Fisking Al Gore's speech

Steven Den Beste on alternate energy:
http://chizumatic.mee.nu/ghosts_of_my_past

I don't blog about that kind of thing anymore. I never enjoyed blogging about energy, anyway, because for too many people "alternate energy" is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations -- and it's not that easy.

In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

My rule of thumb is that I'm not interested in any "alternate energy" until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.

Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I'll pay attention.

Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.

Without that, it's just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

meh, #5 on your list is rapidly becoming true WRT to solar energy, too. Solar panels can be extruded very very cheaply. We've essentially been building them as exact as possible, when it's much better to slap them together as cheaply as possible, with half the power efficiency but 1/50th the cost. It's the difference between making hard drive platters and DVD-Rs...DVDs fail more, and hold less, but who cares, they're 30 cents each.

Which leaves on #3 as the singular issue that can't be overcome. Which, incidentally, is also the problem with wind.

But #3 is more an issue of what we're used to than an actual problem. In actuality, generating power closer to where we use it would be much more efficient. It's just our grid isn't setup to operate like that.

Geothermal and tidal (And wind to some extent), OTOH, fail at what could be called a #6:
6. They can be placed anywhere, or at least within 500 miles of anywhere.

But, anyway, I wish the environmental lobby wasn't still stuck in 'nuclear power bad' mode. Nuclear power is the only no-emission and no-oil possibility to power this country right now.

There's not actually any debate possible on that. There's one group of people covering their ears and asserting that coal is fine to power the country off of, and another group of people waiting for the magical solar fairy to save us, and then there are the realists who have objectively looked at nuclear and think it's at least much better than coal.

Gore doesn't promote nuclear that much, but as his efforts actually appear to be attempting to get us to a) reduce consumption of electricity, b) decrease gasoline usage, and c) increase mass transit, nothing he suggests is actually in opposition to nuclear power, and are all good ideas.