That’s a very misleading statistic. You can add up all kinds of worldwide energy sources and come up with huge numbers. Just for yucks, go look up how much energy is generated by worldwide ocean currents or tides. Or the sum total of the world’s geothermal energy. Trully massive amounts of energy are out there.
The big question is how much of it is available in usable form. For wind to be cost-effective, it has to be harnessed in a place where there are constant steady high velocity winds. For offshore wind power, it has to be located in areas of reasonably shallow water in areas where there is no shipping traffic and reasonable proximity to the power grid. There just aren’t that many places like this, and when people have tried to build wind power plants in suitable areas, they’ve met stiff opposition from the NIMBY crowd. Such a crowd, including the Kennedys, managed to scuttle a perfectly viable wind power station off the coast of Nantucket.
Most analysts who look at viable sources of wind power have concluded that wind won’t realistically provide more than a few percentage points of our power needs, ever. The numbers I recall are in the 3-5% range. That would cover about one year’s growth in energy consumption, then we’d be back to making as much power from non-wind resources as we are today.
This hand-waving about efficiency gains needs to have some hard numbers behind it. What are the costs of making the energy infrastructure more efficient? Do you have any idea? How much power is out there to be reclaimed? How much more efficient can we make the consumption infrastructure?
The answer is not as much as you’d think. The low-hanging fruit has long been picked. What’s left is the expensive stuff. There’s no question that improving efficiency today will raise our energy costs - otherwise we’d already have done it.
CFL bulbs and 35 mpg cars can help a bit, as can Energy Star appliances and more efficient computers and other small gains. But in the end, even if we manage to make a 10% or 20% improvement in our energy consumption, all that will do is kick the problem down the road a few years.
In the meantime, you need to understand that oil is a fungible resource that trades on a world market, and therefore there is a bad feedback loop in place that will punish efficiency. Specifically, if we could manage to make our energy consumption 50% lower, that would drive down the price of oil and reward those who still burn it inefficiently. And if our efficiency raises our cost of doing busines, it will have the effect of driving businesses into countries with less energy efficiency and dirtier technology - exactly the opposite of what you are trying to achieve.
The energy situation is extremely difficult, and there are no simple solutions. Certainly there are no fixes to be had in any meaningful sense from conservation and wind/solar power.
This is why many environmentalists have actually changed their tune and are now supporting nuclear power. Once you take off the rose colored glasses and look at the problem in the cold light of reason, it really doesn’t look like there are any alternatives. Waiting for fusion or for wind/solar to take over, or demanding that the world stop using energy is sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect. You’re not going to get what you want, so the options are to accept nuclear or accept that we’re going to continue burning fossil fuel.
How can you just toss off that statement? Do you have some numbers to back it up? How much will the ‘easy thing’ cost? What are you talking about, anyway? Carbon sequestration?
Says who? Do you have a cite that shows the cost breakdown for this? Who’s planning to do it?
From this cite, Wind Energy is said to cost between 5 and 10 cents per kW/h. From this cite, nuclear shows up at around 3 cents per kW/h. Costs vary for both technologies, of course. Some claim that wind is slightly cheaper than nuclear when used in highly efficient locations. There’s no way wind power is cheaper if you have to produce so much of it that you have to locate wind turbines in non-optimal locations.
I cited the time to build a nuclear reactor in a discussion a little while ago. Various plants average from 3-5 years to build, depending on the technology. The reason U.S. plants have taken much longer is because construction is constantly halted by an endless stream of lawsuits and regulatory demands foisted on the industry by anti-nuclear activists. This drives up costs and delays, then the anti-nuke people use those high costs as ‘proof’ that nuclear is non-competitive.
But good point. I don’t know how competitive their nuclear program would be without that. As I said in the post above, if we are looking at this from a purely economic perspective without worrying about CO2 emissions or other factors than coal is the clear winner. Once we start looking at those other factors though I think nuclear becomes more viable.