 | Andris Piebalgs : getting a sense of proportion | The Oil Drum | Obama's New "Big Oil" Ad: Does He Have It Right or Wrong? |  |
| The Bullroarer - Friday 28 March 2008 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Cogeneration At Home: Ceramic Fuel Cells And Bloom Energy | |
54 comments on Rachel Nolan - Peak Oil Speech in Qld Parliament
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
GAIA Host Collective
Tar sands will take up some of the slack. Ditto for coal liquification. Oil shale will play a minor role. In the meantime,the rising cost of gas will hasten a migration to the grid. Hybrid,plug-in,then fully electric vehicles. Rising fuel costs also make renewable energy more affordable by the day. Wind energy capacity in the U.S. doubled last year. Only supply constraints kept solar from doing the same. Yes,the U.S. peaked 38 years ago,but it's still the world's #3 producer. Peak oil isn't a catastrophe waiting to happen. It's a slow,decades long process...that hastens the worlds transition to the Solar Age. That's a good thing.
The mythology of the fairy tale ending is permanently lodged into the psyche of the European consciousness. The techno-fix is a mockery of a travesty of a sham. Australians and Americans consume 30 times as much as other peoples. Even if we adjusted our lifestyles to that of less energy consumptive nations is humanity sustainable at 6.7 billion people and growing? Of course not.
The techno-fix is a mockery of a travesty of a sham. Will sobering facts stop the overwhelming effort and investment of the west to keep everything going? No. We have a culture of two year olds.
See you on the downside. And that's not a good thing.
I agree 100%. If someone wants to know the difference between an electric (which still requires a source to produce it) and oil, try using a cordless weedeater vs. a gas powered one on knee high weeds and wet grasses. You'll reach for the oil powered one every time. The idea that an expanding economy in India and China coupled with already developed countries swarming through energy at the clip of 31 billion barrels of oil a year can make the switch to electricity is outlandish at best. Only through the most chaotic transition will that ever occur. People can adjust to more, but not less without being forced. Humankind is still motivated by simple, 2 year old perceptions.
The last time we had a solar age was prior to the nineteenth century, before coal. There is avery good reason that industrialisation didn't happen under the last "solar age" and there is a compelling argument that it won't last long into the next one either, tar sands, wind and bio-fuels notwithstanding.
Um.... is that reason that nobody had invented photovoltaic cells?
Maybe it was because they didn't have wind turbines that could generate 7 MW each to power the PV plants ?
Of course, solar thermal just needs some well aimed shiny metal bits - and those have been around for a couple of thousand years now - we just didn't know how to use them back then...
I guess the 20 Mw of installed PV were also used to produce the wind turbines? And those cranes used for the installation I am sure were using only bio-diesel, along with the plug in electric trucks were just sitting around waiting to deliver it all to site.
Of course we have been able to amke shiny metal things for a few thousand years but you seem to think aiming them is easy. It is not easy now, even with our modern control systems to line up thousands of highly polished mirrors ot concetrate enough sunlight on one spot to capture it. Accurately lining up these things requires some pretty hi tech control systems, X and Y axis servo motors for each mirror and an army of cleaners to keep all the dust, grime, bird shit and other crap off them so that they keep working at the design efficiency. Any dulling of the polished surface will reduce the effectiveness considerably as the sunlight scatters in all directions rather than the predictable angles required.
As far as PV goes, this is great for isolated, small scale, low deamnd installations. Even if isolated means your suburban house with a 20KW system on the roof, it is still of limited value to industry , even if you do supply the grid. The power grid is currently designed for a one flow of power. It is not equipped to upload massive amounts of unregulated, PV generated power from every household that wants to do their bit. You may be able to share a bit with your neighbours within the same local distribution grid, but you are not going to supply anything to the aluminimu smelter that is turning out new wind turbine blades. The smelter and other heavy industries need high security power supplies to stay in business. You can't just turn some of these things off, becuase the wind stops or the clouds roll in.
The most reliable form of solar energy conversion is hydro-electricity. If we could combine itermittent wind and other solar technologies to pump water up hill rather than rely on the rain to get it there, we will ahve gone a long way to closing the loop. The biggest problem is having big enough storages to create the scale necessary to keep our curretn industrial apparatus all going.
But hey, if you've got all th answers, theres no shortage of suckers out there waiting to invest.