4 ms·

That's probably one of the best articles I've read on the real nature of 'alternative' energy in a while. My rule of thumb is simple : if someone calls it 'Alt

by brc 14y ago

That's probably one of the best articles I've read on the real nature of 'alternative' energy in a while. My rule of thumb is simple : if someone calls it 'Alternative Energy', it means it's an alternate to having a cheap, ready supply of energy. Otherwise, it would just be called 'energy'. Nobody calls Nuclear power alternate energy, even though it's radically different to anything else that came before it in terms of generating power. The percentage of power generated from wind globally, currently, rounded to the nearest decimal place is zero. Trillions of dollars have been spent on windfarms and solar panels around the world, and, as the article notes, it has made zero difference to the overall energy mix. Yet it has affected national economies in real ways - the bankruptcies in Germany, Spain and elsewhere have real costs, as does taking the most basic economic input - energy - and making it more expensive for zero environmental gain at the global level. Despite the countless examples of failures to point to, the boosters insist that it's the right course, when any plain analysis shows the exact opposite. There are plenty of people who hand-wave around the very real problems as outlined in the article, and say things like 'give it time, it will work out'. But you have to be a starry-eyed believer who trusts in state-coerced solutions to gloss over the myriad of problems of trying to jump-start essentially niche technologies into mainstream adoption. It takes real courage to rely on human ingenuity to solve problems and come up with solutions. It's frightening to look at an issue and realise you have no answers at all. But what's worse is to set off on a futile and damaging strategy just to be seen to be doing something, when that thing is ineffective at best, and damaging at worst due to the self-delusion inherent. This holds at the personal, family, business, state, national and global level.

singingfish 14y ago
I disagree. The article reads to me like a partisan anti-renewable energy opinion piece with the facts chosen to fit the author's point of view. A scientific examination of the issue value would evaluate a hypothesis, not state the viewpoint at the outset.
- jws 14y ago
  It might also use actual numbers for solar radiation in Bavaria instead of childhood recollections. Bavaria is surprisingly not terrible for solar power. Most of Bavaria gets 2/3 the solar radiation of the best spots in Spain, and is even about 50% of the best spots you'll find (like in Chad, but then you'd have electrical power in Chad instead of Germany.) http://solargis.info/imaps/ http://solargis.info/imaps/ lets you poke around much of the world for your dream solar farm.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Germany is actually great for solar power, like the American midwest. The reason is that it's not just about average solar radiation, but also about average temperature. Solar cells are much more efficient when it's cold than when it's hot. Excelon recently built a huge solar facility up in Chicago, and it generates something like 80-90% as much power as plants in much sunnier places, because Chicago is so cold for so much of the year.
- ajross 14y ago
  Indeed. I got as far as the author dismissing solar and wind on the basis of "capacity factor" (average output over peak output), which is completely meaningless. That "peak output" number has no relevance to anything. What matters (all that matters, in the context of the article) is obviously cost (in money, perhaps corrected for things like real estate occupied, etc...) per net power. And it doesn't even get mentioned. Yawn. Still, it's better than the really awful junk Burt Rutan wrote last year.
martythemaniak 14y ago
I found this piece to be depressingly pessimistic and downright whiny. Many people have argued that humanity has become excessively risk-averse and in-ward looking. "It's hard" is no longer a challenge to be overcome, but a reason to sit back and kick the can down the road.
- jbellis 14y ago
  If only the laws of physics could be repealed with guts and hard work.
  - zxcdw 14y ago
    It's not about something not being possible. It's about something not being "commercially profitable". We could abandon all the coal and oil in a decade or two and move completely onto renewable energy sources, it is possibe - it's just nobody gives a damn about it, because it would have a dent in quality of life, especially in western countries. It's our selfishness and greed holding us back, rather than laws of physics.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  humanity has become excessively risk-averse Well exemplified by our incredible fear of nuclear power
  - Semaphor 14y ago
    nuclear power. In Germany just lately there was another (though as always shortlived) surge of news about how politicians played their games with nuclear waste. Our final storage of nuclear waste is a joke from the past by corrupt politicians. When you can't trust people to think about the (instead of their) future it's hard not to fear nuclear energy.
ClHans 14y ago
I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).
- skylan_q 14y ago
  it is theft
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Blinding flash of insight for you little brother: there is no "theft" without the state.
    - pjscott 14y ago
      I assure you, theft predates states. Hell, it predates our species.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        It's not theft without a state to make it wrong. It's natural right.
rayiner 14y ago
> The percentage of power generated from wind globally, currently, rounded to the nearest decimal place is zero. This is just not true. I'm not sure what it is globally, but in the US it's several percent (which is not zero percent under any rounding I'm aware of). More to the point, it produces more than 10% of the electricity in five U.S. states. It's also the fastest-growing energy source in the world, even faster than natural gas. > Trillions of dollars have been spent on windfarms and solar panels around the world, and, as the article notes, it has made zero difference to the overall energy mix. Nowhere near "trillions of dollars" have been spent on wind farms. You're just making things up. > Yet it has affected national economies in real ways - the bankruptcies in Germany, Spain and elsewhere have real costs, as does taking the most basic economic input - energy - and making it more expensive for zero environmental gain at the global level. The bankruptcies in Germany, Spain, etc, are the fault of alternative energy? > Despite the countless examples of failures to point to, the boosters insist that it's the right course, when any plain analysis shows the exact opposite. The analysis of the "skeptics" almost always leaves out the vast externalized costs of traditional energy sources. E.g. if hundreds of billions of dollars of externalized costs from coal were factored into the price of coal, coal power would be more expensive than wind power: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal-costs-_b_831755.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal.... > But you have to be a starry-eyed believer who trusts in state-coerced solutions There is nothing starry-eyed about the economists who point out that the free market naturally underproduces fundamental R&D. Pick up an Economics 101 book sometime.
- brc 14y ago
  - Globally wind power produced < 0.5% of energy last year. Most people forget, or don't realise, that the current obsession with alternative energy is limited to parts of Western Europe and parts of the USA. It has virtually no traction elsewhere in the world. - You're right, I should have written billions instead of trillions, though I'd be surprised if it hasn't reached a trillion by now. It's still an insane amount of money. - Bankruptcies in Germany and Spain by solar companies are very much the cause of bad policies - by pumping up a sector with unsustainable subsidies, then being forced to remove subsidies precisely because they are unsustainable. This creates a bubble into which resources rush, which then bursts and creates a lot of problems. This is the fundamental problem, of trying to coerce a particular set of technologies into place when they aren't suitable for it. The correct response is to admit there is no current technical solution to affordable energy without burning stuff. There is a noisy subset of people who don't agree with this position, and that's fair enough. History has always proven that major advances come from unexpected areas, and tend to render prior technologies obselete almost overnight.
anovikov 14y ago
In the countries that actively pursue renewables, they take a good share of the energy mix. Germany went from 6% of renewable electricity (nearly all hydropower) in 1990 to 21% in 2011 and about 24% now, and from 3% of overall energy mix (including heating, fuels, etc., not just electricity) in 1990 to 12% now. And current rates of adoption is at least 2% per year for electricity and 1% for overall mix. That's a big deal. Most renewables have already worked themselves out to be competitive.

by brc 14y ago

singingfish 14y ago

I disagree. The article reads to me like a partisan anti-renewable energy opinion piece with the facts chosen to fit the author's point of view. A scientific examination of the issue value would evaluate a hypothesis, not state the viewpoint at the outset.

jws 14y ago
It might also use actual numbers for solar radiation in Bavaria instead of childhood recollections. Bavaria is surprisingly not terrible for solar power. Most of Bavaria gets 2/3 the solar radiation of the best spots in Spain, and is even about 50% of the best spots you'll find (like in Chad, but then you'd have electrical power in Chad instead of Germany.) http://solargis.info/imaps/ http://solargis.info/imaps/ lets you poke around much of the world for your dream solar farm.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Germany is actually great for solar power, like the American midwest. The reason is that it's not just about average solar radiation, but also about average temperature. Solar cells are much more efficient when it's cold than when it's hot. Excelon recently built a huge solar facility up in Chicago, and it generates something like 80-90% as much power as plants in much sunnier places, because Chicago is so cold for so much of the year.
ajross 14y ago
Indeed. I got as far as the author dismissing solar and wind on the basis of "capacity factor" (average output over peak output), which is completely meaningless. That "peak output" number has no relevance to anything. What matters (all that matters, in the context of the article) is obviously cost (in money, perhaps corrected for things like real estate occupied, etc...) per net power. And it doesn't even get mentioned. Yawn. Still, it's better than the really awful junk Burt Rutan wrote last year.

martythemaniak 14y ago

I found this piece to be depressingly pessimistic and downright whiny. Many people have argued that humanity has become excessively risk-averse and in-ward looking. "It's hard" is no longer a challenge to be overcome, but a reason to sit back and kick the can down the road.

jbellis 14y ago
If only the laws of physics could be repealed with guts and hard work.
- zxcdw 14y ago
  It's not about something not being possible. It's about something not being "commercially profitable". We could abandon all the coal and oil in a decade or two and move completely onto renewable energy sources, it is possibe - it's just nobody gives a damn about it, because it would have a dent in quality of life, especially in western countries. It's our selfishness and greed holding us back, rather than laws of physics.
sliverstorm 14y ago
humanity has become excessively risk-averse Well exemplified by our incredible fear of nuclear power
- Semaphor 14y ago
  nuclear power. In Germany just lately there was another (though as always shortlived) surge of news about how politicians played their games with nuclear waste. Our final storage of nuclear waste is a joke from the past by corrupt politicians. When you can't trust people to think about the (instead of their) future it's hard not to fear nuclear energy.

ClHans 14y ago

I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).

skylan_q 14y ago
it is theft
- rayiner 14y ago
  Blinding flash of insight for you little brother: there is no "theft" without the state.
  - pjscott 14y ago
    I assure you, theft predates states. Hell, it predates our species.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      It's not theft without a state to make it wrong. It's natural right.

rayiner 14y ago

> The percentage of power generated from wind globally, currently, rounded to the nearest decimal place is zero. This is just not true. I'm not sure what it is globally, but in the US it's several percent (which is not zero percent under any rounding I'm aware of). More to the point, it produces more than 10% of the electricity in five U.S. states. It's also the fastest-growing energy source in the world, even faster than natural gas. > Trillions of dollars have been spent on windfarms and solar panels around the world, and, as the article notes, it has made zero difference to the overall energy mix. Nowhere near "trillions of dollars" have been spent on wind farms. You're just making things up. > Yet it has affected national economies in real ways - the bankruptcies in Germany, Spain and elsewhere have real costs, as does taking the most basic economic input - energy - and making it more expensive for zero environmental gain at the global level. The bankruptcies in Germany, Spain, etc, are the fault of alternative energy? > Despite the countless examples of failures to point to, the boosters insist that it's the right course, when any plain analysis shows the exact opposite. The analysis of the "skeptics" almost always leaves out the vast externalized costs of traditional energy sources. E.g. if hundreds of billions of dollars of externalized costs from coal were factored into the price of coal, coal power would be more expensive than wind power: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal-costs-_b_831755.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal.... > But you have to be a starry-eyed believer who trusts in state-coerced solutions There is nothing starry-eyed about the economists who point out that the free market naturally underproduces fundamental R&D. Pick up an Economics 101 book sometime.

brc 14y ago
- Globally wind power produced < 0.5% of energy last year. Most people forget, or don't realise, that the current obsession with alternative energy is limited to parts of Western Europe and parts of the USA. It has virtually no traction elsewhere in the world. - You're right, I should have written billions instead of trillions, though I'd be surprised if it hasn't reached a trillion by now. It's still an insane amount of money. - Bankruptcies in Germany and Spain by solar companies are very much the cause of bad policies - by pumping up a sector with unsustainable subsidies, then being forced to remove subsidies precisely because they are unsustainable. This creates a bubble into which resources rush, which then bursts and creates a lot of problems. This is the fundamental problem, of trying to coerce a particular set of technologies into place when they aren't suitable for it. The correct response is to admit there is no current technical solution to affordable energy without burning stuff. There is a noisy subset of people who don't agree with this position, and that's fair enough. History has always proven that major advances come from unexpected areas, and tend to render prior technologies obselete almost overnight.

anovikov 14y ago

In the countries that actively pursue renewables, they take a good share of the energy mix. Germany went from 6% of renewable electricity (nearly all hydropower) in 1990 to 21% in 2011 and about 24% now, and from 3% of overall energy mix (including heating, fuels, etc., not just electricity) in 1990 to 12% now. And current rates of adoption is at least 2% per year for electricity and 1% for overall mix. That's a big deal. Most renewables have already worked themselves out to be competitive.