely fair. Is it possible for growth to continue for the next 40 years?
Some people seem to think so but the math, in my view, doesn't support it. Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute doesn't think the math supports it, which is why he keeps issuing updates to Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, which his publisher has recently allowed to be made freely available on the web. He points out that our denuding of the environment is about to affect the economy and is already starting to do so. See a good video of Lester being interviewed here.
The folks who do earth models for a living (Erlich, Meadows, et al) see the resource curves all converging in the next twenty to thirty years. The curves all point to exhaustion of key resources like water, soil, metals, fisheries, etc. It's possible to download their latest version of World3 and run it on a PC when you purchase the updated Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. There are many other world models so if you don't like that one, google for others. Most of them come to the same conclusion.
Another group doing excellent work is the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (www.steadystate.org). For an excellent short overview of why we need to move to a steady state economy (soon!), watch the 14-minute video on this page:
http://www.steadystate.org/CASSEVideo.html
Their best powerpoint presentation, I think is "The Steady State Economy: What It Is, Entails, and Connotes. A primer on the steady state economy from paper of the same name" under their Resources section (but you won't go wrong with the others).
A FAQ is available too, in which they answer all the big questions:
That group is formed of ecological economists and their primary working theory is the trophic theory, which is a form of EROEI analysis for biological systems. Their Board of Advisors includes Herman Daly, who (I believe) first promulgated the notion of a steady-state economy.
Also, see the good work of the Footprint Network, which calculates that we are in gross overshoot. Last year, Ecological Debt day was October 6. That's the day when we've used up the resources the earth can generate in one year. But is that even possible? How can we use up more that what's available?
Yes, it is possible because we are using up the Earth's biological capital. We do that by fishing faster than the stocks can replenish, cutting forests faster than they can regenerate, denuding the soil faster than it can be built up, etc. Needless to say, energy is not mankind's only problem. It just appears to be one of the first pieces of an entire system that is being primed for collapse.
Last, on The Oil Drum I should at least mention that a rapid drop in oil availability has a high likelihood of collapsing civilization, as well. For more on that, see any of the literature on collapse (Tainter, Catton, Diamond, many many others).
So, to sum up, your working assumptions I'm afraid are impossible on our little planet. Once you dig into this topic a little, I think you'll find that there isn't any way to get us back within our ecological budget without dramatically shrinking our presence on the planet and moving to a steady-state economy.
How we get there, however, is another matter entirely. It seems to me that collapse is the most likely way.
-Andre'
It's worth addressing this. I agree of course that exponential growth in energy usage cannot occur forever. However, an asymptotic approach to the solar harvesting capacity of the planet is not infeasible in principle, and we are a long way from that limit. Even at constant energy usage, some economic growth is possible in principle as we could continue to change what we used the energy for in ways that we liked better and therefore were willing to pay more for.
So it's not enough to state that exponential growth cannot occur forever. You will have to address the detail of showing that it cannot occur in the next fifty years.
Another way to look at it (the way I happen to!) is that our ecological footprint is already far too large. The ecological footprint measures are highly conservative--meaning our actual footprint is much larger. So, we have to reduce our footprint substantially, let's say by half.
Ecological Footprint (EF) is roughly proportional to economic activity, which is about 75 trillion $ right now.
If EF was halved, it would be a good thing as far as the planet was concerned and our long-term prospects as inhabitants, and it could be done without much trouble if the rich nations would permit it, but as you point out that doesn't seem likely, so you model increased growth from the rich nations because it is what they want. And growth is required for the poor nations so they can go through the demographic transition.
Instead of halving our footprint, however, the model proposes boosting economic activity to 4-5 times what it is today. Granted, you are proposing doing so using mostly renewable energy, which would tend to lower the footprint/$ factor--but by how much?
If your model increases economic activity by a factor of 5, does it decrease the footprint/$ by a factor of 10? Efficiency gains of factor four and factor 10 are often cited as the way to have growth and still be eco-friendly, but I have never seen an analysis where growth doesn't end up just eating away at the gains over the course of a few-several decades. Total environmental load needs to be watched more than anything else.
I don't see any hint of flattening out in the scenario. At what point do you suggest economic growth stop, and what is the final ratio of footprint/$. Can growth stop when the demographic transition is complete? If you take the UN medium scenario that doesn't happen until late this century, which implies another several decades of growth. So I would look for at what point does the model show a halving of today's EF and a steady-state economy that supports 9 billion people?
Jason: "Ecological footprint" is much too vague a measure for my taste. Which specific resources do you think are the most critical concerns, and then we can debate those.
Stuart,
I'm afraid you're looking at it backwards. That question might have worked back in 1970 but not now. We are operating in a world of diminishing resources now.
A more fruitful way to approach what you seek is to ask, "Which resources will still be available in sufficient quantities between now and 2050 so that I can work out whether I can use those for my plan?"
I think you'll find the list to be exceedingly small. Perhaps sand? Ocean water? Atmospheric nitrogen?
The fact is that virtually all key resources will reach their peak by 2050. Just read the U.N. Millennium Assessment or Lester Brown's work if you doubt that.
-Andre'
I have read both.
Excellent. Now, if you really want to unleash the creativity of this community, I recommend that you put in some real-world constraints and then see what they come up with.
My suggestions would be:
And so on. Then put all those assumptions into World3 or your favorite world modeling program and see what happens.
-André
I have read both.
EF measures a variety of both resource inputs and sink capacities, then puts those into one number for ease of communication. The most important resources by far are the limits of the air, oceans and ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide.
So a quick proxy for EF would be show how your plan keeps the ocean from turning deadly acidic, the air from increasing in greenhouse gas concentrations, and the soils from becoming carbon sources. Those measures would encompass 90% of the EF...I suspect.
The global economy pumps something like 7-8 billion metric tons of carbon into the air each year or so. Can your plan eliminate all of those, and begin to restore ecosystems to make them powerful carbon sinks again so co2 starts to drop back towards 300 ppm? Say, 350 ppm by 2100?
Those are the numbers I'd play with.
Agrichar con do that on it's own, so far as as the tests to date show.
And you don't need any Dr Strangelove technology to do it.
Carbon emissions are the main thing I'm trying to figure out how we could get rid of without causing a broadly unacceptable level of economic decline. So it would appear my scenario as laid out so far is helpful. Obviously, the impact on the biosphere otherwise is something that would have to be managed - but the upward trend in it over the last forty years is quite slight. Most of the other uses are fairly direct (eg cutting wood for timber). It's not at all clear that the effects of economic growth on other biotypes are always bad. For example, the US is much more forested than it was 100 years ago, because the advent of industrial agriculture and urbanization combined caused less productive farmland to become uneconomic and revert to forest. In general, wealthy urbanites visiting the national park in their plugin-hybrid are likely to do it a lot less harm than hungry peasants scavenging it for fuel.
This seems like good place to jump in. This strikes me as a solution for the developed world. The less developed places on earth are not going to be able to afford this type of infrastructure or the energy generated by it. Since you don´t like the vagueness of an ecological footprint let me put forth that the first place the scenario falls apart is with population. If we speculate population continuing along the lines suggested then you run out of water then food. Water, at least the potable variety, is probably getting scarcer than oil. Irrigation water throughout the world is in decline. I wonder how few people agriculture can support with only dryland farming?
Tell you what Jason - I'm all over this ecological footprint thing now. At some point in the next few weeks, I'll produce a projection for the footprint over time under my scenario. But here's my challenge to you - I want to see a guest post with your graphs for global population, GDP, and energy use under your favored relocalization scenario.
Stuart, I do think your plan goes a long way towards addressing my concerns, but since it doesn't make the connections explicitly I am not sure if it does so sufficiently.
No guarantees I can get your request done, but I'll think about it and see what I can do.
You have likely figured this out by now, but there are two groups doing footprint analyses.
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=footprint_overview
and
http://www.rprogress.org/ecological_footprint/about_ecological_footprint...
One problem I have with the way you are measuring things is by using GDP. I reject GDP as a valid measure of what is important. In fact, in the scenarios I would prefer, GDP would decline but well-being would go up. A better measure might be the Genuine Progress Indicator:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indi...
With all due respect, I don't let my employers or clients pay me with fuzzy "personal progress indices" but instead insist on cash. So I would like to know the cash implications of what you propose - how big a paycut do we all have to take? If you don't like what GDP is spent on, maybe just personal income? - to first order, the two correlate pretty well however.
What is the purpose of having cash? What is it that makes life worthwhile? Why do humans have an economy?
Economics must first decide to what ends it is working. On a personal level you need money to take care of basic needs--food, water, shelter, health care, energy--and society makes investments for the commons--transportation systems, defense, education, environmental protection.
GDP is no more fuzzy than GPI. Both are taking a measurement of the scale of monetary transactions over a given period, but one only calculates the transactions, the other asks are these transactions positive or negative. The marginal costs of GDP are now greater than the marginal benefits. This is what GPI reveals.
We need to now ask: are my (our) transactions serving the purpose (I) we want them to? Or, am I designing a marketing campaign to encourage an obese, diabetic 11 year old to eat another cheeseburger and down it with Coke? Since GDP is flawed, a correlation between personal income and GDP is also flawed because it doesn't represent appropriate goals.
GDP in wealthy nations represents the liquidation of natural and the production of waste without documentation of further benefit. It is uneconomic to increase GDP--rather like keeping an oil well pumping after the net energy goes negative.
The monetary system would need to be redesigned to re-establish the relationship between economic activity, personal income, and personal and social benefits. That is a good question. What would such a system look like?
Ok - then do average personal income. I can assure you that I, like most people, view my personal income as unambiguously good, and would not need to start chipping off bits of it and changing the sign on them.
My larger point is that I think you guys advocating relocalization need to explain in reasonably clear terms what the implications are for people's incomes.
Not so sure about most people. Certainly the vast majority consider increased income "unambiguously good", but pretty much everybody makes decisions that do not maximize personal income, because so many other variables are also simultaneously maximized in life decisions. Certainly my own income dropped when I quit the corporate wage slave life to become an independent software developer, but my quality of life improved. Most everybody I know has made many decisions that maximized something other than income.
I agree that the income effects of localization should be defined, but in Deep Economy, Bill Mckibben makes a persuasive arguemnent that increased income has not increased happiness, once over the knee of the curve.
My experience has been that the average "trust-funder" is not a happy person (Boulder seems to be a trust-funder magnet).
Meanwhile ski-bums tend to have smiles on their faces, even the ones sleeping in snowcaves or in their vehicles in the parking lot.
Stuart, why do you keep going on about personal incomes? Have you really not understood anything about what those advocating relocalisation have been saying? Not everything can be measured by a ruler or totted up with a calculator. And the earth cares not a jot about what people are prepared to tolerate or not.
Because I think you guys (advocates of relocalization) have zero chance whatsoever of selling your ideas to the general public once it becomes clear how much of a paycut is involved, and deep down you all know that, which is why you refuse to confront the question head on but instead retreat into a fog of vague platitudes (even Jason it seems).
"You guys"?
Of course it's an impossible sell. Heck, if it can't be sold to intelligent people like yourself, and many others here, then it has no chance of being sold to Joe Bloggs. You know, I thought that a massive public education campaign could help pave the way for such policies but it would be thwarted by too many people.
I must admit that your recent posts have left me far more depressed. It seems that most people, no matter what their intellectual abilities may be, just cannot accept that the earth has limits and our use of the earth (of which we're a part) has limits. This is why the question of personal income is not a valid question for relocalisation. When those advocates propose relocalisation, it is part of a bigger package about reorganising how we live together on a finite planet. So chastising them for not answering the question seems to me to be just a way to avoid having to think about a complete change for society (I agree that it's often not a pleasant thought).
I'd never have thought that you'd take the line you're taking now. Can you really not imagine a world without economic growth or with seasonal food? Your previous post contained a host of errors (not in the data but in the interpretation of the relocalisation argument and the lack of data for the future). This post contains a host of assumptions (some of which I listed in another post) that would need to be validated (which is difficult as most are for the future). It seems that you are desperately trying to prove to yourself that there is some solution that can enable you to live your life much as you do today, or to reach whatever aspirations you previously had about the future.
Growth is not sustainable.
Stuart:
I don't think it is so much a matter of selling ideas as it is a matter of forecasting inevitabilities. We begin with the assumption that the growth paradigm of the past couple of centuries (both populations and economies only grew at a snail's pace prior to that) is a temporary and exceptional episode driven and made possible by the one-time-only bonanza of FF, and that with the peaking and decline of FF the paradigm IS changing, and that we MUST therefore transition to a society and economy that is sustainable within the renewable resource base. Whether people are "sold" on that doesn't matter, that is the reality that they will be facing, whether they like it or not - IF this base assumption is valid.
When it comes to my analysis, at least, my approach is to start at the end and work backwards to the present, rather than trying to project the present forward. Assuming that FF will all eventually become far too scarce and thus far too valuable to merely burn, and that this is likely to become the case in far less than a century, this implies in turn that we have less than a century to transition to a sustainable economy based upon renewable resources. (There may still be some residual reliance upon non-renewable resources such as uranium-fueld NPP, just as there might still be a residual amount of FF still being burned, but these will have to be well into their phase-out period by then. This also assumes that fusion will still be "the energy of the future" as it always has been over the past half century.)
We can debate what level of economic development can be supported on a sustainable basis given the world's renewable resource base. It must be kept in mind that a half century or century from now, some of that resource base (particularly land) will likely have suffered significant degradation. Some people that have posted articles on this board suggest that on a long term basis, the world can only support a human population of somewhere between 0.5 - 2 billion, and even that at only slightly above paleolithic levels of development. While we may come to that, this strikes me as being excessively pessimistic. However, even stretching hope as far as the bounds of reason might possibly allow, I have yet to see a convincing case that would suggest that the global economy and anything between 2-7 billion people can be sustained at the present level on a renewable resource base alone - although if your scenario were re-worked to assume a leveling off of the economy and total energy consumption at something close to current levels, it might come close.
I think that the most realistic scenarios will have to assume a transition downward to a lower level of economic development overall. It is just a lot easier for me to imagine a future world that is workably sustainable with an average global per capita GDP in the $1K-5K range (and with very little variation outside of that range, especially beyond the upper limit) than it is to try to imagine some way to have a sustainable world at a much higher level. IF we were a relatively homogenous species with high levels of cooperation and a functional and effective global government, then I just might be able to imagine something more optimistic. Unfortunately, we're anything but, and that realistic assessment has to be part of the picture.
Thus, starting at the end, I've got to assume that AT BEST were going to have to follow an "S" curve trajectory downward, with what is hopefully a slow and steady downward slope for the world as a whole, and unfortunately a more scary plunge for the USA and some other highly developed countries; there is no guarantee of a soft landing, but I think it is helpful to at least try and imagine scenarios that might get us there.
When one starts with the assumption that we must end up with a sustainable economy, built upon a renewable resource base, with an average per capita GDP even for advanced countries like the USA and Canada at not much more than around $5-10K (in 2008 USD), then the implications of what that economy must look like start to become clear. Looking at countries that are presently at or close to that level provides one clue. Francois Cellier posted an article on ecological footprints several months ago, and he indicated that Costa Rica, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Thailand, Phillipines, and Cuba were among the countries clustering in or close to this range, and that were close to having potentially sustainable ecological footprints. Another way to look at it is to consider when the USA was last at the level of $10K per capita GDP (in 2008 USD); that turns out to be 1941, just coming out of the Great Depression but just before the WWII boom. Thus, if we can imagine what life is like in the countries listed above, or what life in the USA was like in 1941, then we can begin to get some sort of idea as to what we might hope to aspire to for our soft landing IN THE BEST CASE.
Looking at the listed countries, and at 1941 America, I think that one could generally say that they are all less transport-intensive. People do not tend to travel or move about as much. People walk a lot, bicycles are common modes of transport, and many people rely on mass transit; the automobile is a luxury good, driven far less (and often with more passengers) than at present in the US. There are large cities, but also plenty of people living in vilages and small towns, and considerable population in rural areas. There are large farms and plantations, but lots of small subsistence farmers, too; and also lots of people growing at least some of their own food in gardens. Meals tend to be mostly home cooked, tend to mostly be made of home-grown or locally-grown whole foods, and tend to be smaller than the 3600 kCal/d that has become the present US average.
Isn't this beginning to sound very much like the "relocalization" vision?
Agreed, it is a "hard sell" when it comes to suggesting to the typical suburban dweller today. My assumption, though, is that it is not a matter of "selling" it to anybody, that this is the pathway that we are most likely to follow, if only we can avoid becoming totally unhinged and entirely collapsing as a society. The relatively limited steps that would need to be taken to avoid that disaster are thus the only things that really need to be "sold" to anyone. What are those limited actions? (I'm going to confine myself mainly to policy initiatives that might be taken in the US, as there really isn't much that can effectively done at a global level.)
1) It would be very helpful if we didn't blow outselves up in a nuclear war. Thus, continuations of arms control measures and other diplomatic initiatives that try to keep some lid on international conflict are worth doing. Trying to be global policeman has only resulted in the US becoming the global bully, and has become counterproductive for our genuine national security. We would be much better off to downscale our military and pull back from our interventions.
2) It would also be helpful if we burned up the remaining FF slower rather than faster. If we are going to have to decline in our energy use, then declining from a lower level will be less difficult on us than will be a decline from a higher level. It would also enable us to stretch out the transition period, so we are less under the gun to develop renewables to replace non-renewables. Finally, the slower we burn FF, the less damaging GCC will be to the environment. Thus, any measures that can be taken to promote energy conservation and efficiency should be encouraged, and any measures that promote the rapid exploitation of FF (such as drilling in ANWR, for example, or a quick and massive ramp up in tar sands, oil shale, or CTL) should be discouraged.
3) I am pessimistic that we'll see much in the way of a serious move toward urban mass transit and interurban passenger rail until most automobiles are undrivable due to overly expensive or unavailable auto fuel; by then, what we'll be able to do will mostly be much too little, much too late. But it is worth doing whatever we can now. Any project that can be gotten on the table and funded should be. On the other hand, moves to put the automobile industry on artificial life support through bailouts, subsidies, or regulatory relief should be opposed. Any new or expanded highways represent a huge waste of money and should be opposed; only the most minimal repairs are needed. Air travel is also going to decline as fuel costs drive ticket prices higher; the airlines should be allowed to die a natural death.
4) The automobile-centric built environment will eventually be transformed into a walkable, transit-oriented built environment, but it may take many decades or even centuries after the death of the automobile for this transformation to be completed. In the meantime, this built environment is going to represent a giant millstone around our necks, making life much worse for the survivors of the automobile-age than it would otherwise have to be. Thus, at this late date there is NO good reason for ANY more suburban subdivisions, malls, or big box stores to be built; they will only be making a bad situation worse. It is therefore "OK" to now be anti-growth. To the extent that "transit-oriented development" and "smart growth" can be encouraged, do so. Preservation or revitalization of small towns and urban neighborhoods should be encouraged.
5) Water is a vital resource and needs to be conserved. Development should be discouraged in areas that are already stretched thin for water. Water should be charged at a rate that encourages conservation rather than waste. Farmers should be encouraged to grow crops that are appropriate for the natural average level of precipitation in their area; the growing of highly-irrigated crops in arid areas using fossil aquifer water must be discontinued, and if that means we have to pay more for food, so be it. We're not going to have water for lawns, either; urban land use codes and HOA covenants need to be changed to encourage xeriscaping or conversion of lawns to productive food gardens.
6) While it may still make sense for large-scale farms to produce some crops such as grains (as Stuart's previous article argues), it is important that the full costs of production and transport be considered, any externalities be internalized, and the full unsubsidized market price be allowed to find its own level. Subsidizes should also be removed from all other agricultural commodities, especially meat and dairy. As Stuart's previous article on biofuels indicates, the diversion of grains from food supply to biofuel production is a disasterous development and should be prevented rather than subsidized. If we can remove the pernicious effects of subsidies from the marketplace, than I am confident that long term economic trends will drive drive food production to localize to a large extent, and to encourage most people to produce as much food as they can. The only other thing needed is to encourage the removal of zoning and HOA covenant restrictions against the growing of fruits and vegetables or raising of small stock.
7) As with food, so with energy. Any subsidies (including ones) should be eliminated, externalities should be internalized (and this is especially where a carbon tax would be useful), and energy sources allowed to find there own places in the market. I am confident that the long term economics would favor the eventual displacement of FF with renewables. Again, as with food production, regulatory restrictions (such as rules prohibiting PV panels on roofs, or the remodeling of houses to incorporate passive solar heating, or the failure of electric utilities to implement net metering) that get in the way of a rapid build up of renewable energy capacity must be modified.
8) We're going to have a rough ride as the economy transitions downward. We need to learn to live within our means, which suggests that we have to ditch the habbit of running large government budget deficits on a regular basis; I'm talking real budget deficits, not the fake ones hidden behind obfuscated accounting. We need to demand that our government be honest with us and with itself, take an honest look at our real fiscal situation, and start getting our house in order. A declining economy will only be able to support a smaller public sector. This is probably going to have to mean that the federal government is going to have to downsize considerably and focus on only the most important national priorities. Much load is going to have to be shed to the states, which in turn are going to have to go through the same downsizing process and shedding loads to the localities. Localities are going to have to become the one level of government that need to expand considerably, though they are going to have to be extremely selective and are not going to be able to absorb all of the load shed from the federal and state governments. Localities are going to need to have the freedom to raise their own revenues from a variety of sources, and their citizens are going to have to be willing to see their local taxes increase, even if federal and state tax burdens do not decline proportionate to their downsizing. Local community organizations are going to increasingly have to take up the slack; the long-term well-being and even survival of communities is going to depend upon how much these are supported and built up now.
The above is not an exhaustive list, undoubtedly some other things could be added to it. However, I would argue that it is broadly consistent with the "relocalization" agenda. Some of these things might individually be a hard sell, although there is a constituency supportive of each. Each will undoubtedly encounter considerable opposition all the way by those in denial and committed to sustaining the unsustainable. Success or failure by one side or another will not change the fact that we WILL be declining to a lower economic level, however; it will only determine how low that level will ultimately be.
Stuart, we just started with a scenario that began "Stuart Staniford is made emperor of the world." Might it not be fair to say that you are being just a little selective on what is politically salable ;-)?
Sharon
I have a friend who has been preparing to relocalize, step by step, for at least two decades. He keeps hos job (as a numerical control machine tool programmer) in order to provide resources (income). His is an early retirement (if TS does not HTF) or survival if TSHTF.
Early retirement attracts many, despite the loss of income. Relocalization can, and will attract many as well as stresses build.
You are in a smaller group than you imagine if you think that more personal income is a good thing.
"Sufficient" income is all many people want. And in a Great Depression II, the definition of sufficient may be revised.
Best Hopes for Mardi Gras,
Alan
This attitude arises from the atomized nature of our economic system. Your primary job as an economic actor is to make sure that you and your immediate family are secure. After all if a personal financial disaster were to befall you, you would be hung out to dry by society. However, if your pursuit of such security creates negative externalities (pollution, global warming, etc) then the amount of income that you need for security is larger than it would be if such externalities were reduced or eliminated. In fact, if such externalities become so bad that they lead to systemic collapse, you are going to lose a lot more than bits of your income.
It is a curious question why, nearly two and a half centuries after the start of the industrial revolution, even in the richest societies on earth only a tiny elite of super rich people feel reasonably secure in a material sense. The answer, I think, lies in two facts.
The first is our addiction to ever increasing levels of complexity. We do not leverage technological progress to simplify our lives; We leverage it to increase our total economic output as rapidly as possible. Of course, among these outputs are various conviences which allow us to accomplish many tasks more quickly and easily than we did in the past, but because we need to keep increasing our productivity exponentially in order to keep the economy ‘healthy’, these conveniences do not create relaxed lives or allow us to pursue intellectual or aesthetic interests which are independent of immediate economic need.
The second fact is the above mentioned atomization of the economic system. Not only do we need constantly rising levels of income to meet our day to day needs, we also need to save up large quanties of money in order to feel reasonably secure about our old age.
This combination of addiction to increasing complexity and having our material security being primarily dependent on the competitive accumulation of wealth is the perfect formula for the destruction of the commons. The physical reality is that our material security is dependent upon a healthy economic community. If Bill Gates along with his entire fortune in the form of gold bars was teleported to an uninhabited planet he would not be rich any more. An economic system in which people regularly do damage to the true source of their wealth in the name of amassing private fortunes is functionally insane. Voluntary simplicity and mutual support is the only path to a humane democratic future. If human nature truly makes it impossible for such things to be, then no path exists whatsoever.
Roger, that last paragraph is wonderful. Amazing the gems one finds in these comment trails, if one perseveres.
Of course it is yet more reason for pessimism, but still - nice to see a truth revealed so well.
Stuart, all of the ecological footprint analyses I have seen have relied on energy as the single largest component, by far - usually 50% or more is energy.
I would guess that expansion of land use (farm or residential) is the most important non-energy factor for footprint, as it directly destroys habitat. It makes footprint quite literal. The 2nd might be ocean food consumption.
Hi, Stuart.
Yes, I think additional growth is possible — absolutely. The question is: how close do you want to bring us to the point of collapse before we begin to reverse the trend?
Let's assume that collapse doesn't occur before 2050, an increasingly unlikely scenario given the number of issues we now face (soil depletion, fisheries depletion, metals depletion, fossil fuel depletion, etc.), once 2050 arrives we can't just snap our fingers and automatically move to a steady state economy. Our monetary system would collapse because it is predicated on an expanding economy.
That means that we should already be moving to shrink our ecological footprint, not increase it. I would argue that it is already too late to move to a steady state economy before hitting collapse given how quickly we are devouring the planet's resources.
And we don't just have India industrializing, we have all of Asia, including China. Between just those two countries, we have 2.4 billion people straining for the consumption levels of the West. To think that Gandhi was concerned with just 300 million people.
Someone else posted a link to the U.N. Millennium Assessment. I think it's worth repeating what they write:
But some people hold out hope that we can turn this big ship around, like Lester Brown.
I readily admit that economic growth was good to raise our standard of living but now that we have crossed the threshold into overshoot continued growth is 100%, absolutely, completely our enemy. We are collectively living on borrowed time.
Thus, any model that doesn't get us back within our ecological budget as its first priority means that we are accelerating our car toward the cliff instead of braking*.
And any grand scheme that has even a faint hope of avoiding collapse must include three elements:
a) a significant power down of industrialized societies to stretch out the remaining fossil fuels and divert their energy to building renewable energy generation
b) a massive reduction in the numbers of humans on the planet
c) a massive curtailment of resource use (including energy usage) per capita for people in the developed countries, plus freezing the developing countries where they are until our numbers come down
Efficiency or renewable energy generation initiatives without doing all of the above is no different than me lowering my cable bill while overspending by $5000/month and expecting that situation to be sustainable. I simply must remove expenses to get back within my budget.
Here are the warnings of unbridled human population growth by over 1500 scientists in 1993, including most Nobel Laureates alive at the time and by 58 National Academies of Science in 1994. Unfortunately, for some odd reason it is considered impolite to suggest that having only one child per couple might help us avoid collapse due to unfettered population growth.
Why listen to the climate scientists and not the ecologists? They are trying to warn us, too.
And, just as importantly, is there any good reason to spend time on a model that doesn't steer us to what we now know we need to do?
-Andre'
* If you prefer a different analogy, see the work of the ecological economist Dr. Brian Czech "Shoveling Fuel For a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All".
why do people assume they are trying to get to our standard of living or even know what our standard of living is? will Asia every use 60+ barrels of oil a year like we do? probably not. if they do we will be the one's using 5+ barrels a year.
what ghandi doesn't understand is price. as Asia grows the price of commodities rise and that makes someone us more efficiently or use less. many doomers understand they can't have our standard of living but they don't understand WHY.
why do people assume they are trying to get to our standard of living or even know what our standard of living is?
And why have you said this *WHY*?
What rhetorical purpose does it serve? Are you trying to persuade with that statement?
will Asia every use 60+ barrels of oil a year like we do? probably not.
80 million barrels of crude a day. 300 million Americans. 6 billion people on the planet.
If the Americans use ALL the oil, 97 and 1/3 a barrel for the year. If the world get all the same oil allocation, 5 and 1/12 a barrel.
Asia contains 60% of the worlds population. That is over 3.6 billion. If Asia got all the oil, that is 8 and 1/11th a barrel of oil.
And somehow your "analysis" is "probably not"
if they do we will be the one's using 5+ barrels a year.
Lets use NUMBERS again, shall we?
World barrel production 2.92E10. Asia using 60 barrels would have to have production at 2.16E11
A factor of 10 larger in production.
And your "analysis" is
if they do we will be the one's using 5+ barrels a year.
many doomers understand they can't have our standard of living but they don't understand WHY.
VS your hand waving presentations without actual numbers?
Amazing how one can have opinions and believe them so long as you are not constrained by physics, science or reality.
You are welcome for this education I have given you.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia
I haven't even figured out what you were saying!
I'm sorry that English is not your native language.
I guess you didn't realize I wasn't even trying to come up with exact numbers. I was pointing out that saying Asia is trying to get our standard of living is not true as it pertains to what we care about, the 60+ barrels per capita a year we use. the world's use of oil would have to go up 6X for the world to get to the level of per capita oil usage as ours. ghandi's quote doesn't really make sense.
Hi, john15.
I must admit, I'm thoroughly confused by your comment. What precisely doesn't make sense about this quote?
It seems rather straightforward to me. I think he means that should 300 million Indians begin consuming at Western levels the earth will quickly be denuded of resources.
-Andre'
But to assume that economic growth continues to 2050 assumes that the current rate of use of inputs to the economy continues to accelerate. This is especially so since one of your main reasons for assuming continued economic growth is that most people in the world need to have their material circumstances improved if turbulent collapse is to be avoided.
Continued acceleration of consumption means that the total use of inputs in the period between now and 2050 will amount to a sizable fraction of a doubling of all economic inputs used by humans from time immemorial to the present, or more. Some inputs may be used less, some more, but it seems likely that the total mass of inputs consumed historically by humans including dozens of critical ones, would be approximately doubled in the time remaining to 2050.
By inputs, I don't mean just materials, including fresh water and the direct and indirect products of photosynthesis, but also services from the environment -- e.g. absorption of pollution and garbage.
How can you make the probability of reaching the goal of your program plausible to those who perceive there are limits to growth?
The answer to this question is likely to become important as the evidence accumulates that we are approaching the limits. Without shared confidence that your program would be successful before the limits to growth make its success impossible, it would degenerate immediately into a single-iteration multi-person prisoner's dilemma in which the penalties were large reductions of shares of the remaining inputs.
Pretty much what we have now.
This strawman gets a lot of play in doomerland. No one denies there are limits to growth, we just argue what the limits are, and if they're even the least bit important on the timescale we're discussing. We're using 1/10000th the solar energy budget, and have barely even scratched the surface of nuclear fuel avaliability.
have barely even scratched the surface of nuclear fuel avaliability.
And the many different ways man can fail when it comes to fission power has just begun to be explored!
Excelsior!
And the many different ways man can fail when it comes to fission power has just begun to be explored!
Excelsior!
As long as cheap coal exists this is a strong implicit endorsement of more coal power, which kills on the order of hundreds of times more people than fission power. Surely replacing a certainty of disaster with a small risk of disaster is a trade up, not a trade down?
and to do that we have to have knowledge of events and inventions that haven't even happened yet. good luck.
Don't assume they are all going to be good. Don't assume any particular distribution of goodness vs badness. What you can assume, however, is that in a more interconnected and interdependent world - a more brittle and less resilient world - that the impacts of each and every one of these events will be magnified. Survival becomes a game that requires winning at every toss of the dice.
Time to back down.
cfm in Gray, ME
How do you know, Stuart? It seems obvious, doesn't it? But what will be the effects of harvesting increasing amounts of sunlight? How do you even begin to work that out? But, of course, it's laughable that we could have any effect on our environment by, for example, getting most of the energy we use now, and in future, from the sun. Isn't it?
By the way, your focus on energy, in the first sentence I quoted, perhaps hides a belief that that is the only resource problem we face with continued economic growth. Is that what you think?
Its entirely reasonable that energy be the only lon term resource bottlneck besides labor, as just about everything besides labor can be represented as a function of energy.
Just because E=Mc² doesn't mean that we have the capability to make anything if we have enough energy (which is a big if). If you are referring to the theoretical possibility that there are enough vital resources to last even a growing population and economy for aeons, with enough energy to extract and refine them, then that doesn't really help us (as it's theoretical, not practical).
No, only centuries. We'll hit the limit of thermal dissipation in less than a thousand years at current growth rates.
Before that, all options are open. Any service you want you can do provided you have labor and energy.
I'm at a loss here. You can't possibly mean what I think you mean, can you? Are you saying that the limitations we are bumping into can be eliminated just by having sufficient labor and energy?
Of course I mean that. You're postulating limitations that either dont exist or havent been demonstrated.
A long way? On which side of the limit? All of the solar insolation falling on the planet is used. The benefits might not accrue directly to humans but perhaps to fish, to weather or to weathering a rock. Perhaps one might suggest that not all the insolation produces something positive, but I'm not so sure of that when looking at Gaia as a whole system. Once humans create any measurable change on the system they are no longer sustainable, though the system may well tolerate greater impacts.
It's not clear what you consider the "solar harvesting capacity" of the planet. One can't discuss whether the approach is asymptotic or sociopathic without knowing that. 100% of the insolation on planet, 10%, 1%, .1%?
I gotta admire your attempt to put this out. It's way easier to point out the fallacies in this straw man than it is to suggest how the chaos will play out. I'm doing an hour TV show on "post apocalyptic economics" Wed night - thanks for helping. :-)
cfm in Gray, ME
I agree that we do not know our limits. I do not believe that we understand the natural systems that we are perturbing sufficiently to understand the long run consequences. And we sure don't know enough to design a self sustaining, self replicating system as efficient as those natural systems that currently exist. The assumption of continued economic growth can only work if that growth does not imply increased demand on the natural support systems.
I think of Gambler's Ruin when people talk about using more and more (and more) natural resources to support the human population. We may win every bet but the last one.
Random thought of the day: We keep increasing our leverage to support our lifestyles by turning ever more natural systems to our use. Sooner or later mother nature will make a margin call.
What station will your show be on?
assuming we use resources in the same 10 years from now like we do now.
You're right...all indications are that we are using more resources in absolute terms every year. Take the U.S., for example. Given that the U.S. population is growing at roughly 30 million people per decade, and assuming that we are pre-collapse, is there any reason to think resource use will go down in absolute terms between this year and the next?
-André
Some points in no particular order:
1. What you see as a learning curve in PV is more shifting manufacture to cheaper locations. This would not be extendable into the future. It's more likely that production costs will go up (like with everything else).
2. Nobody's likely to ever use batteries for grid leveling. You use mechanical energy storage. Much cheaper.
3. Since you're emperor of the world you just order them to accept wind turbines. They are the lowest tech solution by far and the easiest to ramp up.
Utility scale batteries are being tested now http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Utility_Scale_Batteries.
Solar cells are mainly produced in Japan and Germany. Nanosolar just built their factory in San Jose. Whatever cost savings come from moving it all to China are mostly still ahead of us.