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22 Sep 08

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Why Alternative Energy Isn’t

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energy conservation

Absence of a decent storage technology means we can’t really time-shift electricity demand.
Transmission losses mean our ability to space-shift demand is limited, too
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- Household conservation slightly decreases the maximum capacity needed locally where the conservation is being practiced, but has little impact further away, where demand has to be supplied by different plants.
- Solar and wind power are both time-variable and low-density. Lacking good ways to time-shift and aggregate electricity, this means you can’t count on them to run factories and hospitals and computer server farms. The best you can hope for is that they can partially address low-density usage, running climate control and appliances for homes and some purpose-designed office buildings.
- biomass has much lower practial energy density than coal or oil. This means you have to transport and burn a lot more of it, with much larger pollution and life-cycle costs.
- The industrial base load is the life blood of technological civilization; without it, we’d have a hideous global population crash, and then revert to pre-1750 conditions in which the economy is almost entirely subsistence farming and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The first question any energy-policy proposal has to address is how to sustain an industrial base load equivalent to today’s — much higher than today’s actually, if we don’t want to condemn the Third World to perpetual poverty.
- Those costs are not denominated just in money; low-density energy sources are more labor-intensive to operate and that causes more illness and death. Compare annual deaths from coal mining to annual deaths in the petroleum industry to the annual deaths associated with nuclear power; the trend is dramatic and favors higher-density sources, even if you ignore chemical air pollution entirely.
- And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses. What electric cars can do, at best, is give us fuel flexibility, replacing direct
  
  oil-burning with nuclear plants and coal. But that’s not going to net out to lower pollution and lower costs unless we build a lot of nuclear plants very quickly.
- It’s largely forgotten now, but we’ve actually been through a similar transition before. In the mid-19th century whale oil was heavily used for lighting and as an industrial feedstock. Prices rose as whales were hunted to near-extinction; fortunately, the stuff proved to be replaceable by petroleum. Yes, that’s right; big oil saved the whales. A century and a half later, pond scum looks likely to save civilization.

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Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Why Alternative Energy Isn’t

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