When I read the title of the article from GE's ecomagination blog, I thought it was clearly a biased article against Eco-friendly hydro power. I was suprised when I read the following (referring to small hydro power):
"of the 80,000 dams in the country, only three percent currently create electricity."
Say what?? We have dams out there that are just wasting the opportunity to produce capital and contribute to cleaner air and we're not taking advantage of it!? What environmental extremists don't tell you is that "If managed well, small hydro could have little impact on fish and even improve a river’s health." Here's a great video that shows how positive of an impact small hydro power has for the environment and the home owner's pocket book.
The most efficient way to utilize the most energy coming from the sun is to be able to use the light it produces as well as the heat. Previously, energy companies either capture only one or the other. They capture the light in the form of solar panels and turn it into electricity...
...or they only capture the heat using some form of CSP technology.
Think of solar energy this way: On a sunny day, light is what you see, heat is what you feel. The two aforementioned ways of capturing solar energy, photovoltaic/CSP, only utilize one or the other. As you have probablly guessed by now, the way to produce the most power from the sun is to utilize both of these and that's exactly what one company is now doing. Cogenra Solar has designed a type of solar technology which essentially uses the solar trough design, but concentrates the light onto photovoltaic cells as seen below.
As is explained, this technology can not only provide a buildings electricity needs, but can provide them with the heat as well, heat this is wasted in traditional photovoltaic systems. Since this can make so much power so efficiently, this solar technology will help bring the price of the KW/h down, bringing solar energy one more step closer to being competitive with conventional energy sources.
One of the greatest detriments to the ecologies of regions around the world, but primarily in Indonesia, are biofuels. "But biofuels are green, aren't they?" One might ask this, soley for the reason that they are technically renewable, but they are wrong. One of the worst offenders is corn ethanol. Long story short, its dirtier, drives up the price of food worldwide worsening world hunger, has an inferior energy density to petroluem, and even if we commited all of our farmlands for growing ethanol made from corn it would supply only 12% of our nations gasoline demands-not diesel or jet fuel- because it lacks the chemical complexity to power those vehicles.
However, one of the even worst offenders is palm oil. In fact its much worse because it actually threatens biodiversity across the globe as well as certain exotic species' existence. I mentioned Indonesia earlier, and one example of such is the Sumatran tiger which is critically endangered as well as the Sumatran Orangutan.
It is endangered because in order to make palm oil for biofuel you must clear forest. Forests are what tigers need to survive. As begreen.org wrote, "One environmental necessity for a tiger’s survival is thick groundcover or understory to camouflage them from prey and protect them from the sun. The problem is the natural forests are constantly being converted into farmed plantations and logging operations which has driven the tigers away with virtually nowhere to hide." The biggest mistake people have made is that simply because something is renewable, it must be good for the planet. Rainforest Action Network wrote that "Approximately 85 percent of palm oil is grown in the tropical countries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) on industrial plantations that have severe impacts on the environment, forest peoples and the climate."
Palm oil destroys rainforests.
Forests are the world's largest carbon sink, so by destroying them to make an already dirty fuel, you are dramatically increasing emissions.
2. Palm oil threatens forest people.
The only reason this is legal is because this is done in a third world country and not the USA. This forces people to relocate and has potential to cause poverty.
3. Palm oil causes climate change
Although personally not a subscriber to the anthropogenic climate change theory, many environmentalists obviously attribute the dramatic rise in greenhoue gas emissions (GHGs) as the cause for climate change.
So what's to be done to stop palm oil companies like Cargill? I suggest joining an advocacy group like Rainforest Action Network and being armed with the facts about palm oil's devestating effects on exotic species, the environment, and biodiversity.
I own this film and its a great one to watch in exposing the anthropogenic climate change theory and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth as unscientific and uninformed.
It should scare you to death that people find this disgusting propaganda amusing. How interesting, to see a teacher propose action based on a theory which is widely discredited without an ounce of debate, and without debate, kill the people who disagree with her viewpoint. Environmental extremists love the idea of simply being able to push a button to circumvent "pointless" debate, which is really just stalling "progress." I'm fascinated that in the video it goes straight from it's "humor", a term I use as lightly, to the message without any sort of disclaimer to the video. Who are they kidding? If climate change was really a global problem threatening the planet and the science was as settled as gravity and matter, it seems like solving only 10% would accomplish practically nothing. If the science was 100% settled everyone would demand power from only nuclear, solar, geothermal, and other clean sources of energy like small wind and hydro with tidal in there as well. Oil for transpprtation would be replaced with algae fuel and gas would be replaced with hydrogen, electric cars, etc. This clip is eerie to watch because it ominously says "no pressure" throughout, and especially at the end it's just creepy. How does this accomplish anything? Especially for environmentalists?
Here's an idea: The reason why homes aren't as efficient as they are is not because everyone hasn't decked out their place of residence with the most expensive energy savings items, its because some people simply don't basic eneryg conservation. We all know the person that everytime you come over they have their TV on and they're not even watching it. It just never occurs to them that leaving that on is contributing to their higher electrical bill. That being said, the best way to achieve greater energy efficiency is for homes to modify our behavior by monitoring our behavior. Essentially anything that consumes power which is plugged into a socket should be able to send appliance information and patterns of consumption to your homes central monitoring software which can monitor behavior and learn from it. Say you leave at 8 and get home 6:30, it can turn off essentially EVERYTHING in the home asides from things like the refrigirator, and then turn on before you get home so the house will be nice and cool. The second we're not using anything, it should be off, and home monitoring and behavior analysis software will help us achieve this.
Sustainable, the environmental term we often hear, has three categories by which it can be defined.
Economically: Profitable, competitive, and makes great business sense.
Environmentally: Resource efficient, spatially dense, clean, quiet, aesthetically pleasing, provides no disturbance to environment especially wildlife.
Politicaly: Something both sides of the aisle can agree on throughout the years.
So in order to be "sustainable", a source of power must meet all three of these. Interestingly enough, Dr. Michio Kaku makes an interesting assertion with this clip from Big Think.
He obviously espouses a few ideas which are controversial such as...
Anthropogenic climate change theory
Peak oil
What I thought he said about oil was interesting. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "We're never going to run out of oil, but the oil we do have is going to become more expensive because its in increasingly harder to reach places." For instance oil in Saudi Arabia is already liquid and incredibly clean and ready to go, wheras the tar sands of Alberta Canada, home to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which I support, are going to become more expensive to locate, extract, and refine. To his credit, I appreciate this because most peopel, when advocating for any source of clean energy assert that essentially we're going to run out of oil in x amount of years. Usually a number that will be in people's lifetimes so it's relavent. For instance, they say like 5 years, or 15 years. It's never 261.5 years because then people would just, rightfully, blow it off. Anyways, here's a quick film supporting his statement that we're never going to run out of oil.
Anyways, back to the main point. I like Dr. Kaku's assertion becaus it utilizes everything the sun provides. Fusion is the nuclear process by which the sun produces all its heat and energy which is astronomical and unparalleled, while solar is the byproduct, both of which are, by definition, capable of being sustainable. I say capable because solar is still expensive, and fusion technology will take, at the very least, ten years to achieve. Now, he never makes the assertion that these will replace everything entirely, but that in the coming decades, solar will become cheaper than most fossil fuels due to price fluctuations, demands, volatility, and politics. That being said, with a little faith in the technology and the free market, I believe we will see these technolgies come to dominate the developed world in the coming decades, and the poorer countries later on.
Before I talk about landfill gas as part of our energy solution, I want to share two facts with you. Firstly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. has 3,091 active landfills and over
10,000 old municipal landfills. Secondly, INFORM found that 179,000 waste collection, waste transfer,
and recycling vehicles are on US roads today -- 91% of them diesel-fueled
and most of them old.I will connect the dots between these two facts later on. What is landfill gas and how can it play a role in American energy production? Landfill gas is renewable natural gas that is released from decomposing waste at a landfill. Here's how it works.
Now how do the two facts I mentioned earlier tie in together? Here's two quick facts about garbage trucks
An average garbage truck travels 25,000 miles
annually, gets less than 3 miles per gallon, and uses
approximately 8,600 gallons of fuel each year.
Over 40%
of garbage trucks are over 10 years old, making it the oldest fleet
in the US.
Interestingly enough, waste management businesses can run their entire fleet of refuse trucks on the natural gas generated by landfills. 179,000 garbage trucks times 8,600 gallons of fuel each year on average makes for total oil consumption of 1,539,400,000 1.54 billion gallons. Replace all of those vehicles within the next twenty years with natural gas running refuse trucks and you can seriously clean up the air and put a massive dent in American oil consumption. A prime example of a company that is doing this right is Waste Management with their Altamont Landfill in California. They bring in about 5,000 tons of trash a day, which makes 13,000 gallons of liquified natural gas, LNG, and use that to power the natural gas trucks they have in their fleet. Environmentally, this is consistent with on-site power production, where homeowners and businesses rely on themselves for their needs and not anyone else. In closing, here's a video which explains the whole process in its entirety.
I am a huge fan of Waste Management and their active implementation of single stream recycling. If you have never heard of single stream recycling before, you absoultely must watch this informative video.
Simply put, this technology makes recycling practical and highly effective. This is good for our energy situation and the environment. This technology is outstanding from an energy standpoint because single stream technology is sometimes partnered up with incentive-based recycling like Recycle Bank which increases recycling, most importantly of all from an energy standpoint, aluminum.
This is important because recycling aluminum saves a ton of electricity. Here's why its important to recycle aluminum. According to examiner.com, "The raw material to make aluminum is bauxite. Aluminum ore is plentiful, but turning it into aluminum takes a lot of electricity to strip the oxygen from the metal. The cost of electricity is the major cost for producing aluminum. A major factor for locating an aluminum production plant is availability of cheap electric power." This video about recycling aluminum explains it in even further detail.
From an environmental standpoint the benefits are obvious and many. According to earth911.com, "The U.S. EPA estimates that 75 percent of our waste is recyclable." This means that the need for landfills can be reduced dramatically. Waste won't end up on the streets any more because its valuable, landfills
So by making recycling much more incredibly simple and practical, you...
Increase recycling
Decrease energy consumption
Decrease emissions
Increase awareness
Improve community relations
Reduce the need for unsightly landfills
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Energy production is a lot like life: People don't care what your disadvantages are, they just care about the bottom line. Will you make their life better if they choose you, and if so, by how much? They do have options after all. You can argue all day about how solar is best for the environment but if you can't provide an 850 MW power plant that produces base load power cost-competitively, then people don't really care. The way of going about this is identifying all of renewable energy's disadvantages.
Expensive
Poor power production capacity factor
Inferior energy/power density
Highly intermittent
Takes up impractical amounts of land
Geographically limited
Requires government subsidies to be remotely cost-competitive
I'm not 100% sure on this, but this is a rough guesstimation of energy densities of renewable energy in order of greatest to smallest.
Geothermal
Hydroelectric
Solar
Wind
Here's an idea that will obviously infuriate environmentalists: If you want to guess which sources of renewable energy are most likely to work, look at which ones oil companies are investing in. Sounds crazy, right? Listen to an oil company? Well, here's the thing. A better way to think of an oil company is really to think of them as an energy company. Oil is just their primary medium by which they produce the energy that moves society, literally. That being said, they have a vested interest in producing lots of it; and let's be perfectly honest: They are infinitely better at producing power than any renewable energy company could ever hope to be. Therefore, if they can produce lots of energy, they can make lots of money, something ever business in the history of mankind has been established for. With that, the sources of energy they're devoting lots of time and money towards will be the ones that produce a lot of power, and renewable power is exactly what people want. For instance, geothermal power is the most energy dense source of renewable electricity, and Chevron happens to be the world's largest owner and operator of geothermal power plants in the world. Here's a quick video for you on that. "Chevron's geothermal operations from the four projects in Indonesia and
the Philippines currently have the capacity to produce 1,273 megawatts
(1.273 GW) of renewable geothermal energy, enough to meet the needs of millions of
people in those countries." Solar can't hold a candle to that. Another renewable source of energy is oil's substitute: algae biofuel. This is the ultimate biofuel and here is a video from Exxon which shows how enthusiastic they are about making it apart of America's energy mix.
With renewable energy you do not have to mine a source of energy and then ship it to a power plant and burn it. The source of energy is produced on site and immediately distributed. This tends to create a bit of a disadvantage: Your power plant won't be operating at an optimal capacity factor, and you have to build transmission lines out to the source since it is geographic-dependent. However, that challenge can be overcome. Renewable energy also is not always needed when it is produced and is sometimes wasted. The solution to all of this is to have renewable power companies, the produces of energy, sell their energy to an energy storage company, the distributors. That way, you can have a more predictable and dependable grid which takes in all sources of renewable energy like geothermal, hydroelectric, and solar, and is then able to store and then dependably store it then distribute it when it is actually needed. Collectively, this will make renewable energy make a lot more sense by overcoming its incurable indeterminacy.
One should never be worried about not being able to use geothermal power for their local heating. Where housing is tight, its really not an issue. Traditionally, geothermal heat pump systems will expand outwards which can create issues for tightly packed housing. Not a problem however, due to the fact that geothermal can be drilled directly vertical. Here is a picture of such a system of the Rehau Helix Probe.
