The Oil Drum

Below is 4th in a series of installments by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and his students attempting to update the 'balloon graph' of EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources with help from theoildrum.com readership. Todays post deals with solar energy, specifically: Hydropower, Passive Solar, Photovoltaic, and Wind energy. Next will be Geothermal and Wave energy systems.

Thin film solar company Nanosolar has now shipped its first solar panels, leading to speculation that the (direct) cost of solar power is now cheaper than coal (and falling).

The company also began an auction for the second panel produced, however this was cancelled by eBay because Nanosolar decided to donate the purchase price to charity. The third panel has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose, California.

While it is still too early to tell whether or not Nanosolar can meet their goal of selling solar cells at $1 per watt, the fact that the company has constructed a manufacturing plant and begun shipping the product to a paying customer (in Germany) is a good sign.

As I mentioned in my last post, this is the time for Seasonal travel, and so, for the first time it finds us, transiently, in Western Massachusetts. Picking up the local paper The Sunday Republican I discovered tht they are in the midst of a series on Energy in the 21st Century. The series began with an article on solar power , which was followed by one on nuclear power and then by one on the use of coal. The latest, which first caught my attention, is on power from water. There will be two more in the series, one next week on biofuels, and then one the following week on wind.

AutoBlogGreen has a post on a New Zealand manufactured electric bus (with a solar power "refuelling" station) being piloted in Adelaide. Like the electric truck example, this is a great niche for fully electric vehicles to occupy - a vehicle in frequent use that is contantly returning to its base and has no need to make longer journeys.

The New York Times reported today an intriguing article on what's happening in Fort Collins, Colorado - a city that prides itself on being a bastion of green living. The town's motto, "Where renewal is a way of life," is more than just a metaphor. The city is heavily involved in promoting carbon-free energy production. They currently have two proposals on the table - an innovative solar panel production plant and a uranium mining project for nuclear power. Although the energy that wil be generated from each project will be carbon-free, the processes of production and/or extraction each have their own environmental hazards. Should the town support nuclear, solar, or both? And what about the NIMBY factor? Should the town expose itself to possible health hazards for the sake of local job creation and global carbon-free energy production?

In Alberta, the debate of the the tar sands royalty review is heating up. Major companies are threatening to pull investments in the province, while other point out that a peaking world offers them few other options. The environmental effects of large-scale bitumen mining, which are not considered often enough, are discussed in detail in journalist Willam Marsden's new book.

On the other side of the country, LNG shipments seem set to ignite a political row over safety in narrow shipping lanes. Nuclear appears to be approaching a revival, although cost is an issue. The effects of climate change are making themselves felt across the globe, notably in the Australia and in the Arctic, where Inuit climate change campaigner Sheila Watt-Cloutier could be about to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. (More under the fold!)

RECENTLY, I spent eight days in the Nevada desert with 47,000-some-odd other folks at the utterly unique annual event called Burning Man. This was my third time there, and it was more than a third larger, and quite a bit more taxing, than I remembered from my last attendance in 2000. For those who haven't heard of Burning Man, it's . . . well, it's hard to describe. In fact there are probably as many descriptions as there are attendees.

Well it was raining in Cork this morning, site of this week's ASPO conference, but by this afternoon it turned out to be somewhat nicer, and so I meandered over to the The Lifetime Lab where the evening welcome reception was to take place. (Irish descriptions tend to be “at the top of the road”, “meet in the City Center”, “within walking distance”, and so I wanted to be sure I got there). What those who showed up at the reception missed was that this is a recent addition to the Cork Landscape (open just over a year) and is a teaching tool for the community with several thousand school kids a year coming to learn about energy, the alternatives and the issues that will dominate their lives. The staff at the Lab were very kind, as well as informative about what they were doing with geothermal, as well as solar energy (20 sq m of panels on the roof) and, more to the point, took pity on a relatively geriatric case who took nearly an hour to make the “easy 20-minute” stroll out, and drove me back to the hotel.

I will leave each of you to write your own caption to the photo I thought most memorable from the reception. You should know, however, that the "victim" is Dr Campbell who was welcoming us to the reception, and yes the hawk was alive.

A lot's been said lately about how much energy is in a cubic mile of oil.  This is roughly the amount the world uses in a year.

Assumptions: The Three Gorges Dam is rated at its full design capacity of 18 gigawatts. A nuclear power plant is postulated to be the equivalent of a 1.1-GW unit at the Diablo Canyon plant in California. A coal plant is one rated at 500 megawatts. A wind turbine is one with a 100‑meter blade span, and rated at 1.65 MW. A solar panel is a 2.1‑­kilowatt system made for home roofs. In comparing ­categories, bear in mind that the average amount of time that power is produced varies among them, so that total energy obtained is not a simple function of power rating.
src: Joules, BTUs, Quads—Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, IEEE Spectrum, January 2007
Illustration: bryan christie design. Click to enlarge.

Leaving aside some errors (the coal and nuclear numbers are off by about 10% to each other, and the capacity factor of wind turbines should be closer to 30%) the most essential oversight in that equation is elephantine:

Compared to that, the rest is small potatoes.