Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 01 May 2008 15:51:51 GMT | no comments
Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The World is Flat just wrote a very intelligent op-ed piece for the New York Times titled: ‘Dumb as We Wanna Be’. Here are some edited excerpts:
Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy – this is money laundering. The idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away.
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 01 May 2008 14:55:26 GMT | no comments
Yesterday, I shook the hand of the man whose company might just save the world.
He is Martin Roscheisen, CEO of NanoSolar. He alluded that they are producing solar panels at about $1 per watt with a complete system cost of $2 watt when installed in municipal scale of 1MW to 50MW. This is about the same cost as a coal-fired power plant!
Furthermore, their panels can be installed at the rate of 1MW per day, and need 5 acres per MW, which means a municipal sized system of 50MW can be installed in about two months. This contrasts with coal-fired plants that can take 4 years or more to build.
Drawbacks? Their German plant is producing only about 420 MW of solar capacity per year and their San Jose plant which will open in 2009 will produce about the same.
While this is very high by normal PV standards, it would help the world greatly if this went up by several orders of magnitude.
Just think – instead of building more coal plants we can start building clean solar power systems at about the same cost!
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Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:49:49 GMT | no comments
Wind power can now produce energy as cheaply as coal, about 5c per kilowatt hour (kWh). Solar power is almost to the point where it can produce energy at the marginal electrical rate of about 10c kWh. So with oil prices over $100 barrel, natural gas prices doubling, and all the concern about CO2 and other noxious emissions from coal plants, why aren’t more wind and solar projects being built?
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Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:18:39 GMT | no comments
Last night I attended a seminar put on by the Going Green! meetup group and the speaker was Craig Lewis who is VP Government Relations with GreenVolts. GreenVolt’s goal is to “deliver power to utility companies at fossil fuel costs”.
Craig talked a little about the GreenVolts product, which is a concentrating solar collector system with advanced tracking and is designed to be interconnected at the 12kv distribution level in sizes ranging from 1 to 20 mega-watts (MW). However, his main topic was “Accelerating the Transition to Smart Energy.” His conclusion was that to make alternative energy sources take off, the government needs to shift the subsidies paid to oil companies into long-term feed-in tariffs, i.e. requiring the electric companies to buy power at a set price for the next 10 to 15 years. This would allow alternative energy projects to have a guaranteed return and thus enable them to get long-term financing.
While Craig wouldn’t divulge the cost of their system, he did say it was about half of a typical flat-panel installation, so I am guessing that the cost is about $4 per watt, which would mean they could produce power at less than 9.5c per kilowatt, which is the rate they would be selling it to the utilities.
He also threw out some other interesting numbers:
- Their system requires 3 acres per MW or 100 MW per square mile, which is a higher power density than other systems
- Oil imports comprise more than half of the U.S. deficit
- Oil companies received about $17 billion last year in subsidies while solar industry only got $200 million.
Here are the complete notes:
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Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:38:48 GMT | 4 comments
How much would it cost to build a solar nation? Here are some interesting numbers:
The IEA estimates that it will take a worldwide investment of $5.4 trillion dollars in oil exploration and development in order to meet the demand for oil in 2030, if oil usage continues to grow at its current rate. Since the U.S. uses about 25% of the worlds oil, our cost would be about $1.35 trillion.
Scientific American estimates that if we provide less than a third of this amount as a subsidy – $420 billion – then we can build a solar collection, storage and distribution system that would provide 69% of America’s electricity and 35% of it’s total energy by 2050.
So, can anyone say that building a solar nation is too expensive?
Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:05:49 GMT | no comments
China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and a new study shows it growing much faster than expected.
Previously, experts put growth at 2.5% to 5% per year, but the real rate may be 11%, according to a new study. If this is the case, then between 2000 and 2010, the increase in China’s CO2 emissions will be more than 5 times greater than all the reductions that were expected under the Kyoto Protocol.
(From BusinessWeek, March 24, 2008)
Posted in Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:33:21 GMT | 4 comments
I was trying to explain to my wife how an air car worked, and with a smile on her face she said “So it farts as it moves forward?” Well maybe that sums it up nicely.
But do air cars really make sense? The information from the manufacturers seem like they are the solution to our energy crisis, and to everything else too [1]. But there are several fundamental problems with air cars.
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Posted in Electric Vehicles, Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:11:04 GMT | 1 comment
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific body that researches climate change for the United Nations (UN) and released their Fourth Assesment Report (AR4) in 2007. There are numerous experts participating in the IPCC, and a lot of good science is contained in these reports.
However, there is a big problem with the summary that is included with the IPCC report – the Summary For Policymakers (SPM). This summary is not written by the scientists themselves but by unnamed bureaucratic delegates from the participating countries. As such, they tend to oversimplify and bias the actual results contained in the full report.
So I found that the Independent Summary For Policymakers to be more balanced and representative of the actual report than the SPM itself. The ISPM was prepared by qualified experts, but who were not themselves IPCC chapter authors. The ISPM was subject to expert review and the reviewer’s responses are tabulated so there is a clear record to the extent that the reviewers agreed or disagreed with the ISPM.
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Posted in Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:32:09 GMT | 2 comments
I should ride my bike more. It is good exercise and saves the environment. However, I don’t like to ride my bike on everyday errands.
I was reminded of this today when I got new tires for our car. Like usual, I threw my bike in the back and rode home after dropping off the car. It isn’t far, about 2.5 miles, but I was hot and sweaty when I got home. I was smart this time and brought a piece of string to wrap around my pant leg. Usually I forget this and wind up getting chain oil on my pant leg.
When the car was ready, I rode back to the shop to pick it up, and I was a bit tired.
So it certainly worked out fine to ride my bike, but it isn’t something that I would normally do. Also, for the same reasons, I don’t think we can expect many Americans to forgo their cars and start doing a lot more bike riding either. Good thing I have my electric scooter to scoot around on!
Posted in Random Thoughts, Electric Vehicles, Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:53:19 GMT | no comments
I have been reticent to publicly state my beliefs about global warming for a few reasons. One is that some of my friends are global warming believers and I don’t want to offend them. Another is that the global warming movement has gained so much momentum that it has becoming a core-belief of our society and to speak against it often makes a person seem crazy.
But the time has come for me to state my beliefs, and here they are:
- Many parts of the world are experiencing rising temperatures or other climate changes
- Man’s activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
- This increased CO2 is contributing in part to climate changes
- The effects from man’s contribution to climate change will not be as bad as many claim
On the other hand, I do believe that peak oil is going to be a gigantically huge problem and will be a major inflection point in the development and lifestyle of all civilization on this planet.
Conveniently, the actions to reduce CO2 are almost exactly the same ones that will help with peak oil. So I don’t mind riding the global warming train for now since it leads to the same place eventually!
Posted in Global Warming