Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till its gone..
In this case, maybe we’re waking up to what we have. Who knew that parking lot had so much value?
A 2005 study by the Environmental Protection Administration estimated there were some 105.2 million parking spaces in the U.S. But according to Ben Joseph, that could be low. He told the New York Times that he estimated there were some 500 million parking spaces in the U.S., “occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.”
But increasingly, when it comes to energy use and sustainability, parking lots are actually becoming part of the solution. Why? In many parts of the country, they are becoming solar power plants.
Typically, solar panels are most easily placed in open fields, or on the roofs of building – flat surfaces that afford direct exposure to the sun and aren’t otherwise being used. The same principle applies to parking lots and garages – provided you build a bunch of canopies to serve as platforms for the solar panels.
Such canopies provide a bunch of benefits. In the summer and in hotter regions, they provide shade for parked cars, preventing them from getting too hot. At all times of the year, they provide protection from rain. In the winter, they can shield drivers from the annoyance of having to wipe snow and ice off their windshields. And when there’s light, they produce electricity.
Several companies are now scaling up to turn America’s parking lots into power plants. One of those active in the Northeast is Solaire Generation, based in New York City. “We see a unique opportunity to make a significant and enduring contribution to the global deployment of renewable energy through the parking lot,” as the company describes about on its website, Solaire has a meter tallying its progress: 2.9 million square feet and 23,100 parking spaces.
Solaire’s projects include a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, New York, where it supplies about 25 percent of the store’s electricity, a 3.8-megawatt installation at Dow Jones headquarters in suburban New Jersey. Covering about 230,000 square feet of lots, it produces about half the building’s electricity. Solaire has an even bigger project at nearby Rutgers University, where, in what it claims is the largest such installation in the U.S., it has covered 28 acres of parking lots with enough panels to generate up to 8 megawatts of electricity.
Solar canopies are popular in sunnier parts of the country. In Georgia, MARTA (the Metropolitan Atlantic Rapid Transit Authority) built a huge solar canopy at its bus depot in Decatur. And in California, where carports are already common, solar canopies have become a fixture. M Bar C Construction, based in San Marcos, California, has completed a series of large projects at universities, colleges, and school systems across California.
The next step toward greater sustainability would be to turn those solar canopies into fueling stations. And that is slowly happening. With each passing month, about 11,000 new all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles hit the road. California alone already has more than 100,000 plug-in vehicles. And in some parking lots, building owners are linking electric-vehicle charging stations to the canopies. Solaire has set up charging capabilities at a project it built at a yacht club in Massachusetts, for example.
In many areas, people get excited when the see that parking is free of charge. In a growing number of lots, drivers may be seeking out spots that come with a charge.
Tampa Electric Co. will soon install a massive, 2-megawatt solar-power generating array atop one of Tampa International Airport’s major parking garages, marking the power company’s largest-ever renewable energy project.
When fully operational, the array will span a space of just over five football fields and generate enough electricity to power about 250 homes, and plug directly into Tampa Electric’s overall electricity grid.
Many power companies are experimenting with rural solar arrays in undeveloped rural areas, and others in ultra-urban sites, said Tampa Electric President Gordon Gillette.
“This is a great experiment because it’s something in between,” Gillette said, with a large “utility-sized” installation in an urban environment.
Tampa Electric will soon put out requests for solar panel bids, and construction will begin in early 2015, with a target completion by year’s end.
The installation will be more than 66 times larger than the company’s 30-kilowatt solar array at Legoland in Winter Haven. It will also be slightly larger in generating capacity than the 5,000 panel site that Ikea built on its own atop its store in Tampa, which generates 1.8 megawatts at peak times, roughly enough to power 154 residential homes and replace the carbon output of 242 cars in a year.
At 2 megawatts, this new site would make up a small fraction of Tampa Electric’s overall 4,500 megawatt production, but if successful, Gillette said it could be the first of many new solar arrays they build.
Tampa Electric budgeted between $5 million and $6 million for the project, and over time the company could reduce that cost by about 30 percent in the form of federal tax credits, Gillette said. Tampa Electric will know more about when it will pay off, once they finalize the final equipment costs.
The airport panels will sit atop anchored scaffolding on the top level of the economy parking lot at the airport’s south side, and face south, with about a 10-degree tilt upward to catch sunlight. (An engineering project will study whether the panels could reflect sunlight at landing aircraft.)
For utilities, such solar, wind or ocean wave projects allow them to even out the demand for power, particularly during peak summer days when there is huge demand for air conditioning power.
I’m definitely on board with covering parking lots & appreciate content and glad to see businesses are out there doing this work. However, the Daily Beast article is “Sponsored Content” – just saying that these days you have to be careful.
Best,
D
Been saying this probably as long as E-Pot has been touting nuclear 🙂
Granted that it would have been very expensive to do until just a few years ago but this, more than putting up wind turbines, building more natgas & coal plants is what the entire South should be focusing on.
Is it windy in the South? Wind is pretty nice because it can make power through the night quite often. Most solar sucks wind at night. ;D
It sure is windy in lots of places South but it’s also very, very sunny.
I’m not saying to to drop wind but if you’ve got a reasonable deployment already, focusing on solar for a while will pay off handsomely.
For wind, bigger & taller is way better but you’re building away from densely populated areas and spacing out your towers so you need extra transmission lines
Solar on rooftops or parking lots is generating power on-site, not much extra wiring needed, tracks the daytime demand curve very well and is unobstrusive.
One relatively cheap form of solar that never caught on in America is solar hot water, hugely popular in China who have 80% of the global installed base compared to 10% for the EU, and a paltry 1.0% for India and 0.5% for the USA.
I had solar hot water when I lived in Australia.
It was brilliant. We had a backup electric emersion heater but I think we used it for a total of about three days per year on average.
Water heating typicaly accounts for 30% of electricity use so I can’t understand why they are not fitted as standard to every house in the south of the USA as they are in most of Queensland.
The technology could hardly be simpler – no moving parts, no electrics and nothing to break down. I think total maintenance time was about 10 minutes per year to wipe the dust off the panels. It just sat there churning out more hot water than the two of us could ever use.
Maybe not so effective in the UK or the north but at the very least it would warm the water to lukewarm and so drasticaly reduce the amount of electricity needed to heat to 60C or whatever.
Cheap to install too.
If you live in a sunny area and havn’t already got one you must have money to burn.
I’m sure it will shock you but I’ve been saying almost exactly the same thing for quite some time (going back much earlier than that)… but I include the concern that demand must be available to absorb the supply or There Be Problems. There are ways to time-shift demand to make good use of intermittent supplies, but you don’t like to hear about such issues and down-vote them (apparently because nothing must be allowed to question the vision of utopia, where one nay-sayer can make all the magic just stop working).
Exactly how this would work, on a grid where supply and demand must be balanced on a time-scale of milliseconds, you don’t know. Only evil skeptics even ask such questions, right? Can’t let them get in the way of Achieving The Vision.
“Exactly how this would work, on a grid where supply and demand must be balanced on a time-scale of milliseconds, you don’t know. Only evil skeptics even ask such questions, right? Can’t let them get in the way of Achieving The Vision.”
What do you mean? It would be the same as now, except that there would be a greater need for weather forecasting but sunlight in the sunny Southwest is very predictable, hours or days in advance.
Does Arizona & Nevada even need independent meterologists?
How do nuke plants and coal plants cope with a sudden rise or fall in demand at any time of day?
“Now” uses fossil-fired plants operating under dispatch for large variations, with AGC for the second-by-second tracking. You insist this has to all go away. So: how would you do it?
Load doesn’t track the availability of sunlight, in the Southwest or anywhere else. Nor does it track the wind. How would you do it? How would you guarantee that the lights go on when you flip the switch? How anyone else does it is irrelevant.
I’ve tried to hammer these points through your head time and time again, and you act as if they do not exist; you have a complete absence of logical, factual responses. “Miss Moron” is an eerily apt nickname for you.
“with AGC for the second-by-second tracking”
AGC? What’s that?
“You insist this has to all go away” – to be precise, I’ve been insisting since my late teens that we keep cutting away at fossil-powered plants, conserve, use better materials and embrace green energy.
If it had happened at even remotely the speed I envisioned, we’d be so much better off. Instead, coal became king.
That said, I have NEVER suggested that all eggs be put into any one basket.
“Load doesn’t track the availability of sunlight, in the Southwest or anywhere else. Nor does it track the wind. How would you do it? How would you guarantee that the lights go on when you flip the switch? ”
How do you guarantee your coal plants are there when almost 1/3 the time they’re not available?
““Miss Moron” is an eerily apt nickname for you”
Tsk, resorting to name-calling?
I’m so sorry I have no balm to recommend for your latest hemorrhoidal flare-up but that’s your cross to bear, not mine.
And do you really want to see what the result would be if I stooped to your level and generated anagrams for a moniker with as many letters & vowels as “Engineer-Poet”???
“And do you really want to see what the result would be if I stooped to your level and generated anagrams for a moniker with as many letters & vowels as “Engineer-Poet”???”
It has been many months since I first dissected the arrogance and narcissism behind the grandiose and oxymoronic self-bestowed title of “Engineer-Poet”. Don’t spend too much time on it—-you are welcome to use my “Eeeeeuw-Pot”, which is reminiscent of what one says when one steps in unseen “presents from the dog world”.
Automatic Generation Control. Why are you so fscking ignorant of the essentials of what you profess authority over?
Define “green” in this context, and prove that it can supply what you assert it can.
Have you a clue about WHY that happened?! Mind you, it was predicted… but not by you.
Again, you’re confusing “available” with “dispatched”. A stupid error, but Miss Moron does that.
Not a resort. It’s a penalty assignment, a billet in heck (if not hell). But that’s what happens when “environmentalists” are so stupid as to put ideology before the environment.
Despite it looking like you’ve reverted to childishness, I think you might be old enough to remember Jimmy Carter’s term in office.
One of the things he did was to put solar hot water panels on the White House.
But he talked at the original unveiling about the road not taken, and with respect to solar hot water, he was prophetic. This was affordable when PV would have been horrendously expensive yet the adoption in the USA was embarrasingly low, despite rebates.
The potential savings and lower emissions dwarfed what was possible with more efficient lighting.
“Automatic Generation Control. Why are you so fscking ignorant of the essentials of what you profess authority over?”
I don’t profess authority unlike some who have no doubt they always know better than everyone else. We are honored that you find time in your busy blogging life to bestow your professed omniscience given that Maurizio is but an occasional passerby of late.
That said, your impressive expertise does not prevent you from making enough factual & logical errors to be occasionally punctured and put in their place even by a “Moron”.
Continued downthread at http://climatecrocks.com/2014/10/01/put-up-solar-on-a-parking-lot/comment-page-1/#comment-64252
Btw, steel cage death match coming up between advocates of solar roofs for parking lots, owners of cars with solar panels integrated into body panels which are parked in those parking lots, and the indefatigable solar road advocates. Hey, man, you’re bogarting my photons!
We are fairly far away from solar PV on cars that are powerful enough to generate enough for the car. It has been done, but it is not nearly as practical as PV panels on buildings and EV’s with batteries only.
As a PEV owner whose living depends on doing arithmetic for various solutions and getting it right, I’d much rather have the juice from the PV panels shading my entire parking space than what I could fit on my vehicle. Not that I haven’t fictionalized the idea of carrying lots of PV, but the world of engineering realities is a lot less flexible than flights of fancy.
On a far more modest scale London’s phone boxes are turning green and going solar..
And I still prefer Joni’s original 1970 version of the song.
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2373208/iconic-london-phone-boxes-inspire-first-solarbox
Replying to Miss Moron at http://climatecrocks.com/2014/10/01/put-up-solar-on-a-parking-lot/comment-page-1/#comment-64212
Fuck, man. I remember JFK’s funeral. Who could forget Pres. Peanut Farmer?
What you don’t say is that there were thousands of fly-by-night operators who built and sold shoddy stuff and then went out of business, leaving their customers with leaky, failing collectors and no warranties (and often water damage too). People got the message that solar was a mistake. Then we had the oil-price slump of the 80’s, the “energy crisis” was cancelled (the original “hiatus”), and all but a dedicated core went back to the old habits.
I was there. I saw it all, and time and reading of history has put it into perspective.
Until it came time to fix it. The wind resource on Hawaii looked unbeatable too, but there were multiple failures of wind farms there anyway. Getting even one essential detail wrong can doom massive projects.
This is what nobody’s yet been able to hammer through your thick skull: you are ignoring factors which doom your favorite “fix” to failure. This entrenches the status quo, protecting the interests of the fossil-fuel business. They are even racking up victories because you fail to see how you are being used as a tool to advance their agenda… after being told to your face.
Their victory in Vermont means another 2 million tons of CO2 per year, and you helped.
You show your colors when you attempt to paint me as an authority. I never claimed to be one; when I make claims I refer to data or actual authorities. Who’s your guru? Amory Lovins, whose predictions have been universally wrong, whose prescriptions are massively flawed, and who takes money from… fossil-fuel interests!
Calling you Miss Moron is an expression of frustration.
“Calling you Miss Moron is an expression of frustration”
If you truly remember JFKs funeral, then you’re old enough to be considered an adult. Try acting like one at least once a week and it’ll eventually become habitual, let’s hope before you die.
“What you don’t say is that there were thousands of fly-by-night operators who built and sold shoddy stuff and then went out of business, leaving their customers with leaky, failing collectors and no warranties (and often water damage too). People got the message that solar was a mistake.”
That story can be told about EVERY industry – and in every country. It’s one of the reasons why we have standards, laws, inspectors…..
I trust you’re at least marginally familiar with the history of the car industry?
“all but a dedicated core went back to the old habits”
And this is why the USA is likely doomed. Too many who are always looking for the easy way out.
… writes the clown who insists that the world must pursue HIS fantasy, and ignores every shred of fact or reason which shows that it is grossly impractical at best, and likely impossible. He even ignores confirmed consequences which are contrary to his fantasy narrative! “Lalalalala… I can’t hear you!”
You’re not an adult until you are done with wish-fulfillment. That means stopping with the blatant psychological projection too. If you have greater command of facts and reason than a moron, it’s time to start showing it. Otherwise, regardless of what you can do, your actual functioning is at level of serious impairment.
And what, exactly, was novel about solar DHW? I have read that it was essentially standard in Florida in the early part of the 20th. Shouldn’t the industry have had the details down pat by then?
In truth, it wasn’t down pat. Winter-peaking DHW demand is poorly served by summer-peaking insolation. Floridian engineering practices are inadequate to cope with freezing weather. A lot of the measures ultimately required to make such things work, like double-wall heat exchangers, hadn’t been reduced to practice.
It didn’t work, so people abandoned it. Simple. People went back to stuff that Just Worked, like gas and electricity.
Now, what’s your excuse for trying to force the abandonment of one of the few things that DOES work?
You’re one to talk, trying to force the nation into your ideologically-correct way out. So far this year you’ve scored skyrocketing New England electric rates and the aforementioned 2 million ton per year increase in CO2 emissions.
You promised clean and cheap. Were you lying, or just wrong? What will it take to get you to (a) own up to the error, (b) figure out HOW you got it wrong, and (c) correct yourself?
I bet you’ll stall out at step (a), because you haven’t grown up yet. When your fact-based reasoning is stuck at a mental age of 5, you’re functionally a moron.
“You mean, the country that embarked on a scheme that absolutely requires a huge “Stromautobahn” to make it work, and is just now getting the plans under way?”
Yes, that country or maybe Denmark – I’ve now watched several videos with your “authority” Andrew Dodson opining about the devastation of solar & wind upon the grid and how it’ll take $10 TRILLION dollars to make the US grid work reliably with just the renewables on it now.
There’s an old saying about those who say that a thing can’t be done should get out of the way of those who are already doing it.
You put him up as an authority so you get the privilege of owning his remarks.
“Germany is bankrupting its poorest to pay for electricity” – Read this
Going by what Dodson & the naysayers have to say, both the German & Danish grids should have melted down years ago. Yet they keep on humming.
Dodson mentions subsynchronous resonance and how those horrible wind turbines are destroying the grid because of it yet a few seconds of searching turned up an article from Vestas engineer Steven Saylors, who appears to have actual experience, outlining how this is mitigated or avoided and how this is an ERCOT requirement.
Ah, right. You refer me to a site which censors and bans people who are too critical of its positions (like me), and whose moderators repeatedly assert claims which have been debunked by factual references. I don’t think so.
But you don’t quote him mentioning “Prior to this event, conventional wisdom held that wind turbine technology was immune to SSR issues based on historical operation….” Nor do you say who is paying for the amelioration of this and other issues. Is it the wind farm operators who create them? HAH! No, it’s always going to be rolled into the ratepayer’s bill. The flow of subsidies to the monied interests must not be compromised by such trivialities as the problems they create.
You mean, they have rough energy balances with hydro-heavy Sweden and Norway, but sell their surpluses for a fraction of what they pay during their own times of shortage. Their residential electric rates are the second-highest and highest in the entire EU, and in the case of Germany have doubled as a direct consequence of the effort to be “green”. Despite this, Denmark’s per-kWh CO2 emissions are 5x that of France, Germany’s higher still.
Evading the issue of carbon emissions? Environment taking a back seat to ideology… again?
Wasn’t this whole effort supposed to eliminate carbon emissions and protect the environment?
Why can’t you admit that “ideologically incorrect” France is already where Denmark cannot expect to get for decades on its current course? That’s one Inconvenient Truth too many for you.
“But you don’t quote him mentioning “Prior to this event, conventional wisdom held that wind turbine technology was immune to SSR issues based on historical operation….”
Prior to the Mohave event, coventional wisdom would have been that such a thing couldn’t happen to baseload plants, based on historical operation.
It took TWO such events at the same Mohave plant before the problem was investigated & identified.
“No, it’s always going to be rolled into the ratepayer’s bill. The flow of subsidies to the monied interests must not be compromised by such trivialities as the problems they create.”
I’m guessing that isn’t any different for any industry. Do the operators of your nuclear plants rush home to break open the piggybanks after a screw-up?”
““ideologically incorrect” France is already where Denmark cannot expect to get for decades on its current course? That’s one Inconvenient Truth too many for you.”
I expect Denmark to get it done in 2-3 decades but it won’t be easy.
French attitudes towards nukes is shifting and I’ve heard similar rumors about Sweden. France has best make sure its plants are well-maintained as it’s not likely they’ll be able to find the money in 20 yrs to build new ones.
I take no pleasure from well-run, well-performing nuke plants being shuttered but the industry’s inability to (as yet) deliver next-gen plants at reasonable cost is not winning over anyone in a great hurry.
Instead of opposing renewables, nuke proponents are better off embracing them.
Coal, oil, gas are the real enemy.
If you need to find someone has trouble learning An Inconvenient Truth, the closest reflective surface you can find will reveal the biggest idiot in the room.
You lost against COAL and the ONE country where you can point to nuclear power on a grand scale IMPOSED it on the populace without discussion & in opposition to the written objections of thousands of scientists.
What are you going to say when some redblooded, freedom-lovin’ Real American says it ain’t nuttin’ but commie power that’ll force us to knuckle under the state?
Those piddlin’, pesky renewables that have your inferior grid keeling over at a few percent penetration have been steadily driving down costs while nuclear’s is only going up, up, and UP.
What’s the bill for the new Hinkley Point project? Over $30 billion and not even broken ground? When was the last nuke plant that came in on time or on budget?
If it’s so affordable & reliable, what’s the purpose of the 35-year price guarantee at more than double current utility pricing?
Why did took so long for China to climb onboard the nuclear bandwagon when Russia & India have had operating plants since the ’60s?
It’s childish to place the blame on the layman when an industry like coal, where millions of people have seen loved ones suffer & die, has managed to thrive.
The failure to capture hearts & minds is yours & yours alone.
Thread continued at http://climatecrocks.com/2014/10/01/put-up-solar-on-a-parking-lot/comment-page-1/#comment-64402
“You promised clean and cheap.” – Nuclear was making that promise a long time ago. Go ask the Brits who’ll be paying for the Hinkley Point expansion about that and the fact they’re stuck paying a high fixed rate for 35 years after the plant comes online, whenever that may be.
“What will it take to get you to (a) own up to the error, (b) figure out HOW you got it wrong, and (c) correct yourself?”
How about you lead by example? Your multibillion-dollar atomic teakettle cost projections have been wrong since before TMI and have only gotten worse.
“When your fact-based reasoning is stuck at a mental age of 5, you’re functionally a moron”
When I’ve lived so long, presume to know so much and yet have failed as badly as you and your beloved transuranic waste industry, I’ll gladly accept the title of moron. In the meantime, it’s all yours, baby. Where shall I mail the T-shirt?
The global shipping industry emits about as much CO2 than Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark & Spain COMBINED and probably many more pollutants thanks to its utter dependence on diesel & bunker fuel.
Yet we’ve had nuclear subs for 60 years and the 1st nuke-driven aircraft carrier entered service over 50 yrs ago.
Where…..are….all…..the….NUCLEAR….ships????!!!?!?
There are 10000 container ships – is there even ONE that’s nuclear powered?
Are your fellow genius engineers not able to figure out how to keep the reactor cool in a watery environment?
Yes, the shipping industry is one place that nuclear could replace the nasty fossil fuels that ships now burn. The history of nuclear-powered ships is actually quite good.
“The US Navy has accumulated over 6200 reactor-years of accident-free experience involving 526 nuclear reactor cores over the course of 240 million kilometres, without a single radiological incident, over a period of more than 50 years. It operated 82 nuclear-powered ships (11 aircraft carriers, 71 submarines – 18 SSBN/SSGN, 53 SSN) with 103 reactors as of March 2010. In 2013 it had 10 Nimitz-class carriers in service (CVN 68-77), each designed for 50-year service life with one mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul of their two A4W Westinghouse reactors”. The Russians haven’t been as lucky with their subs, but do have a fleet of nuke ice-breakers that perform well.
“With increasing attention being given to greenhouse gas emissions arising from burning fossil fuels for international air and marine transport, particularly dirty bunker fuel for the latter, and the excellent safety record of nuclear powered ships, it is likely that there will be renewed interest in marine nuclear propulsion. The world’s merchant shipping is reported to have a total power capacity of 410 GWt, about one third that of world nuclear power plants”.
“The head of the large Chinese shipping company Cosco suggested in December 2009 that container ships should be powered by nuclear reactors in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from shipping. He said that Cosco was in talks with China’s nuclear authority to develop nuclear powered freight vessels. However, in 2011 Cosco aborted the study after three years, following the Fukushima accident”.
And that last sentence tells the tale. Fear is the #1 problem, and that’s nothing new—-nuclear powered ships are actually banned in some countries. The #2 problem is economics—-nukes are not competitive (except for warships), but could be if the world decides that CO2 must be dealt with at any cost. You shouldn’t let your anger at E-Pot blind you to that fact.
So Lovins has been wrong about everything? What specifically?
Do you think he’s wrong about building standards, too?
Jeez, can’t you find someone who sounds less like a robot?
Just the 1st few minutes of that video makes a great case for local generation / district heating, if that’s not too commie for you.
I do enjoy listening to the entrenched players talk about how they’re just trying to be fair to the little consumer, much like the car dealerships who bravely hold the line against Tesla to preserve the longstanding warm relationship they enjoy with Joe Consumer and protect them from the horror of ever having to pay the listed sticker price.
Hypercars are not getting 200 MPG.
Negawatts are not reducing net electric demand; greater efficiency expands affordability and thus demand until demand is saturated (Jevons’ paradox).
Eliminating nuclear power has proven incompatible with cutting GHG emissions.
That’s the one thing that doesn’t actually affect the fossil fuel industry very much. His financiers can afford to let him get one right now and then, like a stopped clock.
There’s a difference between an idea not being adopted and not being right.
Are you to blame if your most cherished are passed over by Joe Sixpack?
One of the key ideas of the Hypercar was composite materials which is only now catching on in automotives, eg. BMW i3. The VW XL1 gets >250mpg but its price tag is ridiculous.
It’s tempting to say that similar cars will never be affordable but what would your brash 1984 younger self say if the grizzled veteran you are now were to appear and tell him that he could have a pocket device that was simultaneously a digital camera, mobile phone, and graphical computer with gigabytes of storage for $500?
Homes & buildings eat a LOT of energy and much of that is in electrical demand. Since we have not, on any large scale, adopted the efficiency that Lovins imposed on himself 30 yrs ago, you can’t say that he was wrong.
Speaking of electricity & efficiency, the increasing use of aluminum in cars has me concerned as it takes a LOT of energy to refine although recycling rates are high and will only get better if entire cars are made from it. This will be made worse if the Phinergy fuel-cell that’s based on aluminum makes it to market & becomes successful.
“Negawatts are not reducing net electric demand; greater efficiency expands affordability and thus demand until demand is saturated (Jevons’ paradox)”
At some point, that doesn’t apply. The kind of efficiencies that Lovins demonstrated in his own home 30 years ago combined with steady lowering the electricity & water usage of lighting & appliances and technological breakthroughs means that even exorbitant usage will not overwhelm the reductions in demand that were gained through improvement.
One PC or laptop, one smartphone and one tablet can replace more than 1/2 dozen dedicated devices for a tiny fraction of the cost, weight and power consumption. A family I know cut their electricity bill by 1/3 simply by replacing a 55 yr old fridge and a 40 yr old chest freezer with new appliances.
Since they already have 1 large and 2 small LED TVs and new-ish washer / dryer, what do you think they’ll purchase to make up for the reduction in electricity usage?
Millennials are driving much less than we older fogies & choosing smaller, more efficient living spaces – and having many fewer children. What excess will we all adopt to keep demand high?
Even if we switched to EVs overnight, which would increase total electricity demand, the drop in petroleum usage would mean that total energy consumption would still fall.
“…….what do you think they’ll purchase to make up for the reduction in electricity usage?……Millennials are driving much less than we older fogies & choosing smaller, more efficient living spaces – and having many fewer children. What excess will we all adopt to keep demand high?…..Even if we switched to EVs overnight, which would increase total electricity demand, the drop in petroleum usage would mean that total energy consumption would still fall.”
There are several logical fallacies there. Perhaps the biggest is again looking at trends among a half billion people in the U.S. and the developed world when AGW is a global problem that is going to become worse as the billions who want to “live like us” follow the pathway we blazed for them starting after WW2. Look at the recent remarks by the Indian prime minister for a clue. If and when they manage to repeat our “growth”, the world will be 50 years down the road and CO2 will be pushing 500+PPM.
What “excess” will we adopt here, you ask? We are surrounded by excess in America and it shows no real signs of going away. I visited one of the high-end malls in the DC area recently with my wife. She had been given a $25 gift card to Yankee Candle that had to be redeemed at one of their stores. I was stunned to see a store devoted to nothing BUT candles, in hundreds of scents and sizes. and none of them cheap. (When I was a kid, we opened a window to freshen the air). We cut through a Lord & Taylor to get into the mall and I was also stunned to see the “excess” on display there—one table of cashmere sweaters had over 20 colors to choose from. I shudder to think of what the selections at the Nordstroms and Bloomingdales looked like. Thus sensitized, on the way home I railed at the “excess” we see on the roads—-over-styled, over-complex automobiles, and (in my area) too many people driving huge SUV’s and trucks that will never use them for their intended purpose. I had a few words for the “McMansion” folks too, sitting in too-big houses on too-big lots as we drove by them to our (now oversized for us) “normal” house on 1/3 acre.
I’m worried that humans will never overcome the growth obsession and corporate/capitalist/profit economic model that dominates the world in time to avoid disaster. Even if the other 6-1/2 billion could be satisfied with less than us, it’s still too much and simply not sustainable.
While it does seem that your “authorities” have legitimate concerns, they also have much to learn. Perhaps that bespectacled, bearded fellow should intern at a German utility for a few years.
By any measure, Germany should be a bankrupt, desolate hellhole.
They have no oil, poor quality coal, is 48th in proven natgas reserve and have at best, barely average insolation, on par with Seattle.
East Germany used to be a noteworthy source of uranium but all mines were closed shortly after reunification although small amounts are still produced from cleanup of mine water.
It’s been less than 1/4 century since they absorbed an entire country of communists, and they’ve stopped charging tuition, even for non-citizens.
Yet they have one of the most reliable national grids in the world, possibly even THE most reliable, better than France, who is the low-CO2 nuclear champ of the EU.
And this despite reducing nuclear’s contribution to generation by more than 1/3 in just 3 years.
Germany is bankrupting its poorest to pay for electricity, while planning to sacrifice historic sites to lignite mines and spew grossly unsustainable amounts of CO2 far into the future. People without electricity in a German winter ARE living in a hellhole. They’re just insignificant to you. They are among the sacrifices you think should be made. Meanwhile, industries with the pull to get exempted from the “environmental” fees think everything is hunky-dory. It is… for them. They are not being sacrificed.
Reliability of delivery to customers depends mostly on weather, not generating plants. But Scotland recently had a major outage that was caused by wind farms. Just you wait, the inability of “progress” to overrule physics will become apparent in Germany too.
Why don’t they deserve recognition for that? Why is France not the model to be emulated? Is not the climate the most important issue for humanity as a whole right now? Is not every year lost condemning more species to extinction, more cities to submergence, more farms to desert?
That is the disconnect between your claimed concerns and your prescriptions. You can’t claim ignorance, so why are you still doing it?
You mean, the country that embarked on a scheme that absolutely requires a huge “Stromautobahn” to make it work, and is just now getting the plans under way?
They have seen the actual physics of the networks in action, causing the exact problems predicted… and you say they “have much to learn”? Obviously you are talking about POLITICAL re-education, because they are not Proper Believers like you. The people who complain when things stop working are “wreckers” or “counter-revolutionaries” and you’ll have them re-educated too. You’ll have plenty of camps for that (we’ve seen this movie before, playing in multiple venues in Asia).
There’s a level of social dysfunction worse than ignorance (curable) and stupidity (trainable). There’s evil. The only remedies known involve removal from society by some means or other. When you have decided to fight the facts (like Oreskes’ merchants), that is what you are.
Anyone who can remember the Kennedy administration has a lot fewer & crappier years looming over the horizon than are stretched out to the vanishing point over his shoulder into the past.
So why are you wasting time here when you’ve had all the answers for so long?
While it may be heartwrenching to abandon the 8 or 9 readers you’ve managed to glean in 10 years of pontificating over at your Ergosphere blog, this looming existential crisis demands of ye to get thee to the Capitol and say unto the assemblage that they should hearken unto the wisdom of Hansen & Monbiot and construct vast numbers of atomic teakettles, lest we perish.
(maniacal laugh)Evil, am I?(/maniacal laugh)
So what does that make of people like Don Blankenship of Massey Energy, or Gerald Ford* who proposed using coal to end dependence on foreign oil and TWICE vetoed bills regulating strip-mining’s environmental impacts?
Or present day Elon Musk who damned fission with faint praise.
I doubt they’ll be flattered by the comparison to me & my paltry accomplishments.
Are they diabolical? Dastardly? Super-duper evil?
* I’m aware that Ford proposed significantly increasing the number of nuke plants
TMI & Chernobyl would still have happened and his deliberate support for expanding coal usage & refusal to regulate its impacts did and continues to do harm to this day.
Despite this, Denmark’s per-kWh CO2 emissions are 5x that of France, Germany’s higher still.
Evading the issue of carbon emissions? Environment taking a back seat to ideology… again?
The issue of carbon emissions must also be considered per-capita, total and trend.
Despite their head start with nuclear (and hydro), France & Sweden are not all that impressive despite their apparent head start in decarbonising electricity.
And they don’t seem to have a real plan of action towards the rest of the economy, unlike Denmark & Germany.
Germany & Denmark’s per-capita emissions have declined more as a %age than either France or Sweden and the population growth rate of France vs Germany and Sweden vs Denmark is just about double.
Since YOU would never think of evading the issue of carbon emissions or let ideology (or is that intolerance?) prevail, let’s see what you have to say on that score.
Also France & Sweden are turning an increasingly jaundiced eye towards nuclear so you’ll have to divide your time hectoring not one but 3 governmental bodies.
Yes, and while we’re all busy “hectoring”, let’s not forget that NO ONE seems to have any real “plan of action” to deal with the many problems facing the world. Except for the plutocracy and the corporate oligarchy, that is—-they get richer all the time.
Reliability of delivery to customers depends mostly on weather, not generating plants. But Scotland recently had a major outage that was caused by wind farms. Just you wait, the inability of “progress” to overrule physics will become apparent in Germany too
Is that schadenfreude I detect given that the deleterious impacts of increasing heat waves on nuke facilities?
This has been reported multiple times but it’s rarely mentioned that during the devastating heat wave of 2003 that took so many lives in the Eurozone, France had to sideline GIGAwatts of ultra-reliable nuclear when demand for air conditioning would have been at its highest.
From http://www.rense.com/general40/reactors.htm
PARIS — The French government is considering national electricity rationing after engineers warned that they can no longer guarantee the safety of the country’s 58 nuclear power reactors because the heatwave is defeating efforts to cool them.
A crisis meeting this morning at the Prime Minister’s office will be told that France – which depends more heavily on atomic energy than any other European country – faces the prospect of shutting down half its power grid
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jul/30/energy.weather
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/in-tennessee-heat-waves-frustrate-nuclear-power
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/idUS163919996420110504
As I’ve said before no one, no one solution, no one country has all the answers, excepting Your Magnificence, of course.
“you are ignoring factors which doom your favorite “fix” to failure”
And there’s the “pot” in E-pot. Haven’t you noticed that the entrenched FF interests are not in the LEAST bit worried about you?
That’s because despite the support of Hansen, Monbiot & others, ATK (atomic teakettle) proponents have shown themselves, time & again, to be utterly incapable of winning hearts & minds.
China chose to poison its air & condemn millions of citizens to eventual death by emphysema rather than a wholesale adoption of ATKs.
They may have 30-odd nuke plants under construction but they’ve been building one new coal plant per week for years and their usage is projected to keep rising until about 2040.
http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/chinas-growing-coal-use-is-worlds-growing-problem-16999
There’s more support for Thorium MSRs/ LFTRs, which essentially don’t yet even EXIST than for your “good enough since 1960” solution.
“Who’s your guru? Amory Lovins, whose predictions have been universally wrong, whose prescriptions are massively flawed, and who takes money from… fossil-fuel interests”
Lovins has been living & preaching energy-efficient buildings for 30+ yrs and was a consultant on an Empire State Bldg retrofit that is saving over $2.5 million per year.
He also convinced the treehugging hippies in Austin, TX to double-down on the amount of new solar.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/austins-solar-tariff-newly-incorporates-rmis-energy-price-hedge-recommendation-68647
http://www.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm?id=216608
When you have TEXANS choosing renewables 1st over more “sensible” alternatives, you have an image problem.
And, of course, it’s all my fault 🙂
Replying to comment-page-1/#comment-64360, re-parented for column width:
Regulated utilities have to get rate increases approved; if they haven’t been prudent, they have to eat costs themselves. Merchant plants in deregulated markets simply go out of business if they can’t meet expenses.
In my home state of Michigan, the only plant making news regularly is Palisades. There’s been a recurrent leak in some tank (leaking exactly what, news items don’t mention) and some old mentions of tritium in wells. Tritium is a low-energy beta emitter which has a short half-life in the body and presents no health or environmental threat unless very high levels are present. It decays to helium-3.
The normal leaching of toxics from coal-ash dumps is vastly more dangerous than anything happening at Palisades, but the media ignore it.
News flash, Denmark has been at it since at least 1989 and STILL generates nearly half its electricity from coal. France essentially decarbonized its grid over a span of just 11 years.
Yes, the endless drumbeat of anti-nuclear propaganda has been felt there too. WHY DON’T YOU STOP IT? Why do you tout 385gCO2/kWh Denmark as a model, while 77 gCO2/kWh France has “shifting attitudes”?
Instead of opposing nuclear as incompatible with unreliable generation, why don’t you tell environmentalists to embrace the atom… for the planet’s sake? “Renewables” aren’t working very well; even in energy-starved Japan the utilities have to cut them back to keep their grids from blacking out.
Wind and solar require gas as backup (if not coal, which is what Germany and Denmark are using). The shutdown of Vermont Yankee means New England utilities will be using a lot of oil for backup fuel when natural gas pipelines are maxed out. If they’re the enemy, why are you in bed with them?
You are objectively pro-fossil. Nuclear is the only carbon-free competition that coal and gas have today. The most you’ll allow is for current plants to keep running. You do not want the industry to take fossil fuels out of the market. You know this can be done, because it has been done multiple times. It is the last chance we have to cut our CO2 emissions fast enough to stay below 2°C. Yet you are absolutely opposed to it! And you have prominent company, like Bill McKibben of 350.org. You categorically rule out the best—if not ONLY—means of getting what YOU agree is the planet’s most important task done.
This is why I think Greens are either disingenuous or insane.
News flash, even the worst-run nuke in the USA is safer than the safest natural gas plant and its supply chain. Using weasel-words like “well-run” allows you to move the goal posts at your pleasure. Saying that today’s technology isn’t good enough yet is more of the same; when tomorrow’s gets here it still won’t be good enough, will it?
You’ve been doing your damnedest to evade the question of priorities since I first posed it. Let’s posit for the sake of argument that France has done a good enough job on the electric front to get to our 2050 targets (Denmark and Germany are nowhere near). Given the zero radiation death toll from commercial nuclear generators in France, the USA and even Japan (Fukushima caused no fatalities), we can argue that even 1960’s tech is safe enough; it’s certainly safer than un-checked climate change. If you think that the climate is our highest priority, why don’t we de-carbonize RIGHT NOW using nuclear energy and handle the other details later, once we can stop worrying about e.g. massive sea level rise and acidity-driven die-offs of key oceanic species?
WOW! A post from E-Pot without any racism, xenophobia, or childish name-calling. And full of good arguments that I can support. I watch the clock of CO2 concentration tick upward at 2+ ppm per year and ask why we don’t recognize that nuclear power (despite a few real warts that we CAN live with) is the ONLY way that we are going to be able to quickly generate large amounts of carbon-free electricity.
By “quickly”, I mean nukes coming on line in quantity in 10-15-20 years IF we get moving now. Combined with renewables, we might then be able to stabilize at 450ppm (and pray that’s enough).
Of course, there’s all that coal and gas in Australia for India and China, and the developing countries all wanting “theirs”, and the oil and gas companies drilling and fracking everywhere, but no one wants to really look at that either. The only “projection” that the bright-siders will look at is the rapid and EXPONENTIAL growth of renewables from a VERY small base, while fossil fuels, particularly coal, are ALREADY HERE and are the 600 pound gorilla that is not going away any time soon.
(PS I will again remind all that Denmark has ~5.5 million people, Germany has ~80 million, and China and India have ~2,600 million)
” The shutdown of Vermont Yankee means New England utilities will be using a lot of oil for backup fuel when natural gas pipelines are maxed out. If they’re the enemy, why are you in bed with them?”
A quick look into the Vermont Yankee situation shows that they fought hard against the state’s refusal to issue an operating extension – and won in court.
So good for them for fighting back.
And what did they do next? They threw in the towel because natgas is cheaper.
After 40 yrs in operation, shouldn’t a “well-run” ATK be a pure profit-making machine?
The Vermont Public Service Board was stacked with anti-nuclear zealots who refused to issue the required certificate of public good (CPG) until it was made clear to them that the NRC had sole authority over issues of nuclear safety. The PSB only issued a fractional-year CPG after the state had forced Vermont Yankee, using discriminatory taxes and other lawfare, to shut down.
No, natgas is not cheaper. Natgas gets a higher price in the NE market despite the lack of guaranteed fuel delivery. VY had some of the most reliable generation in the market (not to mention the cleanest) but was still forced to accept low prices, and had to pay a discriminatory tax which applied to no other generator in the state (a bill of attainder).
Yes, should be. Would be, if the state government was not allowed to make the plant run at a loss by pure fiat. So instead of splitting atoms, the Northeast will be getting 587 megawatts of power from combustion instead. That’s about 2 million tons of CO2 per year if it’s from gas, twice that if it’s from coal; between 35 and 70 million tons of CO2 over the 18 years of lost life. At a social cost of $50 per ton, that’s as much as $3.5 billion: about as much as a new AP1000.
After the electric rate hikes from the VY shutdown are fully appreciated (NH rates went up 50%), I hope that Vermont recalls Schumlin and all the other clowns who brought this about.
“Yes, the endless drumbeat of anti-nuclear propaganda has been felt there too. WHY DON’T YOU STOP IT?”
Why don’t you do a better job to telling your side of the story?
You & your ATKs go back to the days of “Leave It To Beaver”.
Greenpeace didn’t come around until 1971.
The “endless drumbeat” against coal, oil, GMO, etc has barely dented their profits; what makes such a bunch of geniuses such terrible communicators?
Shouldn’t you be telling Kirk Sorensen to “STOP IT”?
In the few years that he’s been the traveling salesman for MSRs / LFTRs, he’s done more to make nuke plants look like a bunch of conspiring dinosaurs than any number of greenies.
I know you’ve promoted him on the Ergosphere but watch the full presentation below from the perspective of a layman and at the end, ask yourself WHY would ANYONE support such expensive, inefficient, blinkered technology when a few years R&D would give us the HOLY GRAIL of cheap, clean energy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSmf_qmkbg
And how DID the Thorium story get buried for so long when so much work was done on it and so much progress was made at ORNL?
Was it too much to expect that such principled, ethical, educated people as yourself would have the mere COURAGE & FORESIGHT to make sure that such useful technology didn’t die?
It’s been public domain for decades.
Why do you use that as an excuse to lie? Drawing mushroom clouds over cooling towers is hardly a civil debate tactic. If you had legitimate beefs, you wouldn’t work so hard to poison the well.
I have no idea what “ATK” is referring to. Further, there is no “nuclear lobby” outside of specialist operators like Exelon. Nuclear plants are sold by conglomerates like GE, which have far more lucrative fossil-related businesses. They will not attack their most profitable products.
Of course. The only “options” allowed (wind and solar) require fossil-fired backup. Ethanol is a farm price-support program, not an energy program. Only nuclear truly gets rid of the traffic in carbon. Follow the money.
There must be some alter-Kirk Sorensen you’re talking about. Or maybe he only lives in your mind.
Maybe because there’s no way in hell that the NRC, with its current charter and regulations, will allow such things in the USA in less than 20 years and with less than $1 billion in regulatory costs just to educate the regulators so they know what they’re looking at? Sorensen is talking about going to Canada instead, where regulation is closer to sanity. After 20 years there might be enough operating experience for the NRC to take the stick out of its butt and do things on a reasonable schedule and with reasonable fees.
We don’t have 20 years to get moving on this problem. We needed to move 20 years ago. You prevented that. How about some help getting moving now?
Government put its money elsewhere, and who’s going to invest in a product that government (which has shown that it can and will kill established plants for the sake of ideology) has shown it doesn’t like? You speak of principled, ethical people. Does Harry Reid come to mind when you say those words? Nancy Pelousy? Barack Hussein Obola? I laugh at you.
“You are objectively pro-fossil. Nuclear is the only carbon-free competition that coal and gas have today”
“If they’re the enemy, why are you in bed with them?”
There’s some debate as to exactly how “carbon-free” nuclear truly is but I’ll let that slide for now.
You’ve repeatedly held up the example of France as a “decarbonized” grid. I have to wonder why they stopped at 75-80% when the stated goal was to have many more reactors.
And you’ve pointed out that they implemented load-following in some plants although it appears that some in Germany and a few USA ones also do this to some extent.
But neither the French nor the Germans were the first.
In fact, the FIRST was the very first – dearly departed Shippingport, way back in ’57
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-demand/
Is that mentioned on the Ergosphere? Were you even aware of this?
So what you & yours have had all along, is a colossal failure to communicate.
You’ve had 60 years to show that you could do everything that FF-fired plants can do – and failed. Miserably.
All those years wasted. All those brains & developed tech, underused & miscommunicated. All the times when you & yours could have stood up & shouted down coal & oil and saved the planet before the crisis even really started – but lacked the courage – and left the heavy lifting to a bunch of bearded, unwashed hippies who weren’t afraid to put themselves in the thick of the fight, risking life & limb for what they believed in.
No, there are a few “researchers” with heavily-cooked numbers like Storm & Smith and Sovacool, and then there’s everyone else. (As I recall, at the figures used by Storm & Smith, the Rossing mine would consume more fossil fuels than the entire nation of Namibia in which it’s located.)
<shrug> Ask the French. Much of the balance of their power is hydro, and once the oil-fired plants had been taken off the grid they’d met their goals for self-sufficiency. I also suspect that the government had changed, the dirigiste forces were out and anti-nuke influences had traction once again.
If I’m not mistaken, they’re all of a single design and they ALL do it. There are operational limitations; during the initial “fuel conditioning” period after refueling they operate at constant power, and late in the fuel cycle there isn’t enough excess reactivity to support daily power swings.
Actually, Calder Hall was first to generate grid power on a commercial scale.
Until the operation of nuclear plants went to specialist companies like Exelon, lots of utilities ran their nukes as load-followers. That’s a big reason why historical capacity factors were so low.
I read everything on ANS Nuclear Cafe. If you’d bothered to look you’d already know that I’ve commented on Shippingport before. IMO the light-water breeder test was more interesting, and more significant, than load-following. We can always find things to do with excess electricity. Dumping it as heat is preferable to turning reactors down; there are lots of ways to use heat.
It’s hard to out-shout a well-funded lie machine.
You just admitted that Shippingport demonstrated that it DID everything a FF plant could do.
What the nuclear industry could not do is win against the well-heeled fossil interests, and their NRC which kept ratcheting up “safety” costs without rhyme, reason or limit. The worst nuclear plant accidents in the West, all together, have caused exactly ZERO fatalities from radiation. The San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, by itself, killed more people than the TMI and Fukushima meltdowns. Yet there are demands that nuclear must “be safer”. Safer than what? If we approved things based on deaths per TWh, we’d have an all-nuclear USA by now.
I’ve known much of this stuff since I was 15. I knew that the clowns carrying their placards of mushroom clouds over cooling towers were full of crap, but I didn’t have a well-funded truth machine to counter their lie machine. They were the ones mis-communicating, and they had help going back to the Rockefeller foundation and their financing of Hermann Müller. We knew decades ago that a little bit of radiation didn’t cause genetic defects; the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors proved that, among many other tests. Yet TO THIS DAY the lie machine continues to assert that nuclear power will mutate us into oblivion.
Who’s miscommunicating here? Shut down the lie machine, then we’ll talk.