Re: A programme to tackle the Environmental Crisis
- From: xnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 5 Feb 2007 01:28:52 -0800
On 5 Feb, 01:52, "bill" <ford_prefec...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While a good deal of your list is spot on, a good deal of it is
idiocy.
It's an attempt to start a debate, rather than a finished programme,
thus it's worthy of discussion.
1) "The so-called renewable forms of energy (wind, wave, solar,
tide, etc.) are unsuitable to providing large fractions of grid
electricity. they are unschedulable and unreliable, so they have a
maximum penetration of 20-25% between the set of them."
The evidence indicates that they are more reliable than you think,
especially if they are located in as wide an area as possible.
In the UK the wind resource is actually pretty dependable,
particularly off-shore. Wind power alone could provide 20-25% of grid
electricity, assuming there is a broad spread of wind farms.
Wind Power is actually a very rapidly growing industry across the
world. For example, the recently authorised London Array project
will generate enough electricy to supply 750,000 homes - around a
quarter of Greater London.
http://www.londonarray.com
Solar powered electrical generation has huge potential and is barely
being exploited yet. Were the US to combine a programme of developing
the Atlantic Bight wind resource with Solar power in the desert areas
of the West, it could probably produce 50% of its electricity from
renewables within 20 years.
On a smaller scale, microgeneration, solar home heating and more
efficient insulation can reduce peak demand on the grid. There are
also ways of "buffering" the power that comes from Wind and Solar
power - for example using the electricity to pump water into storage
resevoirs, which can react very quickly to peak demand, or generating
hydrogen as an energy storage/carrier medium.
2) no disagreement
4) "Public ownership of the utilities and supermarkets do you
mean stockholders or government? if you mean government you haven't
studied history much, government owned enterprises have always been
the worst abusers of everything. "
Public ownership would mean getting away from the notion of individual
stockholders and running utilities and supermarkets via democratically
accountable bodies based on consumers and producers.
They in turn would be accountable to the national governement which
would be responsible for monitoring their resourcing, efficiency and
pricing.
So, rather than relying on market forces and bank loans for capital,
there would be a move towards social necessity as a criteria for
allocation of resources.
Utilities like public transport in cities for example, should move to
a position of total subsidy by the state - free public transport.
That would immediately reduce the level of traffic in cities overnight
and would require an investment in new plant, buses and rolling stock,
all of which should be done on the basis of energy efficiency. There
are a million and one energy efficient buses being produced nowadays,
even New York City is running them. ( In fact, when I was a kid in
London, we still had electric trolley buses, which were all replaced
by diesels.)
Where public utilities have been privatised, such as has occured to
the Rail, Coal, Gas, Electricity and Water companies in Britain since
the 80's, there has been a huge increase in bills to the consumer.
While these utitlities were far from perfect in the past, the
experience has been very negative.
5) "The airlines are such a small part of the problem that I
think they can reasonably be left alone."
It's not seen that way where I live. The environmental costs of air
travel are a political issue given the huge CO2 emissions per
passenger.
6) "carbon neutral new homes are nonfeasible without carbon
neutral grid power. "
It's possible to significantly reduce the Carbon footprint with
relatively simple technology though.
7) No real disagreement
8) "Your nuclear stance mandates coal for the bulk of electricity
production, to oppose nuclear is to support coal. This is a fact of
life, there is no third option, it's coal or nuclear, which do you
prefer? "
I don't support the relying on fission power for grid electricity.
Maybe fusion will eventually work, but that's a long way off.
The issue of coal depends on where you live. In the UK, I would
actually favour increasing domestic coal production.
Coal was destroyed for political reasons after the miners' strikes of
the 70's and 80's. We now have the situation where increasing amounts
of coal have to be imported from Poland, Australia, Colombia and
burned in Coal fired power stations sittting on top of coal seams!
e.g. at Drax in Yorkshire.
I actually think the environmentalists who demonstrated against it a
couple of months ago were barking up the wrong tree. In any event
Coal will remain essential to ore smelting and the chemical industry
world-wide into the indefinite future.
Globally, the biggest question is US and Chinese Coal production,
which amounts to 2000 million tonnes per year. That needs to be
significantly reduced in the coming 10 years and I think it can be
done without resorting to building nuclear power stations.
.
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