On the delusion that a solar powered electric car is free of external costs.

Lately we've been hearing a lot of repetition of the now 50 year old fantasy that solar powered renewable cars are free of external costs - that they're somehow noble and to be desired.

In fact, the laws of something called physics imply that the energy invested in a car of any type, including a Prius, including a solar powered car is enormous.

A gallon of gasoline contains 132 MJ of energy:

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

Since there are zero car culture "renewables will save us" hype meisters here who can do math, I will tell you that a gallon of gasoline contains about 37 kwh of energy. In otherwords, burning a gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of running 91 four hundred watt big screen televisions for an hour.

Now.

Solar energy is a trivial form of energy. It has never been - in more than 50 years of hype - anything more than a toy.

Nationwide solar electricity production decreased in the United States from 2005 to 2006:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1_11.html

It feel from 550,294 kwh to 507,706 kwh, hardly enough to power the websites devoted to claiming that "solar will save us."

Since a kwh is 3.6 MJ, and a gallon of gasoline is 132 MJ, it follows that all of the solar electricity produced in the United States as of 2006 was the equivalent of about 14,000 gallons of gasoline. That much gasoline probably evaporates in the US on a typical day.

Now, one of the reasons that solar electricity is a trivial form of energy is that the solar companies can't produce solar cells on a meaningful scale. There has never been a calendar year where enough solar cells have been produced to match the output of 3 or 4 gas plants, and far more than 3 or 4 gas plants are built each year - mostly at the behest of dumb fundie anti-nukes.

(See California, for instance.)

The only thing that solar electricity can do, in fact, is to displace a tiny amount of dangerous natural gas.

It follows that if one were to purchase solar cells to power one's car, since solar cells can only be produced on a trivial scale, that in so doing, one is merely playing a shell game, in effect causing more dangerous fossil fuel waste by running dangerous natural gas plants to produce electricity.

It doesn't, by the way, have to be this way, but it is this way and what is exists because of ignorance and self delusion.

Frankly, ignorance disgusts me. One of the most egregious forms of ignorance is the dumb fundie car culture apologetics that pretends that cars can be "clean," like "clean coal." They cannot be clean. They will never be clean. They are cars. They are the distributed energy point source pollutant nightmare writ large.

Let's put this in terms that even a stupid fundie American can understand:

The average world power consumption for human beings over all is about 2400 watts. This is about 3 horsepower.

Put that in your electric motor dreams and smoke it.

As of this writing, the thread just below mine is but one example of this malignant conceit:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x148149

A recent thread, with a well reasoned opening post, can be found here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=147268&mesg_id=147268

There are many examples of "But, but, but, but, but, but, my fantasy electric car will be powered by my fantasy renewable energy system..."

.
.
.

But I'll make a few comments regarding electric vs. gas powered cars.

As a licensed mechanic, I took 26 weeks of college courses of theory, and spent 5 years apprenticing for my trade. I got my Inter-provincial qualifications in 1975, so I been at it for a while.

One of the things we were taught in college was that at least 35% of an engine's horsepower was lost through the restrictions in the exhaust system itself. That was long before catalytic converters were used, and the converter restricts the exhaust even more-so, and when fouled they can restrict so much that the vehicle will hardly run and gas mileage plummets.

Electric cars, gas, diesel, ANY car will be responsible for some pollution in it's creation stage.

However, let's just look at the OPERATION of the electric car.

1. NO engine oil changes.

Used engine oil is a pollutant, and a carcinogen. CANCER? -from used engine oil? - YES - so much so that well over a decade ago, Shell was the first oil company to put a caution on individual oil cans/containers about getting used engine oil on your hands for this very reason.

2. NO leaky radiators, hoses etc. to leak the toxic antifreeze on the ground, or dumped into local sewers at service stations that don't handle it properly.

TOXIC? - you bet. There have been cases where people have tried(some successfully) to murder their mate by feeding tiny doses of antifreeze to their "loved one", and the symptoms are hard to diagnose. Wanna kill that pesky cat next door? Just put some antifreeze in a bowl, it'll lap it up and die.(I am not suggesting you really do this, but google it if you think this is not possible).

3. No transmission/rear axle fluids to change/leak in most - another pollutant that doesn't enter the environment.

4. NO EMISSIONS - none, nada - no one can smell you coming or going.

Just imagine what the sky could look like in Los Angeles or New York if only electric vehicles were allowed in city limits!

YEAH - there really are STARS in the sky over those cities too - just like up here in Northern Canukisland!

If I could afford the purchase price of an electric car - not a hybrid - just electric,

Then that's what would be in my driveway.

We will ALWAYS have electricity from one source or another, be it hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, solar, wind or whatever - but when the GAS runs out,

the ELECTRIC car will still be usable.

Something to ponder

nuclear power = fail

It just has to be a form of energy that doesn't kill you.

The fact that solar energy has a toxicity problem is mostly missed because solar is now and always has been a trivial form of energy.

If you want to know how "benign" solar electricity really is, I note with contempt that one need only look at the biofuels mess.

Everything sounds great until it's tried on scale.

I don't believe that solar electricity will be a significant form of energy in my lifetime, mostly because I've been hearing about how wonderful it is for more than 40 years with very little real result.

But I do know that if I am wrong and it does become an exajoule scale form of energy, it will have a large environmental impact. It is a mass density problem. One has to haul around and process many millions of tons of stuff just to get a single exajoule. That won't work.

Considering the toxicity of the stuff in question, well...

None of this is to say, by the way, that solar energy is dangerous as say, dangerous natural gas, but that's not saying much. Dangerous natural gas is unacceptably dangerous, no matter how much money Putin pays the fundie anti-nuke Gerhard Schroeder to say otherwise, no matter how much Royal Dutch Shell pays Amory Lovins to greenwash it, no matter how much time Robert F. Kennedy shilling for gas terminals off the coast of Malibu.

But the point is academic. Solar energy is a failure. Decades into the dangerous fossil fuel crisis - also known as "climate change" - solar energy has never produced a single exajoule of energy in a year. It's worthless.

It is therefore very different than used nuclear fuel.

Nuclear fuel - and you'd have to know something called science to know this - is subject to equilibrium.

Dangerous electronic waste is not. The cadmium distributed as a point source pollutant from the trivial solar industry is not noticed because solar is a trivial form of energy - but in fact, the cadmium telluride from 20 year old solar cells now finding their way to landfills will never be anything but toxic.

sitting in corroding casks at US enrichment plants????

Or do we just conveniently forget about this too....

you make Charles Bronson look like Peter Pan....

It doesn't seem to have kept humans from reaching their current population.

Plutonium, OTOH.............well, let's just say we really shouldn't be in the business of creating MORE of it than we already have.

:popcorn:

Admittedly, they aren't dead, so I guess we could debate about whether they count. Yet.

and what does this say about China's nuclear power industry??

By that time, I expect we will have a lot more data on the external costs. Because people are, in fact, building a lot more renewables these days.

Or is it really about China's lack of industrial and environmental health and safety standards.

Kinda like blaming pet deaths from chinese made petfood on the dangers of feeding your dog (I don't think I'm gonna let my dog starve. I'm just gonna buy dogfood produced by a reputable manufacturer....)

Or is it just a problem of standards and proper engineering?

concerning all phases of the manufacturing processes and disposal.

That is, manufacture lots more of it over here. I think we'll eventually discover white bubbling waste being dumped in places that aren't covered by our regulations. Assuming those regulations are even still in play, after 8 years of BushCo.

But it will, at least, provide employment.

are as bad as nuclear power is doomed from the start. The differences are so great that comparing them just hurts your case.

"Bubbling white stuff" can be disposed of safely and generally is. There is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste and never will be.

I'm going to continue hurting my cause, by bringing the question up, until I have satisfied my curiosity.

and what to do with it, damn son. How can you look past radioactive waste and see 'white bubbling stuff' I ask?

http://asia.news.yahoo.com/061218/3/2ujdo.html

And here's another two:
http://www.lni.wa.gov/news/1999/pr990414a.asp
Hey look, death by silicon tetrachloride!
Now where have I seen silicon tetrachloride in the news recently...

Enjoy you popcorn.

If you are trying to imply that solar power is as dangerous as nuclear power, then it really just makes you look ( more ) foolish.

What a joke....

He asked for the name of one person killed by Solar energy. Deme Garibay is one name, although there others.

Sorry if that's an in-depth exchange of information beyond your wit to understand.

Although since you brought it up: Whether or not solar is more dangerous is actually an interesting question. Solar provides less than 0.01% of the world's total energy, nuclear about 10%: On a deaths-per-TWh basis, these four deaths represent the same cost in lives as predicted eventual Chernobyl death toll: If you scale up production of solar energy by 3 orders of magnitude, you can expect to scale the the deaths by the same amount. As it is, the life of someone impaled on a PV mounting bracket in return for ~0.0% of our energy is pretty much wasted, don't you think?

No, of course you don't.

You need to pour yourself a big bowl of Solar Chips (Snap! Crackle! Smug!), or maybe some Greenwash Frosted Wind Flakes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_the_Tiger">They're gre-e-e-at!

--p!
The Best To You Each Morning
Fresh From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg_Company">Battle Creek
(Whose delegates absolutely won't be seated unless the Wicked Witch of the DLC casts an evil spell on Doctor Dean.)

That's the ticket.

Dangerous to those who are making billions of dollars destroying our planet....

Although since you don't care about millions of people not having access to advanced medicine, I should point out I'm not actually expecting you to give a fuck.

If you are are not personally affected it just doesn't matter, does it?

For the occasional visitors to E/E, NNadir had written this same post dozens of times in the last two years. Maybe a hundred times.

As stated already a car has lots of poisons in it like the antifreeze, oil, etc.. To be fair many battery types are the biggest with toxicity and batteries are common to both, but more of them in an all electric vehicle. We won't get around some drawbacks no matter what direction we take. To be clear, most solar cells are made of silicon with slight dopings to create the + and - differences. They are also very thin so there are not great quantities of anything there.
I do have a problem with your statement that solar is insignificant as in a sense you are right, but only because there isn't widespread use of them. Even nuclear, when it first went online, could've been called insignificant until more came to be in use. It may not save us as you state, but it is an additional power source and this could stave-off the need for more power plants being needed to be built quite as fast as it lessens the burdens presented now. Also, the nature of solar being widely physically positioned across a service area lessens the strain on the grid and has decentralized a terrorist's singularity of targeting.

Used grease from local restaurants... When you burn veggie oil, or even animal fats it is not only does it not hurt the environment but it actually helps plant life. Safe and free driving. I also plan to drive a plug in hybrid soon. Will charge the batteries via solar panels on my roof. How the hell can you deduce that that isn't better than dinosaur oil?????

However, the point of the OP is that once you take scale into account, the improvement is not that great.

Much of the pollution China is currently choking on is due to the manufacture of solar components. As the scale increases, the problems will get exponentially worse for them. You can't chirp proudly about your electric car while ignoring these external costs.

Again logic fail the crowd that snorts yellowcake.

Battery electric is a huge energy savings over GASOLINE or DIESEL internal combustion engines.

The increased efficiency with battery electric alone, even without renewables, is worth the transition.

BUT battery electric also provides the grid support and peaking power, making a much, much, higher penetration of renewables possible. The more battery electric cars, the more cheaply the grid can handle the load.

Result. No one is going to want to build nuclear power plants.

Wonderful isn't it?

Poor Marvin...

This probably means he will lose the rest of his life savings....

And then to transport, replace, and dispose of those batteries on a regular schedule? And how would that compare with the energy savings of, say, substantial demand destruction?

you are still consuming an enormous - frankly a piggish - amount of energy to lug around a few tons of metal.

I don't understand why it's so difficult to understand that.

Right now 90% of the world's energy is produced from dangerous fossil fuels, most of it to generate electricity. As long as electricity is unnecessarily dirty - given that an anti-nuclear ignorance cult has fought irrationally and with some depressing success to prevent nuclear power from doing what it could have done in a rational and scientifically literate world - it follows that electricity should not be wasted on cars.

There are zero people with huge self delusions who know anything about the laws of thermodynamics, but the second law, in particular, insists that all conversions from one form of energy to another compels a loss of energy.

Now, I oppose the use of all dangerous fossil fuels for all purposes. I want them banned, but let's look at the energy conversions involved in gasoline. Solar energy was converted, over millions of years, at less than 10% efficiency into chemical stored energy. This energy was then coverted - at a loss - to gasoline, which was burned to give heat energy. This heat energy was converted to mechanical energy in a Carnot type heat engine. There are 4 conversions, including the conversion of oil energy into gasoline - really just a chemical affair.

Now let's consider the electric car. Solar energy is converted to electrical energy in the solar cell, and then into chemical energy in the battery. The battery then converts the chemical energy back to electrical energy which is converted once again to mechanical energy. This is 5 conversions. Note that unlike oil, chemical batteries lose energy spontaneously, though not at a large amount.

Note that the number of conversions is lessened if one dispenses with the battery for the car. Thus solar energy - it is not as clean as imagined in the popular imagination - is cleaner if the electricity is used directly. Since dangerous natural gas has not been phased out and there is no sign of it being phased out, it follows that it is wisest to use this trivial amount of energy in the most efficient way: Shutting gas plants on sunny days to run air conditioners and stuff like that.

:popcorn:

and in fact, your now 5 year old cheering for the failed Utsira project, has not converted one Norwegian into a hydrogen car buyer.

Everyone in this country is trapped in the car culture, just as everyone is trapped in the coal culture, generally because of ignorance.

I avoid cars like the plague if I can. I don't apologize for them and claim that Governor Hydrogen Hummer is going to get me a hydrogen Hummer of my own powered by a brazillion solar roofs Unlike Amory Lovins, I once sold my car and bicycled everywhere for 3 years.

Four years ago, I predicted that the Utsira hydrogen scheme that you were promising us all 100 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide ago, would result in ZERO industrial plants.

You could contradict me of course, by showing where such a plant is being built on say, a 0.05 exajoule scale. But you can't.

The solar/wind hydrogen car culture hype is not just a failure, but it is a morally pernicious failure because it feeds indifference and delusion and doing nothing.

and you didn't use any natural gas to heat your home this winter, right???

:rofl:

Even though wood burning kills millions of people each year around the planet - a fact always overlooked by the hand waving anti-nuke fundie crowd - I reasoned thusly:

Several old growth trees on my property have come down because of winds and storms. The carbon contained in the trees would - if allowed to rot - return to the atmosphere with no benefit. By burning wood and, regrettably releasing carcinogenic PAH's - one may offset the dangerous natural gas being burned in places like Maine.

I have calculated - the ability to do calculations is notably missing among fundementalists - the carbon cost of heating my home via dangerous natural gas, wood, and electricity. I have always assumed that electricity in New Jersey is very clean, since so much of our electricity is generated from nuclear power. Except in fundie land, nuclear power is known to be much cleaner than either wood or, of course, dangerous natural gas, the latter being pushed by fundie anti-nukes like Amory Lovins and Gerhard Schroeder.

I have reproduced my calculations on the internet. They are available here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/8/185552/4950

Since I am less dogmatic that fundies, I was surprised to discover that electricity in New Jersey is not quite as clean as my high efficiency gas furnace. However, a high efficiency gas furnace is NOT as clean as electricity in Vermont, where 70% of the electricty comes from nuclear power.

I note that stupid fundies are trying to vandalize the clean electricity of Vermont through appeal to ignorance.

I quote what I have written in this diary and note that it contains something that is a mystery to fundies: References:




I went on to show that it is stupid to conserve electricity in Vermont during the winter, although fundies are always driving to yuppie dinners at Mom's house to talk up how "conservation will save us."

I wrote:



(The references are posted as links in the original diary.)

The dumb fundie anti-nukes here are all car culture apologists, since they wish to insist against all evidence that cars can be made green by loose talk about theoretical hydrogen automobiles. This is because dumb fundie anti-nukes are all oblivious.

There are ZERO fundie anti-nukes who know what data is, how to cite it, or what - most importantly - it means.

In New Jersey, the native American tribe that inhabited the state were the Lenape. In Lenape culture, it was understood that occassionally it was necessary to chop a tree, since the Lenape had neither clean nuclear power or filthy natural gas. The Lenape however when they cut a tree, apologized to the tree, and by extension, the environment for their impact.

In my diary, I have apologized to the sky for driving one half a mile to the store to buy a high efficiency light bulb. I note, with contempt, that if I had driven to Home Depot or Amory Lovins Walmart, I would have probably destroyed more with the exercise of ersatz "nobility" than I would have saved. The calculation is duly noted in the original.

All human beings, and in fact all living things - one would have to know about something called "science" to understand this - have an impact on their environment. I know I do. I don't wave my hands and pretend - like a fundie bragging about his 50 yuppie friends eating a huge dinner at Mom's estate - that I am environmentally pure.

In the referenced post, I have described one of my family's cars, since you are interested in the subject.

The fact that I own a car does not mean that I approve of cars. I have never written a single post here arguing that the car culture is sustainable in any way. I'm not a fucking fraudulent liar like this fellow:

http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Trans/T04-01_HypercarH2AutoTrans.pdf

The car culture is not sustainable, has never been sustainable, cannot be made sustainable.

I note with contempt that the horseshit television crews who drove to the Maine Solar House to film it, consumed far more dangerous fossil fuels than the giant plastic McMansion will ever save, if it saves anything at all.

The fact that television crews drive like a bunch of yuppies to film the Maine Solar House shows how trivial and useless a form of energy solar actually is. No television crews came to film my high efficiency gas furnace.

We plan to build three more reactors in this state. I would argue that we could and should build ten or fifteen more here. This is the right place to do it. At that time, it will be wise to switch all homes in New Jersey to electric heat.

Now put that in your fundie pipe and generate biomass generated PAH's.

For all the "you hypocrite, you have a car" bullshit posted by car culture "renewables will save us" apologists, there has been zero interest in the fact that I changed my mind and talked about my car and its use.

That's perfectly OK with me, of course, since I am used to the selective attention of the anti-nuke cults. They are all arbitrary frauds, from Amory Lovins down to the last repetitive dumb ass who posts here.

See if you can find here even ONE post on this thread - or anywhere else in this forum - about how battery waste stays toxic forever. On the other hand, anti-nukes are always making a big deal - in a generally scientifically illiterate way - about how so called "nuclear waste" lasts (pick one illiterately generated period of time) for 1) tens of thousands of years, 2) millions of years 3) hundreds of millions of years 4) brazillions of years or 5) until Jesus comes again.

The one that you drive around your yuppie walmart car culture "upscale" neighborhood you always brag about and park in front of your upscale yuppie house that you brag consumes "$3500" a year worth of natural gas.

What happened to all the other old growth trees in your old growth yuppie walmart car culture neighborhood???

BTW - Nuclear New Jersey (Which Is A Fraud) imports 35% of its electricity from out-of-state fossil fuel plants and plans to import coal-fired electricity from WV.

Nuclear New Jersey Is A Fraud.

:rofl:

Let's see...

What happened to my trees...

Um...um...

I held a dinner party for 40 friends of my Mom's house on the family estates (to which I had no intrinsic right, having been "born into it") that has been "sustainably managed" family estate that has been in my family for generations. I burned all of it in my renewable stove to assert that I am not a yuppie fuck up who insists that 616 > 860 http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/ELECTRICITY_GEN_1983-2006.XLS and now, in spite of 6 years of wishful thinking, that 0.072 = 85.307.

Do Orwell much in the cults?

I'll be you do.

Anyway, more about me:

Then I told everyone how after talking about how 0.072 = 85.307 me, and Buffy, and Good Ole' Drake got plastered under the table drinking Allen's Coffee Brandy imported from shithole semi-slaves working the sugarcane plantations in Brazil:

Those Happy Sugarcane Workers In Brazil: The Car Culture and Urinary Carcinogens.

Heckuva job car culture anti-nukes. Heckuva job.

I have already pointed out in considerable detail - using something with which you are unfamiliar (it's called "data") - all the details about the external cost of my car. It was part of an elaborate calculation showing, that it is stupid to conserve electricity in Vermont in winter. I referenced this calculation - posted on another website - in a post here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=148150&mesg_id=148586

I think you had nothing to say about it because you are trying to vandalize and destroy that which makes Vermont's electricity so clean, out of ignorance.

Rather than own up to your gas powered plans for Vermont, you wish to talk about me.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html

I can't imagine why you and Buffy are interested in my personal life, but I have offered some details about it nonetheless in the post's references.

I note, however, that you had nothing to say about this post, just as you have no data to cite either about your hydrogen HYPErcar or about the source of electricity in New Jersey - about which you know zero.

It is, I have noted, a yuppie conceit of the first order that yuppies want to be believed solely because they say something. Frankly I don't believe a word that the anti-nuke car cult says on this website. I don't believe that 616 > 860 because Buffy's Dog Groomer's neighbor's best friend's cousin's financee's mother's ex-boyfriend's sister's mother-in-law's ex-husband's sister's lover's barber's ex-girlfriend's husband lives off grid.

Now, you seem to think that since you own a hydrogen Hummer, powered by one of the brazillion roofs you claim are in California (all hooked up off grid at the above mentioned person's house) that I owe you some kind of explanation of who I am.

I don't.

I am really not interested in your yuppie dinners for 40 really either, although you felt the need to tell us at Thanksgiving how noble you are, with your "locally grown" dinner.

For the record, I am NOT noble. I don't claim that I am immune from responsibility because I live behind The Tortilla Curtain but I note that I was not born behind it. No energy solution offered here by me would cost an adherent a $40,000 up front payment on top of home ownership. In fact, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, India and China have all embraced my energy ideas, and not one of them is talking about solar hydrogen HYPErcar freeways. I know I could do better. I could, for instance, donate time to fight the attempt of the dangerous fossil fuel industry to dump dangerous fossil fuel waste into the lungs of New Jersey's children through a vandalizing destruction of the Oyster Creek nuclear infrastructure.

I could do more to fight the dumb ass stupidity of the Walmart car cult, the one that pretends that the two hundred and fifty million distributed energy machines - the automobiles - that have poisoned the water, the land and destroyed the atmosphere are somehow powered by trivial solar toys and HYPErcar hydrogen.

Speaking of HYPErcar hydrogen, how's the Norwegian plant to scale up wind powered hydrogen facility on Utsira? You were filled with hydrogen HYPE a few years ago telling us all about it. I heard that the ten home facility was being defunded in Spring in 2008.

Where are the exajoule scale hydrogen HYPEr wind plants in Norway being built?

And speaking of hydrogen HYPErcars, let's have another viewing of the picture of Amory Lovins accepting a big fat check from Walmart:



http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid419.php">Ignorance Kills.

Since our local/wild/homegrown/wood-fired Thanksgiving was such a *smashing* success last year, we're doing it again.

We already have the Maine shrimp, fiddleheads and hard cider.

The gardens have been planted.

The firewood has been cut, split and is drying.

Nephews are scouring the woods for Tom Turkey...

toodles!



:rofl:

But I'm not sure of your motives, however, because you disregard current trends and continue to try and make your point using invalid data (out of date and from a different context re energy prices and external costs) you come across as a paid troll for the nuclear industry.

try stating just once a month why the plans currently in the pipeline aren't going to work. Then, the rest of the time you can just vent and at least some of us will know you're correct. But simply saying we haven't so we can't really is one of the most ineffective arguments I've ever heard.

I am not surprised that you think you understand my thinking, but that is characteristic of your thinking.

I am not interested in proving negatives - as I have stated before - just because you can't think.

If renewables really could save us, they would have done so long ago.

Did he turn you down when you asked him on a date once????

Got it?

No?

Why am I not surprised?

As for the "hard on" slur, I note, with due contempt, that if I were gay I would not feel in any way to apologize to bigots for the fact.

I also note that if I were gay, I would not be asking fundie yuppie liars for a date. Love is about respect, and I have no respect for the dangerous fossil fuel greenwasher Amory Lovins or for any of his glib and stupid apologists.

Are we to assume you are pooping rainbows?

save you. Ignorance, you own included, as sealed your fate.

Tough cookies! From what I can tell, you weren't worth much anyway.

I take it you acknowledge that producing LIon batteries isn't a particularly toxic endeavor.

In light of the scale of available to be tapped raw resources, renewables are a vastly larger pool of energy than all the fossils we could possible extract; so I don't understand your claim that "there simply aren't enough to power the autobahn and keep the lights on."

Look at the energy requirement as NNadir likes to phrase it, as a massive whole. And lets switch the discussion back to the US so I don't have to grope around for the numbers.

In 2005 the US consumed about 100 quadrillion Btus of energy. About 40 quads of that was petroleum for transportation. The personal transportation sector is about 75% of that for 30 quads. Does that mean we need an additional 30 quads for the grid if we shift to battery electric?

No, it doesn't.

If we start with the grid as it is presently configured, what happens?

First, because of the efficiency gains of electric drive over internal combustion we only need about 15% (4.5 quads) of that 30 quads to be added to the grid. That's right, to provide for the personal transportation sector we need to add only 4.5 quads of delivered capacity to the grid.

That of course, is a rough sketch.


It leaves out a close examination of grid efficiency, and it leaves out reduced driving demand as higher transportation costs for everything push people into a more communal lifestyle; AND it doesn't take into account that it would likely result in more efficient use of the current grid as much of the spinning reserve that operates overnight is now productively used to charge batteries.

With that final point alone, there may be very little need to at any capacity at all to the grid.

A coal generator is huge; they are so long and heavy that the shaft sags if it isn't spinning. So standby power provided by coal, even when it is only going to be used for a couple of hours in the afternoon, is supplied by keeping those generators running 24/7. Utilizing that power is a huge efficiency gain.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=148087&mesg_id=148144


Shall we start addressing renewables now?

From another place 2:


Anyone need a good job. They are on their way.

Back of envelope numbers:

If the DOE recommendation has a 2010 kickoff and lasts 20 years;

Assume current technology sized turbines of 2Mw for land based; and start point of 5MW for offshore where technology indicates an increase of 1 mw every 5 years. (they are now field testing the larger sizes)



The DOE Goal: 30,total - the 11,500MW existing = 18,500MW required.


Need 2 ships 1 for cable and 1 for installation + support craft

t=turbine, d=day, y=year

Working 280 days per year commencing in 3 years: 1t/d x 280d x 19y = 5320 turbines
Ocean
5MW: 1400d = 1400t x 5MW = 7,000MW
6mw: 1400d = 1400t x 6MW = 8,400mw
7mw: 1400d = 1400t x 7MW = 10,200MW

Total for 1 ocean crew ...................25,000MW

Scale up to 5 ocean crews ...........................125,000MW

1 crew on land at 1/day
2MW: 1400d = 1400t x 2mw = ................2,800MW

Scale up to 20 land crews.............................56,000MW

total: 181GW new capacity plus .......................11,500MW extant =
.....................................................192,500MW wind by 2030

We need the factories to build the turbines. There are no constraints on technology or materials.

If we had to we could ramp up to this same number every 2 years.

Add
Europe
Soviet union
China
India

East Asia
Austraila
Canada
Mexico
South america


If we are faced with a genuine planetary emergency, how fast can we ramp up just wind power?



And then the others - solar, wave.current, geothermal, biomass.

Call me a fool, but is we get confirmation we have 30 years to get emissions down to 0 zero, I think we can do it.



Energy Dept: 20% Of US Energy From Wind By 2030 Feasible
Dow Jones
May 12, 2008: 06:54 PM EST

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- In a new report, the U.S. Department of Energy said that generating 20% of U.S. energy needs from wind by 2030 is technically feasible, but would require $197 billion in investments, especially in interstate transmission build-out.

Arguments against wind power as an unreliable and marginal source of power are "frivolous and uninformed," said Andy Karsner, DOE assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, while presenting the report at a press conference. Preliminary findings from the report were previously available, but the DOE made the final results public Monday.

(This story also appeared in Clean Technology Investor, a daily newsletter published by Dow Jones & Co.)

The expenditure needed to reach the 20% goal would only be $43 billion, or 2%, higher than if the U.S. didn't add any wind whatsoever and reached the same power capacity from other sources, the DOE and its industry collaborators said in the report. They estimated that the additional spending would translate into 50 cents per month on the average customer's utility bill. Adding that much wind to the grid would also cause natural gas prices to decrease, the report said....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=147968&mesg_id=147968

See Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil.

Simply existing has an external cost to it. Biomachines that never die will have enormous costs to the habitat.

Oil has a horrible external cost -- and not all of it can be measured in dollars and cents. Believe me. That is a business I know very well.

Nor do you have plans to discontinue using a automobiles. So your angst about the car culture is hypocritical.

Exactly as I am forced to pay for and participate in the Iraq War.

If I oppose both, but I still participate in this economy, does that make me a hypocrite? I suppose it does, since I could live as a homeless person with no more possessions than I could carry, but that's not what this is about, is it?

We could create a thriving and mobile economy in which owning a car would be seen by most people as an utterly unnecessary, dangerous, and expensive indulgence. But we are making no moves toward that society because our government has deliberately engineered this fossil fueled car culture to take away our personal freedoms and concentrate political power within a corrupt oligarchy.

Before automobiles were common, a person was who they said they were, supported by personal relationships within the community they associated with. Personal identity had nothing to do with the number on a driver's license or it's equivalent, and most people of that time would have been highly offended if asked to prove their identity by a third party, and they would have regarded it as an obvious violation of their fourth amendment rights.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In the future I suspect the failure of the United States as a thriving democracy will be attributed to our consumer culture, most especially our automobile culture.

:evilgrin:

(2) Paste archaic data about the photovoltaic industry into the message body
(3) Lather
(4) Repeat

Paste NO data about the photovoltaic industry into the message, especially data about energy as opposed to peak power.


Whine.


The data is from 2005. In 2005, the anti-nuke "solar will save us" apologists were here denying 2003's data.

I note that the world's most prominent opponent of nuclear power - that would be Amory Lovins - is wholly owned by Walmart, lock, stock and barrel.

Here's a picture of him taking an overt bribe for his efforts on behalf of dangerous fossil fuels and the car culture:



http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid419.php

There are ZERO fundie anti-nukes who have any shame for what they have done.

Only Dick Cheney and John McCain can save it now....

ecconomics?

Let me guess. In fundie land it's a newly discovered fact that 684 > 2685.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

It ranks with the classic yuppie brat anti-nuke cult remarks in these pages that 616 > 860.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/electricity_generation.html

Speaking of 2685, wouldn't this huge number - measured in billions of kwh of electricity generated from "dead" nuclear power in 2006 sort of, um, belie your claim that "nuclear power priced itself out of the energy market?"

Now, I know that neither you nor Amory Lovins could give a rat's ass about the price of dangerous natural gas. You are, after all, rich yuppies. So I guess you don't know at all what the commercial price of $11.37/MMBTU means. YOU. COULDN'T. CARE. LESS.

Speaking of Lovins: I quote the fundie anti-nuke gas shill Amory Lovins in his 1980 Foreign Affairs article, page 1138 (Lovins, Shit-For-Brains, Foreign Affairs Summer 1980 pp 1183-1177):



The article is full of optimistic balderdash about how compressed air wind plants are ready to be built. Of course, Lovins wasn't representing the now failed wind industry. The wind industry doesn't pay him. The fossil fuels industry pays him. Big. Fucking. Bucks.

So, where, after 27 years, and 100's of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped into the atmosphere, are the fucking wind plants that Lovins - Jeff Skilling's pal - has been hawking while Greenwashing Royal Dutch Shell?

Quoth Lovins 27 long years ago:



Um, how long are we supposed to go on dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere before the anti-nuke cults develop some intellectual integrity connected with predictions and results?

Never mind, I already know the answer to that question.

Dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere is racing to 400 ppm and Lovins couldn't care less. We wouldn't want to offend the clients like Royal Dutch Shell, would we?

Apparently in the fundie "renewables will save us" and "nuclear power is dying from economics" cults, they've learned a lot from the Popes who have made huge sums of money for almost 2000 years of predicting the immanent return of Jesus.

Ignorance kills.

And now, for fun, let's repeat the picture of the car culture apologist, hydrogen HYPErcar promoter, Amory Lovins taking payoffs from Walmart to say that the car culture is "Green."



And let's quote the General Council of Walmart, VP Tom Mars (and how ironic is that name, "Tom Mars") on the merits of fundie anti-nuke Amory Lovins:



http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid419.php

Yeah right...

That's what all the members of the E&E board think whenever they look at the sea of cars in a Walmart parking lot, "they're so far along in their sustainability efforts..."

Maybe you think that people can't read.

and the there are only enough Cheney Bucks in the 2005 GOP Energy Bill for 6 *heavily* subsidized reactors - including a 1.8 cent per kWh production credit.

Why do "too cheap to meter" nuclear plants need a production credit - 60 years after the first US nuke went on line???

Cuz they have priced themselves out of the market - $6-12 billion a piece in 2008.

Lovins was right.

1984:


1992:

Nor do you plan to buy one. Thus your hype about hydrogen cars is fanciful and delusional.

I am fighting to end the car culture. The "renewables will save us" religion is trying to put lipstick on the culture.

There is a HUGE difference.

Some of us envision a world where the car culture is a thing of the past AND we use renewables for our energy needs. I suppose that concept is beyond you.

See post #46 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=148150&mesg_id=148400

And anyone who thinks solar production decreased in 2006 is delusional.

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:evilgrin:

internal combustion cars, even with used with our existing energy supplies. There is no silver bullet to end all our environmental problems, especially not nuclear power with its unsolved waste disposal, weapons proliferation, and cost problems. there are many incremental things we can do, first of all conservation and energy efficiency, second, cheap and less toxic sources of power like wind.

The articles table from which you got your numbers lists it's values in "(Thousand Kilowatthours)"

So 2006's solar output was 507,706 THOUSAND kwh.

For someone claiming that solar proponents can't do math, making a thousand fold error is kinda disappointing.

One snowflake or a thousand cannot quench the fires of this hell. In the United States we consume about 388 million gallons of gasoline a day.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.htm

Is that 75% of that could be eliminated by switching to electric drive; the proposition the OP and it's supporters are arguing against. The other 25% would be petroleum for heavy machinery. Increased load on the grid, would be the equivalent of only a small fraction (1/7 or 1/8) of the 75% petroleum reduction because of efficiency gains in electric vs internal combustion.

But the nuclear folks seem to have a better plan...

Solar production didn't go down, it increased.
NNadir missed this footnote at the bottom of the page referenced in the OP:


So that table only includes part of solar production.
Solar production has been increasing exponentially,
as indicated on another page on the same website:


NNadir made the same "mistake" with California in an earlier post,
either he really doesn't understand what he's reading,
or he's being intentionally misleading: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=130015&mesg_id=130175

have grid tied renewables, but totally does not consider those that are off of the grid powering their homes by renewables and there are more who do this than most think.

And you mean after more than 6 years of telling us all about solar PV powered cars, you still can't tell the difference between peak power and energy?

Why am I not surprised?

After you're done explaining why 616 is larger than 860, maybe you can tell us how the prefix "kilo" compares to "mega."

:rofl:

Actual numbers and answers to the questions you ask everyone and deride them for not knowing the answers to.

I'm still not 100% sure I agree with you, but I am much closer now. Your point that we have limited production of solar cells and using them to power cars is far from their best use, was very good.

And the math about how much energy is in a gallon of gasoline was good too.

That's the best he can do.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=148150&mesg_id=148400">Post #46 shows how far off NNadir's math is.
Post #70 shows that even if you correct NNadir's math error you still get the wrong result, because NNadir started with the wrong data - the source he used doesn't measure what NNadir thought it measured.

Reading NNadir's posts is like watching Fox News - they are filled with so much misinformation, you know less after reading them than you did before.

Usually his posts are long on insults and short on substance.

n/t

Since you have confessed to be even more unintelligent than the commentator who thinks that 616 > 860 - and that is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very difficult trick - and since you are concerned about "substance" anyway, I guess we'll skip having you try to read, say, this one:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/1/5/161753/7263

or this:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/1/5/161753/7263

or

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/17/19109/0486/192/347616

If you would like to be a judge of substance, it would be useful if you could demonstrate the capacity to produce some.

Until then don't expect me to hold my breath looking for your praise.

Ignorance kills.

RE: "Nationwide solar electricity production decreased in the United States from 2005 to 2006"

there are so many other variables at play here, not just the energy viability of solar, but its commercial viability, it has to compete with energy generation project-types that are heavily subsidized by the govt., so solar power and its technological development as an energy source is at a competitive disadvantage to conventional forms of energy.

Solar (PV) energy is a semiconductor technology, and the semiconductor industry has been massively funded since WW2. Hundreds of billions of dollars. That money has not gone to waste, but it has not resulted in paint-on solar cells, or even cheap silicon arrays.

In the course of a month, there are over 100 corporate press releases posted in this forum pertaining to photovoltaic technology. There has been some serious money poured into these efforts over the past half-century. Still, solar PV accounts for something like one part in 500 of our base energy supply. It's got tremendous potential, but it's had tremendous potential for a long, long time.

If we are interested in significant solar energy production out-of-the-box, solar thermal is the way to go, but THAT is the kind of solar energy that is being shorted. It's not sexy and the basic technology can not be covered by utility patents, unlike PV. Mirrors and fluid-filled pipes are not the stuff of cover stories in Scientific American and Discover, cable TV saturation coverage, or "sweet" IPOs.

--p!

areas that a blanket statement about semiconductors does not necessarilly include pvs in that funding that say integrated circuits would get. Unless you can show that there is this great leaning of the funds from government to pvs rather than the pittance I believe the bush administration's most likely going with on the subject then please spare us this kind of a general statement. Those ics have more military and governmental use than a pv ever will with NASA as the exception and funds would reflect that.
As to the money spent it wasn't so much from the government as it was private industry doing the investing. As I stated the government has very little to do with pvs or the pv industry and the government had little to do with the developement of pv improvements.

It depends on the application. EVs are well suited for low load efficient vehicles that are started relatively frequently and travel short distances (less than a hundred miles round trip), such as the Aptera Typ-1. For the average driver traveling ~13,000 miles per year, something efficient like this would only require ~1,100kWh/year<1>, or about 10% of the average US household electricity consumption per year<2>. Switching from incandescents to CFLs and minimizing parasitic always on loads would probably free up enough electricity to run said vehicle for a year, not renewables required. Although a .6kW solar system could probably provide enough electricity as well. Ideally, government would encourage investment in concentrated solar, which could provide more than enough electricity to power a fleet of efficient EVs, but since the most profitable fossil fuel companies have proportionally influential lobbies, I doubt this would happen any time soon. In fact, given the likely cost of the Iraqi occupation, if we had instead spent that money on larger scale renewables and/or fission and a small efficient one or two person EV for every driver, we probably wouldn't have any excuses about our oil "addiction" besides not using the free funky little car/electricity the gubberment gave us. As they say, it takes money to make money. ;)

<1>http://www.aptera.com/details.php
<2>http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp

Rant aside, proportionally efficient vehicles incur proportionally fewer externalities.