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Parlez vous Ingles? J'ai besoin d'aide avec ceci. Qu'est-ce que cela signifie?
Danke schon.
Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis….
Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more compe ive with coal.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/1...or-first-time/
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Economics Stunner: “Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added.”
Natural Gas Damage Larger Than Its Value Added For Even Low CO2 Prices
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/1...ution-damages/
One paradox about unscrubbed coal burning vs natgas is that it dumps 1000s of tons of poisonous, greenhouse-warming into the atmosphere, including particulates which reflect solar energy back into space, contributing to cooling, but at the cost of 1000s of people dying from particulate pollution (eg, non-smoking lung cancer, etc). Natgas contributes to the pollution, but not with the reflective particulates, so allows more solar energy to reach earth.
Of course, the "costs of damages" above are all externalized from the carbon-extractors and energy-producers to the rest of us, who pay $Bs in clean-up, pollution for air, land, water, and with sicknesses and death.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-27-2011 at 06:14 PM.
Parlez vous Ingles? J'ai besoin d'aide avec ceci. Qu'est-ce que cela signifie?
Danke schon.
vas te foutre
Australian report reveals a start of the switch from coal to renewables.
If this figure held for the next few years, this potentially means that in 30 years time, less than 20% of Australia's energy use will be from coal. Thirty years is a perfectly logical timeframe because capital markets generally amortise large investments in plant over 15 years, and generally consider retiring and replacing old operations through new investments after 25-30 years.
Incentives to build coal-fired power are continuously diminishing – policy settings for lower emissions energy sources, prices on carbon and community opposition manifest in the market as increasing investment risk and financial ins utions are increasingly unlikely to even consider funding a coal-fired power station.
in 2008 the forecast build for coal globally was 64 gigawatts, the actual build in 2010 was 14 GW! The suggestion the world is building more coal is myth based – the world is actually building less and less coal, not more and more.
Based simplistically on 2011 numbers, in 30 years time, the retirement of generation plant will be 36% gas, 41% wind, and 17% coal.
http://www.altenergymag.com/news/201...newables/22226
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If BigCoal had to start with the real, total-life-cycle cost, all externalities included, then coal-generated electricity would be killed by solar and wind.
"schoen" Need to add in the "e" for the umlauts after the vowel it modifies.
It is the part of the energy equation that most conservatives and free-market dogmatics would rather ignore.
If one does a realisitic accounting of the benefits/costs of various energy sources, then coal/oil/gas with their rather large negative externalities (AGW, damage from mining/extraction, leftover pollution etc), then renewables win hands down.
The Darrins of the world don't buy the AGW argument, so they don't like to include the rather substantial costs imposed.
BUT
What the graph above shows, is that even with this substantial negative cost not added is that renewables are approaching "grid parity" due to economies of scale from production.
This means that, economically, if you are trying to decide how to spend your next $1.00 on producing electricity, then renewables are starting to be cheaper.
We are not very far along on the production curve for renewables as is, so there is still a huge amount of "bang for the buck" in terms of spending a dollar to get capacity.
In economics, each new unit of production costs more and more as the "low hanging fruit" is taken. Think of a limited good like farm land. At a certain price, X amount of land, usually the most economically productive/fertile, gets allocated to farming something. As the price goes up, more and more land becomes economical to farm, but it costs more because you have to use less and less suitable land, so you have to use more $$ for fertilizer and irrigation. This concept forms the basis of the supply curve for any good, and appears to hold good for anything.
As we produce more and build more infrastructure, the costs will come down, especially for things like PV that allows for research to increase productivity per unit.
The link does have some pretty good and well written material that will flesh this out a bit more.
Darrin...
Do you agree that pollution, land use, and black coal on ice have an AGW effect, or not?
Random...
I think you are just blowing hot air. You are probably causing more global warming than CO2 does.
I think it's safe to say that us so-called deniers, who are the more honest skeptics of unproven sciences, do agree greenhouse gasses have caused some warming. We just believe it is very minor. It's you alarmists who are the deniers of real science. You will not accept the dramatic changes mankind has with BC on ice. You will not accept the solar increases and how it is very easily understood how there is a long term lag here, and that CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of warming rather than warming being driven by CO2.
Now I agree fossil fuels have environmental impacts, but they are tightly regulated and coal power plants are shutting down as it costs more to operate them. I agree that coal can be very harmful, in fact, i say it is the second largest contributor to global warming behind the solar changes, and the largest AGW source. However, that is because of Asia's large use of coal, and poring dirty black carbon into the atmosphere, and it settles on the polar cap, Greenland, etc.
Cleaner technology and methods will come. We need not force their usage. Over time the prices will come down.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 11-28-2011 at 04:56 PM.
I think they are beginning to find that the soot produced by coal burning is having a bit more of an effect than they realized. We'll get to see as more research comes in over the next decade or so, especially with all the new Asian coal usage. I highly doubt the Chinese power plants are going to have anywhere near the scrubbing that Western plants do. Acid rain anyone?
I accept what the people with PhD's who study it for a living say, simply because it is more probable that they are right than otherwise.
You have little to no evidence that they are wrong, and that doesn't make you an "honest skeptic", on the subject.
Meh. Another 10 or 20 years or so will settle it either way. That may be entirely too late as we will have again ulatively doubled the amount of CO2 and other gasses we have emitted over our history. If the effect of this is minor, then what happens if our ulative total emission over the next 20-25 years doubles from the total of today?
I don't know, and neither do you. Neither do we know where there might be a tipping point of some sort that starts a nasty self feeding cycle.
Conservative risk management says that given the potential negative effects, we should mitigate our activities until we know more. I just don't buy the liberal "do nothing" approach that accepts a potentially insane amount of risk on little to no evidence.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 11-28-2011 at 08:08 AM.
"more research"
you sound like a Kock Bros-funded stink tank spewing lies.
Been screaming this for years. WE should be leading the charge as to reap the benefits of the rest of the world wanting this energy but we're not.
"WE" don't count for nuthin
USA is run by UCA, not We The People.
The carbon-extractors' $Bs of votes get the policies that protect/enrich the UCA.
Well now you're just showing off.
Danke schoen.
Where was boutons' explanation I wonder? RG doesn't even speak French. What's your excuse B?
We already have been since the EPA was established in the 70's.
Our skies are so much cleaner. I remember the 70's.
show em the urban blight pictures in LIFE. much more effective.
Google gives up on Renewable Energy campaign
Four years after Google launched a campaign to make renewable energy an affordable and mainstream alternative power, the Internet giant is tossing in the towel as their plan to help the world go green encounters a red light.
Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project is one of seven ventures that the Silicon Valley search engine has announced it will be retiring, four years after the company started the campaign that has since proven to be unsuccessful.
Back in 2009, two years after it was launched, the company’s then-Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl told Reuters that the campaign would use Google’s massive brains and budget on the green initiative in order to make renewable energy a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
"It is even odds, more or less," Weihl said back then. "In three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there."
Now only two years later, however, the project is being aborted. In a statement regarding the ending of the Renewable Energy campaign and the six other Google programs, Senior VP of Operations Urz Hölzle says, “we're in the process of shutting down a number of products which haven't had the impact we'd hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts and ending several which have shown us a different path forward.”
“At this point, other ins utions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level.” Adds Hölzle. Weihl, who pushed the campaign back at its beginning, left Google earlier this month.
In addition to the retiring of the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project, Google is also halting work with Google Knol, Google Search Timeline, Google Gear, Google Friend Connect, Google Bookmarks Lists and Google Wave. Development with Wave was abandoned earlier this year, and only in recent days did the company reveal that it will also soon be eliminating Google Buzz, their unsuccessful attempt to compete with social network sites including Facebook and Twitter that was launched less than two years ago.
Yeah! Woohoo! Suck it, hippies!
???
I think we have enough evidence to take some reasonable steps. I don't require more research to come to a fair policy conclusion, i.e. do something to limit fossil fuel usage.
The intended message of the post is that more research will be done, making the Darrins/WC's of the world look more and more like the hacks on the subject that they are. It will be like the peeling away of people from the 9-11 truth movement, until only the really obvious nutballs remain.
As the evidence ac ulates showing AGW to be both real and marked in its effects, as I think it will, I will not be kind to those s who wanted our civilization to ignore the risks and do nothing just because they wanted to be anti-environmentalist "free market" champions.
Better article with updates and a lot more details:
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com...gy-program.php
Google realized it wasn't in the business of energy R & D. Not surprisingly, they came to the conclusion that finding a good company that already is doing R & D and giving them some solid $$$ is probably a better use of capital.Chokshi said the company had stopped its own efforts to improve the technology because other companies, including BrightSource, were better positioned to do so, as it is their singular focus, compared to Google, which has a myriad set of renewable energy interests.
One of those interests, according to Chokshi, is looking to invest in geothermal. Google hasn’t actually invested in a specific geothermal provider yet, but after financing the completion of the latest U.S. Geothermal Map, showing the country has 10-times as much geothermal resource as coal, the company is now actively seeking geothermal companies to add to its investment portfolio.
Finally, Chokshi pointed to the fact that Google is continuing to advance its own green energy technology efforts. The company’s latest data center, the Hamina Data Center which opened earlier this year in Finland, was built out of a converted 60-year-old paper mill. It relies on a custom-built seawater cooling system that takes advantage of the nearby Gulf of Finland.
Of course this has all to do with the economics of renewables. I give it even odds you probably didn't know this or you knew it and are just being a bag.
Which is it?
I am going to guess, since Darrin hasn't answered the question that the answer is: dumbass, not bag
Which, in its way, is sadder. One can always stop being a bag.
Google has entered a lot of markets that weren't in their "wheel house" -- and have done damn well.
You didn't really read the article I linked, I'm sure.
They haven't really gotten out of the renewables business, merely shifted the focus of their investment activities to more efficient channels. Their plans include increasing their funding and investments over the coming years.
Contrary to what your dumb ass seems to think, this means more renewable energy, not less, as the capital is better used.
My question was something of a false dichotomy, for that you have my apologies.
It is quite possible to be both a bag, and a dumbass. Congratulations, you may have finally proved me wrong.
We’ve made a new $94 million investment in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. This brings our portfolio of clean energy investments to more than $915 million. We’ve already committed to providing funding this year to help more than 10,000 homeowners install solar PV panels on their rooftops. But this investment represents our first investment in the U.S. in larger scale solar PV power plants that generate energy for the grid—instead of on individual rooftops. These projects have a total capacity of 88 MW, equivalent to the electricity consumed by more than 13,000 homes.
We’re investing alongside global investment firm KKR and Recurrent Energy, a leading solar developer. Google will provide a $94 million equity investment and SunTap Energy, a new venture formed today by KKR to invest in solar projects in the U.S., will provide the remaining equity.
We’re joining KKR on their first renewable energy investment in the U.S. We believe investing in the renewable energy sector makes business sense and hope clean energy projects continue to attract new sources of capital to help the world move towards a more sustainable energy future.
The energy produced by these projects is already contracted for 20 years with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). SMUD recently created a feed-in tariff program (FIT) to help green the grid for Sacramento-area residents. We’re excited that these projects are the first to be built under the program.
We’ve had a busy year at Google. Since January, we’ve invested more than $880 million in clean energy projects. We believe the world needs a wide range of solutions—from wind, to transmission, to solar PV and concentrated solar—and we look forward to new opportunities next year to further expand our portfolio of clean energy investments.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/...r-clean-energy.
nm.
Germans moving forward, government sets goals, the der volk agree and make the effort, but Amerika No Can Do
German Energy Consumption Drops 4.8% in 2011, With Renewables Providing 20% of Energy
According to new figures released today from Germany’s energy working group, AGEB, energy consumption in the country dropped 4.8% in 2011 from 2010.
German consumption of oil fell 3%, gas by 10.2%, lignite coal by 0.7% (although hard coal rose 3.7%), and nuclear by 22.9%. At the same time, use of renewable energy climbed by 4.1% and represented about 20% of the country’s energy consumption in 2011.
An increase in residential and industrial efficiency combined with milder temperatures in 2011 provided the conditions for the decrease in consumption.
So is that increase in renewable energy and efficiency killing the German economy? Analysts expect German GDP growth to be around 3% in 2011, about the same projected for the U.S.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/1...wables-energy/
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