I’m not sure I should, it would sound like a tease. Basically, long story short, the utilities are not letting the grass grow under their feet. Doubt their altruism, doubt their concern for the environment, but don’t doubt their desire to move with the times to stay on top of the energy pyramid.
There’s a report you can read here: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/41869.pdf
Corps do not look into the future, They seek short term profits. Most execs make a killing and move on. They are looking for a big salary, a huge bonus and a great departing gift. They only have a short time to make a killing. Investing heavily in the future would drop the short term bottom line. That bottom line is what they get big money for. The corporate payoff is part of the problem for building for the future. Let the next guy do it, I want to make a few hundred million and retire or get a job like it then rinse ,wash ,repeat.
The average CFO stays for 3.5 years. That hardly encourages them to outlay for 10 or 20 years in the future. Especially since doing it would result in them making less money now. The system is broken but completely resistant to fixing. We are screwed.
[QUOTE=Una Persson]
There’s a report you can read here: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/41869.pdf
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the cite Una…I’ll try and slog through it and see if I can puzzle out what it’s saying. It’s hard to believe that we could get to 20% of our electricity from wind alone in the US by 2030…that seems like fantasy to me. But if DOE says it’s possible, I have to respect that…and it’s going to change my own thoughts on this subject.
Of course, DOE also said that Yucca Mountain would be operational by (IIRC) 2001, and that didn’t work out so well. 
-XT
Yes they do.
Please note, I neither vouch for nor damn the report, I only link to it. It’s one view of the situation, and others who look at the same data may disagree with it entirely.
I’m already on page 17. Hurry up. 
If you define the future in one year increments. But we laugh at Soviet 5 year plans as government meddling. japan has had long term planning. Our energy planning is done by the energy companies who are trying to wring every dime out of the people, today.
Long term planning and investment comes at the expense of immediate profits,. Therein lies the conflict. The execs are rewarded for short term results. It would cost the chief exec and his co-execs money. So, they don’t.
Sorry you people can’t see the obvious conflict between the short term greedy corporate ethos we have as it conflicts with the long term health of the nation.
Offshoring jobs has creamed the American worker and greatly lowered our tax base. It is harmful to the country. But the corps claim if they don’t they will go out of business. Strange logic. They sent work abroad ,therefore everybody must . They created this mess and we should quietly believe them, no matter how often they lie to us.
If we did not pay our execs these outsized salaries, we could pay our workers better. But the battle is to cut wages more and more while execs get richer and richer. Buffet said it. It is a class war and his class won. Especially since so many can be convinced it is good . Workers really are stupid.
Thank you Una for providing the link for me.
Another source of basic information that people in this thread should have is the DOE’s most recent Renewable Energy Data Book.
Some bits of interest:
“In 2009, renewable energy accounted for more than 55% of all new electrical capacity installations in the United States”
“Including hydropower, renewable energy accounts for 21% of all global electricity generation”
And from this DOE document
“Solar energy in seven southwestern states ‰– AZ, CA, CO, NV, NM, TX and UT –could generate more than 6X current U.S. electricity needs … 15 of the 20 fastest-growing metro areas in the country are in close proximity to solar resource”
Getting those states to 20% fairly quickly is not so difficult. No not easy, but very doable.
Gonz, if you have paid any attention at all to Una’s past posts you’d have read about how the utilities she works with take a much longer view on investment return than you think. They are in it for the long haul and they think ahead. We just need to provide the right incentives to making the investments.
In 1983, a 10MB hard drive cost about a thousand dollars. I recently bought a 2TB hard drive for $90. That is a 2-million-fold reduction in cost/byte in about 30 years.
Wind and solar have been given token amounts of research money by government and industry. If we gave them anything like the subsidies given to nuclear and fossil fuels, who knows how much more efficient we could make them?
China's 'Sun King' Aims to Lead Shift to Solar Power : NPR]’
Here is a story about China’s Sun King. He has set up plants to develop and manufacture solar energy. They are of course deep into doing it while we discuss whether we should or not. They are the biggest manufacture of solar panels in the world and their technology is way ahead of ours. He is a billionaire , so apparently there is money in it.
But I’ve also posted about utter stupidity and short-sightedness at the utilities I’ve worked for, places where they claim 3-month payback periods on multi-million dollar projects are “too risky” for them. I object to his continued parroting of “Awk! All utilities are evil! Awk!” I think people have an especial fear of utilities because for most of us there are no other options. If we don’t like Coke, we buy Pepsi. Or drink water. If we don’t like Micky Mouse Power & Light, our options are…well, try to live-off-grid somehow.
To summarize what could be a 10,000-word essay, my experience has been the following:
-
State regulators have more power and less chuminess with utilities than people think.
-
State regulators are typically not swayed by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other outside influences, but
-
They are very strongly influenced by local citizens groups. However,
-
Serious actions by those groups, that is large, organized, actions which last beyond one vote or issue, are sadly not very common.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Here is a story about China’s Sun King. He has set up plants to develop and manufacture solar energy. They are of course deep into doing it while we discuss whether we should or not. They are the biggest manufacture of solar panels in the world and their technology is way ahead of ours. He is a billionaire , so apparently there is money in it.
[/QUOTE]
I get a ‘page not found’ when I click on that link. Might be the firewall at the hotel I’m staying at atm. At any rate, taking what you posted here at face value, what is your issue exactly? If the Chinese spend money on developing a better solar system, why is that a problem? Do you think they won’t sell it to us, assuming it’s a better mouse trap? Or is your problem the old Apple/IBM Not Made Here issue? Is it only good if we develop it?
Personally, I’m overjoyed that a Chinese billionaire is spending lots of money to develop a new solar power system. If it works, well, that’s a good thing…I’m sure he’ll be willing to sell it to us, or license our own manufacturers to build the things. If it doesn’t, or if it’s not as great as you make it out to be (shocking, I know), then, well, it’s on someone else’s dime for a change.
[QUOTE=brocks]
In 1983, a 10MB hard drive cost about a thousand dollars. I recently bought a 2TB hard drive for $90. That is a 2-million-fold reduction in cost/byte in about 30 years.
[/QUOTE]
The trajectory of one vertical product does not necessarily predict the trajectory of products in completely different lines. We’ve been building cars for over a hundred years, yet there hasn’t been a 2-million-fold reduction in cost…it’s been fairly stable if you look at it based on adjusted dollars. I can’t see a large wind turbine getting a hell of a lot cheaper…certainly not a 2-million-fold reduction in costs. The things are always going to use a lot of resources…it’s the nature of the beast. I suppose it’s possible that solar panels might cost less in the future, but again the basic materials are going to set hard limits on how low they can go…and how many you could possibly manufacture, unless they figure out how to build both out of very cheap materials in the future.
You make it sound like literally billions aren’t being spent in research and development by private industry AND the government (or that the US is the ONLY government who can spend money on something). That’s simply not true. From a research and development perspective, a hell of a lot more money is being spent on development and basic research for wind and solar than is being spent on nuclear to develop new technologies by the government and by private industry…and that’s been the case for years now. From a subsidies perspective, do you have a cite that more is spent in absolute terms on nuclear than is being spent on wind and solar today? AFAIK, the subsidies from the government (by which I assume you again mean the US) for nuclear is pretty low these days…while the subsidies from the government for wind and solar, both private and commercial, are pretty good…as are the subsidies for most other ‘green’ energy. But I really don’t know, so a cite would be helpful.
-XT
I commented on that report in post 70. Theoretically possible it may be, but the practicalities are daunting. It involves installing 300 GW of wind capacity in that time period, which will require several times the current world production capacity of glass fibre for the turbine blades over the whole of that period, among other things. The DOE report points out that the raw material (sand) for glass fibre production is not in short supply, which struck me as rather missing the point. It does acknowledge that sourcing all the resins and polymers to bind all that glass fibre into GRF might be problematic.
I am far from convinced that large-scale renewables installations won’t run into a major resources/costs wall in the near future, as the demand for glass fibre and carbon fibre explodes. Even basic materials such as steel and concrete might become a bottleneck. I guess we will see.
I thought I’d seen something about it before, but I couldn’t remember where with all of these threads. I still haven’t had time to go over Una’s cite except to skim, but I think lev has read through it.
Thanks for the analysis matt and sorry I forgot about your post and link earlier.
-XT
Alternative-Energy-News.info domain is for sale | Buy with Epik.com What wind will and can look like in the future defies predictability and analyzing it with todays outputs and costs is inadequate. There are lots of innovations in alternative energy field. It changes rapidly.
Now that we are honestly investigating alternative energy generation, we are seeing a brave new world that will eventually broom the old energy generations into histories dust heap.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
What wind will and can look like in the future defies predictability and analyzing it with todays outputs and costs is inadequate. There are lots of innovations in alternative energy field. It changes rapidly.
Now that we are honestly investigating alternative energy generation, we are seeing a brave new world that will eventually broom the old energy generations into histories dust heap.
[/QUOTE]
And when do you expect wind turbines flying at 30,000 feet will be ready for full scale testing, let alone ready to start manufacturing them?? Do you think it’s something that’s likely to happen in the next 5 years? 10? 50? 100? It’s a cool idea, but there are going to be all sorts of problems and issues that have to be worked out before they can even fully test the system, let alone start deploying them in any kind of numbers. What we’ll be installing in the next decade is going to be refinements of the current wind and solar technology…not some radically new system that hasn’t even been fully tested yet.
-XT
You might as well say “There are lots of innovations in the energy field, period.” It’d be closer to the truth.
Not really. Nuclear technology is all very much 1950’s and 60’s. All the cool designs people talk about now were discussed and tested back in the 60’s. We have ideas about safer passive shutdown designs and small reactors you can supposedly bury for awhile, but even those ideas aren’t very new.
The DOE wind report makes a point of the fact that the technology changes fast and every couple years engineers say they’re at the limit of what they can do and six months later Vesta or somebody blows past that.
The study is from 2008? They say we probably won’t be seeing turbines more powerful than the (2008) current capacities of 4 or 5 MWs, but Vesta and I believe at least one other company are already making 7 and 7.5 MW turbines.
The thing stopping turbines from getting even bigger, taller and more powerful is transporting the huge blades on conventional highways, and the availability of cranes large enough to heft the components into place.
The report doesn’t venture into what ifs much, but I wonder if dirigibles could be used to make even larger turbines? I wouldn’t be surprised, but the nice thing about wind technology is we don’t have to depend on uncertain future technological breakthroughs for it to provide the clean energy we need now. The industry is constantly breaking records and that’s all exciting icing on the cake. It’s almost such a sure thing right now we can bank on new tech. Not quite, but almost.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Not really. Nuclear technology is all very much 1950’s and 60’s. All the cool designs people talk about now were discussed and tested back in the 60’s. We have ideas about safer passive shutdown designs and small reactors you can supposedly bury for awhile, but even those ideas aren’t very new.
[/QUOTE]
Looked at that way, wind power is even older…we’ve been using it for centuries at least. More like several thousand years depending on how you define it.
How many have been deployed? As far as I know, the standard large scale wind turbine in use today is still 1.5 MW, with some 2.5 MW monsters in production. I know the Swedes (IIRC) have a larger turbine, but it’s hardly in large scale use, and the thing is so massive that I have to wonder if it ever will be in the numbers that would be needed to make a big difference. It also costs a lot more than the 1.5 MW turbines (that run a few million per turbine)…IIRC, something like $35 million, though that price would drop some once they start producing the things. Still, (5) 1.5 MW turbines at 2 million each is going to be cheaper than (1) 7-7.5 MW turbine (assuming my often faulty memory is close about the $35 million per turbine), unless the costs come down quite a bit…unless the costs of putting in the infrastructure per turbine is a huge factor (it probably is at sea).
I imagine costs, maintenance and downtime would also be issues. If you have a single 1.5 MW turbine down for maintenance or because it’s broken that’s going to be less of a hit than having a 7 or 7.5 MW turbine down…and the things do go down.
-XT