[lbo-talk] catastrophy II

[Gar Lipow]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you have the natural gas. Natural gas is a great shaping source.
> Complementary to nukes, coal, renewables alike. Not exactly  low
> carbon though. (Conventional is lower than coal. But conventional
> natural gas reserves are running out. Frakking aside from being
> horrible environmentally, leaks methane and cause GHG emissions
> comparable to coal. Shale gas leaks methane and is environmentally
> destructive. Shipping LNG or CNG overseas is can lead to accidents and
> regardless leaks methane. Methane is a far worse GHG than CO2.
>
> Lets do a risk comparison. Do nothing keep using fossil fuels,
> catastrophe. Try a nuclear path. Expensive, same risk of being aborted
> by poltiics, same risk of running out of money. Same risk of plain old
> not working, cause nuclear is lousy for peaking and demand response -
> two things you need even in the absence of renewables.  Or a renewable
> path. It is not certain disaster like sticking with fossil fuels. Once
> started I'd say the risk of it failing for various reasons is lower
> than with nuclear. And you don't have all the freaking nuclear
> disasters, which I consider worth something.
>
> Barry  Commoner advocated switching immediately to natural gas and
> efficiency with a slow transition to solar back in the 70s when we had
> plenty of natural gas. If he had been listened to then, we would have
> had a no risk option.
>
> We don't have that. We have no low risk options. A renewable path
> (which is not a particularly soft energy path) is the lowest remaining
> risk. Also some of the mineral shortages: they are assuming one hell
> of a lot of electric cars. If we move to electric trains that would
> save some of the minerals. We do have substitutes when it comes to
> building wind generators. We can replace some of the fancy rotor that
> use rare earths with slighly less efficient ones that use iron.  At
> least Jacobson and Delucchi base their proposals almost entirely on
> existing tech. Hansen wants to gamble on tech for which commercial
> prototypes have not been demonstrated. The equivalent would be for J &
> D to have based their proposal on flying energy generators.

Let me expand that. I don't think the risk is that high. The people
who are telling Hansen it won't work are utility executives. Not only
interested parties but not necessarily technical experts. Hansen is
taking the word of self-interested people are in turn taking the word
of other people.  One reason I'm pretty confident is that at least one
study matched hour by hour demand over a three month period with hour
by hour potential wind and solar supply, and assumed a small amount of
storage and found an 85% match even in the single state of North
Carolina.

Blackburn, John. 2010. Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind
Power in North Carolina: Dealing with Intermittent Electricity
Sources. Takoma Park, Maryland: Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research.  http://www.ieer.org/reports/NC-Wind-Solar.pdf.

If you add hydro and geothermal, that already brings the match to 90%.
Extend this long distance to include stronger wind zones, fiercer sun
zones, and you can see why I'm pretty confident that  we can match
supply and demand.

Also 100 trillion dollars is a scary number. But that is over the
course of 40 years. so 2.5 trillion a year. Until you compare it to
what we spend on energy now worldwide.  The difference is perhaps a
third of world military spending, perhaps less because I'm running out
of energy to continue this.