back to article Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

      1. Naughtyhorse

        without driving up construction costs...

        We probably can't

        But really there are no other options.

        You need to do something radical, like for eg. abandoning the market (Gasps from onlookers, ladies fainting and all) It really hasn't worked for energy, and we have given it 25 years or so and a few restarts when it turned out that 'trading types' turned out, by and large to be sociopathic crooks (who'd have thought).

        To build a nuke you need to be able to flog the resulting nimble amps for an agreed price _for the productive life of the station_ thats why edf needed to be given extra time in the comfy chair and blowjobs all round to build hinkley, and walked away from sizewell. with a bogus market in place, such price guarantees are meaningless.

        The real killer for us in the UK is the way the regulator is letting the renewable gravy train runaway at full speed!

        Just you wait until you see what they have planned next... actually you probably wont see it, as the lights going out is going to be a far more frequent occurrence than even your average Nigerian is used to.

        We are chucking billions at this non solution, basically softening the fall for all the developers that suffered a hard landing when their plans to cover every flood plain in the land with houses met the economic meltdown caused (in no small measure) by flogging dodgy mortgages to idiots seeking to buy jerry built houses on flood plains.

        The one upside is that I'll almost certainly be gone by the time the shit really hit's the fan, so file under 'someone else's problem' :-)

      2. Basic

        Re: Hairshirt, Sackcloth and Ashes

        "the costs to building a single plant are huge"... So is the cost of pointless wind farms and the sheer volume of resources wasted on renewables which have no realistic chance of even breaking even!

    1. HelpfulJohn

      Re: Hairshirt, Sackcloth and Ashes

      "I suggest we think about disposing of any waste in a subduction zone. It will be millions of years before that could surface and by that time will be bound in magma and greatly diluted beyond background radiation levels.."

      We tried that with an oil rig or something. Greenpiss had kittens, conniptions and temper tantrums like two-year-olds with their lollipops stolen. Not one of the tree-huggers could grasp the simple idea of "buried = gone forever".

      Next to the otherwise completely useless dump of Venus, which I'll admit would take some engineering to use but which would provide an off-world industrial base as a spin-off, subduction zones are about the best places to store all of those unwanted bombs, decaying ammunitions, WWI tyres and clothing, bio-weapons, chemical weapons and other trash but convincing the greenies of their safety is impossible. They are even green as they recycle the atoms, the minerals and metals that would be the constituents of the rubbish but greenies will never understand this.

      It's a religious thing. They see potential harm to bunnies and seal cubs and their blinkers slam down like hammers.

      And as greenies are fodder for politicians seeking election or power or whatever sense and utility is trumped by religious nuttery every time.

  1. Eric Olson

    I've heard this somewhere before...

    Granted, the details might have been different, but the structure is the same. Week after week, someone somewhere makes a proclamation, and because they have a couple letters after their name or a tangential relationship to the field they are prognosticating, those predictions are followed by stories from both sides about how this supports them or refutes the other.

    Here is a passage from the linked article that seems to describe why Google pulled the plug:

    For us, designing and building novel energy systems was hard but rewarding work. By 2011, however, it was clear that [the project] would not be able to deliver a technology that could compete economically with coal, and Google officially ended the initiative and shut down the related internal R&D projects.

    In short, the plug was pulled because current technology did not allow Google to monetize the project. Crucially, they made assumptions that things such as carbon taxes or subsidies would not be used and it would require a true level of parity on a kWh basis. The rest of the article also goes on to point out that we're already screwed because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for a long time, so even a complete ceasing of carbon emissions tomorrow would still likely lead to ruinous climate change.

    Also glossed over is the that the researchers talked about the importance of shifting R&D from existing technologies to disruptive or experimental ideas. It's the only way we can meet the world's escalating needs.

    I'm all for repeated looks at the economics, "doing the maths", and serious discussion regarding our energy economy in the future. But we can't take our eye off the ball for the sake of short-term point-scoring; we are going to need alternative sources of energy. Coal isn't just a CO2 threat; it harms human health through soot, mercury, sulfur, and NOX emissions, and the mining of it has massive costs in terms of human lives (even in the US, permanent injury and death are very common) and destroys the environment.

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Velv
    Boffin

    Necessity is the mother of invention. We will need to reduce energy consumption and we will need to find cleaner ways to make energy.

    To take a steer from Douglas Adams: "fruit and berries on strange planets either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at which to start toying with them is when you're going to die if you don't."

    And in the grand scheme of things, we're closer to death than you can possibly imagine.

    1. phil dude
      Thumb Up

      Bill Bryson...

      "A short history of nearly everything".

      "How much notice will we get if an asteroid hits the Earth?"

      "None".

      P.

  4. John Savard

    A Ray of Sunlight

    I am so happy to read an article that tells us the truth about what we have to do to allow civilization to continue and avoid a serious disaster. This truth has been mentioned a few times before, but sadly there is still no constituency for it - one has the fossil fuels business as usual camp, and one has the green camp that is dead set against fission, between which we are headed for serious problems.

    It used to be we could count on a certain level of intelligence from politicians, and necessary but unpalatable measures would have bipartisan support. Now, it seems the only thing that gets bipartisan support are excessive expansions of copyright.

  5. Psyx

    Same drum, same drummer.

    "The Piper Alpha gas rig explosion of 1988 on its own caused three times as many deaths as the nuclear power industry has in its entire history. Bizarrely though, no nations ceased using gas."

    There are plenty of good arguments for nuclear energy, but that's not one of them.

    We can make more humans. We can't make more land to replace Chernobyl.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Same drum, same drummer.

      "We can make more humans. We can't make more land to replace Chernobyl."

      I guess land reclamation and bulldozing are myths, then? Besides, what if the plant's in the middle of nowhere?

  6. ToddR

    Thorium Flouride reactors were developed in the fifties, but didn't go mainstream as they don't make Plutonium.

    As regards not being ideal ,that would because dumbo politicians need a quick fix, aka Areva, (except they can't build and commission a PWR in less than 20 years.

    Thorium salt reactors would be a great tech for the UK to specialise in, IMHO :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      One problem is that Thorium reactors can still produce fissile Uranium in small quantities. But given enough desperation...

      1. cray74

        "One problem is that Thorium reactors can still produce fissile Uranium in small quantities. But given enough desperation..."

        No, so-called thorium reactors MUST produce uranium or they don't run. Thorium isn't a nuclear fuel - it doesn't make energy in a nuclear reactor. Rather, thorium is a fertile material that can be bred into uranium (uranium isotope 233), which is the nuclear fuel for the reactor.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

        I mean, the thorium fuel cycle is great, but it isn't perfect. It's worth taking a minute to learn its drawbacks so you don't oversell it.

        You can design thorium-fed reactors that make it very awkward to extract usable uranium, but that's hardly a problem to someone in possession of the reactor. By the time someone's operating a nuclear reactor on their home turf, they're usually able to get the fuel you want no matter how you think you've hindered that. Look at how India pulled a fast one on Canada after getting a CANDU reactor.

  7. Stevie

    Bah!

    Translation: Windmills won't power the Google Server Farm.

    Maybe the elephant in the room is that we need less internet capacity sucking up all the megawatts?

    Or perhaps we need to relocate the server farms somewhere it is cold all year round, making more passive A/C possible? Somewhere where the energy *can* be found from, if not renewable sources, clean ones. Somewhere that desperately needs the income this would generate.

    Like maybe Iceland? Cold, broke and sitting on top of the world's most reliable geothermal sources.

    Barges in hot, humid SF or NYC don't really cut it in comparison.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Bah!

      Maybe that's because the elephant's really a frozen mammoth?

      Let me put it like this. How would the world be able to produce over 1 yottawatt of sustainable power per year without any more significant energy outlay to build and transport it in the process? Even if you put the server farms in blankin' Antarctica it probably wouldn't be enough. And the alternative too all this information flow is to go back to using dead trees...

      As for using Iceland, I think it's already tapped out by aluminium plants and other things that have no other way to run except electricity (electricity is the only practical way to extract aluminium, so they're always built near power plants).

    2. Psyx

      Re: Bah!

      "Or perhaps we need to relocate the server farms somewhere it is cold all year round, making more passive A/C possible? "

      I believe Google are also doing that.

      They also use propriety kit which reduces energy consumption. They tell us that this is done because they care. (but obviously not enough to let everyone else use the same kit!)

      "Maybe the elephant in the room is that we need less internet capacity sucking up all the megawatts?"

      Apparently Google searches use a crap-load of energy.

      So too does bitcoin mining.

      I read something the other day that said 5% of our energy consumption is spent crushing and grinding up rocks. I'd be interested to know if that's true.

  8. b166er

    A home fitted with solar PV and a ground source heat pump, would surely require very little in the way of fossil fuels, if any at all. And that's achievable right now.

    Regarding the cost, it's a simple supply and demand argument. When plasma TVs first launched, they were around £4000 each. Driven by market demand, this fell to £400 pretty quickly.

    If ground source heat pumps and PV roofs were mandated on all new build, the price of installing it would plummet and therefore be more accessible to retro-fitting for owners of older properties.

    So if each domestic property was self sufficient (including charging cars, at least for the daily commute), then attention needs to turn to industrial processes. Again, if the large sheds that businesses live in were covered in PV, a large amount of energy requirement would be removed. Converting industrial waste into energy is already being done by various companies, I believe Sainsbury's have a store powered entirely by food waste. There are a good few countries that have close to 100% renewable electricity generation through geothermal or hydroelectric.

    I'm far from being an expert, but these things I can see with my own eyes, so I refuse to believe it's not going to be possible.

    I'm sure saying this will probably prove unpopular.

    1. Charles 9

      Don't think in terms of operating costs. Think in terms of manufacturing costs, and by that I mean the entire manufacturing process: from mining the rare earths and other difficult-to-extract minerals needed for the devices to function to all the complicated and energy-intensive processes needed to actually extract them from the ores to the costs needed to operate the delicate machinery to apply these materials into your panels and such.

      Remember, with infrastructure like this, there are always two costs: upfront costs and upkeep costs. A low upkeep cost doesn't always justify a monstrous upfront cost.

    2. Charles 9

      "Regarding the cost, it's a simple supply and demand argument. When plasma TVs first launched, they were around £4000 each. Driven by market demand, this fell to £400 pretty quickly."

      BTW, plasma TV prices didn't really fall because of demand but because they fell out of fashion. Plasma TVs were hot for a time, but they had a couple issues: burn-in problems and issues with service life. LCD TVs caught up with plasma due to economies of scale (helped by their use in multiple industries) and basically out-perked plasma (LCD TVs weren't as prone to burn-in and had comparable if not better service lives). So plasma didn't drop due to demand but due to lack of it. Lack of demand and/or a supply surplus can both drag the equilibrium price lower.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So you are saying that the house shuts down at night, unless you have some way of making the PV array work in the dark (maybe something like the Spanish did with lights except there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine).

      There is also the problem that, to be efficient the PV array should be facing south, facing north does not generate very much power.

      1. squigbobble

        "solar storage"

        Google it. Pretty expensive, though :/

    4. Salts

      @b166er

      When I was a young lad, the BBC had a program called house of the future, loved it, at the age of 11 ish started my love of renewable and such, but as I got older realized, to me at least nuclear is the only sensible option.

      The cost of a drilling rig alone makes ground source without significant subsidy not worthwhile, there are many things as an individual we can do that 'benefit the individual' but for the human race as a whole, nuclear, is the only option that makes economical sense, 40 years of looking at it, that is me :-)

      Side note:

      Dropping a nuclear bomb or two on Japan, was criminal, but it also hurt the good that it could achieve.

      PS why criminal, because testing weapons on civilians is criminal, well if not it should be :-(

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @b166er @Salts

        Please stop the mistaken attempts at legal/ethical interpretations of any of the World Wars. Your brainwashing is showing.

        We did not "test" nuclear weapons in Japan, we lit "Trinity" off at Alamagordo, New Mexico.

        The government knew full well what those bombs would do.

        Sadly, dropping those two bombs in Japan likely saved more people than were killed because the Japanese people were considering mass suicide rather than surrender or capture.

        Conventional warfare would have resulted in many more deaths over a longer period.

        The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only beneficial in that knowing what would happen if more were used, has prevented anyone from using Nuclear weapons again.

      2. ilmari

        Re: @b166er

        Buying a drilling rig to just make one hole is very silly.

        As someone living in the Nordics, where groubd source heatpumpd are now withib top-3 modt popular heat source for new or newly renovated houses, i csn tell you the hole doesnt cost that much.

        Roughly speaking, changing to gshp is a 15kE investment, of which roughly 5k goes to the dude that comes over and parks drilling rig in your yard and naps for 2days as the machine works away.

        Oil heating running costs on the order of 3-5kE annually, electric even more.

        Wood fired central heating needs something on the order of 3-5ha of forest for comfort, and 2-4 weeks of work put into it, to harvest and process the "free" fuel.

        Rules of thumb for renovations or new houses: 100cm of rock wool above and below, same or atleast 60cm on walls. Forced air ventilation with heat exchanger (or even a heat pump), and underfloor heating. Underfloor heating allows system temperature to be kept at around 40C instead of 60-80C as with radiators. Lower system temperature boosts overall efficiency considerably.

      3. JeffyPoooh
        Pint

        Re: @b166er

        Salts: "The cost of a drilling rig alone makes ground source without significant subsidy not worthwhile..."

        Huh?

        Around here, in the glorious suburban sprawl, everyone has a drilled well for water. Our drilled well is over 300 feet deep. Neighbours are mostly in the 200 foot range. Solid bedrock all the way, with occasional cracks where water pours in. It's so much per foot. Write a cheque. Not a big deal compared to building lot and building an entire house. Not a big deal, but it could add up if you need four holes!

        For heat, one over-ambitious neighbour opted for a lake sourced heat pump. $30,000+ at 20 years ago!!, plus a machine room for the gear. Payback period, both fiscally and embodied resources, is about three lifetimes ...of the Universe. Not to mention his system needs more power than my 10kw baseboard heaters. Bad decision.

        If you're trying to save money or save the planet, then investing a fortune and the associated embodied resources, is a very bad first step. Blame innumeracy.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @b166er

        God, what happened to Tomorrow's World ? I fucking loved that. Bring back Tomorrow's World.

    5. cray74

      "There are a good few countries that have close to 100% renewable electricity generation through geothermal or hydroelectric"

      And they're mostly small countries (under 10 million people). The sum of Iceland's vaunted hydro- and geothermal sources (2.2GW) is less than a major power plant in Europe, Asia, or the Americas. For that matter, it doesn't even rate on the top 10 list of geothermal developments, and the total output of its dams is smaller than dozens of the largest dams in the world. Other most-hydro nations tend to be small like Norway, Georgia, Costa Rica, and Sweden, or are under-developed and have small electricity needs (like Colombia and Venezuela).

      Larger developed nations like the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and the US don't have enough hydropower for their own needs, let alone enough conventional geothermal.

      Hydroelectric power is great stuff when it's available and you don't mind traumatizing the riverine ecosystem, but it isn't endless. For example, the Himalayan nations are about the last great untapped source of hydropower with about 100 gigawatts waiting to be tapped...but that'd be about 1/10th of India's needs when India is fully developed to Western levels, assuming China and the Himalayan nations were going to share all that. Meanwhile, the Americas and Europe are mostly tapped out of large hydro sources, at least those that won't get mobbed by angry environmentalists (because hydro power is now evil, apparently.)

      And geothermal? With conventional systems, the available sources aren't going to be powering too many cities - there might be 35GW of power across the planet for existing technology. That'd light up about half of Britain, but those choice geothermal sources aren't in Britain.

      1. Dagg Silver badge
        Holmes

        @cray74 - there might be 35GW of geothermal power across the planet

        >And geothermal? With conventional systems, the available sources aren't going to be powering too many cities - there might be 35GW of power across the planet for existing technology

        Epic fail 67,246 GWh already exists!

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy

    6. Basic

      "I'm sure saying this will probably prove unpopular."

      Yes... Not because the goal is bad, but because you clearly have no idea of the numbers involved.

      Covering a factory and ancillary sheds in PV would do nothing significant to the external energy requirements.

      Yes, a modest home can become (almost) self sufficient after the installation of PV/Geothermal, but the energy cost to produce them, ship them to the home and install them is considerable.

      The amount of energy used by industrial processes is many orders of magnitude higher than a residential property and makes up a significant proportion of the global energy usage.

      Look at construction in the UK alone... More than 400 million tonnes of materials get delivered to site each year. Consider what that costs in terms of energy consumption!

      The bottom line is that PV is a drop in the ocean and always will be unless we give up our current lifestyle and regress to the middle ages. Since it's unlikely that the vast majority of the population would ever accept that as an answer, it's time to start investing more in Nuclear.

    7. Richard 126

      If ground source heat pumps and PV roofs were mandated on all new build, the price of installing it would plummet and therefore be more accessible to retro-fitting for owners of older properties.

      Nice idea but in reality the price would go up not down. Once something is mandated you have to have it and then the manufacturers can and do charge whatever they like. In this situation the price always goes up as the manufacturers exploit the market and all manufacturers maintain similar prices.

      Richard

  9. Craigness

    Solar Roadways show our future

    If you want to know the future of energy, look at the Solar Roadways project. It's been soundly debunked by various sources on grounds such as the energy it could provide would be produced far more cheaply by other methods and without the maintenance headache (tilted solar panels by the side of the road, for example). But because it's "cool" (it's solar! - free energy!) people who see the debunkings retain their faith in it, and have given the kickstarter project ridiculous amounts of money. The US taxpayer has chipped in too.

  10. L W J

    Thorium Nuclear Reactors

    Thorium nuclear reactors could provide non-carbon energy indefinitely. Thorium is three times more abundant than uranium, cleaner and easier to extract from the earth, much more stable, less 'radio-active', and much harder to weaponize. It is also much more efficient rendering energy per kilogram. The technology is already here (e.g. Candu nuclear reactors can be configured to burn thorium), so there are many reason to go this route for energy.

    One of the main reasons countries have not settled on thorium is because it is much more difficult to weaponize the thorium fuel cycles. Gov'ts long ago decided they wanted the nuclear power reactors of their respective nations to produce material for nuclear bombs (who cares about the environment, right(?)); so, thorium was dropped in favour of uranium as the choice for nuclear fuel.

    This needn't be the case going forward.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Thorium Nuclear Reactors

      "One of the main reasons countries have not settled on thorium is because it is much more difficult to weaponize the thorium fuel cycles. Gov'ts long ago decided they wanted the nuclear power reactors of their respective nations to produce material for nuclear bombs (who cares about the environment, right(?)); so, thorium was dropped in favour of uranium as the choice for nuclear fuel."

      I recall that myth was debunked as the military got all the materials they needed decades ago and could obtain it through specialized military breeder reactors.

      1. L W J

        Re: Thorium Nuclear Reactors

        [Quote]

        The connections linking nuclear power and weapons is more than political or historic. Consider: l FISSIONABLE MATERIALS: It is the same nuclear fuel cycle with its mining of uranium, milling, enrichment and fuel fabrication stages which readies the uranium ore for use in reactors, whether these reactors are used to create plutonium for bombs or generate electricity. In the end, both reactors produce the plutonium. The only difference between them is the concentration of the various isotopes used in the fuel. Each year a typical 1000 mega-watt (MW) commercial power reactor will produce 300 to 500 pounds of plutonium -- enough to build between 25 - 40 Nagasaki-sized atomic bombs. [/Quote]

        http://www.neis.org/literature/Brochures/weapcon.htm

        1. Robert Sneddon

          Re: Thorium Nuclear Reactors

          That's great, 500lbs of plutonium from a LWR in a year! Problem is it's a mix of Pu-239, the good bomb-making isotope and Pu-240 which is not fissile and which prevents a bomb going off "right". It's also intensely radioactive and self-heating to point where a bomb core would be at a temperature of several hundred degrees, not quite a dull red. It also takes a big expensive processing plant to get the plutonium out of spent fuel, lots of power and special chemicals, technicians and engineers. It's easier to make a few hundred kilos of pure Pu-239 for a small nuclear arsenal using a dedicated breeder reactor the way, well, everybody with any sense ever did (I except the North Koreans from this august assemblage).

          The US has about a hundred tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium in storage at the moment, Britain about 70 tonnes, Russia lots and lots. The nuclear weapons states don't want or need more bomb-grade plutonium as they've got nothing they can use the surplus for but they've still got to keep it safe which costs money and effort. The non-nuclear states such as Vietnam tend to buy in their nuclear installations as turnkey operations where the reactor builders (in Vietnam's case, Rosatom) will supply the fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel afterwards.

          1. L W J

            Re: Thorium Nuclear Reactors

            "The nuclear weapons states don't want or need more bomb-grade plutonium "

            So they're clear to switch to thorium!

            1. Robert Sneddon

              Why thorium?

              Why switch to non-fissile thorium when uranium is cheap and abundant, now and for at least the next fifty years and we already have a lot of experience using it to fuel existing reactors and their replacements currently under construction? Of course at the end of that time we can reprocess the spent fuel that's in store and fuel another generation of uranium reactors for fifty years and more from the "waste". If all else fails there are proven techniques to extract uranium from seawater, cost estimated to be about USD 300 per kilogram.

              Thorium is difficult to use as a nuclear fuel. It's not fissile, it needs to be converted in a high-temperature high-neutron-flux breeder cycle into U-233 to make it into a fuel that can produce energy by being fissioned. The theory, and it is only a theory, is that this can be done in a continuous process. Further theory suggest it can be done in a molten-salt stream but it's never been achieved in the real world, just in Powerpoint slides and at TED talks.

              No, the molten-salt test reactors that were run at ORNL and elsewhere fifty years ago didn't use thorium, they used U-233 and later U-235. Some reactors have used thorium, usually pebble-bed designs which were not a great success (see the German HTHR-300 for an example) and they were mostly fuelled by U-235 and in some case Pu-239/240 with a little added thorium to season for taste.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fukushima's cost

    But how much did Fukushima cost and how much energy is it producing today?

    1. codejunky Silver badge

      Re: Fukushima's cost

      I am sure you say that about every place hit by a big natural disaster (or 2 in this case)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Without Hot Air.

    David MacKay has done a lot of the calculations required for a reasoned argument about most forms of renewable or carbon-free energy. Look for withouthotair dot com. Quite a surprise to find out that someone that well informed advises the government...

  13. Jim O'Reilly

    And thorium cycle nuclear power is even better!

    Using an alternative thorium-based nuclear cycle, radioactive waste can be reduced to a fraction of the waste from the current uranium cycle. The thorium approach also prevents Fukushima type accidents.

    We have enough thorium for 3500 years ready to be mined, and could probably increase that 10-fold with less rich sources.

    1. dwieske

      Re: And thorium cycle nuclear power is even better!

      no need to wait for a thorium design to do this, any gen IV (like the GE PRISM) can do this today, it's even safer than a MSTR and you don't need to mine anything to power it, we already have enough nuclear waste and nuclear warheads to power the world for centuries with this type of reactor

      1. Robert Sneddon

        PRISM = Powerpoint

        There's a lot of paper exercises, grad student TED talks and general blue-sky bullshit around in the nuclear biz. PRISM and all the other wonderful Great Ideas all suffer from one fatal flaw though; nobody's building any of them. There's research money around, a few million dollars here and there, enough to fund some computer modelling or materials testing and pay for some PhDs but no-one is bending metal and pouring concrete on the GE PRISM or any of the other glossy-brochure reactors in the public eye.

        What IS getting built right now around the world is nearly all light-water reactors, GenIIa and GenIII designs based on fifty years and more of operation of hundreds of GenII reactors because the operators aren't interesting in advancing the technology but in generating cheap electricity. There are a few, a very very few experimental power reactors being built or commissioned like the Russian BN-800 fast spectrum reactor and the Chinese quasi-modular HTR-PM pebble-bed design but Russia and China are stamping out cookie-cutter LWRs by the dozen, the Soviet-derived VVER family and the Chinese CPR-1000, a home-grown version of the Westinghouse AP-1000 because they and their customers need the electricity.

      2. aqk
        Facepalm

        Re: And thorium cycle nuclear power is EVIL!

        Thw world is being run by LADIES. And with their lack of scientific knowledge, they deem anything that is "nuclear" must be EVIL!

        Say hello to the dark ages again.

  14. jelabarre59

    Localized generation

    The problem with a lot of these grand schemes to solve the energy problem is that they usually involve some massive, centralized, one-size-fits-all solution. That's not how it's going to happen. It will involve a mix-and-match of multiple sources (wind, solar. hydroelectric, nuclear, etc), *plus* highly localized generation. Solar generation would work so much better if considered a localized solution: Consider making the lid of your laptop computer a solar panel, one that can be flipped up to collect energy when the screen is open. Could be useful for those long staff meetings/presentations, although at many of those there's not a whole lot of light and illumination. Maybe give your kids an exercise-bike generator, which they have to pedal in order to watch TV. And localizing power generation reduces line-loss from distant generation sources.

  15. ecofeco Silver badge

    Context is everything.

    What they really said: (from the linked article, big caption on left hand side under the charts)

    "Yet because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for more than a century, reducing emissions means only that less gas is being added to the existing problem. Research by James Hansen shows that reducing global CO2 levels requires both a drastic cut in emissions and some way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it."

    Thus, renewables, JUST BY THEMSELVES, will not reduce CO2.

    Context is everything.

  16. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

    This is not news

    The calculations behind this are NOT NEW. Some engineers have been saying this for 10 years or more. They have been ignored, sidelined and sacked if they kept saying it.

    The only thing that's changed here is that society is slowly stopping vilifying people who raise these objections. This whole extraordinary popular delusion has cost humanity many billions - trillions before it will be finished, and has set back human progress by about 30 years.

    1. hamlet101

      Re: This is not news

      how come Portugal gets around 50% of its electricity from renewables then? Google it.

      1. cray74

        Re: This is not news

        "how come Portugal gets around 50% of its electricity from renewables then? Google it."

        I did Google Portugal, and noted it has a population of 10.5 million people with average electrical needs of 5.8GW. In other words, it has smaller electrical demand than a city like London, Paris, or Atlanta.

        Like I said elsewhere in these comments, there ARE nations that get a majority of their power from renewable resources. They tend to be small (have populations under 10 million) like Sweden, Iceland, and Norway; or they have undeveloped economies with small electrical needs (like Kenya and Venezuela), or both (like El Salvador).

        Note that the nations that generate the largest absolute quantity of renewable power - China and the US - only get a small percentage of their power from renewable resources.

      2. RFMarine

        Re: This is not news

        \\how come Portugal gets around 50% of its electricity from renewables then? Google it.\\

        not all renewables are the same. geothermal and hydropower work, we know that because they are non intermittent although not all areas can use them. intermittent power sources are the ones in question

        "In the first 10 months of 2014, renewable energy production supplied 62% of consumption: 32% from hydro, 24% from Wind, 6% from biomass and 1.3% from solar."

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal

        25.3% from wind and solar is much less impressive than 62%.

        Plus portugal is connected to the european power grid. Portugal and all other european countries that use wind and solar power import power whenever its not windy/sunny and if you average out all the wind/solar installations in the entire interconnected european grid then the percentage of wind/solar as a total of the entire european grid's generating capacity becomes smaller

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.