 | The Bullroarer - Friday 4 July 2008 | The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Inquiry into the Excise Legislation Amendment (Condensate) Bill 2008 and the Excise Tariff Amendment (Condensate) Bill 2008 |  |
25 comments on Waiting For Garnaut, No More
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25 comments on Waiting For Garnaut, No More
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Which is it?
Do you believe "20-40%" tops?
Do you calculate it? If so, what is the basis of your calculation?
Do you see it as or count on it being 20-40% tops?
Are you making plans taking account of it as being 20-40% tops?
Because honestly, most of us will only be interested in the calculation. Your beliefs, imaginings and plans are very important for you and your family, but not very important for us.
These are fair questions and I see the start of a long thread. I'll break it down;
need for baseload - people who actually run power grids say about 40% of the total needs to be constant output ie to run hospitals and aluminium smelters
get real about wavepower and hot rocks - I'm sure there's a dentist's waiting room somewhere with a Popular Mechanics from 1975 that says these are the next big thing. How come it's taking so long?
the EROEI cliff - (see Euan Mearns articles) what distinguishes us from the Neolithic is that we need system averaged energy returns >10 or so. That's intermittent power with major backup.
there's not enough spare cash - we can't easily change from power that's 5-10c per kwh to power that costs 30-50c due to high financing costs. Another way of looking at it is that if future energy has a payback of 8 years we need all the spare energy from the next 8 years just to replicate the current output.
does the Easter Bunny exist? - I'm not saying yes or no but I want to see the evidence. What large countries have 50% or more renewables without unique factors?
This confrontation is long overdue and there's plenty more ammo. I suggest the next few years is put-up or shut-up time for the dreamers.
Boof - you are close to trolling now, making your usual collection of assertions without backing them up with any references.
Show me articles from the 1970's predicting imminent wave power or HDR power generation. From Popular Mechanics or any other source. Just one.
Both wind and CSP have EROEI way over 10, so there is no EROEI cliff to worry about if we get cracking building enough supply.
Your obsession with "baseload" I find strange. Most of our "base" load in Australia is a function of offering very cheap late night power to these smelters - because all this excess fixed capacity existed.
You are relying on circular logic. If large coal fired power stations didn't need to generate a minimum level, then we wouldn't have this demand in the first place.
Supply is variable, so is demand. That is just how it is, in spite of your apparent need for some sort of fixed baseline. As the gird gets smart and we utilise more clean and obviously intermittent power sources, demand will be managed to meet supply.
Its not that hard - the idea of markets has been around for a long time now.
Okay, so you believe and count on it. You didn't calculate it, you've no basis for your ideas except one or two private conversations and some made-up stuff - your imagined PM article, for example.
That's okay, you can believe what you want. But if you're going to tell others what to believe, then we need to have... well, you know: facts.
Ideas based on casual chats and made-up stuff we can manage by ourselves, we don't need your help ;)
I disagree with Boof on nuclear power but I also agree that 100% grid electricity from renewables is a big ask. In the case of wind, csp, PV, tidal, wave, ocean currents, geothermal and hot rocks, all of them have some level of proven ability to generate electricity. What they have not yet proven is the ability to run a modern industrial economy (any OECD one would do) and scale appropriately to allow economic growth and BAU to continue.
In both the arguments there seems to be an assumption that BAU is both possible and desirable, albeit with a bit of refashioning in the image of Boof or Gav.
Gav's renewables and Boof's nuclear won't produce liquid fuels, the recent price rises of which have created the start of a tsunami of political momentum which threatens to wipe the climate change concerns completely off the landscape.
Liquid fuels are mostly used for transport.
Transport can mostly run on electricity (planes being the main exception).
Therefore you can replace liquid fuels with electricity.
Electricity can be provided by renewables and/or nuclear.
The amount of energy available from renewables is more than 10,000 times our current energy consumption.
Therefore you could replace almost all our liquid fuels needs with renewables (nuclear advocates would make a similar argument about nuclear power, though you can argue about how long this could be sustained, whereas renewables last "forever", or thereabouts).
Change is possible, I don't see why people focus on one type of change (peak oil production) and refuse to accept many other changes aren't possible at the same time...
Whether or not "BAU" is desirable is another matter - there are other issues to deal with - but each of those is an additional discussion.
Shipping is the other exception. We have had electric transport in some areas of the world for a little over 100 years. The knowledge of electricity and its generation, distribution, control and application has expanded vastly since the 1950's and the advent of the electronic age. The advancements that are happening today are minutely incremental and are more focused on the nano, compared with the leaps and bounds that took place in early twentieth century. The electric vehicles that are yet to appear in Australia, all look like lightweights and are trying to mimic what a petrol/diesel can do but don't seem to making any great market penetration.
Electric rail passenger transport only makes economic sense in densley populated urban areas, or between major metropoli. Freight rail to and from factories is possible only once the factory reaches a certain size. Retail deliveries have a similar problem. But perhaps the biggest industry that cannot be electrified very easily is agriculture.
The transporting of grain, livestock, fodder and produce from farms is heavily reliant on trucks which are not easily replaced. In a post peak oil scenario where diesel is in short supply, it is questionable as to the survivability of many agricultural industries on the transport implications alone, let alone what is used on farm. It doesn't matter if there is oodles of electricity from any source available if it cannot be practically applied to a traction motor that is hauling a load. When it costs $20-25M just to put in a rail siding, what do think it will cost to run an electrified line past the door of every farm in the country?
The relentless assumption that we can just order up electric transport for everyone and then power it with renewables (or nuclear) is a simplistic answer to a complex set of questions.
The questions we need to be asking oursleves is what is essential transport and what can we do without; how do we redesign cities and towns so that people don't need to use mechanised transport as much as they currently do; if people are staying put, how do they get fed, clothed, housed and all the other essential inputs for life; what are the people going to do to keep themselves occupied, and what implications for transport does that have? etc etc ad infinitum.
If we can come up with low energy solutions to these questions, like Kiashus example of the 1 Tonne Carbon Lifestyle, then we may be able to simply retire many of the FF technolgies we currently use and either not have to replace them with anything or give zero emission technolgy a much lower total demand that they need to meet.
Its funny how differently people look at rates of change.
I see both the electric grid and vehicle transport poised for large transformation - and its already beginning in some places.
What is happening in Australia today is irrelevant - we don't lead in technological change - we follow.
You need to watch what is happening in California, Germany and Japan - that is where technological innovation actually happens.
Electric cars and smart grids are both hot areas now for venture capital investment. The majors are hurrying to catch up in the car industry and various cities are already starting to roll out smart grid programs. We'll see both trends manifesting themselves here within a decade.
As for farm machinery, if it can be run by a diesel engine, it can be run by an electric engine - I don't see why you think this change impossible.
Even if it was, we could use biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel or CNG from biogas) for agriculture - no big deal.
Low energy solutions are good, but they aren't the only way. As fuel prices rise, we'll see people, organisations and communities adjusting in different ways depending on their individual circumstances.