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Energy Vision 2050 - part I
Posted by Luis de Sousa on September 10, 2008 - 10:10am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: 2050, alternative energy, economic growth, nuclear, renewable energy [list all tags]
This is a guest post by Sterling Smith (TOD user Sterling). This first installment of the series outlines the evolution of the energy panorama from now to 2050. A second installment will deal with technical and political aspects of the path put forward.
Sterling is a software architect who works in Silicon Valley and lives in Woodside, California. He was born in the suburbs of New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he majored in physics. He has worked in the software business for 35 years, still writes code, and has been part of eleven start-ups as well as several major corporations. Sterling's wife, Deborah Metzger, PhD, MD, is a very prominent gynecologist with whom he is raising four kids.
Overview
While many people who are just beginning to learn about peak oil do not yet grasp how serious it will be for society, many of those who do understand the threat are perhaps overly pessimistic of the world’s chances for shifting to a new energy base and even of maintaining civilization. Much of this debate revolves around the desirability of trying to preserve modern civilization and its apparent reliance on physical growth, but many also doubt that there are any energy alternatives to oil and the other fossil fuels that could possibly ramp up to address the looming need. I think we need to decouple these two issues and debate them separately. This article does not attempt to answer the question of whether civilization is worth saving. I think we need to answer that question “can we preserve modern civilization” before we try to take on the question of “should we do so”? The objective of this and a future piece is to derive and present a vision of a world that preserves modern civilization after it can no longer rely on fossil fuels as its primary sources of energy, with the assumption, supported in the second piece, that energy sources exist to support this outcome.
The world may follow any of several paths but the single one presented here seems to me the most likely. The first step will be to project the overall economic path that the world is likely to take as it struggles through the coming peaks of fossil fuels and replaces them with an alternative infrastructure. In step two, I will attempt to derive the total energy that would be required to support this projected economic activity. The third step will be to determine the energy mix that could support this energy demand. A future article will attempt to describe how we get there from here and what the new energy system would look like.
My reading of the evidence convinces me that the world possesses adequate energy resource to power a civilization like ours into the indefinite future. However, for this to happen, we will have to transition to a radically different energy infrastructure in the years to 2050. Can the world survive this transition? My faith in the ingenuity, persistence and will to survive of mankind says yes but I am not prepared to defend that at this time.
The Size of the World Economy in 2050
Assumptions:
- Energy resources exist that could power a civilization like ours forty years from now.
- The long term growth rate will approximate the current rate after a new energy infrastructure is built.
- The world will not be able to avoid a severe downturn, due to peaking, lasting about 20 years.
- Concerted societal action will mitigate the downturn.
- Total world population growth will end by 2050.
- The world economic activity mix will shift toward less energy intensive activities.
- Growth in traditional economic activities will slow.
My starting assumption is that the rate of economic growth in the next forty years, if unconstrained by declining energy, would likely be about what it has been for the last fifty years, which is 3.9% (World Economic Growth - Earth Policy Institute). However, since the current population growth rate is about 1% (1.167% - 2007 est.) and population growth is expected to go to zero by 2050, I reduce the expected growth rate without an energy shock to 3% in 2050. The rapidly developing countries such as China and India have had more than twice this growth rate in recent years but many critical resource are becoming constrained. These physical resource limitations are likely to slow physical economic activity but the economic mix is trending towards more creation of intellectual capital (entertainment, knowledge, communications, software, etc.) through activities that are placing much lower demands on physical resources. It should be possible to maintain this 3% level of aggregate economic activity growth while dramatically reducing physical resource consumption. I think it is fair to conclude that this level of economic growth in 2050 would maintain the current level of economic vitality.
Figure 1. Gross World Product, 1950-2005
The next task is to estimate the impact of fossil fuels peaking on economic activity. Three potential scenarios come to my mind as possible with a fourth thrown in since it seems to be popular.
Collapse – In this scenario, once the crisis of peaking hits, it is never successfully mitigated. Economic activity turns down and continues down to a low level. Since there are potential mitigations, this might happen is if the shock causes the economic system to break down so that a coordinated response is not possible. This scenario would undoubtedly be accompanied by wars, tremendous environmental destruction and a huge die-off.
No Growth – For some reason that I cannot fathom, zero economic growth seems to have great appeal to some. This scenario seems completely implausible to me. We will either make the transition to a new energy base or we will not.
Profound Oil Shock – In this scenario, economic growth slows down as shortage of oil, principally, puts people out of work. Eventually, substitutions emerge and economic growth resumes. The net effect is the time at with the economy reaches a certain level is delayed for some years.
World War Mobilization – This scenario would occur if the world mobilized to take concerted action to mitigate the problem as quickly as possible by focusing world resources narrowly. It seems more likely to happen after a more rapid deterioration. Growth could be significantly above trend for the entire world for up to ten years. A third World War might not include as much wholesale killing as the first two. It might just be an intense economic competition with dramatic winners and losers. The rapid wealth transfers now occurring are setting the conditions for this kind of event.
Figure 2. Four Responses to Peaking
While the world war level mobilization seems to me almost as likely as a profound oil shock, I am going to arbitrarily choose the oil shock perturbation as the basis for my model. The question is, what is a plausible depth and duration for the downturn? The Hirsh Report predicts that it will take twenty years to fully mitigate the effects of oil peaking. It also notes that economic upheaval is not inevitable (“given enough lead-time, the problems are soluble with existing technologies.”) During the Great Depression in the US, the economy lost 25% of its value in 1930-1933, but was back to its previous high by the beginning of 1937. My guess for the coming downturn is that it will be similar in magnitude to the 1930s depression but that it will be shallower and last longer. With this in mind, my model estimates that the world will lose about 70% the economic growth that it would have otherwise had during the twenty year mitigation process starting in 2010 (23 vs 78 T$). This is a very severe downturn but I am simply making guess here how severe it will be.
The only somewhat similar historical precedent for such a downturn happened after the 1979 oil shock, prompted by the Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iran – Iraq War, when the price of oil rose two and a half fold and stayed at about twice the previous level for about six years before collapsing in 1986. This event involved a temporary reduction on consumption of about 15% which created a noticeable blip in world economic growth (see figure 1) but no overall downturn. This was a much smaller event than the 2010-2030 downturn assumed here. It is interesting to note that this event was mitigated not only by the rapid increase in oil supply in many countries but also by the world’s first nuclear power buildup.
Figure 3. Projected Gross World Product to 2050
Energy Demand
Assumptions:
- Economic activity and energy consumption are directly related.
- Energy supply constraints produce greater energy efficiency.
- Greater energy supply leads to lesser energy efficiency.
- Emerging knowledge intensive activities will use proportionally lower energy.
It is widely believed that there is a direct relationship between a level of economic activity and the amount of energy that must be consumed to produce it (see works by Robert Ayres and Charles Hall). However, I expect three major trends which will slow the growth of energy demand. The first is the already stated expectation that world population growth will go to zero by 2050 which will lower long term economic demand growth to 3%. The second is that energy efficiency will improve for the current mix of economic activity, which will itself decline by one third due to resource constraints. However, these efficiency improvements will be largely given up once the supply of new energy resources increases. In my model, the current mix of economic activity improves to 70% of the current energy consumption per unit of GPD in 2020 (i.e. these activities are 30% more efficient), but then reverts to 90% by 2050 once the supply of energy has rebounded. I believe the world will add an additional approximately 1% of growth per year (of 3% total growth) of low physical resource activities which characterize the information society. These are modeled at half as energy intensive as the current mix and grow to 33% of the total mix by 2050. Together these would provide 3% economic growth with 75% of the current energy demand per unit of economic activity in 2050. The current world energy demand is about 15 TW per year (World energy resources and consumption).
Figure 4. Projected World Energy Demand
The question has been raised if it is plausible that energy efficiency could improve 30% by 2020? For the purposes of my model, I am mainly concerned with deriving the demand in 2050 so the efficiency in 2020 does not matter except for the light it might shed on the plausibility on the depth of the downturn. To me a 30% improvement in 12 years does seem plausible in a severe crisis.
Energy Mix
Assumptions:
- Oil will peak by 2012 , coal by 2024 and natural gas by 2029.
- The amount of electricity that can be generated by nuclear, wind and solar is not effectively limited by the amount of available fuel.
- No new energy source will be significant between now and 2050.
- Production volumes of fuels from low grade hydrocarbons will never rival today’s production of traditional fossil fuels.
- It will be important to leave a significant amount of coal in the ground to lessen global warming.
- It will be necessary to slow the consumption of remaining oil and gas below the projected natural decline to save some for future generations.
- A future electricity grid will be designed around the principal of power on demand
Transportation will shift to an electricity base from an oil base.
The next question is how to provide for the energy demand with the resources that are likely to be available. Fossil fuels are all projected to peak in this period. It is probably not possible, in the short to mid term, to ask people to reduce their use of oil and gas more than they will have to due to peaking, since there are not good immediate substitutions. However, if possible, it would be better to slow the consumption of these so that we do not exhaust the last supplies of these as soon as projections now suggest we will. Coal is another matter. It is the dirtiest of fossil fuels and it can be displaced directly for electricity generation by sources that I do not expect to be in short supply. Due to the seriousness of global warming, my model phases coal out for electricity generation by 2050. It will presumably still be used in 2050 for transportation fuel, especially for aviation and for such uses as steel production.
Dave Rutledge of CalTech, who has done some of the best work on the peaking of coal supplies, has estimated that even if all fossil fuels are consumed as quickly as they can be produced, that carbon dioxide levels will peak at only 460 ppm, a level that most climate scientist recognize as at just the threshold of doing serious damage to the climate. Does this mean that fossil fuel depletion will solve the global warming problem and that we do not need to do anything about it? I do not think so. James Hansen, NASA's top climate expert, thinks that this threshold needs to be 385 ppm, below the current level, and we are already seeing serious negative effects. Even once emissions decline significantly due to peaking production, it will take several hundreds of years for the carbon dioxide levels to come down to acceptable levels.
My model will use these data compiled by Luis de Sousa for his Olduvai revisited 2008 article (thank you Luis) which has oil peaking in 2012, coal in 2024 and gas in 2029 (1 TW = .086 Mtoe):
Figure 5. Conventional Fossil Fuels
In the following three graphs I show how each of the three fossil fuels is expected to decline due to peaking and also provided recommended levels of consumption, shown as dashed lines below the solid lines of the same color. I assume that coal will be phased out in the model by 2050, except for expected non electricity generation purposes, due to its severe impact on global warming. For oil and natural gas, I cut back the consumption of each on the assumption that these will become too value for us to consume them as fast as we can. I am convinced that this will only be possible once we have alternative sources rapidly coming on line. All data are converted to tera watts.
Figure 6. Projected and Recommended Oil Supply
Figure 7. Projected and Recommended Coal Supply
Figure 8. Projected and Recommended Natural Gas Supply
As you can see, I am projecting that by 2050 we will be able to rely on fossil fuels for only 5.5 TW of my expected world demand of 31.7 TW or 17.3%. I believe this total includes essentially all likely production from alternative fossil fuel source such as oil sands, oil shale and bio fuels which are essentially repackaged fossil fuels. None of these sources seem to be capable of producing much net energy and/or to be producible at high rates. I expect that Biomass, hydro and all other sources (excepting nuclear, wind and solar) will provide about 1 TW combined, as they do today bringing the conventional total to just over 20% of my predicted demand. (I do anticipate the there might be a very large increase in hydro to deal with the wind and solar intermittency issue.) Here is a view of the current world energy mix (World energy resources and consumption):
Figure 9. Current World Energy Mix (Click to enlarge)
Wind and Solar will play vital roles in the future. However, they will have to operate within a power on demand grid. People will not stand for not being able to get on the Internet at night or use air conditioning during the day because the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Today, all wind and solar has to be redundantly backed by dispatchable sources such as gas or hydro to cover for their intermittency. A max of 20% for these sources is widely accepted as the upper bound of their usefulness without a method of large scale power storage or other way to cover for their intermittency. This situation will be made worse in 2050 by gas becoming too precious for power generation. The only large scale storage method of power storage that has emerged to date is pumped water storage. Stuart Staniford and others have proposed a world wide super grid as a way allow solar to be used where the sun is not shining. Al Gore has also recently described a large scale electrical grid as a way to allow wind power to provide a very high percentage of electrical power. To give these vital sources the benefit of the doubt, my model will allow 30% wind and solar with one third of it assumed to be backed by some storage method or grid yet to be determined. I do not think that the proponents of these approaches have demonstrated that they could reach the high levels of renewables they advocate, preserving the power on demand nature of the system and competing on cost with alternatives likely to be available at the time. Note that my model does not adequately provide for the dispatchable power sources that would be necessary to provide the redundancy for the level of wind and solar projected.
My model assumes that 80% of the energy that the world will require in 2050 will have to come from nuclear, wind and solar, or 25.4 TW of electricity. At least the current amount of gas used for electricity generation and all the hydro totaling another roughly 1.5 TW will also be part of the total for an electricity total of 26.9 TW. Of this 30% could come from wind and solar together adding up to 8.07 TW which is 158 time the current .051 TW from these sources. Note that the level of wind and solar projected would only be possible in a mix with nuclear baseload or if the power on demand characteristic of the current system were abandoned. In the latter case, the grid would be completely dominated by the intermittent characteristics of wind and solar.
Figure 10. 2050 World Energy Projected Production Without Nuclear
The next chart shows the dilemma of what would be possible without nuclear power or some other energy source not here considered. Again, remember that this scenario would also feature an electric grid that would only provide power on intermittent supply.
Figure 11. Production vs Demand without Nuclear
I am not sure how to explain the gap in 2010-2030 between the energy projected to be available and the demand projection of the model. One interpretation is that the crisis will be primarily a shortage of oil and that coal and gas cannot immediately substitute. Demand goes down because the oil shortage depresses economic activity and enforces conservation. This article does not pretend to understand what happens during that period, how we would muddle or suffer through it. The important point here is to look at the end state: what is the size of the world economy in 2050? Perhaps the downturn does not have to be a severe as I am forecasting it to be. Tom Whipple, former CIA analyst and top peak oil reporter, has a recent article the comments on the coming crisis. He concludes:
It is getting very complicated out there, and none of us really know what is going to happen.
The Solution
This article assumes that the world has sources of energy in nuclear, wind and solar that are not supply limited and it has the will and the means to transition to a new energy base after fossil fuels are no longer available. In my view, the only credible way to do this is with a large nuclear, wind and solar buildup. In my model nuclear increases 19 fold and wind and solar increase 158 fold.
| Energy Mix in 2050 (Tera Watts) | ||
| Oil | 1.0 | 3% |
| Coal | 1.5 | 5% |
| Natural Gas | 3.0 | 9% |
| Wind & Solar | 8.1 | 25% |
| Nuclear | 17.0 | 54% |
| Other | 1.1 | 3% |
| Total | 31.7 | |
My goal is to write a future article which describes what this world would look like and how we would get there. My hope would be to write that article with the collaboration of several Oil Drum posters who know more about the details of this issue than I do. It is obviously controversial to put forth a vision that assumes that the world can resume the kind of growth it has seen in the last 50 years after fossil fuels are largely depleted and especially to base the vision heavily on nuclear power. Regarding nuclear, I cannot think of a topic where so many contradictory views are debated so often without a consensus emerging. For example, many people still think that nuclear has a low energy return and that supply of fuels are nearly running out, views that I think are strongly at odds with the evidence.
Is this vision hopelessly naïve and cornucopian? Only if you assume that there no way to go but down for mankind.
Spreadsheet with calculations and graphs.
You grossly underestimate the global potential for new hydro and geothermal. A near steady 40 GW for 50 weeks/year from Grand Inga alone. And extra 15 GW from Canada, etc.
On first reading you did not reflect the 20:1 efficiency gains possible from electrified rail, urban and inter-city. That is, more GDP, less energy.
More Later,
Alan
Alan, There are a lot of unanswered questions about geothermal. "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched". As for hydro, there are few untaped cost effective hydro resources in the United States. Jesse H. Ausubel evaluated the Land use requirements for hydro, and came up with some startling observations:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/HeresiesFinal.pdf
Other than not letting so much water go over Niagara Falls unused, and refurbishing some old hydropower plants, Ontario is not included for new Canadian Hydro.
Manitoba, Quebec, Labrador/Newfoundland and BC are the potential sources. And Alaska might build the 5 GW Rampart Dam.
USGS says that the USA has 17 GW of potential small hydro. Small hydro is severely under used almost worldwide (EU best).
Elsewhere, Tajikistan, India (40 GW from memory), Nepal, Afghanistan, Siberia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile (4+ GW), Laos, several in Africa and elsewhere have significant hydroelectric potential. All of current African electrical demand could be meet by hydro + geothermal production with power to spare.
Alan
AlanfromBigEasy, Just because hydro resources exist does not make them cost effective resources. Small hydro may have very limited capacity factors. Ecologist long ago determined that daming every river might not be environmentally sound, and you might get opposition to building a dam at Niagara Falls on aesthetic grounds. Some past hydro projects have proven to be dangerous, for example the Glen Canyon dam which nearly failed some time ago, and the leaky Cedar Creek dam on the Cumberland, that has the potential to drown Nashville.
Niagara Falls already generates 5 GW (Sir Adam Beck on Ontario side). Relatively little water is allowed over the falls at night and a maximum during daylight during "tourist season".
In addition, seasonal maximums exceed the capacity of the power plants. An upgrade to Sir Adam Beck (including a 14.5 m diameter tunnel) is designed to reduce frictional losses, and reduce the % of time that water is "spilled" unused (after subtracting tourist flows) from 2/3rds to 15% of the time (from memory).
Paperwork is the limitation on small hydro in the USA. An operating hydroplant of 3 MW cannot generate enough income to pay for renewing the license after a 50 year renewal (several examples).
Alan
Small scale hydro seems to be a greatly under-estimated resource - the power of the Mississippi river, to name just one example, is worth harnessing as well.
On your original point - not only are geothermal and hydro greatly under-estimated, but solar, wind and biogas are as well (with ocean power - particularly tidal and ocean current also likely to make a significant impact by 2050).
This article doesn't seem to have considered the potential of renewables thoroughly at all and largely ignores the cost and safety aspects that make large scale nuclear power a non-starter for solving our energy needs.
How anyone who is peak oil aware can baulk at the very theoretical safety concerns of nuclear escapes me.
Power down will kill billions, as proposals to use all renewables for the whole world are based on technologies which we do not have deployed at the needed scale, and rely on considerable breakthroughs.
Any contribution form renewables will be welcome, and it has good potential to provide peak solar power in hot climates, wind power where there is a good wind resource, and so on.
The difficulty arises when for ideological reasons it is generalised into an assumption that we can do lots of things that we have not presently got the engineering for.
There are plenty of wind turbines built where it is not windy, solar cells where it is not sunny, and so on.
That is all great fun if it is taxpayers money which is being spent.
However in the serious situation that we are now in, we need ot get on and build what we have the engineering for.
If that changes with future progress, well and good.
The main effect to date of the theorising about what might happen in future and largely imaginary difficulties with nuclear has been to provide support for the lethal coal industry, and increase greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm all for renewables being deployed as fast as is practical, and also for nuclear power.
India is planning to exploit new rivers with one or two dams and a series of "run-of-the-river" plants downstream from the dams. Recent advances in tunneling make run-of-the-river more viable.
The dams release water as needed and, at scheduled times, the water enters the several run-of-river plants downriver.
If we "had it to do over again" many other rivers would have been developed this way.
Best Hopes for more Hydro,
Alan
Canada produces 1,000GWh/day from hydro, which is an average of 42,000MW. Quebec alone produces at an average rate of 20,000MW. A single hydro project (La Grande) has a maximum capacity of 15,000MW. Even Ontario already produces about 7,000MW from hydro, and the province is hardly 2/3 flooded.
I think it's safe to say that whoever wrote the linked article has no idea what he's talking about.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about geothermal. "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched".
Charles, You can say the same thing for Nuclear energy. Some of the questions might be who is going to finance them and do you want one in your backyard. Yet the paper gives us nuclear at 37% of total energy. I do not see that happens particularly in a financially decimated world economy that seems to be occurring as we speak. The prospects for geothermal are much closer to reality that an explosion (pun intended) in nuclear power plant building. It is essentially a first world solution.
The uncertainties are of a different order for geothermal as it is a much more immature technology.
That assumes that you are talking about using it for really substantial power generation, which means hot dry rock.
A number of problems have been encountered, notably getting just the right amount of fractioning in the rock to allow the water to flow through to the well which extracts it, and that problem will be different for every field.
At present it also costs a fortune - that may change, but we are talking about uncertainties.
You also can't build a geothermal plant just anywhere, and practically speaking the areas where you can hope to build them are relatively limited.
Iceland seems to be at the leading edge for geothermal. It is one of many renewable energy resources that I think we need to develop in order to keep the electric grid functioning. It will be a different set of technologies for each locale. I really cannot see nuclear at 17% of world production. Financing, adequate cooling water coupled with climate change, containment building production capacity these are just the direct difficulties The energy problem needs many diffuse solutions based on local resources and needs, not a handful of concentrated one designed to keep the energy fat cats engorged.
I'd like one under my backyard (say, 500 feet or so down) because then I'd have a cheap source of low-grade heat to keep my house heated in winter and perhaps cooled in summer with an absorption chiller.
As for what kind, I think the USA could start with roughly 100 GW of molten fluoride reactors operating as thorium breeders. The initial fuel loads could be obtained from the plutonium in spent PWR fuel, eliminating it permanently. Small, standard-sized reactors could be cranked out in factories in pieces small enough to be moved through tunnels and assembled underground, where they would be isolated from the environment (and terrorist-proof) but still very close to customers for waste heat.
Once you have supplied the local need for electricity, heating fuel and low-grade industrial process heat without a gram of fossil fuel, the impact of shrinking supplies becomes much more remote.
And a big plus is that you can keep the fuel molten as the rock around the reactor also melts. Geeze, what do you think the thermal conductivity of rock is? Nuclear power plants need substantial cooling. Putting them in a hole makes no sense at all.
Chris
Most remaining hydro is in China, which currently has about 50 GW of hydrocapacity under construction, and has plans for another 50 GW. Grand Inga is in Congo and hardly relevant for the civilized world I think.
Grand Inga is in Congo and hardly relevant for the civilized world I think.
Speechless,
Alan
Items:
1) Get some sensitivity training, or at least get consious.
2) In any rational "substitution for fossil" scenario, the huge resource potential of the Sahara desert is likely to make central Africa the energy equivalent of todays middle east.
3) Given 2) and the resulting electricity export infrastructure developed, Grand Inga just happens to be in a near-perfect location to exploit and supplement that solar energy.
Congo is a total mess, with mass rapes and brutal killings, it is simply not a civilized place, thats all. And no, we will not see GWs exported from a dam in Congo up through central africa and to Europe. Let us be sensible here. Hydro is in China and thats where we see the mass growth and it gets done, no hassle, may I remind you that China has 150 GWs already in capacity, with another 100 GW coming online in the next decade?
Inga 1 and the world's longest HV DC line have been exporting power south, some as far as South Africa, for a couple of decades.
China is a minority, less than a third, of the potential hydro by 2058. Today, Iran rivals China for hydro under construction (China is in a pause, Iran has several GW under construction).
Alan
It is totally out of the question to export GWs from the Congo to Europe. Besides, if you are talking 2050 or whatever, Congo will have over 200 million people, and some of them will want electricity as well when the madness going on in Congo hopefully is put to an end.
Iran rivals China for hydro under construction? Where have you heard that China has stopped hydroconstruction? It is totally false. 50 GW is under construction. We'll see what might happen in 2058, but for now, China is the place for hydro and no other.
I would prefer that Grand Inga and other hydro and geothermal power Africa (perhaps exporting a few MW to Spain and Saudi Arabia).
But there is no technical limitation to prevent HV DC to Spain.
In late 2003, Iran had 243 dams under construction,
www.payvand.com/news/03/sep/1062.html
Shahid Abbasspour is being increased from 2 GW to 4 GW, and the 3 GW Karoun-3 is under construction are the two largest projects.
You are ignorant of the world wide hydropower projects to maintain that China is the only major source of new hydro. (And China has had political kickback from the prior projects and is "go slow" ATM).
Canada - Lower Churchill 2.8 GW
Chile - HidroAysén 2.75 GW
Brazil - Jirau 3.3 GW
Argentina - Pati 3.3 GW
Venezuela - Tocoma 2.2 GW
Russia - Burreya 2 GW
Russia - Boguchan 3 GW
India - Subansiri 2 GW
And many more (other things to do than google) but enough examples to refute your "only China" claim.
Alan
Hello, I am rather new to the Peak Oil discussion. However, I have spent a great deal of time studying the issue. From listening to both sides to this debate, the one fact everyone agrees with is that for numerous reasons it is getting very difficult to find and produce more oil every year as the older oil fields decline. Assuming demand continues to rise as it has in the past this would seem to inevitably lead to a numerous and massive economic disasters.
BUT, I also see a relatively easy path which could be taken which could dramatically reduce the need for oil. Converting our transportation fleet to hbrid plug in electic vehicles would create massive demand destruction for oil. Further demand destruction could be obtained by converting the vehicles to run on compressed natural gas. Further oil demand destruction could readily be expanded by the use of biofuels. We need to stop the tarrifs on ethinol imported into our country. With this adjustment to our transportation we could have cars running effectively hundreds of miles while only using a gallon of gasoline.
It seems that if these simple and readily attainable chages could be accomplished, oil demand could be so destroyed that the world would face a glut of oil and Opec's hold on the world would be ended.
One only needs to look at how oil prices have fallen almost 30% due to very modest demand destruction due to the high prices, to see that demand destruction can derail the horrible consequenses of peak oil as it occurs.
Where are you from? I think you now need to spend a good deal of time studying those alternatives you propose.
Reply to PeakOil Is A Bitch,
I think that "we" will do all the things you mention and more, If "we" means the nations of the West. The problem. who is the "we" and "our" that is being referred to?
If it is the U.S., our gasoline consumption only accounts for about 10% of all the oil produced in the world. If any of the Peak Oil models widely accepted by the Peak community are correct (the Hubbert, Campbell, Deffeyes, Simmons models roughly averaged) and if the Export Land Models (ELM) are correct, the U.S. could stop EVERY CAR inside the borders of the nation from operating tomorrow, and outlaw the use of any privately owned gasoline vehicle, ANY, in the U.S. for the future, and it would still have virtually no impact on Peak oil. Likewise if the U.S. keeps driving, and Europe stops. Likewise if the Japanese stop driving. No one nation or even continent in the West now has the power to stop or even slow peak oil. We are simply not the area of growth in oil consumption in the world. Oil consumption has been roughly flat in the U.S. for years, and declining in Japan and Europe and will continue to do so. This matters not a spit in the sea to the issue of peak oil, because again, the western developed nations IS NOT where the growth in oil consumption is happening.
In the key post we are now replying to "Energy Vision 2050-part I", we must assume that Sterling Smith is taking a world view and not a national view. The question is, how can Mr. Smith assume that the nations of the world will come to any real agreement on how to address the energy issue? The high growth nations such as China, India, Eastern Europe and others will have an entirely different agenda than the slow growth but already wealthy nations of Europe, Japan and the U.S. We can sit around and discuss "here's what we should do" all we want to, it doesn't mean that the nations that really matter,the Asian developing nations that are really growing in consumption will agree to the agenda we set.
The oil consumption in the U.S., Japan, and Europe WILL DECLINE. That is as it should be. But we will do so simply because it is most economically sensible that we can do, because it enhances national security if we do, and we have the technology to reduce oil consumption if we so choose. Oil is frankly now not worth the trouble it takes to get it, even if it were far cheaper than it is now. It is going the way of the rotery telephone and television by antenna. We will reduce oil consumption in the West not because it is the "right" thing to do (although it is) but because it is profitable and will protect us.
But that will have absolutely no effect on peak oil. In a certain odd way, and if one is willing to be politically incorrect, it can be said that Peak Oil is a problem for the poor nations and the poor folks. The only reason we care is because we know that poor nations and poor folks can get a bit unruly.
RC
Are you implying that humans are rational and will always work together for the common good. I challenge anyone to prove that. Oil consumption will decline because it peaks, not because humanity comes to grips with it and voluntarily takes the drastic measures needed to mitigate the economic crisis peak oil will create throughout the world. To go on to say that we can profit from reducing oil consumption ignores the inevitable ongoing increases in the price of oil. Any savings from reduced oil consumption will be more than negated by the increasing price of oil. We are too far behind on the technology curve of alternative energy sources to solve the economic issue.
I may agree with your point that reduced oil consumption is profitable if you mean that reducing demand is cheaper than the cost of wars to enable us to increase our use of oil.
Saying oil "is frankly now not worth the trouble it takes to get it, even if it were far cheaper than it is now." is an unusual observation that I have never heard before on TOD and one that I'm not sure sounded the way you thought it would.
By the way, I still have a rotary phone; it comes in handy when the power goes out:)
> If it is the U.S., our gasoline consumption only accounts for about 10% of all the oil produced in the world.
And if you include diesel, kerosene (jet fuel), bitumen (asphalt), etc? In short, all of the transportation consumption should be included, which is about 66% of US oil consumption or roughly 18% of world consumption. Other developed countries could also make a big impact (most don't have as far as we do to go), increasing the percentage of world consumption.
Of course, I concur with Dr. Hirsch's finding that we will hit the wall regardless because there is not enough turnover in the auto fleet alone, among other measures, to enable a painless transition. But I believe starting the transition will now will likely reduce and shorten some of the pain later.
China is on the verge of a massive oil consumption boom though. China is where Japan were at the beginning of the 60s and S-Korea in the mid-80s in terms of development level. What happened in Japan and S-Korea the following 10 years? Japan's consumption increased 6-fold in 10 years while S-Korea increased its consumption 4-fold. The demand pressure building up in China up to 2020 is staggering.
Hello there newbie. Welcome to TOD. Sorry for the rude reception (negative 5 rating at time of this post). Obviously you ruffled the feathers of some old crows here the wrong way.
Try to understand why and forgive them.
Yes, obviously you are new to the PO discussion. The HPEV option has been explored round and round here many a time. Bottom line is that "we" H. Sapiens are not as clever or as capable as you currently believe or as you may have read about in the science fiction books.
The bigger problem is that each of us is a "specialist" in some oddball triviality (accounting, acupuncture, business, engineering, law, etc.) and that tiny amount of knowledge gives us swelled head beliefs about the capabilities that "we" as a species have. We're not that smart. We don't have scalable technologies to do the "easy path" that you propose.
Welcome any way. Sorry for the bad news and the rude reception.
_________________________
(If you are truly interested in PO, you will next begin to study electrochemical battery technologies to get a better understanding of why "we" don't have a decent battery, and then you will study electric power grid technologies, etc. You've got a lot of learning to do.)
-9 now, The Doomers have got the knives out today... :o)
PHEVs and so on will have a part to play as transportation is one area where economies are just begging to be made. A 100mpg PHEV will cost a fraction to run than a 20mpg SUV for sure and there are some breakthroughs currently being made in batteries and recharge times. I also think they will go some way to 'close the gap' in Fig 11.
But I also fear that the desire to carry on BAU as long as possible but 'more expensively' will be the real problem. Our ability to fund this 'more expensiveness'/BAU by telescoping all future earnings into the present via debt only works out well if the future is all roses. What happens when it becomes clear to everyone that the future is looking bleak? -And I don't just mean the 'Amuse Bouche' Credit Crunch we are now witnessing.
Add to this ELM, Resource Depletion/Nationalism, Social factors like Retiring Baby Boomers/ Medicare and a handful of other SHTF issues and its going to take some amazing decisioning to get us through and steer the ship from the rocks...
Nick.
Even if we TOD Folk can agree on what the answers should be for the brightest future, our challenge is how to educate the other 99.99% to vote for politicians and policies that will make a difference.
Put another way: We are only collectively as intelligent as the TV shows the majority watches. Look at the US Presidential election. What is today's top issue? Pigs with lipstick! I rest my case.
Maybe its just the massive contempt I have for the system/country/people I have the misfortune to be embedded within, but I think the US is unique among developed countries in this regards. My impression is that most of the rest of the developed world is able to come up with at least semi-rational energy plans. Sure some really stupid mistakes have been made -abandoning the nuclear option early on for many European countries. But they do seem capable of learning from their mistakes. It is only in the USA, where that seems impossible today.
POiaB: I'm keeping myself away from a warm bed so I can give you an up-rate and a well-deserved response.
Aside from the difficulty of expanding the supply of petroleum-compatible biofuels and the effects of tariffs, I think you're dead on. The inelasticity of oil supply is believed to produce a 20% price increase for a 1% shortage; this implies that a 1% demand cut can produce a 20% reduction in price.
Plug-in hybrids are, step back's claims notwithstanding, the bridge to the future. Existing battery technologies such as advanced lead-acid (Firefly Energy) could power vehicles for 15-20 miles until lithium-ion or rechargeable zinc-air or sodium nickel chloride (Zebra) can step in. The problem is getting the vehicles built with adequate powertrains; adapting to available batteries is the easy part, as it seems that just about every hybrid with decent sales has at least 1 PHEV conversion for it.
If rail is electrified, the supply of steam coal is no longer dependent upon oil to move it and the electricity supply becomes relatively secure against disruptions. If road transport moves to PHEV and EV, the definition of "motor fuel" goes from petroleum to anything which generates electricity, from wind to nuclear to micro-hydro to industrial or domestic cogeneration. As the number of sources grows, the threat of disruption recedes.
Yes, we can still screw this up. It doesn't mean we will.
I think a much more realistic way to look at the future is to consider if high tech enclaves can be formed and if so how extensive they would be.
Trying to do generalized demand concepts in what is probably going to be a fractured world probably gets the numbers wrong.
If instead you look at the world on a region by region basis what stands out is that regions with both farmland and good hydroelectric power can remain relatively intact. In addition if they have good ports and at least decent railroads they can survive on agriculture and manufacturing. Outside of these regions with good coal supplies and good rivers or rail also come out fairing fairly well. And finally of course existing nuclear and NG power are important. If forced the use of oil for transportation can be minimized but electricity and farmland cannot be replaced. And last but not least the population should be well below the carrying capacity of the region.
Given this if you look around the world a lot of areas seem capable have having a robust local economy. Depending on your filter it represents anywhere from 400 million to two billion people who are blessed to live in a regions that could fairly easily withstand a energy crisis and keep its infrastructure intact.
On the west coast of the US from Northern California up the entire region fits a lot of the criteria to some extent its really southern California and much of the southwest into parts of Texas that could have problems.
For Mexico the biggest problem is of course Mexico City.
In many of the marginal cases the issue is more population concentration beyond the local carrying capacity.
In general in the US plenty of places exist that could support the entire population but it would require some movement in general away from the coasts and back to the Mississippi valley region. The point is that reasonable migrations alone could greatly reduce the stress at a regional level.
A similar analysis works for South America and Europe. Eastern Europe could for example handle a higher population. Australia for example could also fair fairly well with some reasonable movement of people to the northern territories.
But even assuming people don't make optimum moves you continue to have plenty of regions with sufficient natural wealth in fact if for some reason movement was restricted or the nations fragmented leaving large populations stranded with limited resources the other regions would probably fair even better if they where defensible.
Given this the need for nuclear plants to power certain regions or renewable sources is a lot lower than would be suggested if you simply assume that no major changes take place.
Now looking at your graph its pretty easy to see that energy production could easily drop to 5 terra watts without assuming further disruptions.
This would imply that countries like the US would produce 30% of their current energy levels and have economies closer to those of the 1950 as far as GDP.
This is easily doable without making assumptions about our societies ability to mobilize itself post peak.
Certainly it might be better but the easiest way to deal with peak oil is to cut demand by 50% or more.
These cuts take the form of moves to electric rail where political stability exist and can even take the form of additional nuclear power and coal fired plants. For regions of instability that take the form of demand destruction via social breakdown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption
Looking at world wide energy production.
And population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
One can see that a technically advanced population of around 2 billion seems very reasonable assuming 5 TW.
In fact the rest of the population which would continue to use energy could have 1-2 TW's to use if you assume a total of say 7 or so.
In any case you can push the population numbers and TW potentials around bottom line is 1-2 billion people are probably going to see a substantial drop in their standard of living.
Keep in mind that China alone would require about 2 TW by the early 2020s, almost triple the current production. Where is that going to come from?
"If instead you look at the world on a region by region basis "
Thank you memmel.
Why do people think the world will somehow miraculously unite and work together - how often in history have diverse regions/nations who were desperately competing for resources got together and sang Kimbia to solve their desperate problems?
There is no reason, other than "faith" and wishes to think it will be any different this time.
There will be regions where they can sustain a relatively modern economy and their biggest problem will be trying desperately to limit immigration.
I do not make any assumption that they will.
I do not think the areas that you describe are defensible in the way you envision. Once other areas of the world become unlivable, people will migrate to places what survival is still possible. Those areas will eventually be wrecked as well.
My point is that if there is a way that people can build an alternative energy infrastructure, it will probably happen. People are not going to willingly submit to a power down and huge die off.
I said nothing about people willingly doing anything one reason I think a 5 TW baseline energy level is reasonable is that a lot of resources would become unavailable because of war.
However the important point that seems to come up every single time I look at the problem is that a significant population redistribution seems to be a absolute requirement post peak. A micro scale version of this which we call the end of suburbia is a contentious issue on the oil drum.
This is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak in what we will be dealing with. In fact these migrations and attempted migrations are in my opinion the driver for fragmentation of our current nations into enclaves that will refuse entry to citizens of the same nation.
As and example of this look at China which has very tight internal border controls. Although ineffective to a large extent the wealthy cities with a special example of Hong Kong are not freely accessible by the average chinese.
So one is probably the number one post peak issue which is migration seems to be generally ignored by people trying to look at the big picture. I simply don't see a model as valid that does not include future migrations.
Just the simple example of building a new nuclear power plant will draw people and industry around the plant.
Given that we will have a shortage of energy and excess of people I can't see this going smoothly.
So you predict essentially a collapse scenario. That might happen. I think a successful building of a new energy infrastructure is possible. I am just trying to explore what it would take to get us there.
Of course it's possible. It's even possible that the energy infrastructure will be similar in type to the energy infrastructure we have right this minute. It is possible I can win the lottery ... not likely, but possible.
Other development scenarios are more likely, in my opinion. I would expect to see a general shrinking of 'industrial bases' to enclaves - with the other areas being 'de-industrialized'.
It is possible that many de-industrialised areas will be pleasant while others, hellholes. Some fertile area will become desert. Other places will wind up underwater. Without the constant fuel imput and an improvement in water management, food production will become 'chancy'. Marginal areas will likely be hard places to survive in. More and more places will become marginal. People in difficult circumstances are not in a position to support technology projects. Only the wealthy can do that, and a de-industrialized world will become a less wealthy (in some ways) place.
De- industrialization and enclaves are already under establishment in the US. Wealth here is generated by borrowing from other countries while enabling their own industrialization. On its face, this is unsustainable.
As for wars; very likely, but the 'danger period' for major, interregional wars (with possible nuclear outcomes) is from this minute ... to perhaps ten years from now. All 'modern' military forces are extremely dependent on liquid fuels ... particularly the militaries of the US, NATO, China, Russia, India and Pakistan. As petroleum runs out, the temptation to use military force to guarantee supplies will intensify. See: Iraq ... It's a 'Use it or Lose it' paradigm. Once petroleum decline sets in in earnest, the military effectiveness of the major powers will decline ... along with the powers, themselves. Even if a 'working alternative' for electric production is put into place, it will not substitute for conventional liquid fuels. One cannot run a 60 ton main battle tank ... or helicopters or self- propelled artillery ... on batteries.
Without modern militaries, the political structures that they support will subside, which means irregular forces will fill the vacuum.
2050 Europe/America might well become like 14th century Italy; divided into small, ineffectual warring states with merecenary militias sufficient to maintain instability, but insufficient toward compelling the sort of unity that would succor technological advances. Some of these states might be very pleasant, with many 'marvels' (streetcars and streetlights and whatnot) and culture. Others would be hellholes ... but none would be under any measure a substitute for modern Italy ... or America. Under this scenario, broadly based replacement infrastructure development would be unlikely.
This leaves out the onrushing 'peak water', 'peak arable land', and 'peak credit/wealth' issues.
The concept of wide-scale 'prosperity' is a conceit that has existed as long as it has because it is politically expedient. No politician can get elected promising less, sacrifice or hardship. Prosperity has so far been easy to obtain, tap, drill, mine or chop down for it. Nature doesn't vote and it hasn't ...
until now.
The underlying issue is whether nature is capable of satisfying our insatiable gluttony. Whose specific gluttony and how it can be managed in fine detail is irrelevant. The gluttony will be reduced. This means less, not more of some different kind. Less either will be done by action on our parts ... or it will be imposed upon us by nature.
Steve,
I think we have examined these doomer scenarios often here. My idea is let's define what it would take for the world to take a big hit in the next twenty years but build like crazy and come out of it. That is the idea behind my scenario. Then once we have some agreement on what it would take (I do not hope to line up the irreconcilables), the survivor faction will come back with another part of the vision that describes what it would look like. Then you can judge if that vision is plausible and whether it is likely.
Right now you doomers have had the floor pretty much alone. Many people think there is no conceivable way that we could build our way out of this. I just think that is mistaken.
Sterling
To doom or not to doom, that is the question!
What exactly are we trying to build? A cleaned-up version of 'the American Way of Life'? 'Consumer Paradise Deux'?
Unless it is a quantum improvement over the current mess, it's not worth making an investment in, period. To generate terawatts of power ... for more cars, more noise, more sprawl, more waste, more, more more more more more more! YIKES! Waffo?
Opt me out! I am a doomer. Hear me roar!
This is an existential situation that cannot be simplified into an engineering issue to be dealt with by applied technolory. A lot of what the 'Doomers' express - here and elsewhere - is dissatisfaction with the current regime. This regime doesn't measure VALUES of its products, but rather the technical means of their production relative to cost and that measurement is given as a substitute FOR values. This is a fundamental fraud, that cannot be reconciled in any way to either ends or means. These things and all that supports them ... have insinuated themselves into every part of our lives. The consumer paradise has leeched itself onto us and won't let go. It does not even have the courage of its own conviction to admit that this is so ...
We ... I ... am more than the sum total of automobiles I own. Can't we try something else?
In the economics world there is a lot of talk about 'The Economy'. "What does it mean," I ask? "Is there One Economy like One God or ... Jesus or Allah ... " Our 'One True Economy' doesn't work very well, why does everyone in America and the developed world make such sacrifices for this Economy? What about alternative economies? Can anybody think of any? How functional can the 'One True Economy' be when it measures the profits of gambling casinos as production? How functional can it be when if measures Consumption as Production? How functioal when economist cannot agree what are the best ways to keep it running properly; the Austrian School has one idea and the Keynesians have another ... and the Friedman school and the Greenspans ... and everybody cheats, anyway! How is our current 'lifestyle' so much different from our ridiculous economy?
The world has gotten itself into this corner by doing things ... just because they can be done. Your issue is seminal to the degree that the reconciliation of the dilemma - that an alternative scheme is possible or not - can be measured in abstract, here. Time will tell, of course. In a perfect world, there would be no need for terawatts. In an imperfect world, calculating whether the terawatts will arrive or not requires more than just connecting the wires.
I just got here and don't know anyone here. All I wanted to say is that Steve from Virginia's post is a very sensible statement. The present model does not work. Only hubris demands that we believe it can be fixed. Only hubris.
Wishing doesn't make it so. And I would point out the {questionable} ethics of wishing death and destruction on most of your co-inhabitants, simply because they don't subscribe to your personal view of utopia.
Sterling,
Forgive me if my point has been addressed down the thread - I'm diving into the discussion while I have a couple of minutes.
I don't think it's helpful to cast people as doomers simply because they do not think that the world can build its way out of a problem that is being created essentially by overbuilding. I hope for a better world for my descendants but that doesn't mean I believe it is possible or desirable that such a world will need an ever-growing number of vehicles, flyovers, airports, cellphones, airports, you-name-it, together with ever-increasing consumption of resources to feed that growth.
Historically, humans do not have a good record of making big transitions without getting into conflicts (think industrialisation/empire building; Napoleonic War (really, the first "world war" since it spanned America, Europe and the Far East) or the growth of oil and the first/second world wars). Humans have warred for millennia - I don't think that having had stupid amounts of fossil energy at our disposal for around half a century will change that, so further conflict seems inevitable. Again, I don't think that recognising that fact makes me a "doomer" - many millions have died in past wars but millions more were unaffected by wars or survived them (even prospered) and then lived out the rest of their lives.
I'd recommend Clive Ponting's book "A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations" to anyone looking for a perspective on how we got where we are today in order to seek answers for the future.
And of course, "collapse" doesn't necessarily mean annihilation.
There's a difference between acknowledging the potential for nasty future scenarios and trying to work out rational mitigations, a position which I take, and actively promoting and hoping for said nasty scenarios (doomers).
The question is not "is our society good"; the question is "can we replace fossil fuels as our energy source"?
You or I or anyone here may or may not like the various things you've listed (consumer culture, militancy, etc.), but those likes and dislikes of ours have very little to do with the physical question of whether getting energy from X instead of Y is possible. It's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that replacing fossil fuels would be easy, but that we should not continue business-as-usual for other reasons.
"Possible" and "desirable" are different questions, and it helps no-one to mix them up.
True they are different questions, but one has to ask both before making one's plans otherwise one runs the risk of either attempting the impossible or achieving the absurd. Utopia or suburbia.
Ask how to produce "TW for growth" or whatever before asking why by all means (the former question might at least produce answers that most people agree on) but let's not fall into the trap of calling people doomers simply for pointing out that that's what we've always done in the past and questioning the value of where that has got us.
Ends and means. How can the two be separated when they are both part of one process?
Both have to be ocnsidered if only for reasons of allocating capital.
>>>>>
End: "I want to visit a friend."
Means: "I will drive my car there."
Now remove oil:
End: "I want to visit a friend."
Means: "I will ride my bike there."
Or change the goal:
End: "I want to get a bookcase from the store."
Means: "I will drive my car there."
Ends and means are very different. It needlessly confuses the issue to try mixing them.
Absolutely. But they're different questions, which means that confusing one for the other will just lead to muddled thinking and a lack of progress on figuring out either.
The absolute power of the military might decrease, but it is relative strengths which are important, and that is what wins battles.
Their power could be a fraction of what it is now, and lesser armed peoples would still be helpless.
The only reason that areas like Iraq and Afghanistan are able to fight back is because the Great Powers are still 'playing nice'
Halagu Khan had no trouble at all subduing them.
He just killed huge numbers of people, and any resistance would have resulted in entire districts being denuded of people.
As the technology drops further, machete's are quite adequate to dispose of whole populations.
Those who want to give up all aspects of Business as Usual, must be tired of Breathing as Usual, as any drastic drop in material circumstances will lead as it always has to massive endemic warfare, and in that environment any notion of some sort of green paradise with everyone back to nature and avoiding the alleged evils of nuclear power are entirely fallacious.
We either make things work, and although many things might change that include large amounts of BAU, many elements must remain, or the death toll will leave few survivors, and they would be at a fantastically low standard of living.
Any little areas which were doing something like trying to survive with the low EROI of wind turbines would have their infrastructure hopelessly smashed so as to make that impossible.
We don't need to guess about it, it has happened before and the result was very primitive conditions, with all the complicated systems of the Roman Empire, for instance, rendered useless.
Of course, at that time the disaster was not universal.
This time it would be, and the process of reducing the population to the 500 million or so which might theoretically be maintainable in some sort of renewable society would smash things up so thoroughly that the population would drop far, far lower.
Exactly. The doomers do not have the moral high ground.
The real problem that I think causes the split between doomer and non doomer is the doomer don't make the assumption that the middle class must be sustained at anywhere near its present size or form while most anti-doomers are really pro middle class.
Looking at most job descriptions including my own I see no real reason for it to be sustained. As long as the middle class resulted in growth and the flow of wealth to the top it was tolerated to a certain extent.
Historically and by a large number or metrics large middle class populations are rare.
Certainly our modern kings are in love with technology and the need a fairly extensive support class and generally technology is needed for mass production etc. So we have a reason for X precentage of the middle class thats involved in our core industries. But this required precentage is much smaller than the worlds total.
I'll use two example almost anything thats technically possible can be done within the state of California or within the countries of Britain or Germany. What I mean is that in these cases a population level of 30-60 million living a decent living level can provide everything we need as far as high tech goes.
Now certainly when you get into these population and do a serious review of the jobs people do you can make some significant further cuts how low can you take it ?
10 million is very reasonable and it could be lower if you focus on key technologies. The bottom line is most of us are not needed at all and for people that are doing needed jobs most of them are redundant esp if the population living the good life was smaller.
So just assuming BAU in the sense that a complete high tech civlization exsists with PHEVS EV VC EV? etc etc really does not require a huge backing population.
It hurts to realize your not needed but thats the truth. If your not needed and energy is in short supply then you will be forced to reduce your standard of living or if your luck find high paying meaningful employment.
Doomers if you will like myself recognize this and further we recognize that concentration of power has reached the point that we no longer have control of our futures. The wealthy are just as unneeded but they have power we do not.
How can you convince them to pay for all this stuff so we can live the good life at their expense ?
Once energy and other resources become dear again the natural outcome is for the wealthy to begin to concentrate resources concentration of fiat currency is not that important. In fact the wealthy being smart are the first people to switch back to a barter economy and collect real assets to maintain wealth.
The big question is then how many people do they need to ride their coat tails so to speak.
I'm a doomer because I say not very many.
Your not a doomer because you feel like we all have high net worth however you never explain why we need to keep the middle class anywhere near its current levels.
Show me that the miles of strip malls and housing tracks and nail salons etc etc are absolutely critical to our high tech economy and I'd change my views. However if they are not needed and the wealthy do switch for concentration of fiat currencies to concentration of assets then you can be pretty sure these redundant assets that don't generate wealth will be scrapped just like the people the live and work in them.
Its tough realizing you have no more value than the poorest beggar in the streets of India but to be honest from the viewpoint of the people at the top what we see as a huge difference is a minor split.
Once you humble yourself and realize that your own value to a post peak world is small then you realize that most people you know are in the same boat and the doomer position follows.
Memmel,
Thank you for raising a very interesting point.
But before I give my perspective I'd like to outline what I think are your assumptions:
1. The elites will continue to requre a certain level of technology
2. Those same elites require a supporting skilled population to provide that technology
3. The current large middle class population is larger than needed to provide the elites with what they require.
Are we in agreement with that?
If so, I'd like to begin by examining the assumptions.
#1 I will leave alone.
#2 I will leave alone.
#3 is the interesting one for me.
Why do we have a much larger middle class population than is strictly necessary to maintain the elites?
I think this comes down to a couple of factors.
The one is that the increased wealth of the middle class makes the elites even wealthier than they would be otherwise and that, human nature being what it is, would make them want to continue the status quo unless they are absolutely convinced they have to take a drop. If that is the case, can we answer the question of whether the elites are the same as the rest of us? Will they willingly take a drop?
The other is this:
If it is the case that the elites have indeed decided that it is necessary to reduce the middle class then the question is:
Are they ABLE to? A corrollary question is this: Is is SAFE to do so?
I ask this question because if there is a sudden collapse in the standard of living of the middle classes, a dictator will be voted in who will problem the ex-middle-class the lifestyle they used to have. Dictators being what they are, will provide this by *blaming* some other third party and effectively igniting a war. I can see that the rest of the world could easily say the problem is the USA or China which would be a huge, huge issue. If we get a third world war the elites themselves in their carribean hidey-holes will not be safe either.
Thus I have to question the whole position that it is in the interests of the elites to reduce the middle class by means of a collapse. If they had the power (and it is by no means certain that they do) to reduce the middle class population and desired it, it would be much safer for them to do it *slowly*.
I question whether it's in their interests at all.
This is a massive issue in China. Essentially, the government is using economic growth to keep its hold on power secure, with the idea being that people whose lives are improving are less likely to revolt.
If you're super-rich, would you rather have (a) 10% more money, or (b) a 10% chance of revolution wiping out your wealth?
Driving vast amounts of the middle class into poverty simply isn't a sensible strategy for anyone rich to take. Wealth is of limited value without stability, and even someone trying to selfishly maximize their own benefit will want to maximize stability. In a relatively modern society, one of the best ways to do that is simply by making sure most people have reasonably good (or improving) lives.
... or the "dream" that one will come in this life or the next if only they continue to do good works for the elites ;-)
Let them eat cake.
Seriously for the most part the American middle class is only interest to the elite every four years or so for a few months around election time.
Hell our politicians barely even try to act like they are representing the people any more.
What the elites do or don't do is up to them but one thing we do know is they suffer from infinite greed.
I suspect most would be classified as psychopaths or suffering any number of mental problems.
As far as safe or able to destroy the middle classes well we have not have anything close to the use of force to control the masses used in the past so sure they are able.
On that note, I see where our lipstick candidate is not ruling out war with Russia. Great to hear directly from the hand that rocks the cradle. It will be quite an empty cradle should that occur.
Ahh, the "things were better back in the Good Old Days" fallacy.
Are your "Good Old Days" the 50s, when people were blacklisted on suspicion of being commies? Or the 60s, when the government misled the public to get support for starting a war? Or the 70s, when national guard troops were shooting students? Or...
Those days weren't that good, and these days aren't that bad.
And you base this "knowledge" on what, exactly?
The two richest people in the world have donated almost all of their money to charity. That doesn't make them saints, but it suggests that "infinite greed" doesn't have much basis in reality. And while I suppose it could be argued that you'd be crazy to give away $40B, I hardly see how that's a reasonable basis for a diagnosis of "psychopath".
Far more likely is that you simply don't like "The Man", and so you believe all kinds of bad things about people with money or power. If that indicates anything about anyone having mental troubles, I don't think it's indicating it about them.
You realize you've just said "we've never seen it so of course it would work"? Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
Fact of the matter is, places like China can and have used brutal force to control their populations, and have decided that it's much better for them to use soft power - like economic growth - than hard power. Anyone can look for themselves and compare places like China which use soft power to places like Burma, North Korea, or Zimbabwe which use hard power, and anyone who does will pretty quickly come to the conclusion that they'd much rather be elites in the former than in the latter.
Living in a stable and prosperous country will make an elite richer and safer than living in a beaten-down, impoverished one; why would any rational person choose the latter?
So I simply cannot agree with any of your theories, as they all make what all evidence suggests is an insane assumption, namely that "the elites" will sacrifice their own wealth, comfort, and safety in order to beat down "the masses". Unless you can back up that assumption, you're never going to get anywhere.
Memmel, you draw one possible future and assume that it is the only one.
It is also doubtful if it is in fact possible, as the high-tech enclaves you refer to would attract considerable forces which would try to take them over.
In any situation where there is much conflict and a shortage of resources, the contenders usually thin out, as the advantage goes to the biggest fish, in the law of the fishes.
In this situation, the point of mass production and the middle classes is that it increases the ability to fight war, and so the instabilities in the system you suggest might well lead to either total collapse as people fought over the remnants, or one power which in fact managed to maintain mass production, maybe by the use of nuclear power, dominating the others.
You are hypothecating a system which suffers a catastrophic collapse, and then somehow miraculously stabilises, without giving any indication of why that should occur.
Your case for the impoverishment of the middle classes is a strong one, but the story doesn't stop there, and can go in all sorts of directions thereafter, including the sans culottes executing the rascals.
Even the IPCC draws more than one scenario! It appears that you have allowed your dislike of many aspects of the present system to influence your predictions, which verge on prophesy rather than rational scenarios aware of the unpredictability of the real world, which escapes and transcends our models time after time.
Well my point was its easy enough to come up with a good base case scenario that not the end of the world.
I don't consider impoverishment of the middle class as the end of the world the only reason I focus on it is that anti-doomers if you will focus on saving the middle class as indicative of saving the world.
Driving your EV from your suburban home does not ensure we have saved the world so to speak and on the same hand riding a electric train to work for 30% of your current pay and living in a shoddy soviet style high rise apt block is not the end of the world.
Between these two extremes is a quality of life concept that replaces our current materialism.
And underlying these resource focused arguments is a need to change our lifestyles and societies.
My approach is to start with the bad scenario and see how they can be turned into better outcomes.
I don't agree with most of the rosier projects simply because they have assumptions that may or may not be true.
For example assuming that suburban homes retain their value alone implies that we have no major changes in the social, economic, resource framework that requires 30 years of stability to support long term home loans.
This assumption is a bit of a catch 22 since its only true if we successfully mitigate peak oil.
For the most part all rosier projects implicitly require the success of the projection to validate the projection. So most including the current key post are logically invalid.
Assuming that we maintain the resources to build nuclear power plants required to create and support the infrastructure to build nuclear power plants suffer from this logical bootstrap failure.
Bootstrapping from a overshot in the sense of over impoverished situation ensures that resources are in excess because the majority is denied them by force.
This overshoot condition ensures reasonable bootstrap capacity. And it simply requires extensive impoverishment of our excess population with is the natural outcome anyway.
Can we do better dunno our track record is awful.
Attempting to parse that was a chore; you need to punctuate.
The difference is not that non-doomers are pro middle class; the difference is that they don't see their lives as being controlled by "modern kings" the way you seem to.
Your arguments don't have anything to do with energy or oil; they're all simply based on "the kings won't need us, so they'll cast us aside". With that worldview, the question of energy supplies is basically irrelevant; you've started with your conclusion already picked out, and all you're doing is making up a story to fit it.
So?
You're arguing as if people are only allowed to live if they're "necessary". That's an assumption of epic proportions, and it makes your entire argument essentially meaningless to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
Most people won't be "necessary" to maintain and advance technology. Most people aren't now. Most people haven't been for generations. Why does that suddenly matter now? Why didn't the "modern kings" force us all into penury already? If they haven't yet, why will they suddenly decide to do so?
You're just latching onto peak oil as a rationalization for a pre-determined conclusion.
Your question doesn't even make sense outside of the argument you're tried to frame.
Sterling's not arguing we "need" to keep the middle class large; he's arguing we want to do so, as it's a lot more pleasant to be middle class than dirt poor.
Your argument, as best I can make out, is that "our modern kings" won't "let" us keep a large middle class. Modern history doesn't agree with you, though; in the last 50 years, the middle class has been growing by leaps and bounds throughout the world. You can see this going on today in India and China, despite the fact that the level of control elites have over the masses is far higher in China than in the West.
We don't "need" a large middle class, and haven't ever needed one. It's steadily grown, though, because that's what people want, and they're willing to work for it.
I don't buy it. If you are going to assume, Sterling, that there are enough resources (no limits as you state) and that people are going to turn on their AC at will, your argument reduces to "do better". Peter Drucker wrote repeatedly how if something failed repeatedly - a position, a policy - then "do better" is not a functional solution. It is delusional, he writes.
Memmel's 30% number seems order-of-magnitude right to me - a disruptive level. John Howe crunched the numbers and figured 1/8 current use. Close enough for rock-n-roll. I don't see how we move at all on this until we do hit a major and serious disruptive junture - a discontinuity. At discontinuity, all those pretty graphs fall apart.
That the US will cut its total energy use to about what the Pentagon uses already strikes me as unlikely.
The other thing about this top post - it posits solving energy issues without much consideration to climate change, environmental degradation and economic inequalities. All of which are issues when population drops to 1 to 2 billion. Nor does it fit with any sort of thermodynamic analysis of the greater economy. So I'm skeptical.
Still, if your aim is to figure out what is necessary to keep civilization going as we need it, then yes, the assumptions - among them "no limits" - are necessary.
cfm in Gray, ME
There are plenty of limits. There are just three sources that are not fuel limited, but two of those are very diffuse and intermittent. However, there is one way to solve the puzzle.
Turning on the A/C at will does not equate to pulling lots of power from the grid at will. If you want something chilled to somewhat above 0°C, it's relatively easy to do it with ice stored from hours to months previously. It's been done before, and it's likely to be done again. You can buy an Ice Bear unit to do it today. Similar adaptations are quite feasible for other goods.
I'm skeptical of the thermodynamic issues to which you allude. I've not seen one which holds water.
The available wind power world-wide has been recently estimated at around 72 GW. That is 8 kW per capita for a population of 9 billion.
I think you have dropped three 0's. 72GW/9Billion= 8watts/person. The US has 20GW of wind capacity now, and the world about 80 GW capacity and only scratching surface. Perhaps you mean 72Tw capacity? At 10x3.5 MW turbines per sq mile this would require 72,000,000 MW/35MW=2million sq miles or x3 this to allow for 35%capacity factor.
Niel,
The US DOE says 10 MW per section, not 10 turbines. If you want to use 3.5 MW turbines, you get three per square mile. The problem is that wind is very diffuse and even if you use very large areas of land you do not get that much.
Then there is the question of what parts of the world have good wind resource. From US-DOE World Wind Map it looks to me that the only parts of the land area of the world that have good large scale wind resources are the North American plains and the western Sahara, where each might have a million square miles. Maybe there are three million square miles of the world that have good resource. So if reliable production is 1/3 of nameplate that is 3,000,000/3 * 10MW = 10TW as the upper bound.
Sterling
You are correct; that should have been 72 TW.
I'm getting more kneejerk reaction from the comments than the article. Alan my prediction is that nonvolcanic geothermal electricity will disappoint big time. Memmel people could move to the northern territories but they don't want to.
I suspect to keep 'growth' numbers looking good TPTB will have to redefine GDP or material well being. Something like 'your stress levels have improved 3.9% since you became impoverished'. I'm also not sure about power on demand, more like aggressive supply interruptions. The electrolytic zinc smelter near here is going to hire more staff. I think they'll all need iPods to receive messages like 'don't bother coming in this week'.
Yes, "Hedonics" gone mad...
Since people now have to car share they are talking more and thus the commuting experience is a lot more enjoyable, GDP Inflator factor: +10%...
Anyone else think its getting a bit 'Big Brother' ?
Nick.
Only in the last few years have "other than water" working fluids been proven (to a level that convinces a skeptic). Still lots of sorting out to find which fluid works best where. But by 2050 good engineers should have that well figured out.
The ability to exploit lower grade thermal resources at "acceptable" cost is now a given IMO. Not so just five years ago.
Not all areas have even "low grade" geo-thermal resources, but many do.
Best Hopes for Barely Proven New Technologies,
Alan
Good to have a little optimism shining through, forgetting the if's but's and maybe's. Being right isn't necessarily always for the best.
However, what's wrong with zero economic growth? Surely there are countless examples from history, indeed most of history, where no economic growth took place and everyone got along just fine. I'm thinking of Australian Aboriginal society and others.
An intelligent person can only eat, drink and generally consume so much and remain healthy. For those of us who can satisfy our real needs (not greeds) what exactly is the point of growth?
No growth will cause havoc for people, high unemployment and social chaos. It is not a good situation. We need growth, and especially as society ages, unless you want to work 40 hour week until you're 80.
"..unless you want to work 40 hour week until you're 80."
Like they do in China/India/and 'developing' country - if they get past 50 that is... ;-)
l,
Sid.
The fact that so many still live in crushing poverty without food security, clean water, access to medical care or information.
I'm drawing a blank here.
Unless you are enamored with nasty, short and brutish lives filled with tribal warfare, disease and death I would discourage from using aboriginies or indeed any indigenous tribes as an example.
Depends on what you count as economic growth. Monetary terms aren't so interesting to me since money is just a token with which you can entitle yourself to accessing real wealth, but it's not wealth in itself.
If as many harddrives are produced as last year and sold for the same price, but 10% faster and twice as large, is this economic growth? No, the same number of green slips of paper with numbers printed on them change hands(absent inflation); but it is undeniably a growth of human wealth.
I can certainly think of an almost endless list of things; many of which imply technological growth rather than a growth of energy or resource consumption. Longer useful life-span, more leisure time, more people able to work fulfilling jobs involving scientific or creative endevours instead of manual labour or beaurocratic toil, more music and widespread access to it, more varied and interesting food supply, better access to education, cheaper and faster housing built to individual specifications by machine, better access to the technology to create and sell or share creative works, better access to nature, the abillity to customize each individual item produced on an assembly line to individual specifications instead of making each item from the same template...
'Growth' has often engendered these problems, rather than alleviate them. The argument is hollow.
It's called Japan. Specifically during the Edo Period
How much do you know about Australian Aboriginals, really do tell? A life full of death? - Let me turn off my non sequiter detection a minute.
But you're right, we must show a complete disregard and distaste for all indigenous peoples who choose to live with nature rather than attempt to subdue and defeat it - This is the only way to ensure we do not undermine the sense of self-worth we derive from our physical affluence.
Your final paragraph is list of the presumed benefits of a bogus ideology and bankrupt culture. All these perceived benefits come at a price however and they are all based on an extractive culture regardless of the purported wonders of technology.
Somebody said this here recently:
"Any suggestion that the system that rewards them is based on a failing assumption implicitly means that they might not be so extraordinary."
I hope this doesn't sound too sentimental. But I think we need to give the Australian Aboriginals a bit of respect here, guys. Sure, they didn't have 'civilization' as we define it, that is, advanced, sophisticated, urban culture, with collosal energy use; but to almost regard or imply that they we brutal, warlike, close to beasts, is wildly inaccurate and unhelpful.
They did the best they could with the resources at their disposal within framework of the environment occupied. Plus their way of life was extraordinarily stable, sustainable and didn't launch a genocidal attack on their flora and fauna like our civilization has. Their lifestyle, technology and culture, was arguably the most 'successful' and long-lasting in all human history, measured in tens of thousands of years, far longer than ancient Eygypt, China, Rome, Greece, not to mention our own, which has only been around for a couple of centuries.
Seen from an aboriginal perspective the coming of the Whiteman to Australia has been something close to an ecological catastrophe for the continent. Let alone the terrible effect on the natives themselves, who have bascally seen their culture destroyed.
In a wider historical and ecological perspective we have a tremendous ammount to learn from the aboriginals, as we do from many 'primative' peoples, about how one lives in an environment over time without destroying it, perhaps beyond repair. The contrast between how we live and how they lived is very informative. It shows how it's possible to live in a relatively hostile environment, with minimal energy consumption, and survive and flourish. Arguably the aboriginal lifestyle is the only realistic and longterm way to survive in the Australian environment, unless one is capable of accessing a 'infinite' ammount of energy from somewhere and an 'infinite' supply of other vital raw materials.
I might just point out that one needs a lot of education in aboriginal cultures and histories to draw conclusions such as this. eg. presently Australian aboriginals are in a fight with Friends of the Earth Australia to retain their traditional methods of interacting with nature (widspread use of fire to control undesired vegetation and encourage preferred vegetation, mistreatment of rivers by FoEA standards, etc.) Also there is signiicant evidence that a lot of species may have abruptly gone extinct in Australia about the time humans first arrived there. How does whale-killing by northern Canadian aboriginals fit into your vegan diet definition of "sustainable"?
http://paradigmoz.wordpress.com/2007/07/05/the-environment-movement-and-...
Just saying. Oversimplifications are often unhelpful.
It may not be necessary to go as far back as Australian Aborigines. We have Amish and Mennonite societies embedded in many parts of the world. They have done a fairly decent job of being stewards of the land and living in harmony with themselves and the ¨outside¨ world. Lots of necessary post peak skills are found in these communities. Fairly low energy footprint. They seem big on utility rather than style. They use actual horsepower though some have tractors. Though each community has some specialists many are generalists. There sense of community and shared responsibility is strong. It is very much a pacifist society. There is much they could teach us I believe.
Economy, Schmeconomy!
Our economy, the current one, the one everybody complains about in 'Business Publications' is a relatively new invention. Along with the 'new, improved' economy, came 'growth'. Advancing technology has accompanied growth to the degree it is conflated with it, but technology has not been with us consistently for a long time, either.
Anything prior to the 16th century could be considered 'no- growth' or better, 'Pre- growth'.
The Romans didn't have an economy. They (as far as I can tell) didn't have economists. They did have coins and a treasury. Coinage does not mean economy, in the sense of a centralized collective enterprise with the purpose of creating wealth. the Romans had other roads to wealth. In the Republic, the treasury was the national collection of captured weapons from the leaders of defeated states. Rome acquired wealth through military prowess. It became merchantile prior to the Empire (it traded between different parts) but never organized an economy.
The Chinese had money in the 2d century BC. The Mongol conquerers of China had paper money! Marco Polo noted it. Europe had banks from the Renaissance onward; the trading states needed convertible funds and forums for settlements as well as loaned capital. The Crowned Heads needed to pawn gems and whatnot to support explorers and wars.
Trade in the Pre- growth era was not the 'Trade' of today. Exchanges took place between enterprises that were not necessarily collective. Pre- growth trade was merchantile. Today's trade is extending the supply chain.
'Fractional reserve' banking was invented in England. There were 'Country Banks' in England in the 17th century using this system which lends deposits at interest leaving a fraction on hand for day-to-day operations. There had been lending at interest prior, but it was disreputable. Fractional reserve banking had a flaw, a demand for deposits by a certain percentage of depositors would quickly exhaust the amount of money 'in the till'. Reserve and corresponding banks were a way to manage this problem.
In 1914, economic growth became valuable on its own terms because it could be used to justify an increase in the amount of available money. Prior to 1914, money supply was tied to the amount of gold that a banking system held in reserve as collateral for money released into circulation. It could be said the modern economy was born in 1914 ... as a wartime expedient.
Between 1933 to 1975 the western world severed the money supply - gold relationship, insuring that the money supply would be continuously inflated. Like the increase in population ... rising exponentially ... the amount of money keeps growing. All (post- modern) money is debt, loaned and inflated into existance. With no constraints, it grows. There is 'growth' built into the very concept of economy; one truly cannot exist without the other. Problem is ... just speaking economically ... money growth becomes irrelevant to anything at some point. There is huperinflation OR ... the creation and destruction of money in a galaxy long ago and far offstage. (Hint, the latter is taking place in America, right now.)
The debt implicit in money creation itself becomes too large to pay. This is also where we are 'at' in America, right now.)
We are @ peak money. This is me, I might be wrong. I don't mind being wrong. I look at money as a tool, like a tape measure. If the number of standards of the tape become too great or increments too small, how useful can it be? An economy of billions and trillions has abandoned human scale. What purpose can it have except to measure itself, and with the rate of growth expanding exponentially, that measurement cannot be accurate. If it's not accurate ... back to the beginning ... it is not useful.
We are currently in a no growth period right now. (Economists say 'different', but they lie.) It's not so bad, is it? If we go back to a gold- standard, Pre WWI 'no- growth' economy, (hard currencies tend to be deflationary, the def of no growth) it will be different ... but it may very well prove to be quite superior to what we are saddled with currently.
Let's put it this way; we're going off the 'growth' process whether we want to or not, for economic reasons, not necessaily energy related reasons. We need to come up with another process ... another tape measure ... damned quick.
Perhaps could benefit by mixing some economics and history into your reading.
1) The Romans developed a very sophisticated economy, as did the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, etc. etc. before them. One of the constant worries of a Roman Emperor was where to get enough imported grain to feed the proles in Rome so they wouldn't rebel. He usually resolved this by purchasing grain from across the Med. and hiring merchant fleets to ship it to Rome.
2) Can you give me a single rational explanation for why all economic activity above barter in the world must be limited stictly to that which can be paid for with units of some randomly chosen yellow metal which is also commonly used up and lost as an electrical conductor, mirror reflector, etc. etc.? If someone should then discover some previously unknown easily recoverd huge source of gold which doubled the world's stocks of gold, what would be the effect on the economy?
"We are @ peak money. This is me, I might be wrong. I don't mind being wrong. I look at money as a tool, like a tape measure. "
What are we supposed to do, respond to random arbitrary comments?
"Unless you are enamored with nasty, short and brutish lives filled with tribal warfare, disease and death I would discourage from using aboriginies or indeed any indigenous tribes as an example."
That's a very Hobbesian outlook. While I agree the the myth of the 'noble savage' is just that a myth, I think you would be advised to examine aboriginal life-techniques in more detail - you may be surprised at the abundance and ease of living that they provide. Of course it is in tune with nature, so infant mortality tends to be higher to keep the population from expanding unsustainably, but its no worse that that seen in the early 20thC and certainly nowhere near as bad as most '3rd' world countries. Two good examples are the U'wa and Ann Osborne's thesis on their culture (http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/emancipa/research/en/ft/uwa.html) and Bruce Parry's excellent BBC series on 'Tribes' especially the Penan (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/). Just because they have a 'different' lifestyle, does not mean that life style is either unsustainable or for that matter, primitive. Many tribal/indigenous medicines are now the subject of cutting edge 'western' medical research: see http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-21408-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.
The only 'brutish tribal warfare' has come from 'western tribal exploitation' of their natural resources.
L,
Sid.
You might want to read the history of the travels of early explorers with the natives along the Coppermine river in northern Canada. Encountered a camp of Inuit along the riverbank, and simple surprise attacked and slaughtered the whole village, despite the protests of the explorers. Or Gengis Khan or Attila's troops
Generally, members of indiginous tribes were / are not significantly more or less controlled by humanistic values of co-operation etc. than present people.
Hi Lengould,
Or the Mahabharata or the Iliad. My main point was that a low energy life style does not lead to 'brutish and short lives'. As you rightly point out, that is the result of human conflict. Of course, the last centuries two world wars and numerous conflicts along with the current 'desert-nam' in various parts of the Middle East go to show how the technological advancements have really made a difference... Zigmund Bauman's 'Modernity and the Holocaust' examines in depth the problems of technology distancing people from the consequences of their actions.
Who knows, with less 'technology', society may end up more peaceful... or not.
L,
Sid.
The problem with "zero growth" is that it's a complaint about the current socioeconomic system, and it's not about energy or resources at all. It's a red herring.
What you actually want is no growth in consumption, particularly of resources. Zero growth in consumption can certainly occur at the same time as non-zero economic growth, as resources are used increasingly efficiently. In fact, it's possible to have economic growth even while resource consumption falls; post-unification Germany is in many ways an example of that.
If you want to lower resource consumption, then just say so, instead of supporting something that sounds catchy but doesn't actually do what you want.
Quite right. No reason at all why economies cannot grow while energy consumption declines. We have technology for this, just not the motivation. People do not voluntarily abandon excess. They need to be forced, this time by price and regulation. After all, there are other areas of life where we cannot be as profligate and greedy as we might be. We are not allowed to do it. We can't afford. It is socially unacceptable. Other people might kill us. This projection of the future by looking backwards is not constructive.
I do not think that 'zero growth' is a catchy phrase. It is an imperfect, but nevertheless useful, expression of a desire to live on the earth with ecological modesty. As far as I am concerned people in the OECD countries should be striving to decrease their resource use not merely to stand still. Kenneth Boulding's concept of the economics of space ship earth is relevant here:
By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.
In order for this idea of stock maintenance with maximum efficiency to be practiced, we have to develop a socially agreed upon concept of what constitutes sufficient capital stocks. If we desire to increase the variety and sophistication of our gadgets and recreational toys without limit then the spaceman economy cannot come into being. Yes, economic output equals resource consumption times efficiency, but if the primary use we make of our increased efficiency is to manufacture and sell as much stuff as we possibly can in the short term, then pressure on natural resources will continue to be high. Private finance capitalism does not give a rat's ass about resource efficiency in and of itself. All it cares about is increasing the total volume of economic transactions as rapidly as possible. Insofar as resource efficiency is gating short term profits attention will be paid to improving it, but long term sustainability is largely ignored. People who deplore this state of affairs should not be ridiculed.
Well said, as usual.
It was the neoclassical economists who gave us the equation growth = progress = good equation. From my little reading of economic history this was done to "remove" economics from the discipline formerly called "political economy" in which discussions of purpose and value were had.
See, the economists wanted to be more scientific and not normative. The tricky part is, economists had to find a way to be doing something, but organisms can't really DO anything unless they have a purpose behind it. Hence, call it "growth" and say it is value neutral, then set up a system for consumption to be equated with happiness and find the policies and incentives and market freedoms that optimize growth!
Forget to ask if the marginal cost of growth can ever exceed the marginal benefit, as in it is non-economic to burn enough fossil fuels to cause the Arctic ice sheet to go bye bye even if it is "cheap energy that fuels growth."
Does not zero growth also imply zero population growth and thus zero immigration as well? My question is, how much of the incentive toward ZG may be based in some very questionable motivations, recognized or not?
Don't get me wrong, I've no interest or desire for continued economic "growth" beyond decent maintenance for the average, and in fact have often criticised such as measurements of "ecnomic growth" because it often simply measures the relative levels of monetization of formerly non-monetary activities.
Talk to a priest or a friend about a problem, there's no economic growth. Pay a psychiatrist to talk to you about them, that's economic growth. Clean your own home, no growth. Pay a maid, that's growth. Often ridiculous.
What's questionable about promoting zero population growth? Surely nothing is more obvious that the fact that the human population of the earth cannot increase in size indefinitely.
On the other hand, you are right that immigration is undoubtedly going to be a big issue in resource limited world. However, my perception is that supporters BAU economic growth are more virulently anti-immigration than people who promote living more simply. Admittedly there is a contradiction involved in this sort of anti-immigration sentiment:
Limits to growth do not exist. All we have to is aggressively promote nukes, electric cars, biofuels, energy efficient appliances etc. and the growth machine can roll on. But we also to need keep out the 'furiners' who want to consume resources at the same rate that we do.
If zero growth means that the current global distribution of wealth is frozen just as it is now, then I agree that this is not a desirable goal. But the claim, which I have heard often repeated, that the citizens of OECD countries need to go on getting richer and consuming more resources in order to lift Africans, South Americans, etc. out of poverty is so absurd that it is almost beyond belief. We should be reducing our demand on resources so that the underdeveloped world can rise to meet us on some reasonable common ground. Yes I know that you are laughing hilariously. It is a sad commentary on the functional insanity of our primary cultural belief system that the most obvious common sense truths are regarded as the utterances of raving lunatics.
I think I see a different point to the question, which is why growth -- at all? Is this a sacred concept, never to be questioned? Is questioning it to be mocked as Ned Ludd?
Because economic growth is correlated with improved standard of living.
This correlation isn't the same everywhere. In the West, economic growth in many ways means cooler toys - iPhones instead of rotary landlines, computers instead of adding machines.
In developing countries, though, economic growth means real improvements to people's lives. Growth means clean water. Growth means enough to eat. Growth means money for the doctor. Can you look at a third-world slum dweller or subsistence farmer and say "I don't think they need more money"? Because that's what "no global economic growth" really means.
The problem isn't economic growth; the problem is resource consumption. These are not the same thing.
Economic growth is also correlated with development. Development is the only proven way to stop population growth.
Education is the only proven way limit family sizes.
Yes,
I think we need to distinguish between the broad sweep term "no growth" and the term "no resource growth".
I think it is possible to grow the "economy" for a long time forwards by becoming progressively more efficient in the use of resources and shifting everything else to services.
As long as the population eventually stops growing this could be workable.
Please give some concrete examples of what you mean by growth in services without growth in resource use.
Even assuming that dematerialized growth is possible (which I personally doubt) why should we desire it? If we can comfortably provide essential services such as food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education, why do have to dedicate our excess productivity to trying to increase the total volume of economic transactions? There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the philosophy of neo-classical economics.
Please give some concrete examples of what you mean by growth in services without growth in resource use.
A meal in New Orleans, using local foodstuffs, versus American chain food, centrally processed and distributed in refrigerated trucks and microwaved to order for TGIF, Olive Garden et al customer.
Best Hopes for Good Food :-)
Alan
This is not example of growth in services. This is an example of providing the same services more efficiently, which I am highly in favor of. Our economic goal should be to provide vital products and services within minimal resource consumption. Given the current size of the earth's human population and the ecological stresses on the biosphere, growth (or even maintenance) of the total volume of economic transactions is an insane goal.
It is a DRAMATIC growth in quality and value# between a typical New Orleans meal and a typical TGIF or Olive Garden meal. Quality often counts for more than quantity when one can only eat 3 meals/day and wear one pair of shoes at a time.
I am a richer man for eating New Orleans meals and not American chain swill and for wearing Cole-Haan, Johnston & Murphy and Alden shoes.
Best Hopes for Growth in Quality and Shrinkage in Quantity,
Alan
#Another example would be the difference between Alden shoes ($475/pair) and WalMart's cheapest leather "dress" shoe ($45/pair ?), same quantity of leather, less transportation costs for Alden (made in New England).
PS: YTD, Diesel $128, Cobbler $138. I kind of hope I will spend more money this year on repairing my shoes than I will on diesel. Does that make me richer or poorer ?
You keep saying things that I agree with but refuse to respond the central point of my posts. I agree that substantial opportunities exist to improve the quality of our life without growth and even in the face of economic contraction.
However, the point I was making is that the primary goal of private finance capitalism -maximizing the total volume of economic transactions - is a bad goal. You are playing semantic tricks. Obviously no one wants an end to growth in the sense of complete intellectual, cultural, and artistic stagnation. But these forms of psychological advancement are very different things from the narrowly defined composite economic growth of neo-classical economics. If you refuse to distinguish between these different kinds of growth your are helping to discourage realistic responses to the crisis which humanity is facing.
This is only one of the thousands of possible scenarios for the future. What makes you so sure that the world will go according to your precise assumptions?
Long-term prospective exercises are not just a question of picking a few macro-economics hypothesis and running Excel-based algorithms.
You have tried to describe the world for the next 40 years. Do you really think that somebody in 1968 would have succeed in predicting the last 40 years by using such methods?
The point is to figure out if there is a possible way for advanced civilization to survive. Let us first come to some consensus on a plausible model (not a prediction). Then we can debate if the way we get there is possible.
What do you mean? Is there some way for the current economic system to survive? Some way for the current power structure to survive? Some way for some of the technology to survive? All of the above? None of the above?
You article is an exercise in futility, imho. You over-simplify, which you acknowledge. But that doesn't make it acceptable. This sort of exercise is only that as long as people insist on working at it piecemeal instead of as a very, very complex problem.
How do you discuss the future with zero regard for climate change? Even worse, how do you do so without even the barest understanding of the current situation with regard to climate change (450?!)?
Blah, blah... blah.....
Cheers
Yes, I think this vision is very cornucopian. For example:
The first is the already stated expectation that world population growth will go to zero by 2050 which will lower long term economic demand growth to 3%
Expectation is in scientific terms, useless. It is not objective and it 'belongs' to the one that 'expects' therefore it is extremely subjective. But the worst problem with the above scenario is expectation of growth. Growth as we have it today is absolutely unsustainable, especially so in the environment of increasing population. With stable population of some 8 or 9 billion people, how can growth be maintained? Where from? Using what resources? Growth is a concept so dear to the economists because they are not aware of its physical and thermodynamical background. With present population or the one from 2050, any growth represents the idea of a limitless growth. Until when?
In order to support such an idea, the author states:
My model assumes that 80% of the energy that the world will require in 2050 will have to come from nuclear, wind and solar, or 25.4 TW of electricity.
"Will require" as an arguments belongs to the same class of arguments as the one visible on the oil production prognosis of IEA or Cambridge Energy Associates that speaks about 115 million bbls/day somewhere in the future. It is enough to check the estimates of the available uranium reserves to become quite less optimistic about the role of nuclear energy in the overall energy mix in the future. So, why would be energy mix be as stated, in 2050? Just because we need energy and cannot think of any other way of getting it does not mean that this is a viable way ahead. It is enough to go through the prognosis of electricity requirements in UK until 2030 and plan to build 20 or 25 nuclear power plants to supply this energy. No actual construction can start during the next 8 years due to long preparation stage. That means between 2016 i 2020 at least 20 nuclear power plants have to be completed. At the price (as per German estimates) of 3000-3500 Euros per KW? There is only one manufacturer that makes high pressure vessels forgings for nuclear p. plants in the world and they can deliver two such forgings per year...
So yes, the vision is cornucopian... The model essentially proposes that we can go ahead in the same way as we were going until now, with some modifications but without the overall consequences for present paradigms valid in economy. Maintaining, at any cost, that the only way for this civilization is 'up', no matter what, is against all historical experience of this same human kind during the last 6000 years.
AKarlovic wrote:
There are no doubt a great many historians that would disagree with this view. Certainly with the resources are available, a comfortable life can be provided for every human being who lives on this planet for as long as we live here. If this is "cornucopian," so be it. There is enough recoverable Uranium and Thorium to provide us with all the energy we want and need for hundreds of millions of years. You might not like the civilization that we have, but the consequences of not having it are far worse than the consequences of living with its problems.
Certainly? That's a very bold word. I'm sure that many disagree with you, Charles, and would think it is by no means certain that there are enough resources to give 10 billion (or 12 or 20 billion) people a comfortable life (presumably measured in terms you're familiar with today). Nor is it certain that nuclear power could (in practical terms) provide whatever energy humans would want and need for hundreds of millions of years.
sofistek wrote
Before you make such claims, you ought to look at what the earth is made of, how much extractable Thorium and Uranium is available, and what can be done with them. For example there is enough thorium present in high grade ore (25% to 63%) at Lemhi Pass to provide the United States with all its energy needs for 400 years. Enormous recoverable thorium resources are available within the United States. Reactors that use the thorium fuel cycle like the LFTR can be built in factories for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time of conventional reactors. You ought also to look at world mineral and metal resources.
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/5045860-HVRCd7/5045860...
An analogy to your argument that we have enough (whatever) to last (X,000) years:
All we need to build and run a car is gasoline.
For goodness' sake...
Cheers
Charles, I have trouble swallowing the hundreds of millions of years of supply. IIRC, fissionable material was more like 10,000 (still more than enough time for any concievable bridge to truly renewable power), and even fusion of all the dueterium in the ocean is only good for a few million years. There is no need to exaggerate, the resource is big enough that we will have time to develop the science and engineering needed for a totally renewable based economy.
I keep trying to push Thorium. There must presumably be reasons why we have done Uranium based reactors instead?
We did Uranium first because it was easier to make bombs from it.
I think Charles is right about the hundreds of millions of years of fission fuel supply but I state it as at least in the millions of years.
And millions of years of steel and rubber and copper and lead and....
One word, er, name: Liebig.
Cheers
enemy of state wrote,
Enemy, rather than try to argue with you, I invite you to spend an hour researching how much recoverable Uranium and Thorium are in the earth's crust. Sterling somewhere in this comment section provides a link to a summery of Uranium resources.
This was historical circumstance. The Navy designed a reactor capable of producing steam to power its ships. They convinced power plant manufacturers to adopt the design. Reactor scientists from Eugene Wigner onward understood that fluid core reactors offered significant technological advantages in processing the thorium fuel cycle. By the end of the 1950's it was clear that the MSR was the ideal candidate as a thorium fuel cycle reactor, but politics killed MSR research as designs for a 1 GW MSR/LFTR were being prepared. Currently design research for LFTR projects is being conducted in France and Japan.
Charles,
If you have been reading my other posts in this thread, you will have seen that I am trying to line up people to write a joint post that would be part two this vision. I need someone with your obvious knowledge of nuclear technology. I have laid out my plan with Pitt and Levin here and DaveMart is probably in. You interested?
Sterling
Sterling Sure, i would be glad to contribute, what ever I can.
Terrific.
Sterling Just let me know what you want. I can, if you are interested about lowering nuclear costs.
Charles,
I need to get your email. If you come back, please email me at sterlingpesmith at yahoo dot com.
Sterling
"Yes, I think this vision is very cornucopian. For example:
The first is the already stated expectation that world population growth will go to zero by 2050 which will lower long term economic demand growth to 3%
Expectation is in scientific terms, useless. It is not objective and it 'belongs' to the one that 'expects' therefore it is extremely subjective. But the worst problem with the above scenario is expectation of growth. Growth as we have it today is absolutely unsustainable, especially so in the environment of increasing population. With stable population of some 8 or 9 billion people, how can growth be maintained? Where from? Using what resources? Growth is a concept so dear to the economists because they are not aware of its physical and thermodynamical background. With present population or the one from 2050, any growth represents the idea of a limitless growth."
I agree. Not only that but recent estimates don't even support the notion of a declining population growth rate. Although the rate had been declining up until 2003, since then the growth estimates have been:
Figures from the current and past editions of the CIA World Fact Book.
CIA factbook is useless. They even claim that Spain has had no immigration over the past decade, even though many million people have moved to spain.
I just checked the CIA world factbook on Spain and it
says (0.99 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2008 est.)
So by rounding up too 1% and multiplying that by 40 million people and going around 10 years...thats....
well you get my point. The CIA fact book didnt say what
you said it didnt say.
How do you know those numbers are even from the same original source? They may be computed completely differently in different years.
If you take all the numbers from a single source, such as the US Census or the UN, you get a steady decline in growth rates since 2003.
Hey, I'm just reporting what looks like a reversing trend. Can you post the corresponding UN estimates, for the same years? I can't get that UN link to work.
Of course, we can just continue believing that population growth is slowing and will reach zero mid century and keep our fingers crossed. Or we could ask: what if that trend has stalled (as it seems to have done) and we have 11 billion in 2050 with no sign of a leveling out?
The UN data is not detailed enough, only giving data for 5 year periods. The US census data does show a steady but very small decline since 2003, a decline of about 0.01% per year. The US census projections are significantly different from the UN projections up to 2050 (the UN has growth at 0.36% for the 2045-2050 period, whereas the US census has growth at above 0.5%), so the US census is projecting 300 million more people than the UN is. Which of these projections does one take? Furthermore, the US census still has population growing at 48 million per year, by 2050, whereas many people seem to assume population will have leveled off by then.
I wouldn't expect the CIA projections to ignore US census estimates but one thing seems certain: we can't assume that population will level off at 9 billion by 2050 (unless resource depletion kicks in) and we should assume that population will increase much more substantially by the end of the century, maybe to at least 11 billion. Should we be looking to provide the means for population to rise by that much? Would that be an intelligent thing to do? What if we get it wrong and population is at 11 billion by 2050, and trending to 15 billion by 2100?
I am not here trying to make the case that this vision can be accomplished. I think we first need to arrive at some consensus of what civilization continuing would require. I will try to show how we would accomplish this vision in a future article.
“Reserves” are completely useless in determining the resource base for a resource that is not in short supply. “Reserves” result from mining companies spending money to qualify know resources as ones they can exploit in the current market. The mining companies would never be expected to qualify more that about fifty years of reserves, especially for a resource that is so price inelastic. Not only would this be a waste of money but success in doing so would negatively affect their stock prices.
Sterling, actually Japanese researchers have "qualified" the 4.5 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in sea water, by demonstrating the viability of their extraction technology. Uranium extraction from sea water is not expensive, and it is in effect a renewable resource, since newly dissolved uranium is enter the sea all of the time. So even with the absence of "qualified" mining resources, we do not need to worry about the shortages of reactor fuel, and hence shortages of energy.
As I understand it, seawater would have to be processed at a rate greater than the rate at which the Rhine flows out to the sea (that is, we would have to process seawater at a greater flow rate than the Rhine) for just one reactor. And you say it's not expensive?
Renewable? At what rate? If it was leaching into the sea at a rate that was useful for extraction and use, then why is the concentration not much, much higher than it is now?
sofistek wrote
The Japanese plan to use the Japanese current. The Rhine is a trickle compared to the Japanese current. The materials used, a form of plastic, I believe, are inexpensive, and the whole technology is low tec, and does not consume much energy.
I am not as chemist, but as I understand it, the dissolved Uranium in the sea water is at a saturation point. As new uranium enters the sea in river water,and from from sea bottom sources, uranium precipitates out, keeping an equilibrium. As uranium is withdrawn from the sea, the uranium content of sea water is no longer saturated. Thus dissolved uranium can be added from rivers and underwater sources. I am not sure at what rate, and I suspect no one has studied the process in detail. But clearly the process makes uranium in seawater a renewable resource, although how big a resource is not yet know.
So, a) you assume that, because one experiment has been done on a small scale (though it took about 10 months), the whole concept of uranium from seawater is proven, and the fact that it would take a flow rate greater than the Rhine to supply one power plant, hundreds (maybe thousands, if some advocates had their way) of nuclear plants could easily and economically be fed by seawater uranium extraction, and, b) you think "renewable" means "at any rate".
Seems like a lot of wishful thinking here and a lot of poor assumptions.
On the nuclear issue, people can be so naive economically. Sure right now there is only one pressure vessel manufacturer at current plant sizes, but when demand picks up someone else will jump in and make more. Oil price goes up, more people drill so why would nuclear be any different?
If you compare nuclear to wind, you automatically lose all credibility in an energy discussion. At current and near-term technology they don't compete with each other.
The key here is carbon caps, if coal gets banned (it won't) we will see 50% nuclear by 2050. Even so, there is more than plenty Uranium and Thorium to tie humans over until the next big source of energy arrives whether it is battery system renewables, fusion power, solar panels in space, mining other planets, etc.
When we get to the point in advanced materials technology where nuclear can go Brayton cycle, we will have neighborhood nuclear plants.
The "one manufacturer" meme is highly misleading. Plenty of reactor designs which are in wide use already don't use that type of pressure vessel, or pressure vessels at all (for example, CANDU reactors and derived designs).
The capacity or lack thereof for this Japanese steel company is basically irrelevant to the world nuclear power industry.
Why?
The main argument against wind is intermittency; however, wind, solar, and pumped storage can be efficiently combined to provide baseload power.
I agree with you that they're not in competition, but that's only because they're most efficiently used in complementary manners. Directly comparing them, though, is quite reasonable to do.
When Oil comes off the current plateau our industrial economy will be dragged kicking and screaming off that teat.
The price of oil will wreak havoc regardless of alternative energy which is mainly electricity.
High quality energy will only be available to those able to pay for it, having a paid job may not be sufficient given the cost of food and massive debt now being punted into taxes.
Best
The reason some like the zero growth model...
To get the doubling period for any stated percentage growth, divide 70 (100*ln(2)) by the percentage. 3% for example is 23 years. You are doubling the energy consumption, the resource consumption, the population every 23 years. I believe a Professor Albert Bartlett has already been discussed here.
I dont think thats quite true as there is ample room for energy efficiency and conservation, especially in the Middle East for example.
Especially in the United States.
A -75% or -80% reduction in USA energy consumption can be combined with a higher quality of life (but less conspicuous consumption). And in as little as twenty (not fifty) years.
Alan
If you're concerned about resource consumption, say "zero consumption growth". That is not the same thing as zero economic growth.
Roughly speaking, economic growth = (1 + consumption growth)*(1 + efficiency growth)
If you want to make the rate of change of consumption zero, you'll still get economic growth as efficiency improves. If you are more interested in controlling society rather than resource consumption and you want to make the rate of economic growth zero, then you can still get growth in resource consumption if efficiency/productivity falls.
If you're interested in resource consumption, you're looking at the wrong side of the equation.
Efficiencies have limits and will yield increasingly fewer benefits for resource consumption. Ultimately, economic growth = increased resource use.
Not true, at least in theory and also in medium-horizon practice.
Suppose 1%/year economic growth, and 2%/year efficiency improvement. The first year we use 1 unit of resources. The second year we use (1.01)/(1.02) = 0.99 units of resources. And so on.
After 10 years, we will have used 9.6 units of resources.
After 50 years, we will have used 40 units of resources.
After 250 years, we will have used 93 units of resources.
Until the end of time, we will use 102 units of resources.
Obviously, this doesn't work "until the end of time", as there are minimum sizes of physical objects. That doesn't mean similar levels of improvement can't hold over the scale of centuries, though, especially if recycling is taken as contributing to efficiency.
Nice mathematics. What does that mean in practice? Well you've already acknowledged that it breaks down over long periods. You have also not included any figures for efficiencies. How can you say efficiency can improve 2% per year, for ever? In each application, there will be some practical efficiency level and it will get harder and harder to improve on that, the close we get to it. Your whole calculation makes little practical sense.
Economic growth is positive change in the market value of all goods and services. Some goods and services gain their value from their physical inputs. Some gain it primarily from their intellectual input. If the total of the movies they make in LA in any year sells much better than the prior year, that is economic growth. This could be because they have much better car chases or it could be because someone thinks up a more compelling love story. Writing a great song takes just as many physical resource as writing a terrible one, but the good on does more to raise the total market value of all goods and services.
Let's ignore the fact a lot more energy is used making movies now than in the past. Hollywood used to fake scenes of driving a car to the train station even in movies with big name stars, and now a schlocky action flick that you will forget about ten minutes after you leave the theater shoots on exotic location, destroys dozens of cars, and has high tech special effects coming out the wazoo. But let's forget about that.
And let's ignore the fact that a big part of the movie industry is the home sales and rental market, where, the last I checked, the size and luxury of home theater systems was still increasing (Got your HDTV yet?).
Let's ignore the fact that people drive to large air conditioned buildings to watch movies and eat lots of highly packaged food products transported over long distances.
Let's forget about these facts and just concentrate on the fact that if theaters can lure more viewers into the same physcial set of buildings they can grow their revenue with mininmal increases in resource consumption. In order for this increased revenue to represent composite growth some other part of the economy needs to grow as well. If people are switching spending to movies from some other form of entertainment then growth in the movie industry is being matched by the shrinkage of some other industry. Therefore some other sector of the economy must also be growing. In order for the total growth to be dematerialized then the other part of the economy which is growing must also not be consuming more resources. So computer game makers, video game makers etc can trade more games for more movies. In reality, of course video and computer game profits are closely tied with hardware sales. If you can come up with a better example than this feel free to present it.
Furthermore, in order for the psychological satisfaction industry to be an engine of long term growth, it must concentrate on quality and not on quantity. Time is finite. We cannot exponentially (or linearly for that matter) increase the time that we spend entertaining ourselves. We have to pursuade people to spend more on our dematerialized product because the experience is better than our competitor's dematerialized product. In return we get high quality entertainment from somebody else. Calling such an enterainment competition economic growth is a rather bizarre use of language. Strangely enough, in the real world sucessful entertainers do not seem to spend their money soley to purchase dematerialized psychological satisfaction. They buy beach houses, ski condos, $100,000 sports cars etc.
The idea of providing for our material needs as efficiently as possible, and spending the rest of our time ministering to our psychological and spiritual needs is not a bad one. But why it is neccessary to do within the context of an unending competition to sell to sell more stuff to each other is a mystery understood only by the faithful members of the Church of Everlasting Growth.
Sterling,
Great post, agree that many of your assumption are reasonable 40 years out.I do take issue on your assumptions about wind and solar being limited to 30% by needs of a grid supplying energy on demand. Assuming that NG is providing 9% of energy and hydro 2%(allowing for a small increase especially in Africa), both of these resources can be used very strategically for peak demand. Where several hydro storage sites are available at different levels, pumped storage can be expanded to provide very large capacity, 10-100 times net hydro capacity, ideal to back-up wind. NG is often used only as peak power, so 9%NG energy could back up 30% wind alone( ie NG used for about a third of the time).
Solar power is produced at peak demand so even if 25% power was from solar it would need only to backup the difference between cloudy versus sunny production and no back-up during night-time when demand is much lower.
Geothermal also appears to have great promise in some regions but its hard to know if it could grow to provide 25% power, but it would only be less than that if the capital and operating costs turn out to be much higher than expected( for example more like nuclear).
Your other assumption is that there will not be more demand regulation such as smart metering, off-peak EV charging etc, that would allow more than 20% of electricity to be generated by wind power.
If a much higher proportion of 2050 energy comes from solar, wind and geothermal, this would mean less from nuclear. I don't see that's a problem, as nuclear is good at replacing base load coal power generation. If no new coal fired plants are build and retired plants replaced by nuclear, we would require 12% from nuclear plus 3% replacing the existing nuclear would give at least 15% nuclear. Thus nuclear may be as low as 15%, but I think 54% is way too high, mainly because of the high capital costs and long build times relative to wind.
Neil1947 wrote:
Pump storage is not going to cost less than conventional nuclear power, and will certainly be more expensive than Pebble Bed Reactors, and either thorium cycle or Uranium cycle Molten Salt Reactors, all of which are in expensive enough to to be profitable as peak electrical sources. Unlike pump storage these Generation IV reactors do not require water for their operation. Wind is a none starter as a peak electricity source, and wind back-up can as easily be provided by Generation IV nuclear as by NG.
Neil1947 assumes that solar conditions found in the American Southwest will prevail everywhere, and they will not. In Northern areas of the United Syayes and Canada, peak demand rises on winter nights. In at least 2/3 of the United States, cloud cover is going to be impacting solar at least 25% of the time, and we have a summer-winter solar differentiation.
Geothermal works in Iceland and California, elsewhere it cannot be counted on yet.
If we examine the liabilities of solar, wind and geothermal, the estimated 2050 penetration of nuclear may be low. Of course, if nuclear is to assume greater than 50% penetration of the electrical market, it will have to change the way it does business. More advanced reactor technologies must be adopted. The Pebble Bed Reactor and the Molten Salt reactor are two promising technologies that have already been tested, and the Pebble Bed Reactor will be in production in China and South Africa by 2020. Both the Chinese and the South Africans expect to build their BPRs in factories, and factory production is the way to go if nuclear power production is going to be the main show.
Factory produced Generation IV reactors can be built and set up in months rather than years. They can be built in very large numbers, and they can be built cheaply. Generation IV reactors use nuclear fuel more efficiently than conventional reactors and thus produce less nuclear waste. In particular the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor can burn up to 98% of its thorium feed stock, leaving very little long term nuclear waste. Another generation IV Molten Salt Reactor, the Liquid Chlorine Fast Reactor can burn existing nuclear waste as fuel, while producing new nuclear fuel.
Generation IV reactors possess many inherent safety features. Thus a a rapid switch to Generation IV nuclear technology would answer traditional objections to nuclear power.
Charles,
I can see that you are very enthusiastic about nuclear, I also think it will play an important role, and building new nuclear plants to generate 15-20% energy is a big ask, but there is one reason why energy plans should not rely on more than 20% of power from nuclear- one additional total melt down accident, anywhere, would probably doom future nuclear power in all democracies. We are still recovering from the last one 25 years ago.
As for solar, 25% of N America's power could come form solar in a corner of Arizona. You wouln't build it in Maine. Peak demand in US is in summer, in Canada its in winter, thus the HVDC connectors between US and Canada.
The thing about pumped storage is that it doesn't use up any water except for storage evaporation, you can re-use it daily.
Hot rock geothermal hasn't yet proved itself, and there are technical risks, but there are massive resources.
Neil1947
The passive safety features of Generation III+ conventional reactors make core meltdown virtually impossible, The Yellowstone super volcano is 100 times more likely to erupt, that a ESBWR will have a core meltdown. Secondly core meltdown is no problem with a MSR because the core is already molten! If nuclear meltdown is the boogie man of the anti-nuclear set, the MSR is the Chuck Norris of reactors!
Schemes to produce all North American power in the desert Southwest are utopian, extremely expensive and dangerous. Ultra expensive HVDC lines make excellent and largely indefensible terrorist targets.
They make awful terrorist targets - they're easy and fast to fix, and damaging a line may do little or nothing to interrupt power transmission (remember that electricity responds almost immediately to changes in graph connectivity, so any grid with spare transmission capacity will be highly resilient). Not only that, but taking out a power line has little or no lasting effect - consider how often it happens in the winter.
Now compare this to a coal or even nuclear plant. These installations are incomprehensibly more complex than HVDC lines, meaning repairs will be much more expensive and time-consuming. Attacking them has a direct effect on energy supply, not just availability. Worst of all, there's the potential for significant long-term effects, especially in the case of damage to a nuclear plant (radiation leak).
If you're concerned about terrorists attacking the electrical grid, and I think there are much more pressing things to worry about, then that is not an argument in favour of nuclear power. Given their constant need for fuel, it's not even an argument in favour of coal or gas - we know from recent history that both pipelines and convoys are vulnerable to interdiction.
Indeed, probably your best bet would be wind and solar, as their diffuse nature and simple operation makes them hard to target. A coal plant has multiple critical systems that can cause a shutdown, and doing so removes 1GW from supply. To remove that same GW from wind or solar, you would need to either cut enough power lines - possibly dozens - or to disable hundreds of windmills or solar installations. It's like trying to target food supply by blowing up cornfields; it can be done, but it's going to take a lot of work.
The one thing is for certain: all these sophisticated and new reactor designs are just designs for some reason... Can we ask ourselves-why? Can we rely on civilization being supplied AC power from such new design power plants (simple to build but albeit nonexistent!) if in 30 years we HAVE TO replace all gas fired power plants in the world with something else? What else? I will try to find the article describing the problem of extracting tritium from sea water required for the startup of the first nuclear fusion reactor. It is a gargantuan task and it makes the idea of getting tritium for fusion reactors from sea water ludicrous. The tritium has to come (be provided) by the operation of the fusion reactor itself - assuming that the thing will work. The first reactor provides tritium for the second and so on and on.
The problem with nuclear energy is that it was pushed into corner for 30 years. Secondly, the dogma of private capital solving our energy problems is nonsense because private capital always finances the projects with lowest initial investment and fastest return. Nuclear obviously does not belong to that category.
The term 'cornucopian' means that no matter what, technology will always pull us out of trouble. For many decades the fusion was considered the end of civilization's trouble with energy or electricity to be exact. Now, the fusion power is still 30 years ahead because we will be so busy building fission reactors that making a functional fusion reactor will drop into background.
The idea that there is enough of everything for all of us no matter what that 'us' means (5 or 6 or 9 billion people)is a complete nonsense. It sounds 'socialistics' but besides that political judgement, we know that it is impossible even today, not to mention tomorrow. If there is enough of everything for everybody, how comes people are dying from hunger all over the planet?
Neil,
I think the difference this time is that if we had such an accident, we would not be able to use cheap coal instead. Why it is that of the two, nuclear is considered more dangerous, beats me when coal generation kills 30,000 every year compared to 0 for nuclear. But the relative costs of the waste issue is now more understood. Coal caused global warming is now understood as a very serious problem.
Even if the world wanted to use an alternative (coal) that is 10-100 times more dangerous and dirty, it just will not be there.
Sterling,
I appriciate your efforts. I'm not fanatically anti-nuclear. I think it could provide an important and necessary 'bridge' so we can move from one era to another. I don't believe it's a panacea though. I wish it was. I'd like to think it was cheap, safe and potentially abundant.
What I do question is your assertion that nuclear power generation, or the nuclear power cycle, is as extraordinarily benign compared to other forms of energy production. Zero is a fantastically low figure. Are you being serious? Or is it merely rhetoric in the heat of the argument? I'm sure it must be, otherwise it would reflect very negatively on the quality of the rest of your arguments. Statements like that don't enhance your credibility and I think should be avoided. Hope that doesn't sound too harsh!
When you say that nuclear is responsible for zero deaths, I believe you are way, way, off the mark. However, this is an intensely complex and controversial subject, how many excess deaths are attributable to the nuclear power cycle on a global basis? What are the longterm effects of releasing radiation into the environment? Do we really know yet? What do we know? We do know that people who've worked in the nuclear industry are dying today of various forms of cancer, but exactly how many is difficult to say, though it's certainly more than zero. What about the cancer clusters in the populations that live close to nuclear plants, don't they count? Then there's the problem of radioactive waste contaminating our rivers and groundwater, I think it's unfair and 'dishonest' to blithely ignore the problems associated with nuclear.
But don't get me wrong. I am not against nuclear power. I think we are going to be forced to use it, but that may be another story.
The dangers of nuclear power have been wildly exagerated by its opponents. I am not aware of any deaths that have been shown to have been caused by the Western nuclear power industry in its history. That is not rhetoric. We expect a much higher standard of safety and environmental impact of nuclear than any of its competitors but even when they achieve it this in no way placates their opponents.
Neil, the issue with solar as well as storage is the need to overbuild as soon as you are any distance at all from the equator.
In a very good location such as the Mohave winter incidence is only around 25% of summer.
For peak load in hot areas where the main need is cooling, just enough storage to stretch the energy from peak by a few hours does the job, so it is very reasonable to think that this is on course to be a major source of power in those areas.
When it gets silly, and the engineering starts getting fantastic, is when people start talking about using it to power areas like the North-East of the States in winter.
You have huge transmission issues, and solar is at it's weakest just when it is most needed for heating.
Wind is better, but you would still need one heck of a transmission system and have to deal with cold, still snaps one way or another.
Maybe costs will drop enough to make more energy from these sources practical, we just don't know, but we do know a great deal about how to provide a huge amount of power close to where it is needed using nuclear energy.
If something better comes long that is fine, but right now we know that with a substantial input from nuclear there is no need to have an energy poor future, and that is our best hope of getting everyone to a reasonable standard of living.
Conveniently, that's when wind tends to be at its strongest.
Based on hourly real-world wind generation data (from Ontario Hydro's website), even modestly-distributed wind power will tend to be reliable and produce strongly in the winter. It's only in the summer when it tends to have significant droughts, but summer is exactly when solar is at its best.
Like I've shown before, solar and wind are very complementary in their availability patterns, and it takes only a modest amount of pumped storage capacity to turn them into baseload power.
They're practical now.
Wind/solar/hydro baseload power would cost about twice the current US average, or about the same as average prices in many EU countries. Since people and businesses in those countries are paying those rates and thriving, it is clear that producing electricity for that price is economically practical.
***
I don't know why many pro-nuclear people are anti-wind/solar, or why many pro-wind/solar people are anti-nuclear. This is not an either/or question!
It's like a starving man saying steak is inedible because he'd rather have salmon; the reality is that either one will do him just fine, and both would be even better. So quit insisting your way is the only way.
I suppose I should be used to the way future WORLD energy production tends to be conflated by American commentators into whatever the US is up to.
It actually uses a relatively small part of world power, and that is going to get smaller.
The US has far better wind, solar and geothermal resources per capita than almost anywhere else, with obvious exceptions such as Australia.
As for practical, I am happy for renewables to provide as much of our power as they can economically do, but I wouldn't base present planning on technologies and systems which are unproven at a large scale at this time - I am all in favour of progressing those other technologies as fast as is possible, but I would also press on with nuclear technology too.
I have repeatedly linked to this experiment in Germany, which linked biogas, wind and solar:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/2008/02/renewed_energ...
Comment is free: Renewed energy
So I am hardly against renewables - in fact, certainly in much of small town America, this would seem to be the way forward.
For many other areas, such as northern Europe, many of the resources do not exist at any reasonable cost.
In any case, the present discussion and argument is about whether it is possible to provide the power for a fairly energy rich society, and the suggestion is that nuclear technology guarantees that.
If we don't need so much power due to better conservation, that is fine, and it reduces the required investment in plants.
If we can make greater use of renewables than it seems safe to count on at the present instant, that is fine too.
There is no need to suffer energy shortages though as soon as a nuclear build gets going properly if neither of those come off, is all.
"The most comprehensive study to date[70] found the potential of wind power on land and near-shore to be 72 TW, equivalent to 54,000 MToE (million tons of oil equivalent) per year, or over five times the world's current energy use in all forms."
So there's plenty of wind.
As for solar, I humbly suggest that you don't know what you're talking about. The US isn't even close to the equator, so there's an enormous range of countries which have much better geographical locations for solar than the US does. Hence the proposals floated around to power Europe with solar in the Sahara, for example.
Perhaps Britain doesn't have much in the way of wind or solar potential, but - no offense - that's largely irrelevant to the world energy picture.
I have no issue with the use of renewables where practical, it is the exaggeration of their present utility and use in unsuitable locations that is the problem.
For wind power, what the resource base is depends on your criteria, often economic , and many of the best locations are a very long way away from where it is needed.
To take one example, the fact that the American plains can provide huge amounts of power does not help Europe very much, so the overall world wind potential may mislead rather than enlighten.
On shore wind in the States is an excellent resource, but off-shore costs are so horrendous that it is currently multiples of the cost of other resources, probably even the mythic clean coal.
As for solar, of course there are regions nearer the equator than the states, where it may be a better resource, although it should be noted that many of those regions where it could be really useful such as India have far less space to deploy it than the US.
It should be noted that for many forms of solar power cloud cover is also a huge difficulty, so that only some forms which likely would not include solar thermal are suitable there.
The point of the illustration using the Mohave is that that is about as good as it gets for solar resource in the States, which is an area which could certainly use vast amounts of power, but even there unless you make heroic assumptions about future cost reductions the difference in winter incidence makes it very difficult to use as base-load, with peak power use being more suitable.
No doubt molten salt storage or similar can provide enough storage to make diurnal variation acceptable.
The problems worsen if some of the more far-fetched schemes for transporting this power to the north east of the US were attempted, as you want most power when least is generated.
None of this is to argue the absolute impossibility of using solar and wind for a very substantial part of power in some areas, but it does serve to indicate that some of the difficulties of getting there would be substantial.
Your own estimate of around 2.5 times the cost premium against nuclear sounds reasonable.
Of course, if you just use the different technologies where they are happiest, with nuclear providing much of the baseload, but in remote areas where it is expensive to connect an area system using a variety of resources being used, and with wind being used to top up power for the north-east in the winter, and solar to cope with air conditioning in hot climates, then the cost premium disappears.
Dave,
I think there's room for nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and solar thermal.
I don't think it is helpful to blast any particular one technology which will add to stabilizing our current energy supply.
If we focus on just a single technology to power our entire needs in every single case we can provide a technical solution to any of the problems.
Nuclear has a waste issue. We can solve that. Expensively.
Wind has an intermittency issue. We can solve that by batteries or pumped storage. Expensively.
Solar has a similar intermittency issue to wind but more seasonal. We can solve that by e.g. neighborhood thermal storage.
Every single technical issue has a solution. The question is which is most cost and resource effective.
But that's the main question of how to mitigate peak oil isn't it... what's the most cost and resource effective way to get from here to there.
Dan, I don't know where you get the idea I am against renewables.
I am not, and fully support their development, and use in appropriate environments.
The thing is though, that we don't have time to do the engineering to develop then more fully, which does take time.
For instance, hot rock geothermal power in Australia and the American West is a very promising technology, but anyone who imagines that we are in a position to do a massive roll out right now just has not been following the issues.
Pilot plants are being built, and issues such as how successful fractioning the rock in between the well putting the water in and the ones drawing it out are being investigated, but we need years of experience and a gradual move to bigger systems, we can't just plan on running a country on it right now.
Again, storage of solar power using salts is a very promising technology, but issues such as it solidifying when too cold at a couple of hundred degrees need to be worked through.
The problem really is the exaggerated expectations encouraged by those for whom the use of renewables is primarily an ideological matter, rather than a matter of practical engineering.
This can also be seen very severely in the insistence of building turbines where it is not windy, and solar power where it is not sunny.
Renewables are welcome, and indeed essential, and will play a very major part in providing for energy needs in future - but that should not stop us getting on and building the low-fossil fuel resource that we know how to do at a major scale - nuclear power.
Do you have the data to show that, or are you simply speaking out of blind faith?
The Tianhuangping pumped storage facility in China came online in 2001 for a cost of about US$1.1B and with a 1.8GW generating capacity.
Stored water has a potential energy of 0.272kWh per m^3 per 100m of height, and that can be converted to electricity at about 90% efficiency. Accordingly, this facility's elevation difference of 590m and 8Mm^3 of storage capacity allows it to generate 42GWh running from full to empty.
Splitting the cost of the plant evenly between storage and generation, it was about $12/kWh of storage and $300/kW of generation capacity. Even assuming storage was free, generation capacity was at most $600/kW.
The data is clear: pumped storage is cheap.
Pitt the Elder wrote
The Chinese could not duplicate that price today, and it certainly is not indicative of what pump storage would cost in the United States. The Chines bought 4 Westinhouse AP-1000 for $5.3 Billion. or about $1.1 Billion Per GW. Given that the cost of cement, steel and oil have at least doubled since 2001, the cost of pump storage would seem comparable to the cost of nuclear in China.
Perhaps not, but it does give us relatively recent quantitative data to work from.
Even something as subjective as "let's double the price to account for inflation, commodity price increases, and more expensive labour" is a lot more grounded in evidence than just taking a wild guess at the prices involved.
You're right that it doesn't give us the price of such a system being built in the USA in 2010; it does give us a solid data point, though, and using it will make our estimates better, which was the whole point.
Charles, you write well on the merits of nuclear - but writing authoritatively on economic phenomena with so much self feedback is not possible. We know that solar and wind production prices have fallen off a cliff with newer technology and production standards & are currently driving rapid growth, while nuclear has gotten more expensive because of construction cost inflation even while safety has ceased to be a serious concern in all but the most abstract manner.
Do you have any idea, in terms of cost per watt and cost per KWH, how printed CIGS thin-film PV compares with polysilicon waste cells, the newest solar thermal designs, floating offshore turbines, helium kite turbines, Wasatch Wind carbon fiber turbines, onshore ridgeline turbines, AP1000 reactors on US union labor, conventional reactors that the US government has decided not to insure anymore, PBMR reactors shipped up from South Africa, Molten Lead Fast Reactors put out by some startup from Pittsburg, etc etc etc...
And do you have info on how those cost numbers will change in relation to competition for materials and labor, as well as supply saturation and government incentives, over the next half century?
Didn't think so.
Committing to a single variety of silver bullet isn't adequate to our needs: any technology is unlikely to rise to the challenge reliably. Committing to developing a wide array of choices that look promising in ten years just might be. If that means our grid becomes an overbuilt patchwork of systems - that's a good problem to have in a nation that needs exports, fertilizer, cement, desalinated water, charged PHEVs, "a hydrogen economy"(coming soon to a science fair near you!).
Squalish asked
Squalish the cost of PV modules has held steady over the last few years, and runs about $0.21 Per KWh. Even if that price drops to 0, the prices of building massive PV arrays will be the killer. The cost of those arrays will not be significantly less that a nuclear power plant of comparable name plate output. The nuclear plant will produce far more electricity over a 24 hour period, and thus be a better deal. Concentrated Solar also appears from my admittedly incomplete assessment to have similar costs to nuclear. Much of the Data on concentrated solar has not been published, so final judgement is not possible.
I havecalculated on the basis of published data that BrightSource CSP facilities will cost about as much as nuclear plants with equivalent name plate capacity, but in fact the nuclear plant will generate 3 times as much electricity every day.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/06/brightsource-dimming.html
Navada Solar 1, is rated at 64 MWs and cost $260,000,000.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/06/subsidies.html
Finally my calculationof the current cost of CSP suggests with interest that the price tag runs about $7 per watt, a price which is certainly not significantly less that the price of nuclear.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/06/solana-subsidies-and-future-sol...
I have attempted to assemble such data on solar materials and labor input, but have run into a road block. The builders of solar generating facilities have not released information about materials labor input for their technology. However, data published during the 1990's suggest that solar facilities require several times the amount of steel that nuclear facilities do. Thus solar facilities may be subject to greater materials inflation than nuclear plants will be.
Sir you underestimate me!
That's not even true now.
Installation costs a little less than the solar module currently (link), meaning it would be about $4/Wp, or about $4B for a 1GW nameplate installation, vs. $6-7B for a 1GW nuclear plant.
That's using retail prices, though. Using prices for a larger installation (500kW) gives $5B/GW including installation and the PV modules. So, realistically, installation costs for solar are about 1/3 what they are for nuclear.
(Of course, nuclear often has a capacity factor 4-5x that of solar PV, meaning its installation costs will still be cheaper per kWh.)
Pitt, $4.85 per watt is closer to 5 than 4. Installation charges do not include interest. If you install a 15 kWs array on a factory roof, interest does not matter much, if you build a 1 GW array in the California, interest is a killer. Of course if you don't count the interest on the nuclear plant the cost goes down to $4 billion or so. And the nuclear plant pumps out power 24 hours a day, verses 5 to 8 hours a day for the PV facility.
And installation costs are less than module costs. What's your point?
They include it in exactly the same way nuclear installation costs include it. It's a direct cost comparison.
Yes, that's why the cost per kWh is lower for nuclear.
That wasn't what you claimed, though. You claimed the installation costs for solar were higher for the same nameplate rating, even if module costs were zero. You were wrong; same-nameplate costs are lower for solar, even including module costs.
Pitt,
I would love to have you contribute to a next article but I need your email address. Please email sterlingpesmith at yahoo dot com.
Regards,
Sterling
Pitt the Elder,
The solar industry is keeping the lid on information on solar installation costs. Published information and I have looked at it, seems to refer to overnight costs. I have yet to find a discussion on interest costs for solar installations.
But the information that does filter out suggests that solar installations overnight costs are running to at least $4.0 Billion per name plate GW. Solar Buzz reports that the cost of Solar modules has not dropped during the last 5 years. The cost of wind installations doubled between 2004 and 2008, and continue to inflate. Similar inflation factors have effected the cost of nuclear power, and - this is one of the things the solar industry keeps hidden - the cost of solar installations. Unfortunately no on in the solar industry acknowledges that the inflation exist. The self censorship on cost and inflation information consigns solar advocates to the same class as snake oil salesmen. Information about solar costs is highly selective, and simply cannot be trusted without information about installation costs and inflation trends.
In evaluating the cost estimates for"The Grand Solar Plan", which appeared in the January Scientific American, Dan M. wrote in the Scientific American Blog:
Despite your claim that solar costs are decreasing, this is not reflected in the very limited information that is available about the costs of solar installations. My finding, based on very incomplete published information is that
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=7597656451205429515&searchType=ALL...
I am not entirely pleased with this assessment because a year ago, I was writing confidently about the usefulness of solar power to provide peak demand electricity in the Southwest. I have been forced to reevaluate.
Charles,
The cost of solar projects is tracked very closely by states. To pretend otherwise seems silly indeed especially since so much detailed information from NJ has been posted here.
Chris
Depends on the information you're looking at. This story, though, suggests that the recently-signed OptiSolar 550MW installation will cost about $1B, and deliver first power in 2011. That would suggest, at least for cutting-edge thin-film, a cost more in the range of $2B/GW.
However, I haven't been able to find much cost information on currently-operating facilities, such as the two 20MW Spanish installations. Based on the solarbuzz estimate, $4/GW nameplate would seem to be a likely figure for large installations.
I haven't said that, actually. I'm well aware that the module costs being tracked by solarbuzz haven't moved much either way in quite a while.
I do expect solar costs to fall in the future, for several reasons (new factories easing the shortage of silicon; increased competition from thin-film; greater economies of scale), and what little information I have (the OptiSolar deal, above) suggests that will indeed happen.
The last few years, though, haven't been good to the prices of solar (or wind, or nuclear, or coal, or just about any infrastructure project), and you're quite right that there is not a clear trend of declining prices right now.
If the above news article is to be believed, the PG&E plant to be built by OptiSolar will come in below that. It should be interesting to see.
That's the problem with being confident about uncertain things. Kudos to you for being willing to reevaluate, though - a lot of people try really hard not to, and that's always sad to see.
Actually, you want to take the cost of solar at the time a nuclear power plant can come on line. In 15 years, the cost of panels will be below $1/Wp. They may also be more efficient and thus require less effort to install.
It is worth remembering that every increase in demand for solar leads to a lower cost for the future while increased demand for nuclear power leads to cost escalations since the supply chain is so bottle-necked. More demand for solar means more manufacturing with China likely to take the lead this year. More demand for nuclear reactors means a longer queue for the one foundry in Japan that can still supply cores, a longer queue for the few remaining institutions that can train up people to work in nuclear construction, a longer queue for other nuclear qualified materials and a longer queue in the regulatory process. I would say that $12/W would be an optimistic final cost for nuclear power give the escalation trend over the last couple of years, $20/W with just a few unanticipated delays.
Chris
My point is that we've done the really hard work - using innovative technologies and manufacturing processes, we've gotten costs down on both wind and solar to the point that they can compete with nuclear - they're all in roughly the same area costwise. We've reached a point where Al Gore can demand 100% renewables in a decade and not be laughed out of the room. There are enough new ways of applying wind, solar, and nuclear that dozens of good ideas still lie untested in favor of standardized designs, while dirty coal and natural gas plants go up every year and we debate whether to construct a pipeline to exploit Athabasca.
Now the task ahead is to rapidly scale up *all of the above* renewables in search of advances, not whichever one happens to be the least expensive in year V based on W particular technology tested in X construction experiences in Y political conditions for location Z.
Bring it all on. Develop all the renewable techs that are remotely credible. We'll sort out the winning technologies after we've actually tried to implement them as bridge technologies.
You can't malign a CIGS thin-film factory that claims a theoretical fifty cents a watt based on estimates of something as obtuse as steel usage at a single 1990's monosilicon PV factory. Judging all potential future solar thermal based on a single project older than I am doesn't make sense. Panicking about bird kills based on windpower tower designs that havn't been economic since the last oil crisis does no one any good. Neither does removing all thought of nuclear based on a sixty year old reactor designed under Stalin, with all his love of safety and regard for human life.
Agreed.
This Generation IV nuclear technology sounds great, especially the Thorium stuff, which I gather is not weapons grade and produces waste with a hugely shorter half life. My questions are, why aren't we hearing more about it and what is preventing it's commercial introduction?
I have voiced support for algae based biofuels here on a number of occasions, only to be told that it will take a lot more work (time) to make it commercially viable and that it will not scale up to be very helpful (?). Is this the case with Generation IV nuclear technology?
It seems to me that both of these are solutions that seem to be theoretically sound but, not ready for implementation.
Here's hoping for rapid advances on both fronts!
Alan from the islands
It's not really surprising that in the States at least new designs (actually there was a prototype molten salt reactor operating in the States in the 1960's) face incredible regulatory hurdles.
Any technology which the regulators are unfamiliar with has to pay the staff $200 and hour to learn about it, before deciding on authorisation.
Unless it is an American company and the bill is being waived by the politicians, that means that not even very large corporations can afford to get a new design authorised.
This is an excellent way of destroying innovation.
Fortunately not every country has such absurd regulations.
Building a plant in China costs a fraction of the US costs, amongst other reasons having more than one authority to authorise what happens each with their own idea of how to do things causes huge expense.
If anything was regulated the way nuclear build is it would be very expensive.
The coal industry and the so-called greens have been very effective in the States in handicapping the nuclear industry - every capped mountain in WV attests to that.
That is just downright depressing. Another case like "Who Killed The Electric Car". Assuming that it is a tiny fraction of the human race that are employed in FF extraction and an even smaller fraction that "own" the industries involved, it is almost inconceivable that people could be so greedy and short sighted. Rape the planet, pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and prevent any other energy solutions from gaining a foothold while you're at it. Then when it's all done watch the suckers try to adapt to a world without FF. Of course you won't have anything to worry about because you're rich, you can afford anything you need or want.
Renewable energy resources like wind and sunshine are much more widely distributed than FF deposits so, I guess using renewable energy would allow a lot of smaller players to get involved in energy production, on a smaller scale. I can see how a lot of rich and powerful people would not be comfortable with that idea, no matter what the benefits are. They want to continue being the gatekeepers. "You can't pass through here unless you pay me." It seems peak human greed is something we will never see.
Alan from the islands
Cheap Uranium, anti-nuclear activists and people who are misinformed and unwilling to take on the anti-nukes.
I don't think that such a high percentage of nuclear is realistic, because if all costs are taken into account (including deconstruction and risks) and without (indirect) subsidies nuclear is extremely expensive, and more expensive than nowadays fossil power plants. Even the nuclear-friendly IEA admits this. Those who are aware of this do avoid nuclear. For example the British Thatcher government wanted to sell their nuke plants (including all risk liabilities) to private investors - but none did even want them for free.
Instead I suspect that renewables will get a big boost after the peak of the respective fossil fuel + the costs of carbon capturing : In Germany, even supposing a slow rise of fossil fuel prices wind and photovoltaics are expected to become competitive within the next decade.
BTW: I don't think that peak gas will be very relevant, as the price of gas is coupled with the price of oil. Even with more LNG market activities this won't change much in future due to the quasi-cartel of very few gas exporters: They will sell what they have to who pays best.
It is only because most of the externalities of nuclear are included in the cost while they are not for such sources as coal that nuclear appears to be expensive. On a more level playing field, nuclear would be the lowest cost alternative.
I don't think that peak gas will be very relevant, as the price of gas is coupled with the price of oil
not in the US, and long term differentials are wide enough that we could easily see LNG offtake capacity built to transfer a huge North American oversupply to world markets.
The cost of new nuclear power is prohibitive. This is from the beginning of Lovins and Sheikh quantitiative new work "The Nuclear Illusion" http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNucIllusion.pdf
This work is well documented and persuasive. Nuclear proponents need to get a grip and stop attempting to divert us from the real task.
Chris
midsolar is off on his usual anti-nuclear rant. The methods and cost of building nuclear generation capacity can be altered to dramatically lower costs. (see my "Keys" posts http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html)
midsolar also is unaware of the devastating critiques of the Lovins and Sheikh essay by David Bradish and many others. (Bradish provides links to all of his earlier essays and the critiques of several other bloggers in his concluding post. See http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/07/amory-lovins-and-his-nuclear...)
Bradish argued that Lovins uses terms inconsistently, and that the working definition of Lovins language mean one thing in his essays, and another thing in his data set , Thus the "RMI’s “micropower” data don’t fit their own definition of “micropower”. Bradish charges that a well researched principle of classic economics, Jevons Paradox" contradicts Lovins claims about energy efficiency. Bradish "explained that energy efficiency and “negawatts” will not necessarily reduce demand and in fact strong evidence suggests it will most likely increase demand". Bradish further charged, "RMI cherry-picks cost components in their paper and, as the anonymous commenter stated, “[RMI] is leaving the territory of cherry-picking to bravely enter the la-la-land of making things up.” Finally Bradish pointed to evidence "that nuclear plants are a reliable source of electricity, contrary to RMI’s claims".
Lovins attempted to debate Bradish in two posts on Gristmill, but did not answer Bradish's criticisms and failed to respond to Bradish comments on his posts. Although Lovins promised a comprehensive answer to Bradish, he only offered two very incomplete posts, no response to Bradish;s comments and has offered no further defense of his arguments against Bradish's criticisms. No doubt Lovins knows that anti-nuclear fanatics will continue to mention his work despite his own unwillingness or inability to defend it.
Charles,
You need to read Lovins and Sheikh's article. It says many of the things you have been saying about the problems with current nuclear power.
From your quotes of Bradish, it does not sound as though he actually participates in debate, just ad hominem.
Chris
Chris, I read the Lovins and Sheikh article and did my own critique. My conclusions were similar to Bradish's. I have not attempted to describe Bradish's arguments, only his conclusions. That is why I referred back to his original argument. Rest assured that Bradish had impressive grounds for his conclusions, He was not arguing ad hominem against Lovins, he demonstrated that Lovins had committed the errors he talked about.
Bradish's main argument seems to be that CHP is expensive. This does not seem to agree with reality so there is not much more to consider in that bit of whatever-it-is.
As to your link, you are still saying that we need to junk current technology so I don't quite see where you disagree with Lovins and Sheikh. They make many of the points you do.
Chris
"...the problems with current nuclear power."
That is the problem - most people do not understand the theoretical and experimental advances that have been made in the field of nuclear engineering. Also, they do not understand the socio-psychological conditioning of atomic powers first (and hence seen as primary) use in atomic weapons. Chernobyl, the 'current' myth maker was actually a crude bomb making factory - (see: http://www.niof.org/campaigns/chernobyl.htm - is it any wonder it blew up?) used to produce fissile material for the arms race - as were most cold war nuclear plants. The hope is that as a race of intelligent (?) beings we have gone beyond that paradigm, though reading the article on The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy (by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press) posted the other day, I do wonder...
L,
Sid.
Talking of Lovins, look what's in the Economist this week:
"Brain scan
The frugal cornucopian
Sep 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Amory Lovins began making the case for resource efficiency decades ago, long before it became fashionable. Now things are going his way
IF ANYBODY should be on top of the world today, it is Amory Lovins. That is not just because the energy visionary makes his home on a mountain in Old Snowmass, Colorado. Rather, it is because today’s interrelated energy and climate difficulties have at last made the world see the importance of resource efficiency, energy innovation and holistic design—principles that he has been advocating for nearly four decades."
From:
http://www.economist.com/scienc/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11999219
Etcetera...
L,
Sid.
Lots of people have theories.
The fact is that France has been producing most of their electricity for years with nuclear, and has some of the lowest rates in Europe.
There is no sign that the French economy is staggering from the high costs of hidden subsidies, and for many years now they have had some of the lowest CO2 emissions per person in Europe.
They have also had an excellent safety record, although how anyone who is peak oil aware can regard nuclear energy as risky compared to the huge numbers of people who will die is energy is short or there is climate change escapes me.
David,
You'll notice that I said quantitative in my description. It is an open and shut case now. Nuclear power leads to more warming and energy shortages than the superior alternatives. This is not a theory.
At this point, anyone who still supports nuclear power is delusional and is probably cruel to kittens and puppies as well ;-)
Chris
Please...
Gonna make that puppy glow! :-)
And I probably torture puppies, too. Well, at least that is a new one.
Thank you Sterling for the thoughtful and intriguing post. It's a good start to this conversation. But, I too think it is a bit cornucopian.
"My faith in the ingenuity, persistence and will to survive of mankind ..."
Your "faith" - or your last-ditch prayer? Either way your faith is useless when you "cannot defend it at this time."
"Is this vision hopelessly naïve and cornucopian? Only if you assume that there no way to go but down for mankind."
It is cornucopian. With your last sentence you leave an open ended accusation directed at the reader -"have the same faith as I do in my plan or else admit you are assuming humans are goners."
That of course is complete nonsense - there are many other alternatives to the simple dichotomy you propose.
The global village will collapse. The symptoms of collapse will be vary over time and place. But history says there will be some regions what will survive and likely prosper in the aftermath of this collapse.
Humanity is too combative to allow collapse in some areas whilst others mange to transition to some sort of low-energy, green future in a relatively pleasant manner.
History shows that endemic warfare will result unless we do a reasonable job of providing enough energy, and that will destroy the infrastructure too much to allow that kind of half-way house.
By the time that we are done throwing nukes around living at the stone-age level for the survivors would be a distant dream.
I tend to agree with you davemart that we will be far too combative as things get more desperate.
But if we avoid wide-scale nuclear war/nuclear winter I think it's likely that a number of regions in the world will survive with sufficient resources to carry on a relatively "modern" way of life. Possibly even a fossil fuel/petroleum-based economy, depending on the location and the ability of surviving regions to regain their senses and possibly begin cobbling together a new world economy.
One likely aftermath of such a World War III will be massive demand destruction.
If so, the there may be enough "easier to get" oil remaining to be sufficient to allow at least some of the surviving regions to return to a petro economy (assuming we do not waste too much on the wars themselves).
Seriously? 54%?
You and what cement factory?
step back wrote
Step Back, the steel and cement requirements of nuclear are relatively modest compared to wind, and the requirements of Generation IV reactors will be even smaller.
The clear evidence is that nuclear power does have a low energy return. Even proponents say there is a need to move to centrifuge enrichment because the energy return is so low. But, even then, nuclear power does not compare well with solar, wind and hydro. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/eroie.html
Standard estimates for nuclear fuel availability stand at about 70 years at the present rate of use, much less at the rate you would use it. Again, nuclear proponents require a breeding cycle to avoid this issue, a technology that has led consistently to meltdowns. The evidence certainly does not support your position.
Chris
On expense of enrichment -what about Laser Enrichment:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/gas-centrifuge-versus-laser-uranium.html
"The Silex laser uranium enrichment process has been indicated to be an order of magnitude more efficient than existing production techniques but again, the exact figure is classified..."
On Energy output -what about annular fuel power uprates:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/annular-fuel-50-power-ultra-uprate-to.html
"MIT and Westinghouse have been working on increasing the power of existing pressure water nuclear reactors by 50%."
On Cement causing GW -what about Calera Cement:
http://www.calera.biz/
"Calera Corporation is dedicated to reversing global warming and ocean acidification by trapping the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, in the built environment, proactively reducing the level of free carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere"
On how long Uranium supplies will last:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/how-long-can-uranium-last-for-nuclear.html
The current generation of reactors are really quite inefficient at burning fuel -I think they only use about 3%- And then there's Thorium...
Nick.
Chris, the energy return on thorium mined from the Lemhi Pass strike would be tremendous. especially if it were used in thorium fuel cycle liquid fluoride reactors.The fuel cycle of light water reactors is not very efficient.
Gas diffusion enrichment uses fifty times as much energy as centrifuge enrichment. The only reason the gas diffusion is used at all is that it is a legacy of World War II and the Cold War when those plants were built. No one will ever build another gas diffusion plant. That is why energy return estimate for future reactors should only use centrifuge enrichment. The current gas diffusion plant will supply some current reactors but all future reactors will use centrifuges. That is why it is so dishonest for the anti-nuke to still talk about gas diffusion enrichment. What is so surprising to have a new, better technology after fifty years?
Those mistaken claims that fission fuels are in short supply result for misunderstanding what “reserves” mean and thinking that because the reserves for an resource like oil which is in short supply, closely approximate the resource base, this must also be true for Uranium. The only way to estimate the Uranium resource base is to look at what is known about its distribution in the crust. This, Thorium and the possibilities of other fuel cycles show that there are at least millions of years of supply.
It hardly makes sense to argue for increased use of nuclear power and then assume that diffusion plants will be closed. They can't be.
If you want to use thorium to overcome supply problems, which are in trouble in 2013 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fuel-supply.html, then you need to act very fast. Let see, how soon could a breeder program get going? It is illegal now, so not too fast I think.
Chris
I am not proposing to close gas diffusion plants. I am calling for something like a 19 fold increase in nuclear. The gas diffusion plants will still supply the old base. All the new construction will use centrifuges.
However, what you are calling for is too expensive, as pointed out by Lovins and Sheikh, so it is not going to happen. It is possible that diffusion plants will shut down as nuclear power continues to decline as a fraction of generation.
PS, looks like Ike is headed for the South Texas Project. It will be instructive to add the storm surge to anticipated sea level rise to get a guess about the advisability of building more there.
Chris
You remind me of the black knight in Monty Python.
Best line I've heard yet. I think that's checkmate:)
He will bite your ankle.
You've got granite in your brain if you can't read the writing on the wall. Nuclear power is a dying industry. It is really only oil producers who can afford it now: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7587582.stm
Chris
I went to Dartmouth College where the college Alma Mater has these lines:
Wah-Hoo-Wah! I had John Walsh for particle physics. Don't know if he was there when you were.
Chris
1974
Wah-Hoo-Wah
I graduated in '85. You probably also have some hands on experience with nuclear materials from Christy's lab class.
Chris
It is also possible that like CANDU plants now-a-days, and Magnox plants long ago, they will run on unenriched fuel, and require no membranes and no centrifuges. At http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/235_248.pdf I include an outline of how no-enrichment nuclear power might provide motor fuel. Also, a way for solar power stations to get through winter.
Thank you for writing this. I've been meaning to get around to writing something like it.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan
If the US government had the political will of France, UK, and Japan we would recycle our spent fuel rods.
"Reprocessing used fuel* to recover uranium (U, as RepU) and plutonium (Pu) avoids the wastage of a valuable resource. Most of it - about 96% - is uranium at less than 1% U-235 (often 0.4 - 0.8%), and up to 1% is plutonium. Both can be recycled as fresh fuel, saving up to 30% of the natural uranium otherwise required. The materials potentially available for recycling (but locked up in stored used fuel) could conceivably run the US reactor fleet of about 100 GWe for almost 30 years with no new uranium input."
If your 70 year figure is accurate, and there are many who don't buy into to it, then with recycling that would give us a 100 year supply.
A few notes:
No it doesn't. People keep saying this, but that it not what it says, and never has been.
What it does say is that the programs he identifies (hybrid engines, CTL, GTL, heavy oil/oil sands, EOR), if started 20 years before a peak, would create enough