Do We Know what "Renewable Energy" means? 67

[zdas04]

Much is made these days about "renewable energy" almost always talking about (in declining order of importance to the narrative) wind, solar, hydro-electric, geothermal, solid biofuels, and liquid biofuels. What I cannot find is a definition that limits how renewable something has be be to be called "renewable".

For example, I have deployed thousands of PV solar panels on remote wellsites over the years. When I'm doing project economics I expect to replace 1/3 of the panels every year and 1/2 of the batteries every year. This is because birds and reptiles are incontinent and their waste on the warm surface tends to short out the electronics. Further, covering a panel with dust or sand reduces its effectiveness towards zero and the first sand storm sandblasts the surface to the point that the electronics can't tell night from day (and cleaning the panels shorts them out about as often as it doesn't). No matter what metric you use, Solar PV does not ever generate as much energy as went into the mining, raw material transport, fabrication, and finished product transport. The industrial units I've deployed return under 5% of the energy required to make them appear on site. Project economics reflect that and the economics often favor Solar PV over bringing in grid power, but the only part that is "renewable" is that fuel cost for operation is zero. The popular literature uses a 25-30 year life for solar panels. Fires and sand blasting experience at large solar arrays seem to make this number laughable if you actually take the panels out of the box.

Forbes Magazine had an article a while back that claimed that grid-scale wind power units get about 83% government grants, subsidies, and tax credits (i.e., a company desiring to install a $500,000 wind turbine would have $415,000 covered by federal programs, state programs would further reduce the cost in most states). Then the federal government has mandated a price that the utility must pay for any power generated beyond the company's need (which is retail price, not the wholesale price that they pay for other power). Expected actual power generation from a unit that size would be worth (both in sell back and in avoided power purchase) about $30k/year which is not enough to service the debt on a $500 k loan. In this case Forbes is using dollars as a surrogate for energy input and energy output, but that is usually a reasonable surrogate--bottom line is that without the government involvement wind energy would not pay for itself. Most "information" available on this topic is like Science Daily that uses nameplate hp, 24-hour/day, 366 days/year operation at 100% capacity and subsidized sales prices to say that the turbines pay for themselves in 5-8 months. This analysis assumes energy storage that has no energy cost (and that it exists, it doesn't). When you factor in back-up power supplies for calm days, and fuel needed for standby plants the 5-8 months becomes laughable, but that is the number that "researchers" in this field continue to use.

Geothermal (where is is a viable option) is likely significantly "renewable" in that you get more energy out of it then you put into it. New research is linking industrial-scale geothermal energy to significantly increased seismic activity (both frequency and severity), but it is renewable.

Hydro-electric represents a love-hate relationship with the environmental movements. The narrative around evil fossil-fuel shows hydro as a huge win (it represents about 6.8% of the U.S. electricity usage), but the land that is taken out of service, the changes to the eco system by changing fast moving rivers to slow moving lakes, and the absence of flooding in river bottoms is depleting soil. Dams silt up and require maintenance/repair. Still, hydro is renewable in that it provides many times the power required to deploy the technology.

Solid biofuels like wood chips and vegetable debris have serious delivery problems (and ash-removal problems and particulate matter pollution problems) that caused the Province of Ontario to have to derate their coal fired plants by half when they were converted to solid biofuels.

Liquid biofuels to date have primarily been oxygenators like ethanol. Adding 10% ethanol to gasoline (petrol) will reduce total fuel efficiency by about 13%. This means that a trip that would have taken 100 gallons of fuel will take about 113 gallons of fuel--101.7 gallons of gasoline and 11.3 gallons of ethanol. In other words it is significantly energy negative. Bio-diesel has about 77% of the specific energy of diesel and tends to gel, absorb water, and requires higher compression ratios. In general without government intervention, this is an idea who's time will never come.

That brings me to gaseous biofuels. Methane comes from anaerobic biological activity on organic waste. In a recent article I computed that contemporary methane sources are on the order of 5 TSCF/day (the world uses about 0.3 TSCF/day). The organisms on this planet generate so much organic waste that we don't even have to get a lot more effective at re-processing organic waste to supply the world's power needs forever--truly renewable and sustainable. The only hurdle is that the contemporary narrative has methane listed in the "evil fossil fuel" category and not in the "renewable" category. That is it. A small shift in the narrative and the world will turn the engineering community lose on this problem and very shortly we will have unlimited power for an unlimited number of future generations. There are already hundreds of small and medium sized dairy farms, chicken farms, pig farms, and feed lots that are harvesting the animal waste to generate heat and methane for power generation (you get methane from anaerobic digestion which requires a small power input and generates horrible smells, taking the last step in the process into an aerobic digester, which is exothermic, provides heat for the anaerobic process, and gets rid of the worst of the smells). Everyone with knowledge of this process knows that there are a number of things that could be done to improve yields and recover more of the biological energy, but with an EPA focused on "eliminating methane emissions", there is no incentive to commit the engineering effort required.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to change the narrative from "methane causes global warming" to "retail harvest of contemporary methane can be a big part of the solution"?

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[controlnovice]

A theory that provides a physical mechanism, that agrees with known physics, (greenhouse effect) and makes predictions (see here at 11 Feb 16 03:21)

Interesting that before 'the pause', the data was used to claim Global Warming. Once it showed a 'pause', all the alarmist say..."well, that data isn't sufficient...we really need to look at this over here."

Prior to the 'pause', that data was being used for years to 'prove' a theory. Once the same data differed from models or theory...well, the alarmist become great Wizard of Oz....'nothing to see here, pay no attention to the data behind the curtain." and come up with some other data to show correlation as seen here:

The various predictions align with past observations (yes and yes) as well as match future projections (yes), creating a consilience of evidence.

but the data that shows a pause is thrown out now because it doesn't match the intent of the author.

______________________________________________________________________________
This is normally the space where people post something insightful.

 

[natepiercy]

The amount of money on the table on the "warming" side is big enough to tempt Martin Luther King to join the KKK.

Steady...

 

[natepiercy]

Ok. So let's put HVAC aside. We'll say running a compressor contributes a negligible amount of heat to the earth. We'll furthermore assume that winter does not exist and nobody on the planet runs a furnace to generate heat.

What about a car engine though? Most engines are ~60% efficient before parasitic losses IIRC. Doesn't that mean the other 40% is lost as waste energy (noise, heat, etc)? I'm just asking, has anyone taken the approximate heat dump of a few hundred million running vehicles, the specific heat of air, and approximate mass of the atmosphere to see if that might account for a non-negligible degrees/time contribution?

 

[canwesteng]

Well 100% of the energy is ultimately converted to heat, so the ~30% of the energy your car uses to accelerate itself eventually becomes heat on the brakes when you stop. FYI, car engines aren't 60% efficient, unless you are driving a combined cycle natural gas power plant.

 

[IRstuff]

It's interesting about the money, because clearly, organizations such as Heartland and the Koch brothers have tons of money to fund people to write articles against AGW, but seem to refuse to fund serious efforts to come up with a full and complete physical model that explains their counterpoint. If money was such a big deal, dangling a billion or so out there should entice a bunch of scientists to bail from their positions and take up the mantle of the deniers. Even a $100 million endowment, which would be chump change to the Koch brothers, could fund a dozen or so researchers and their grad students indefinitely, and they could surely come up with a model that predicts the exact same trend using non-greenhouse gas mechanisms. If only 1% of the scientific community actually accepts AGW, then it should be trivial to fund any number of scientists to go the opposite way.

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
faq731-376 forum1529

 

[Panther140]

Explain to me how the hot side of the AC unit transfers heat to ambient air without being warmer than the ambient air.

Here is a really basic introduction to the refrigerator cycle:

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/tools-products/appliances/how-does-refrigerator-work

Go touch the back of your refrigerator if you still cannot grasp how an AC unit would warm outside air.




"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[Panther140]

Did you GHG alarmists go to engineering school? I figured they would've covered that you can't transfer the heat out of the house without creating a temperature differential.

Here is something from MIT

http://web.mit.edu/2.972/

http://www/reports/compression_refrigeration_system/compression_refrigeration_system.html

At this point I am proud to have the opposing viewpoint to your theories on ANTYHING relating to heat energy.

Here is some more information on how heat travels.

http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/light_lessons/thermal/transfer.html

Class dismissed.


"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[zdas04]

JNeiman,
Do you really believe that? Here is a February, 2015 quote from National Review

The federal government — which will gain unprecedented regulatory power if climate legislation is passed — has funded scientific research to the tune of $32.5 billion since 1989, according the Science and Public Policy Institute. That is an amount that dwarfs research contributions from oil companies and utilities, which have historically funded both sides of the debate.

The article goes on to talk about "left leaning" foundations that only invest on the warmist side of the debate. $32.5 Billion from the feds in 20 years doesn't sound like much, but it has funded some amazing life styles. Say that there have been an average of 2000 people drawing on that pool (no one really knows, and the government records on who the checks are cut to is not available to the general public), that is $812k/researcher/year. People like Michael Mann (who has received $6 million according to the linked article) may skew the per capita number downward some, but $6 million only takes a bit over 7 years to be $6 million so maybe not.

The source of this information is the Science and Public Policy Institute. That link goes on to add the amount spent on "climate technology" and "Foreign Assistance" for global warming bringing the total to $79 billion between 1989 and 2009. Not chump change. A couple of other factoids from the link:

[ul]
[li]Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 – $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.[/li]
[li]Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.[/li]
[li]The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?[/li]
[/ul]

This amount doesn't include tax credits for renewable energy (which are easy to find in percents of purchase price, but very very difficult to find in total dollars, I wonder why?) or the biggest of all "net metering" of electricity (where the utilities have to pay retail prices for power that they don't need and is 3-7 times more expensive than wholesale power).

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Panther140]

Lets think about this consensus claim for at least one second..

We're all scientists, by definition.. Is there even CLOSE to a 97% consensus on this subject even within this thread?

I highly doubt there is even a 50% consensus on any single part of this subject. Anybody claiming a 97% consensus is not a trustworthy source. Not only are they referring to one single bogus study from long in the past, but they probably don't even know the semantics of that survey or how the results were actually scored. They basically rejected all dissenters.

In some circles, finding somebody willing to question the claims of the GHG Chicke-Littles is about as likely as seeing a nun with a copy of "The Origin of Species". Their punishments would be the same, and for the same reason. Blasphemy.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[zdas04]

Panther140,
There are a large number of papers on the web describing the methodology that Cook (for one, there were others) used to come up with that made up number. One that I like (the fact that I wrote it does not color my thinking) is One Engineers Perspective on Global Warming

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Panther140]

zdas04, thank you for the link. That article makes a lot of good points. I think everybody should read it

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[canwesteng]

Panther, I think everyone here grasps refrigeration a bit better than you... Obviously there is a temperature differential to take heat to the outside... there is also a temperature differential taking heat inside. That's where the heat on the inside is coming from. Look at your fridge. The back of it is hot, so surely it takes some energy outside the fridge, and it does this constantly, no? Although, stick your hand inside and you will find it is well above absolute zero. That is because heat enters the fridge through conduction. That heat is the same heat that the fridge circulated. The only net heat is the energy lost in compressors and pumps running the fridge.

 

[Panther140]

Apparently my work here is not done, canwesteng.

Picture this for a minute to help you understand:
- Remove all of the atmospheric air from the earth, along with all of the heat energy contained within it.
- Contain that air and heat energy separately for now-- Put is someplace empty. We'll call this container "Al Gore's

​

head"
- Substitute a new atmosphere that starts off at absolute zero (that means there is no heat energy present)
- Allow that new atmosphere to reach equilibrium temperature
- Pump all of the heat out of Al Gore's head and into the newly temp-steadied replacement atmosphere
- Be sure to leave the cooled air inside of Al Gore's head
- Insulate Al Gore's head extremely well and put it somewhere on earth

You will see that you have doubled the energy content in the atmosphere.

The heat that was originally taken from the atmosphere and put into the room was replaced/backfilled in the atmosphere organically. Then the heat was pumped back into the atmosphere, which is possible with the AC unit.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[canwesteng]

That's the dumbest analogy I've ever read. So when you build a house you are removing the heat from the atmosphere? Then running AC you are adding it back? It isn't rocket science to see that AC units aren't adding any heat to the earth outside of the heat losses running their pumps. Running an AC unit in a closed system (outside of thermal radiation, the earth more or less fits that definition) doesn't create heat, it moves it around. Of all the things that humans could do to add heat to the atmosphere (physically burning combustible material for example), you pick the one that is obviously and demonstrably incorrect.

 

[ME27272727]

I'm not sure what the argument is about HVAC heating the atmosphere. To what significance, I am not sure and have not spent time looking into it.

According to the US EIA, in 2015 about 40% of energy in the US was consumed by buildings (39 x 10^15 BTU), 20% of that by cooling and refrigeration (7.8 x 10^15 BTU). So 8% of US energy is consumed(transformed)in a refrigeration cycle to eventually become heat. Yes, the energy balance between heat source and sink is equal, but you lost entropy in the process, and all compressor input energy is converted to heat.

The heat being pumped out of your refrigerator evaporator coil is equal to the heat pumped to the condenser PLUS heat of compression, plus motor / compressor losses. The fridge heats your house, and HVAC heats the atmosphere.

Unless I'm missing something which is always a possibility.

 

[rconnor]

Let me repeat:

Secondly, waste heat from human activities (that release heat energy otherwise stored in a chemical or other form) are absolutely nothing compared to the amount of energy the planet is accruing due to the greenhouse effect. The forcing of waste heat from humans is +0.028 W/m^2 (Flanner 2009) whereas the greenhouse forcing is +2.9 W/m^2 (IPCC).

To put this another way, the planet is accuring ~2.5x10^14 J/s (source , 2). That’s equivalent to humans setting off 59,751 tons of dynamite every second (assuming 4.184x10^9 J/ton). So, no, waste heat is not significantly impacting the amount of energy in the atmosphere. But the greenhouse effect sure is.

Even if the heat rejected from HVAC systems back to the outside was 100% waste heat from human activities (which it's not), it would be a fraction of a forcing 1/100th the power of greenhouse gases. Even if you deny the greenhouse theory, there is no way that waste heat from human activities is causing the planet to accrue 2.5x10^14 J/s, unless we are setting off 60,000 tons of TNT/second, every second. Furthermore, if we were increasing heat generated within the Earth's atmosphere, without influencing the energy balance at the TOA (Top of Atmosphere), the Planck feedback would likely cause the planet to radiate the excess heat, leading to a small net change.

So I'll say it again - Heat rejected from HVAC systems or all other human activities combined does not have a significant impact on increase in global temperature.

 

[Panther140]

"build a house you are removing the heat from the atmosphere? Then running AC you are adding it back? It isn't rocket science to see that AC units aren't adding any heat to the earth "

In essence, you are removing heat and air from the atmosphere when you build a house. Then you are adding only the heat back into the atmosphere. That means you concentrate earth's overall atmospheric heat content into a smaller amount of air.

Go into a room that has a steady temperature of 300 Kelvin inside. Then bring in a refrigerator that contains 25% of the volume of total air within the room.

Turn the fridge on to bring its internal air temp down to 0 Kelvin.

You think the room around that refrigerator will stay the same temperature as it was before? You now have 75% of the ambient air as before, but you still have 100% of the original heat being contained in that smaller amount of air. This is an incredibly basic concept. I think you are over-thinking it.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[Panther140]

rconnor tell me what the carbon cycle's role is throughout this entire process of our sky falling and sending us into certain apocalypse.

Is CO2 one of the four horsemen?

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[rb1957]

so we may not know what "renewable energy" means, but we sure as heck know how to pi$$ off one another !

and to answer panther "yes", or rather he's riding in the chariot being pulled by the four horsemen

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[Panther140]

Julius Mayer already has told us what renewable energy is. Google it or read a book or something.

rb1957, does "Famine" pull the chariot with CO2 in it? Because I always thought lack of CO2 as kind of a cause of famine??

One thing is for certain, the omnipotence and omniscience that governments grant themselves in the name of "protecting" the environment GOES VERY WELL WITH CONQUEST.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin