Comments rgmerk has made
Less than currently devoted to corn biofuel
The way I crank the numbers, there's at least 50,000 square miles of American farmland devoted to corn-based bioethanol, which as well all know contributes a negligible percentage of America's energy needs.
Given that, 46,000 square miles for a large whack of America's energy use doesn't seem like a big deal to me.On A roadmap to getting 70 percent of U.S. electricity from solar by 2050 posted 1 year, 10 months ago 42 Responses
Batteries miles out of the game...
You're guessing batteries will see game-changing advances over the next few years.
On what do you base this optimism? The comments of startup companies seeking VC funding?
90% of what startup companies claim they'll achieve doesn't pan out. That's why investing in startups is legalised gambling.
Your beliefs would be more plausible if batteries were a neglected technology bereft of research and VC money over the past couple of decades. That seems to me to be very far from the actual situation. Battery technology has advanced a lot over the past couple of decades. It's still not even in the same suburb as the ballpark, let alone the actual ballpark, of being cost-competitive with standby generation in areas with a decent-size electrical grid.On A roadmap to getting 70 percent of U.S. electricity from solar by 2050 posted 1 year, 10 months ago 42 Responses
Assumptions...
Part of efficiency will, IMO, be siting sources close to loads to reduce transmission loss. That means small- and mid-size distributed power -- not ginormous, distant coal plants.
But this is mutually contradictory to the usual arguments people make when the intermittancy of wind and solar is pointed out "oh, we'll distribute the generation over a wide area, after all, the wind is always blowing somewhere". Well, guess what, you can do that, but you'll have to pay the cost, both in terms of the capital costs of building a highly distributed power grid, and the efficiency costs of taking power from one end of it to the other.
Not that I think these are showstoppers, by the way; high-voltage DC connections are very efficient ways to send lots of power a long distance. But that applies whether it's power from a disparate bunch of solar cells, or a 1600 MW nuclear plant.
As for the alleged fallacy: yes, it doesn't logically follow. There are some background assumptions. But the only way it could turn out to be false is if renewables hit some sort of price floor, above the price of coal, that condemns them to being forever more expensive. That seems fantastical to me. Do you think it's a serious possibility?
Renewables aren't chasing a static target. There's still plenty of room to make coal-fired power (both dirty and clean), more efficient and thus cheaper. The thermal efficiency of steam and gas turbines keeps going up, for instance.
Furthermore, as renewable technology matures, the big cost-efficiency leaps will start to drop off. I'm no expert, but I don't see that there are big gains left in wind turbine design, for instance. Furthermore, the kinds of things that will help renewables will also help the competition. For instance, far as solar thermal goes, the steam turbines are pretty much the same as those for other thermal power plants.
Finally, as far as security goes, at least in the USA one thing you have no shortage of is coal, and much of the world's uranium comes from those known rogue states Canada and Australia. If there are energy security concerns (in the narrow supply sense), they revolve around oil and natural gas, not coal.
By the way, I'm not ruling out the distributed renewable energy future - it might indeed pan out. But I'm not betting against the possibility that the only thing that will change is the direction of the exhaust pipe on the local coal-fired power station. And if that's the cheapest solution well and good; we can use the spare cash on fixing the damage that's already locked in from the carbon we've already released in the atmosphere.On Even in the short term, R&E is a better choice than clean coal for developing nations posted 1 year, 12 months ago 8 Responses
Big hole in the argument
Aside from wild optimism on the state of renewable technologies, there's a logical hole in your argument big enough to drive a coal-powered ship through.
Your argument (stripped of stuff about energy efficiency, which is an important contribution to reducing emissions but essentially irrelevant to the question of where the energy comes from in the first place) seems to go something like this:
- Clean coal is fundamentally more expensive than dirty coal (if air pollution is uncosted).
- Renewable power will come down in cost.
3) Renewables will be cheaper than clean coal.
I accept that premises 1 and 2 are completely correct. But the implications you draw are not supported by your premises.
On Even in the short term, R&E is a better choice than clean coal for developing nations posted 1 year, 12 months ago 8 Responses- Clean coal is fundamentally more expensive than dirty coal (if air pollution is uncosted).