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http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2011/06...-power-trends/
I've been saying this on this website for years. The trend is there. Its exponential growth.
Yes, I understand. Water is also important for ethanol. Would you agree now that ethanol has a mandated, captive market, that all subsidies should be removed?
My point was that yelling doesn't help, and in the way this forum structure deals with some text, makes it worse. You too often use words that are literally too big to understand. Maybe your browser deals with them differently than mine, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one that you are making this hard on.
http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2011/06...-power-trends/
I've been saying this on this website for years. The trend is there. Its exponential growth.
Not to mention, how many power plants run off of oil?
And the financial sector, even with the high returns in their rigged casino, is financing solar and wind projects.
Loser Yoni on the ideological, environmental wrong side of history, as always.
With just the announced financing, insurance being hard to find, nuclear still is :
Nearly $1 Billion in Vogtle Nuclear Reactor Overruns (So Far) — Who’s Surprised?
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/05/14/...hos-surprised/
Carbon-addicted TX is ing up its solar resource, no surprise there, with no policies for time-of-day metering and feed-in tariffs to Let A Million Rooftops Bloom.
hehehehehehehehehehehehe
The author there uses the BP statistical analysis of global energy.
http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do...tentId=7068481
fascinating.
Lots of interesting long term trends there.
Strange, they don't talk about shale oil.
GOP Wants To U.S. NAVY To Stop Buying Biofuels
Secretary of the U.S. Navy, addressed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in early March, he illustrated the expensive challenge of protecting the open seas on vehicles powered only by fossil fuels.
“Both the Navy and the Marine Corps must use energy more efficiently and we must lead in the development of alternative energy,” he stated [PDF] in that address, “otherwise, we put at risk our military readiness, we put at risk our national security, we put at risk the lives of our Sailors and Marines.”
the Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee voted to prohibit the Defense Department from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than fossil fuels (all of them) and to repeal part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that has been the catalyst for efforts to wean the country off petroleum
http://www.care2.com/causes/gop-want...#ixzz1v24x23tW
Maybe you should,
Thermodynamics and Money (Peter Huber, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, MIT)
In his day M. King Hubbert was a great geologist who spent his life studying the planet's deposits of oil and gas. But as he got older, he simply lost it. His "peak oil" theory--which many people are citing these days--is a case study in junk economics.
Hubbert was born in 1903. By 1949 he had concluded that the fossil-fuel era was going to end, and quite soon. Global production would peak around 2000, he predicted, and would decline inexorably thereafter. By 1980 the aging Hubbert was certain that the impending crisis "was unique to both human and geologic history.… You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered." Indeed we would soon be forced to abandon our entire "monetary culture," replacing it with an accounting tied to "matter-energy" constraints. An editor of Geophysics magazine summarized Hubbert's views in 1983: "The science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance are incompatible."
Today this same nonsense is often dressed up with numbers in an analysis that's dubbed "energy return on energy invested" (Eroei). According to this theory it can never make sense to burn two units of energy in order to extract one unit of energy. The Eroei crowd concedes, for example, that the world has centuries' worth of junk oil in shale and tar sands--but they can also prove it's irrelevant. It takes more energy to cook this kind of oil out of the dirt, they argue, than you end up with in the recovered oil. And a negative Eroei can only mean energy bankruptcy. The more such energy investments we make, the faster things will grind to a halt.
Eroei calculations now litter the energy policy debate. Time and again they're wheeled out to explain why one form of energy just can't win--tar sands, shale, corn, wood, wind, you name it. Even quite serious journals--Science, for example--have published pieces along these lines. Energy-based books of account have just got to show a profit. In the real world, however, investors don't care a fig whether they earn positive Eroei. What they care about is dollar return on dollar invested. And the two aren't the same--nowhere close--because different forms of energy command wildly different prices. Invest ten units of 10-cent energy to capture one unit of $10 energy and you lose energy but gain dollars, and Wall Street will fund you from here to Alberta.
As it happens, the people extracting oil out of tar sands today use gas from the fields themselves to power their refineries. There's gas, too, under what has been called Alberta's "trillion- barrel tar pit," but it's cheap because there's no pipeline to deliver it to where it would be worth more. As an alternative to gas, Total S.A., the French oil giant, is thinking about building a nuclear power plant to supply heat to melt and crack the tar. But nuclear reactors extract only a minuscule fraction of the energy locked up in the nuclei of uranium atoms; all the rest gets discarded as "waste." On Eroei logic, uranium would never be used to generate either electricity or heat. But per unit of raw stored energy, uranium is a thousand times cheaper than oil.
Greens touting the virtues of biomass as a source of energy rarely note that almost all of it is used by lumber mills burning branches and sawdust on site. No one cares how much energy the sun "invested" to grow all that waste wood. And every electric power plant, whatever it's fueled with, runs a huge Eroei deficit, transforming five units of cheap, raw heat into two units of electrical energy. But it all works out because the market values the energy in electricity at about 30 times the energy in coal.
The economic value of energy just doesn't depend very strongly on raw energy content as conventionally measured in British thermal units. Instead it's determined mainly by the distance between the BTUs and where you need them, and how densely the BTUs are packed into pounds of stuff you've got to move, and by the quality of the technology at hand to move, concentrate, refine and burn those BTUs, and by how your neighbors feel about carbon, uranium and windmills. In this entropic universe we occupy, the production of one unit of high-grade energy always requires more than one unit of low-grade energy at the outset. There are no exceptions. Put another way, Eroei--a sop ric form of thermodynamic accounting--is always negative and always irrelevant. "Matter-energy" constraints count for nothing. The "monetary culture" still rules. Thermodynamics And Money.
In 15-20 years, where are green energy sources going to be?
Yeah, I thought so.
There is nothing magical about "Hydraulic Fracking" it is a market based solution to rising energy prices.
Are you saying the government is incapable of properly managing water resources? I've been making this argument for years.
Total lie, without subsidies solar and wind would not even exist,
Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007 (PDF) (pg xvi) (EIA)
Natural Gas - $0.25 per megawatt hour
Coal - $0.44 per megawatt hour
Hydroelectric - $0.67 per megawatt hour
Nuclear - $1.59 per megawatt hour
Wind - $23.37 per megawatt hour
Solar - $24.34 per megawatt hour
Last edited by Poptech; 05-17-2012 at 12:53 AM.
Really? Tell me, what are the trends in Solar regarding efficiency and cost? Where will those trends carry them in 15-20 years?
Do you take joy out of being incredibly wrong?
I wonder how much of the $174 million subsidy for hydroelectric is maintaining the Pacific DC Intertie, to supply Los Angeles with power from dams on the Columbia River, since hydroelectric power itself needs no subsidies.
Almost none,
0.9% of the United States electrical generation comes from oil (EIA) (45% Coal, 24% Natural Gas, 20% Nuclear, 6% Hydroelectric, 2% Wind, 0.03% Solar)
This is why you effectively have two separate energy sectors,
1. Electrical Generation (Coal, Natural Gas and Nuclear)
2. Transportation Fuels (Oil)
Nothing is more economically viable as a transportation fuel than oil.
Well, if the hunters would stop killing the monster squirrels, we could use squirrel cages and put them under the hood. We could just pick cherries for the fuel.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...tion-boom.html
Now about the cost trends atm.
Willfully ignorant?
LOL...
Fuzzy's link is speculation of years out, and even points to the equatorial regions.
What about the southwest, where solar energy isn't as direct?
I see you have something new to contribute.
EROI is a rough guide that helps in conceptualizing energy and how it relates to potential returns.
Energy is, to some extent, money.
They are interchangible in that when you use energy, you are either purchasing it, or, as the good prof points out, consuming what you have produced as opposed to selling it. Both are economic costs.
I have never heard anyone claim that tar sands offer a negative EROI, as the professor claims "they" say.
Neither is the professor correct about what is commonly held as EROI on nuclear.
Both statements seem somewhat oddly inaccurate for a guy with a PhD in Mechanical engineering, but hey, I can roll with it, as he does make some cogent points that should be made in any consideration of energy and money.
What matters ultimately is cost per unit produced, and how much energy it takes to get that energy to the point at which it is useful.
One thing that got glossed over here, is the fact that the oil produced is the heavy, sulphurous kind. This takes more energy/money to refine than sweet cruide and this is why sour crude oils command less money in the open market.
Another thing that he does point out is important is getting energy to where it needs to go.
Tar sands require massive infrastructure projects in terms of pipelines, and additional specialty refinery capacity. (not all refineries are set up to process it)
Topping this off are the negative externalities of pollution, and water consumption. both of which drag down the profitabilty of tar sands.
Canada has just begun the proces of the strip mining necessary to get at this, but again, there is another energy/cost, and this cost is an ongoing one.
I don't object to it per se, as long as it is done responsibly and economically. From a profitability standpoint, I'm not sure it is going to be profitable over the long term for a variety of reasons. It has some rather concrete drawbacks that I don't think have been fully encapsulated yet.
The OP isn't about hydraulic fracking.
It is about strip mining, crushing, and boiling vast quan ies of shale rock.
Not all shale oil/gas is suitable to current fracking techniques either.
There is a reason there aren't any investors lining up to do this.
You didn't really read the GOA report or note the excerpts I posted did you?
Last edited by RandomGuy; 05-16-2012 at 11:08 PM.
Solar and wind would exist without subsidies, but not to the extent they do. Like any technology and energy source, they require infrastructure investments to get the ball rolling. This is what governments do for any industry, oil, coal, and natgas included in the past.
Let's round out our understanding for this bit with some important context you seem to have missed.
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, those figures for subsidies have likely fallen substantially, as the installed capacity of both solar and wind has expanded markedly. Additionally, costs for solar PV have come down with the alleviation of the silicon bottleneck.The differences between rankings of subsidies and support based on absolute amounts
and amounts per megawatthour are driven by substantial differences in the amount of
electricity generation across fuels. Capital-intensive, baseload generating technologies,
such as coal-fired steam generators and nuclear generators, together produce about 70
percent of total net generation,4 which tends to reduce their subsidies and support per unit of
production compared to the other fuel groups (Table ES5). For the same reason, electricity
subsidies for solar and wind show a relatively large subsidy per unit of production, as these
groups account for less than 1 percent of total net generation in the country. It is important to
recognize that the subsidies-per-megawatthour calculations are a snapshot taken at a particular
point in time. Some electricity sources, such as nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas, have
received varying levels of subsidies and support in the past which may have aided them in
reaching their current role in electricity production.5 The impacts of prior subsidies, some of
which may no longer be in effect, are not measured in the current analysis
You have a 5 year old, incomplete snapshot, essentially.
Hardly compelling.
The economics do not favor fossil fuels over the long term. This will become apparent to you in the next 10-15 years, kid.
That will change within 10-20 years, and quite possibly sooner. By some calculations, it has already happened.
Battery technology advances will mean that the line between the two sectors blurs and disappears at some point.
Given the current natgas glut that will be doubly true over the short term.
Natgas will be used increasingly for fleet vehicles, and to replace aging coal plants.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 05-16-2012 at 11:39 PM.
The most powerful driver in our industry is the relentless reduction of cost,” Michael Liebreich, chief executive officer of New Energy Finance, said at the company’s annual conference in New York yesterday. “In a decade the cost of solar projects is going to halve againDon't forget the free installation companies.Electricity from coal costs about 7 cents a kilowatt hour compared with 6 cents for natural gas and 22.3 cents for solar photovoltaic energy in the final quarter of last year, according to New Energy Finance estimates.
Comparisons often overstate the costs of solar because they may take into account the prices paid by consumers and small businesses who install roof-top power systems, instead of the rates utilities charge each other, said Qu of Canadian Solar.
“Solar isn’t expensive,” he said “In many areas of the solar industry you’re competing with retail power, not wholesale power.”
Rooftop solar installations also will become cheaper, the executives said.
“System costs have declined 5 percent to 8 percent (a year), and we will continue to see that,” SolarCity Inc. CEO Lyndon Rive said in an interview. The Foster City, California- based company is a closely held installer and owner of rooftop power systems.
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196872
The free market is picking up here and running with the technologies.
Given China/India/Africa energy demand curve expansion in the next decade or two, we will see some pretty substantial cost reductions in renewables.
No, money is a medium of exchange. The possibility exists that commodities such as oil can be used as money but so far society has preferred fiat currencies and precious metals.
Since money is a medium of exchange yes you would use it to purchase energy that does not mean they are the same thing.
You need to hang out with more peak oil conspiracy theorists.
He makes no argument against this as this is widely understood. The point being that even difficult and expensive to refine oil is still more economically viable than alternative liquid fuels.
Even with all these costs factored in, tar sands are still more economically viable than alternative liquid fuels.
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