So please enlighten us. Are solar and wind profitable and growing purely because of artificial subsidies from public authorities, or are they genuinely viable? In other words, are the subsidies temporary, i.e. seed-corn which will soon lead to self-supporting industries? Or are the subsidies a life-support machine for a brain dead patient? I would like to see some analysis of this.
I recall my time as a small cog in the civil service. On more than one occasion I recommended to management a suggestion involving a financial outlay of under £1000 that would achieve a three-fold or more saving over three years. In pretty much every case, I was informed that there was no budget for the expenditure. This is small potatoes stuff, but the principle scaled up to the highest levels, as far as I could tell. You could not spend money even if it meant saving significant sums of money in the medium term. Budgets are budgets. The only efficiencies Government knows how to deliver are straight cuts. They are constitutionally incapable of spend-to-save and other such "complicated" mechanisms.
Yeah, not sure why I added that bit in about the government. I guess it was to emphasise that promising efficiency savings is easier than delivering them.
Funkyrimpler. Your post has probably wasted about 3 hours of my day. 48 minutes to watch the film, and about 2 hours to think about it and write my reply which you will find here: The Venus Project - another dystopia - The Glidd of Glood Blog Now don't do that again. You can leave any comments on the blog. I barely get any, so it will make a nice change.
No, the newest panels are genuinely viable. The government subsidies have all but dried up now, but the technology works. The speed of the return depends on a number of things, i.e. size of panels and number installed but there is a two pronged benefit. First off, generating a lot of electricity off grid is good, because its free, but secondly it's isolated against future price rises. Even if you don't allow for selling any back to the grid (which you inevitably will), you will gain and gain as electricity prices rise faster than inflation.
I have to say that the usual moans here are quite typical of the British psyche. No wonder we lost car and bike manufacturing to the Japanese and the Germans. Yes, there are green taxes, but any business that bothers itself can get that money back and more by getting into the Enhanced Capital Allowances scheme, as run by HMRC. Me? well me and Mrs749er just invested a tidy sum in a biomass boiler. We are off the gas grid, and quite frankly, were fed up being raped by the local oil cartel into paying 60p+ per litre for fuel oil for a boiler that used 1.5 litres per hour. So as far, as I am concerned, screw the oil companies and screw Osbournes fuel taxes. as for turbines that don't turn very often, my sister lives near the biggest wind farm in Britain. It supplies every home in Glasgow with clean power. Look at the arctic sea ice today compared to 20 years ago, and it doesn't take Einstein to work out where all that water has gone. it spends most of its summer falling on us and ruining our riding season. When the offshore farm in the Moray Firth is complete, most of Scotland's homes will be powered by wind. England has fallen so far behind its not true. The investment in wave power up here is going off the scale. Last year the Scottish gvt signed an agreement with Norway to connect the 2 countries together. When its windy the Scottish turbines pump water up into the Norwegian dams, when it not windy, the Norwegian Hydro schemes power Scotland and Norway. So for me, I would rather pay a bit more for electricity, and have normal summers back. Glidofgood, keep your Alfa. There is as much embodied energy in a car as it ever uses in its life time, so keeping it is the environmentally friendly thing to do.
Generating energy off the grid is NOT free. If electricity prices do rise faster than inflation that will feed inflationary pressure back into the system. What EROI tells us about ROI | SmartPlanet Take a look at the Net Energy Cliff half way down the article. PV EROEI is currently less than 10:1 and it is estimtated for a modern society to function it needs energy with an EROEI of better than 10:1 to function. Understanding EROEI and more importantly the implications of a falling EROEI for world energy production is fundamental.
Generating energy off the grid is NOT free. If electricity prices do rise faster than inflation that will feed inflationary pressure back into the system. What EROI tells us about ROI | SmartPlanet Take a look at the Net Energy Cliff half way down the article. PV EROEI is currently less than 10:1 and it is estimtated for a modern society to function it needs energy with an EROEI of better than 10:1 to function. Understanding EROEI and more importantly the implications of a falling EROEI for world energy production is fundamental to understanding our future.
Those turbines wont provide Glasgow with clean power in the middle of winter with a high pressure area over the UK and temperatures at -20 C And the energy conversion losses of pumped storage and transmission back and forth across the North Sea will further reduce the poor EROEI that comes from wind power. Wave power has been at the 'experimental' stage for literally decades, it still is.
The article is probably all very inteliigent, but I'd have liked to have known more about how the EROIE is calculated. For example, in the case of nuclear electricity generation, does it include the energy used in the mining operation of the uranium, its transport, the building of the power station and the energy costs of its decommissioning along with any energy used to actually produce the electricity on a day-to-day basis? The whole subsidy thing is a red herring, as is the price per barrel of oil. You don't want to mix up money and energy. I'm just interested in the energy equation. After you've looked at that, you have to consider the other factors. For example, if burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change, then there is energy to be invested in fixing that too. The article implies that oil is just a free lunch. The whole interest in other forms of energy production is the concern that climate change carries massive attendant costs in all sorts of areas. Of course, the climate change thread a few months back indicates that not many forum users believe in it, or are concerned about it. Hence this thread is a little sterile - we're just going over old ground. I've given up trying to change anyone's mind as apparently, the polar caps are either not melting, or if they are, it's not bad news, or even if it is, it's inevitable and we can't change it and aren't responsible for it. That seemed to sum up the prevailing forum opinion on climate change.
the thing is John, if 1/10 the R&D budget had gone into wave/tidal as went into nuclear this would not be a topic of conversation. In the late 1990's documents were released that showed that the cost of generating electricity through wave would have been the same as generating though nuclear. Guess what, you cant build a bomb with wave so its figure got doctored up by 50%. The point is that most people don't understand renewables and how they should be deployed. Its about local generation and reducing transmission losses. Its about a greater and more diverse generating mix, filling in the gaps when others are not producing. It also helps that they are not terrorist targets. Go back even just 30 years and see how much money you would have to spend to get a 6 second, 0-60mph car. Nothing stays the same, at least it doesn't if you ignore those who oppose new technology. Hands up who wants to live in the shadow of a nuclear power station or even a coal one? The financial subsidy afforded to nuclear is eye watering, and it too benefited from the non fossil fuel obligation. Basically, a tax on fossil fuel generation. Then there is the amount of concrete used to build them......environmentally filthy material.
Is biomass (wood) any cheaper than other forms of heating now? I had a solid fuel boiler in my old house.... What a massive ball ache it was!
Accurate measurement for EROEI would have to include all of those other facets, which would further reduce the ratio. A world where the EROEI of total global energy production is falling will be profoundly different from the world today, ever more investment will be required for smaller returns. As EROEI moves to 1:1 more of the energy produced would be used to produce further energy with less and less left over for society to function. This is irrespective of climate change, infact I think it is climate change, real or imagined, that will become the red herring.
I think the point about renewables that most people don't understand is their low EROEI, the law of diminishing returns and the fact that they can never supply the quantity of energy that we currently consume as a whole nation. The investment required would be on such a scale that the rest of society as we know it would crumble; think North Korea. A modern society needs energy from sources with an EROEI of greater than 10-12 to function. I take your point about the link with nuclear weapons though. Thorium is a better fuel than Uranium.
the thing is John, there are some aspects of energy which are just skewed. Eg, nuclear is so heavily subsidised, the cost of energy is too low, as much as people don't want to hear it. I would be interested to know why the Chinese and French have pulled out of building the UKs next generation of nuclear reactors? If those factors were addressed, renewables such as wave would be far more advanced and the EROEI would look very different. Surely it a question of economics more than technology? Additionally, once Hydrogen is sorted out, the whole picture will change. i remember being told at Uni, that a wave barrage off the coast of the outer Hebrides, about the length of the Hebrides could power Scotland. Being an optimist,
A very disappointing program with no critical analysis of where the industry is, just vested interests and even they said wave power will not be producing cheap electricity any time soon. Projects were still 'experimental' or small scale technology demonstrators.
ALL hydrogen has to be made, which takes energy, and you never get more out than you put in, therefore hydrogen is an excellent carrier of energy in a few highly specialised applications but as a fuel for the masses it is a non starter. Yes we could build a windmill to produce hydrogen to drive our vehicles but it would be impossible to replace all of the fuel we currently use because the investment required would be massive and cripple the economy, a bit like N Korea putting all of its GDP into the Army. The EROEI would be so low that there would be insufficient resources left to drive society as we know it. Could we use some renewables to help ease the problem ? Yes, but the implications of living in a world with falling EROEI is very significant, it would not be business as usual.
Am sure it will be a ball ache in comparison to oil or gas. In winter it will need loaded morning and evening. Maybe a third time if it gets to minus 15 again. In summer once or twice a week. in my old flat I paid about £22 a month for gas, with a modern condensing boiler. At the new house, I would be paying about £5000 a year in oil if I wasn't so tight the log boiler should go through about £2000 a year in timber max, maybe as little as £1000. We also have about a dozen dead trees between 8m and 15m. So a few years worth of timber once felled and dried.
Have we not been here before John? Eg before James Watt came along and sorted the Newcomen(sp?) engine? a similar technological advance would surely have the same effect? On a smaller scale, Todays oil wells last far longer than originally forecast as technology has increased their economic life. The FORTIES field is producing more oil than when BP had it and it was one of the North Seas first.
