***Alternative Energy Forecasts*** 21

[deltawhy]

Hello, so I know everyone here has at least an opinion on this subject. I would like to see what the industry experienced members think of alternative energy and the forecast for the near future.

Within the next 5, 10, and 15 years, what do you think will become dominant in North America, Europe, and Australia?

One of the main issues plaguing alternative energy is the method of energy storage. What do you think will become dominant? New types of chemical batteries, flywheel storage, compressed air, water pumping, etc.

How about less known about methods, like plasma gasification and MSW energy?

Will micorgeneration become a major player, with the addition of hybrid and electric vehicles putting massive amounts of stress on the already stressed grid?

Any thoughts?

Regards

 

[KENAT]

deltawhy, there have been a number of related threads over the last few years, you may want to take a look.

Be warned though, these types of threads often devolve into a debate over 'global climate change' and if people really are to blame.

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[deltawhy]

Hi Kenat, yes I have seen a couple older threads on this subject and yes as you said, they do not yield the information I am looking for and readily go on useless tangents. I intended this thread as a future analysis only thread.

 

[zdas04]

Good luck with that. I just spent 20 minutes typing a detailed discussion of the current state, then I refreshed and saw your future analysis and deleted it.

David

 

[deltawhy]

Oh, David that's unfortunate! Keep in mind you cannot know the future state without knowing the current state... your help would be much appreciated.

 

[MiketheEngineer]

Obviously, the most economical will dominate. I am afraid we will still be driving gas guzzling cars, go back to "regular" light bulbs and wasting water as always.

Just my thoughts. Saw this happen in the '70's, 80's, etc. Everything changes - yet nothing really changes.....

 

[cranky108]

Look at the cost without the goverments additions, and most renewables don't make the cut.
Also look at the numbers for consumed power, and what area of collection is required make up even 10% of the consumed energy.

Besides the hype I just don't see to much impact without a storage technology. And fossel fuels are a type of storage, but just not fast enough.

 

[zdas04]

I look at the amount of shale gas in the world (a staggering number if the IDIOT politicians can stop listening to the anti-human environmentalists and let us drill it). I look at the amount of sea-floor hydrates (an even bigger number). Then I look at the amount of gas that is being retrieved from fairly inefficient land-fill gas (big number) and see that the world never runs out of methane.

Any country with a rational energy policy (i.e., no country) would be doing the world a service by providing economic incentives to develop the infrastructure for meaningful gas-to-liquids development and large scale (effecient) waste-to-methane development. Those two activities are sustainable, pretty green (no VOC or HAP anyway), and renewable. Oh yeah, they are not sexy like ethanol (which takes more imported energy than it produces, and which is increasing the cost of all farm products), solar farms (which cast a huge shadow on the scorched earth under them and have some serious hazardous-waste issues), wind farms (which are so intermittent that the power-generation capability has to be duplicated with conventional plants), electric cars (which use about 3-4 times more energy than an IC engine to move the same payload and would put an unsustainable load on the power grid), or hydrogen cars (which represent an impossibly complex transportation and storage problem).

The politicians will continue to pour our money into the dead-end technologies because that gives them the appearance of being green while allowing them to facilitate sending $500 million/day in petrodollars to countries that don't like us but that contribute heavily to political campaigns. The short term projects with a chance of success would reduce imports and political contributions. The world's politicians are collectively and individually scum-sucking slime.

David

 

[owg]

Canadians will finally realize that the oil sands are their greatest asset and will demand that production be increased from the current 1 million barrels per day to around 10 million barrels per day ASAP.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[TheBlacksmith]

There is no free lunch. I think pumped storage is underutilized, but it entails flooding some land, with the loss of any CO2 absorbing vegetation or any other use. Energy storage allows us to run more existing facilities near their design load and then cover peak usage times; no need to build additional plants that run 1/2 the time. Might even moderate the sporadic output of the windfarms. Big point, made by others, is to get the governments out of the business and let the experts devise the best systems in a free market environment.

 

[KENAT]

Except, in other de - or at least less - regulated areas the 'experts' often get overridden by the MBA's etc. who are mainly interested in goosing their short term numbers to maximize their stock options etc. not in the long term good of the company, let alone country (or dare I say it planet - if you believe in AGW etc. anyway).

Given than energy policy is at least a medium, if not long term, issue, perhaps some government involvement is appropriate. That doesn't mean I fully agree with everything ours is currently doing though.

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[cranky108]

zdas04, I agree. However many in goverments see green power as a form of jobs program.

The problem is mechnication and the minumim wage has reduced the number of workers needed to a point that we would have millions of unemployed people if we did not have these make work programs.

The issue is unskilled, uneducated people really are not worth much. The minimum wage makes them unusable except where machines can't easly be used.

Don't get me wrong, most of these people do have skills, but at the present time they are not needed. So they belong to the unskilled catigory.

 

[ornerynorsk]

I really think any new, sensible, and viable ideas will be well-killed long before they have a chance to propagate into the mainstream. I have every confidence that big oil and the absolute, asinine stupidity of governments will see to that.

Not to mention special interest lobbies. The ag lobby in the US put their muscle into the ethanol boondoggle, and we have little hope of that dying out anytime soon. As another poster already mentioned, it's a net loss.

Just my 2 cents.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[zdas04]

Governments (or any other corporate entity) never create anything. At all. People do that. Individuals with ideas, abilities, warts, and hemorrhoids create things. The very best a government can do is to create an environment that minimizes the barriers that prevent creative individuals from succeeding.

In the case of energy policy, many governments around the world have realized that no economy can survive importing petroleum (and exporting petrodollars) to the tune of several percentage points of the GDP. These governments have put very high usage taxes on petrol. People complain bitterly about paying 4-6 times more per unit volume in much of Europe compared to US prices, but they do their complaining in smaller vehicles, vehicles with fuel-effecient technologies, on public transportation, and on bicycles.

The US sorry excuse for an energy policy revolves around the Department of Energy which was created in the Carter Administration with the clear goal of "eliminating all imports of oil to the US by 1980". 30 years later imports are approaching 3/4 of total domestic consumption. The DOE is so inept that they don't even have responsibility for Oil & Gas royalty payments to the federal government.

The lack of a policy has created urban sprawl without mass transit. Rush "hour" in the LA basin or in Houston is approaching a 24 hour/day activity and nearly every vehicle on the road has a single occupant. Government policy has caused that. If Carter had imposed a $0.50/gallon tax on gasoline usage with a progressive annual increase, it would have hurt, but walk-to-shopping neighborhoods would have developed, safe and effecient mass transit would be normal, and families like mine (two people at home) would not have three 6,000 lb vehicles.

That didn't happen and we are sending our future to Venezuela, Canada, and Trinidad. What can government do point forwarded? End subsidies for "alternate fuels". Provide meaningful tax incentives for any kind of research and development (we need to re-create private R&D departments that were outsourced to public universities in the '90's and haven't produced much since). Create an environment where light rail projects that go from homes to business centers (not from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere like was built in New Mexico) are viable. Mostly governments just need to get the hell out of the way.

David

 

[rb1957]

i guess a key question for the future is are we going to continue with a distributed hydro-carbon energy source (as today) or is it more efficient to have centralised power generation and electrical distribution (what you might describe as an electricity-based economy). ie electric cars ?

will there be a shift towards distributed power generation ? ie many small generators, one per village, or few large power stations, with the attendant costly distribution system ?

heating (in northern hemisphere winter) is probably best with NG (rather than electrical resistance heating) but then how significant is this energy burn (pun intended)?

solar power satellites ?

 

[deltawhy]

With the cost of photovoltaic $/W decreasing, I can see microgeneration blowing up. If hybrid / electric vehicles become more and more prominent, it will incapacitate the currently stressed electric grid (unless sanctions are put into place such as night time only charging). The general population is very naive regarding how their energy is made and transported, as well as the implications of each type. People like hearing that they can charge their electric vehicles using power that they themselves generated, leaving a zero "carbon footprint". Even though producing the PV cells and battery storage units are far more environmentally detrimental than using your old IC vehicle. Not to mention the disposal of your currently working IC vehicle.

It is apparent that it's unrealistic to try and change areas of the government energy policies. The people making the decisions have absolutely no idea what the best plan of action is, and even if they did, current economic factors will always take precedence.

The smart move would be to capitalize on whatever stupid decisions the government makes regarding the energy policy. The important thing for a single engineer is not what the government should do, but what the government will do.

 

[lacajun]

The issue is unskilled, uneducated people really are not worth much. The minimum wage makes them unusable except where machines can't easly be used.

Don't get me wrong, most of these people do have skills, but at the present time they are not needed. So they belong to the unskilled catigory.

I know of plumbers that make a lot more than I ever did and plumbing doesn't take much skill. I've done a lot of it over the years. If I can do it, just about anyone can do it. ;-)

I know of car wash owners that are raking in a lot more money than I've ever made. They got the capital and had them put in but the payback was pretty good. His dad was worried he would starve to death because he was the least bright of his sons. He's outearned his sibs with his car washes.

I think we'll be carbon based for decades to come.

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC

 

[moltenmetal]

Want to know what we COULD do, economics aside? And want to know how much we use, by category, in comparison? A great place to start, obviously:

http://www.withouthotair.com

"Even though producing the PV cells and battery storage units are far more environmentally detrimental than using your old IC vehicle." I think that statement can be shown to be conclusively untrue. In fact, the last time I looked at it, from an emissions perspective, the all-electric commuter vehicle was superior to an IC engine vehicle even if the source energy fuel was 100% coal- if CO2 is considered.

The claim that PV panels make less energy over their lives than they contain in embodied energy of manufacture has been pretty thoroughly de-bunked. It was claims like this that annoyed the author of Alternative Energy Without the Hot Air" enough to do the analysis and write the book. Frankly, until we have energy pricing which includes the cost of carbon emissions and gets rid of the market-distorting subsidies for "green energy", we'll have to deal with claims like this constantly.

What will we be doing for energy 10-20-30 yrs from now? Just look at what we're doing now- except more of all of it.

I don't think governments will get their collective sh*t together to deal with carbon emissions to the atmosphere in a meaningful way. People will pay whatever it costs to adapt to climate change, and will continue to pay an ever-increasing cost for fossil fuels as they become scarcer. All the costs of these fuels- including the military and environmental costs that are right now not at all factored into the price most of us pay for them. The increase in terms of even the partial cost of fossil fuels will gradually, slowly, change people's consumption behavior, favouring energy efficiency.

By the way, just because of rising fuels prices, I do see a big potential future for electric vehicles- especially when the Indians and Chinese start mass-producing them.

 

[KENAT]

"The smart move would be to capitalize on whatever stupid decisions the government makes regarding the energy policy"

Which neatly summarizes my current top priority project. "Make an XYZ accessory to help research on solar cells so we can rake in lots of grant money over the next couple of years before governments restrict the funding stream" or something like that.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, there are some fairly good applications for solar.

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[cranky108]

Correct we should reduce imports of oil. We should drill here, and drill now.

So what is the real beef agenst carbon? An increase of CO2 increases plant growth. And as the numbers show, one volcano spits out more carbon the us humans do in a year.

What I have an issue with is you want big goverment to command us on how to live our lives. This is just wrong.

If alternative energy is to be, it should compete on a fair basis with oil, coal, natural gas, nucular, etc. No special taxes to shift away from carbon, unless you are willing to pay a tax for breathing, and for each of your children.

Granted, reducing smog is a good thing, but the solutions need to be economic solutions, not goverment solutions.

Besides who will be paying the tax on soft drinks? The consumer, or the bottler?