Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:32:28 GMT | 1 comment
A new report from Rice University confirms what I have been saying for a long time – electric vehicles (EVs) are the best way to reduce America’s oil dependency.
The report found that if only 30% of vehicles are electrified by 2050, oil usage would be reduced by 2.5 million barrels a day and carbon emissions cut by 7% – even if the electric generation mix remains the same as today. They also found that a carbon tax of $30 a ton would actually increase US dependence on foreign natural gas!
So even if our government is not able to get its act together and institute a comprehensive renewable energy policy, the widespread adoption of EVs will do the job anyways.
(Source: AllCarsElectric.com)
Posted in Electric Vehicles, Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:25:59 GMT | 8 comments
There is more evidence coming out that some of the catastrophic claims put forth by global warming advocates and the IPCC do not have a lot of scientific basis.
The Globe and Mail just published ‘The great global warming collapse’ by Margaret Wente that posits: “as the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.”
Walter Russell Mead agrees that “the global warming movement as we have known it is dead.”
Regarding the IPCC claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035, Wente states that “the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it.”
Wente describes Climategate as “a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties.”
Wente continues:
“Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming . . . but the sole source for that claim . . . was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article ‘a mess.’”
“None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.
“By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe.”
Unfortunately, I have to agree with her conclusion.
Posted in Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:03:36 GMT | no comments
I just went to an interesting talk about distributed solar and found out that prices of solar PV panels are dropping dramatically. Soon, PV will be about $4 per watt installed (in large installations) which works out to about $0.17 per kWh.
By comparison, coal-fired electricity sells for about $0.05 per kWh. This includes about $0.02 for the coal itself ($2.15 per MMBtu and 1 MMBTU produces about 100 kWh) and $0.03 for all other expenses.
Adding in a $30 per ton CO2 tax would add about $0.03 per kWh to this price, (coal produces about 2 lbs of CO2 per kWh) for a total of $0.08 per kWh.
So even with a CO2 tax, coal electricity will still be half the cost of PV.
Therefore, for coal electricity to cost about the same as PV electricity, a tax of 400% would need to be added to coal!
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainable Energy
Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:54:16 GMT | 2 comments
While looking for the external costs of coal, I ran into a great table that shows how much it costs to build and run various types of electric power plants.
It is interesting to note that while a convention coal plant costs much less to build than a solar thermal plant, the coal plant costs more to maintain so over 30 years, the total costs would be equal.
Table 1: Specification of electric power technologies used in GMM model. All costs are
given in $(1998). The progress ratio (pr) is the rate at which the cost declines each time the cumulative production doubles. The data presented in the table comes from various sources: IIASA MESSAGE model database, literature reviews. Characteristics of technologies with CO2 removal are adopted from [8].
(Reference: Internalisation of external cost in the power generation
sector)
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainable Energy
Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:20:21 GMT | 4 comments
Natural Capitalism is a terrific book. But it got one thing wrong – its hope for hydrogen cars. Dan Neil at the LA Times put it well: "Any way you look at it, hydrogen is a lousy way to move cars." (Ref) Here are a few of the reasons why hydrogen won’t work:
- Hydrogen is only an energy carrier. It is not an energy source. (Ref)
- Hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. And this will likely be the case for the next several decades. (Ref)
- Hydrogen production produces CO2. (Ref) For instance, the Honda FCX Clarity hydrogen car indirectly produces 176g CO2/mile while the Toyota Prius hybrid produces less CO2 at 167g CO2/mile. (Ref)
- Hydrogen cars are very expensive. The FCX Clarity costs several hundred thousand dollars and it will take many years to even drop below $100,000. (Ref)
- Hydrogen leaks. A hydrogen car left in an airport parking lot for two week could lose 50% of its hydrogen. (Ref )
- Hydrogen isn’t very efficient. (Ref) Only 20% to 25% of the energy needed to make hydrogen can be recovered. (Ref) Even using renewable energy, battery powered vehicles can still go 3-times further on the same electricity than hydrogen vehicles. (Ref)
- Hydrogen cars fill up slowly. It currently it takes about 30 minutes to fill up a hydrogen tank. (Ref)
In the long-term, maybe the challenges with hydrogen cars will be solved. However, it is also likely that the few remaining problems with battery powered vehicles will be solved too. Physics will then remain firmly on the side of battery powered vehicles and it will be easier and more efficient to just transfer renewable electricity over power lines to charge battery vehicles than to convert the electricity to hydrogen, ship it, and convert it back into electricity again.
Posted in Electric Vehicles, Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:21:55 GMT | 4 comments
In the late thirteenth century, the church came up with the idea of indulgences, which was paying someone else to do the good works demanded of you. Church officials argued that clergy were doing more good works then they needed to, so why not sell them to raise money?
Are carbon offsets like these medieval indulgences? Just reducing our guilt without really helping the planet? Let’s look a little more closely at them.
Read more...
Posted in Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:25:41 GMT | no comments
Here is an interesting article written by Michael W. Foley, a former professor in the social sciences, that looks at various examples around the world where there was social breakdown, what the factors led to ensuing violence, and how the US might react given a similar crisis situation:
Coming Chaos? Maybe Not
He found that while there were many cases where economic and ecological collapse led to violence, there were also many cases where it didn’t. The major determining factors were:
- Political motivation
- Police
- Leadership
- Community
His conclusion is that prospects for violence in the US following a “hard landing” are very small, except in some isolated locations where police and community support break down.
Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil
Posted by Max Dunn
Sun, 18 Jan 2009 06:45:00 GMT | no comments
On January 16th, the Long Now Foundation sponsored a very interesting talk at Fort Mason by Saul Griffith entitled “Climate Change Recalculated”.
Saul first went through a calculation of his energy usage. However, he did it in a different way – instead of using energy (kilo-watt-hours or kWh) he used continuous power expended (kilo-watts or kW) because this made it easier to add up and compare.
After adding up all his plane trips, driving, food, energy usage and embodied energy in the stuff he buys (which accounts for 1/4 of his energy use), he calculated that he used 18kW. By comparison, a person in Qatar uses 27kW but the average person in the US uses 11kW and the global average is 2.2kW. So he uses a lot more than the average American and way more than the global average. So he decided to shoot for 2.2kW and see how he would have to change his life.
First, he would be able to fly to the East Coast only once per year, and fly to Australia only once every 5 years. He would need to have a car that got 100 MPG, and then could only drive 20 miles per day. He could eat meat only once a week and would need to buy 1/10 of the stuff he does now and make it last 10 times longer. He isn’t quite there yet but has cut down on his travel and the stuff he buys and now is using only 12kW. Interestingly, this has also increased his quality of life. For instance, he isn’t traveling as much so is spending more time with his family.
Next he talked about climate change and what would be necessary to hold CO2 to 450 ppm. Humanity currently uses 16TW (tera-watts or 10^12 watts or a million-million watts) and in order to hold the CO2 limit, we can only burn 3TW of fossil fuels. Since 1.5TW already comes from renewable resources we would need an additional 11.5TW from new renewable sources. To meet this, we would need to produce 2TW of power each year for the next 25 years (not sure how he got this from the 11.5TW figure?), and this would require installing:
- Photovoltaic: 100 m2 per second
- Solar thermal: 50 m2 per second
- Wind: one every 5 or 6 seconds
- Nuclear: one new plant every 3 weeks
This is a lot! However, if GM and Ford stopped making cars and started making just wind turbines, they could meet the goal of creating a wind turbine every 5 seconds.
Summary: We need to reduce the power we all use – which we can do but is not easy. We also need to dramatically increase the amount of renewable power production – which we can do but it won’t be easy.
(For more details, see Climate Change Recalculated)
The next by the Long Now Foundation is Social Collapse Best Practices on February 13th and features Dmitry Orlov who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and how it survived and applies these insights into how the US might not be able to cope as well with a similar collapse. Should be interesting too!
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainable Energy
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:46:24 GMT | no comments
With all the talk about global warming, we sometimes forget that man is damaging the planet in far worse ways. Take for instance, polar bears. They have become a cover issue for global warming and are prominent in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. One study found a decline of 15 bears per year in the western coast of Hudson Bay and there was a sighting of 4 drowned bears after an abrupt windstorm. Both of these have been attributed to global warming.
However, in Baffin Bay the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board will allow 105 bears to be killed this year, even though biologist feel that the quota should be 64 or less to avoid overhunting.
Whatever the number, whether 64 or 105, it is obvious that man is responsible for directly killing more polar bears than are harmed by global warming.
Posted in Global Warming
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:42:20 GMT | 1 comment
I have always thought that LED bulbs should provide the best energy efficiency and lowest lifetime cost of any bulb. However, looking into this more, I am not so sure.
An
article on Salon by
Ask Pablo (who happens to be a graduate of the
Presidio School of Management) showed this comparison:
| Bulb |
Cost |
Output |
Power |
Efficiency |
Lifetime Bulb Cost |
Lifetime Power Cost |
Lifetime Total Cost |
| CFL |
$7 |
500 lumens |
10 watts |
50 lumens/watt |
$35 |
$55 |
$90 |
| LED |
$60 |
500 lumens |
7 watts |
71 lumens/watt |
$60 |
$38 |
$98 |
(Note: Lifetime is 50,000 hours, and I used an electricity cost of $0.11/kWh)
Even though LED bulbs are much more expensive than CFLs (compact fluorescent), they are also about 40% more efficient, so adding in lifetime electricity costs their total cost would be about the same.
However, there is a catch. If an LED bulb is used 4 hours per day, it would last almost 35 years – and what is the chance that over those 35 years the LED bulb gets broken or there is a power surge that damages it? Probably pretty good! So assuming that LED bulbs actually last on average only 10 years, this would make them twice as expensive as CFLs.
So until the cost of LED bulbs come down quite a bit, CFLs will still be the better buy.
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainable Energy