Is saving energy really helping anything?

Yup. There's a lot going on in the Solar, Wind, and Ocean sectors of the energy market. Good stuff will continue to happen. Wind and solar are growing by upwards of 30% annually. The traditional sectors are more like 1-2%/yr. The real problem with stationary energy generation is that you have to be able to supply base load. Right now there aren't renewables that can do that on a large scale AND be cost competetive with fossil/nukes. Until a cost effective and reliable way of storing excess renewable energy is developed these sources are going to be supplemental. Solar is a really useful "peeking" source because it's readily available when it's needed most... on hot, sunny days. Currently, natural gas fired plants are the most common "peeking" power plants because they can throttle their output, whereas coal and nuke plants can't. That's why coal and nuke are used for base load.

As for oil... Global oil consumption is expected to rise again this year to about 85 million barrels (42 US gals) per day. An increase of something like 1.5 ma bbl/day over the past amount. I sure that in the short term that production will be able to keep up but oil production has as much to do with geo politics as physics so who knows. All of the oil "crises" in the past have been of a politcal nature. It'll be interesting to see when they are of a physical nature. When that happens the price of oil will skyrocket since global production will have peaked.

What's counted in the global reserves is tricky at best. The middle east oil barrons guard their reserve estimates very closely so no one really knows what's going on over there. The Kuwaitis recently addmitted that their Burgan oil field, the second largest oil field in the world, has peaked... about 15 years AHEAD of schedule. There are some folks who suspect that the Saudis can't increase their production in any meaningful way (they're already injecting a lot of water into their fields to produce more oil... a standard practice but one that suggests that their fields are maturing). Also, the quality of the Saudi oil is changing to heavier varieties of oil. I don't think that the Canadian tar sands or the US oil shale has been included in those reserves. We (US) have appearently VAST amounts of hydrocarbons locked up in the oil shales. The catch is that the oil shales represent underdeveloped oil. They contain a compound called kerogen which is a precursor to oil and natural gas. The catch is that to create oil and NG from kerogen you've gotta heating up, cooking the hydrocarbons and causing new reactions to take place thereby creating oil and NG. The same basic approach is required of the tar sands. The problem is that these processes require HUGE amounts of energy to be expended to transform the kerogen, or bitumen in the case of the tar sands, into usable oil. That energy is likely to come from ole King Coal (he a'int a merry old soul, the bugger) because it's cheap and often located near the oil shale or tar sands. Thus the amount of CO2 and other pollutants associated with a gallon of gasoline will jump up quite a bit. Not good. Shell claims that they have an in situ process for producing oil for oil shale that is competitive with $30/barrel oil. They have a couple of test facilities here in Colorado and possibly Wyoming (those two states have the majority of the economic deposits of oil shale in the US). I saw a blurb on Green Car Congress about lease applications flooding into the BLM for oil shale developement.

As much as I hate to say it I think that our best short term solution is PBR Nuclear power plants. Nuke will never be long term because it's still non-renewable but it would go the farthest to buy us the time to develope something else and completely rethink the way that the grid is structured. I really like the idea of the WWW approach (ie a completely distributed grid instead of a couple of massive power plants feeding everyone else). It's gonna take time to implement though.

And that is my $0.02 (adjusted for inflation, those are 2005 dollars )

 

There's a song that includes the verse:

"I believe my Savior is coming in all haste,
and anything we haven't used will then have gone to waste."

I don't subscribe to that philosophy, but I fear the morons running our country do. I just hope the bubble doesn't burst in my lifetime. I give it a 50-50 chance, depending on whether or not the doctors can figure out what's causing my arrythmia and fix it. If they can't, my chances are pretty good of not being around for the next big economic crash.

 

Nope, just an interested citizen.

Propane is the by-product of natural gas and oil refining. As such there aren't really propane reserves because it's tied to the reserves of those other commodities. For more info check out this link

Dams acutally have storage... the water behind the dam. With solar and wind there are approaches and hydrogen is one way. Compressed air is another as well as flywheels.

The current problem with hydrogen is that electrolysis (the splitting water part) takes a lot of energy. Then, once you've got hydrogen you've gotta store it. Right now there are only two practical methods: liquification and compression. Both require a fair amount of energy to accomplish. Many folks have argued that its better to just use the electricity directly instead of lossing half of it to the various inefficiencies.

This all translates into inflating the cost of the electricity produced. That's the whole problem. The conventional methods are so cheap (granted they are also subsidized so we're hardly talking about a free market... but that's another issue altogether). Until the hydrogen storage issues are solved... and they will be, solar and wind are going to be supplemental sources of energy.

I think that if we can just get solar cheap enough that we'll be able to use it at the home level and not worry about intricate storage solutions. I'd love to have a solar array that feed energy into a flywheel that could then charge my plug-in hybrid quickly. The technology is there to make that happen today... but you'd have to be rich. That'll change. There's a lot of stuff going on in the nanotechnology sector that's going to revolutionize a wide variety of fields.

Terrawatts

 

There's all kinds of caveats to alternative power methods... Solar power is something insane like only 15% efficient and would take a land mass the size of Alaska to power a large metropolitan city, wind power has issues with bird migrations flying into them.

The sad reality is that we will probably be dependant upon fossil fuel for at least another 40 years. Open up drilling in ANWR to reduce our foreign dependancy and push funding into hybrid and alternate solid or liquid fuel source development.

 

Actually, that's WAY off. Using current technology we could power this entire country using an area of land that was 102 miles on a side... of course that would only be during the day. There are enough class 3 wind areas on the planet (on land too, not in the middle of the ocean) to supply 72 Terrawatts of power. Current global consumption is about 3-4 Terrawatts.

ANWAR would help but is largely a useless gesture. First, it would be 10 years before we see a drop of oil. Second, the 50% case has peak oil at 887,000 barrels/day. While that's something it's really not much. It will barely keep the US at it's current produciton levels. Remember, US oil production peaked 35 years ago. It's all downhill for us from there.

We would be FAR more good by having much more efficient vehicles and cities.

 

Solar only produces during the day. That means it can only supply half our non-transportation energy needs. The word "only" is a joke here. Half our non-transportation energy needs is a humungous amount of energy and would take an enormous bite out of our import requirements.

Wind has analogous limitations, but similarly enormous potential.

The solution is not going to be any one technology. It's going to be a mix of technologies, some of which will provide very small amounts of energy in specialized applications or where they happen to be available, and others of which will be larger.

Example: in North Dakota the peak energy demand is during blizzards. Wind therefore becomes the ideal solution for peak-shaving. Wind is ALWAYS available when peak energy is required in N.D.

With creative thinking, we have the technology NOW to end the importation of oil and eliminate the need to drill in sensitive areas.

All we have to do is dump the crooked politicians who are tied by their own business interests or by corruption to fossil fuels and the people who profit from them.

Back to N.D.: The biggest impediment to wind power in N.D. is that the coal companies own the power distribution grid and will not allow wind power onto their grid. Other states have passed laws requiring the power companies to buy excess wind energy. But in N.D. the coal companies have paid off the legislators to block similar legislation. So the problem is political, not technological. Similar market distortions exist on the national level due to subsidies for established industries and laws favoring them.

 

Surely you're missing the point, probably man's ingenuity will keep sufficient energy flowing in some form or other to satisfy demand, the cost will rise but that's to be expected. It's not the cost or availability of energy that's the problem, it's the by-products of it's use that's buggering our planet. Global warming is insideous and it's effects will make themselves felt for generation (that's if we manage to limit carbon emmisions from now). The Prius is primarily designed to limit emmisions, excellent fuel consumption id a happy by-product of that. In the UK we pay annual car tax based on emmissions and the Prius at 104 grams is one of the cheapest cars. (Petrol prices have reduced dramatically from the peaks around the time of Katrina and now are an average of 87p / Litre, about £3.96 / Imp gallon in the UK so the Prius is a great economical car)

I've heard President Bush's arguments against Kyoto but a start has to be made, no matter how imperfect the method, efficiency improvements/ refinements can be introduced after. You may have a few more years of comfortable living without too many penalties to either private citizen or industry but climate change will get you in the end and in the meanwhile the rest of the world's resovoir of goodwill towards the USA will keep on sliding. As the undoubted lead nation of the western world we look to leadership from you not reticence when it may prove less convenient for you in the short term.

 

Unfortunately, you're preaching to the choir. The problem on this side fo the pond (at least in the states) is that there's no federal leadership on this issue. There are several states that are moving forward with their own initiatives. Right now the count stands at about 20 that have mandated that some amount of their electricity come from renewables. The two most agressive states, California and New York, have Republican Governors who have been very engaged in the renewables push. The real problem is the abundance of cheap fossil fuels available in the US (and they're cheap because the externalities aren't included in the cost and there are significant subsidies in place). There's a lot of money involved and short sighted greed has been a real hinderance to both conservation efforts and replacement technologies.

 

You cannot "save" energy. You can conserve, use less and be more efficient. Regardless of source, conservation is always more cost effective. Cost deferred is cheaper than constantly "going and getting more".

Buildings (schools, business, offices, churches) must be climate appropriate (geography, latitude, heating and cooling degree days, oriented for solar heating and light). Every roof should have photovoltaic panels - to contribute to the grid when an individual building has a "surplus." Even at low efficiencies, renewables are cost effective in net metering states - we must think and act long-term, not short-term.

Lloyds' of London (400 years in business), fully realizes that money is made by NOT paying a claim, rather than collecting a premium, then paying later on a loss. No premium is collected for investment or coverage elsewhere, but then no loss is incurred.

In energy, it is always more cost effective to hold onto what you already have vs. "go get more." We are still suffering from the unlimited energy promises of the 1950s where energy was supposed to be "too cheap to meter." There is always a cost, and paying up front (conservation) is always more cost effective.

 

There's no doubt that there's a lot going on in this sector. Whoever's first to come up with a viable product is gonna make a lot of money. Nanotechnology is what's gonna make a breakthrough possible almost assuredly.

 

You make it sound like the problem is solved. None of this is anywhere near producing anything practical. Maybe in a decade, or two, or three...

I suspect that viable electric cars are closer to reality than practical hydrogen storage.

Maybe something like a hydrogen Prius-Plus, with 50 miles of battery and 50 miles of hydrogen for a 100-mile range. On the other hand, the LiIon tzero went from L.A. to Las Vegas on a charge!

Stuart: How am I missing the point when I advocate renewables like wind and solar that do not involve carbon? I am agreeing with you that we need to get away from carbon-based energy.

I used to say that in North Dakota we're in favor of global warming. But nobody got the joke. Sigh!

 

That's the effect. The rotation of the earth causes that.

My guess is that the number is 0. If it'll make a buck then it'll get produced.

 

No one has mentioned "Peak Oil" yet. The concept that we have gone through half of the world reserves of oil and has peaked. From this point forward this concept basically says we are on the declining slope of the bell curve of producing basic oil.

For more on Peak oil see this link:

Peak Oil

While the name of the web site seems off the wall, when you get into it the information is pretty dog gone believable.

I also have heard gas prices will be going up in the Spring of 2006 because no maintenance has been done on the refineries due to Hurricane Katrina. They merely postponed normal maintenance activity. When those refineries start to go down I have read the price of gas will again go past the $3.00 level. We will see.

I also have heard if everyone had a hybrid there would be no need to import oil from other countries. Not sure if I believe that. But if that is true then we certainly would be doing something constructive with our hybrid vehicles.

 

That's absolutely the point Three60. Conserving what we have is far more important that finding more energy sources. All of the existing alternative energy sources have their limitations and don't come even close to replacing fossil fuel so they can help but this idea that we'll somehow find a new source is wishful thinking. It's nice to have that kind of faith in science but if we don't find it, we'll be SOL sooner rather than later if we don't conserve what we have. Tripp's point is very important too. This country needs the leadership to get us to conserve. Of course, Jimmy Carter, who was way ahead of his time in this area got voted out of office because everyone wanted to keep on consuming and didn't want to bother with conserving.

 

Windstrings: now you've drifted off into fantasy.

Tesla never harvested any free energy. Crackpots have been "inventing" so-called perpetual motion machines for ages. All they work for is to con stupid people into handing over their money.

The Earth's magnetic field has nothing whatsoever to do with the coriolis effect, and the coriolis effect has nothing to do with why the water swirls in the toilet bowl.

Water swirls in the bowl because U.S. toilets are designed to swirl: the water enters at an angle. The toilets commonly used in Europe do not swirl because the water enters straight. (I lived there for a year and a half!)

Storage is NOT the "major" obstacle to a hydrogen economy. It is only one of several. A bigger obstacle is how are you going to produce it? If you produce it from fossil fuels, all you've accomplished is moving the pollution from the car to the production facility. Another obstacle is the astronomical price of fuel cells. If we had storage today, nobody but Bill Gates could afford to buy a fuel cell car.

Finally, NO, we cannot harvest the Earth's rotating magnetic field, because we are rotating along with it by sitting on the surface of the Earth. The field is NOT moving with respect to us or any machine that could conceivably harvest it, And BTW it is incredibly weak.

I am afraid the only true statement in your post was that you are definitely not versed in any of this.

Tesla was a genius. The people who've made a cult figure out of him are morons and lunatics who don't know the difference between work and power.

Maybe we need a separate forum for make-believe. It could be called the "WHAT IF CHEESE COULD FLY?" forum. People could speculate about solving the world's problems by electing Bilbo Baggins president or sending all the earth's pollution into a wormhole.