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Now's The Time To Switch to Alternative Energy
As Robert Redford writes
this week:
Thursday, May 20, 2010, marks one month
since BP's oil rig exploded in the Gulf Coast ....
This is the
clearest picture we could have of our failed national energy policy --
which extends over many decades and administrations.
It's not just the one BP oil rig. For example, since the Deepwater
Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama
administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27
exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil
exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there are the
12 new oil and gas drilling rigs launched in the U.S. this
week.
And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil
explosion claims
in a lawsuit that BP's operations at another oil platform risk
another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the Gulf oil spill,
partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for
the operation. And see this.
Indeed,
if Alan
Greenspan, John
McCain, George
W. Bush, Sarah
Palin and others
are right, the costs of our failed energy policy might be much
higher, as it would include
various military costs as well.
And the Department of Defense also apparently has some issues with
extensive off-shore drilling for security
reasons.
Many still believe that alternative energy is an expensive,
unrealistic pipe dream.
But that is no longer necessarily true, especially when the externalities of
environmental and military costs are taken into account.
Technological
Breakthroughs
As
I have previously pointed out:
One of the world's leading experts on
trend forecasting says that producing our own energy for our homes and
cars (called "micro generation") will become a huge trend in the next couple of decades.
What's he
talking about?
Well, energy and food prices will keep going up.
Every dollar we don't have to pay to the energy utility or food
producers is a dollar we get to keep. And the technology for
producing it ourselves is getting better and better.
So
increasingly over the next couple of decades, we will generate our own
energy and food.
***
Due
to high oil prices, major breakthroughs in energy production are
happening every day.
For
example:
- A scientist has figured out how to make and store energy by splitting
water with sunlight. He says:
"You've made your house into a fuel station [and we can get] rid of all
the ... grids" [he's recently discovered an even
cheaper way to do this]
- A new generation of highly-efficient
wind turbines (and see this) is being
introduced which can produce much more energy
- And
new approaches to solar energy [see below] are making residential solar
very cost-competitive
- It has been discovered that
alcohol made from donuts, grass and other abundant materials can run
cars and all other engines [see below]With recent
breakthroughs, individuals can now generate enough energy to get off
the grid and power their own homes. Indeed, some companies will even provide the equipment for you
(and see this).
Indeed,
an new government study shows that North Sea wind and wave power could
make Britain the "Saudi
Arabia of renewable energy". For more on microgeneration and solar
energy breakthroughs, see this,
this,
this
and this.
Moreover,
Japan and other countries are funding large-scale projects to place
solar collectors in orbit, and then send clean energy to Earth.
And
as I've written before, alcohol has more alternative energy
applications than you might know:
There's a
secret history regarding alcohol that you won't hear on the six
o'clock news:
- Cars and everything else running on
internal combustion engines can run on alcohol at least as well as they
can run on gasoline. Indeed, engines were built back in 1870
that could run using either alcohol or gasoline"Autoists
Discuss Alcohol As Fuel; Great Future Ahead For Use In Commercial
Wagons, Says Prof. Lucke. Tests With Motor Truck E.R. Hewitt Tells
Engineers Of His Results With Gasoline And Alcohol In Same Engine"
- Henry Ford said that alcohol was "a cleaner, nicer, better
fuel for automobiles than gasoline" (James Brough, The Ford Dynasty: An
American Story, p. 118, and cited in "Ford - The Men and the
Machine", p. 365). The Model T Ford had a knob right on the dashboard
to adjust the fuel-air mixture for either alcohol or gas
- Alcohol does not corrode or shorten the lifespan of modern
cars, and an inexpensive adjustment to regular cars will make them run
smoothly and inexpensively on alcohol***
Moreover,
those in the know actually are
using alcohol as a fuel today. For example, there are many
millions of cars being driven in Brazil that run on alcohol.And
many government and car fleets are actually required to be able to
run on either alcohol or gas. The car companies simply forgot to tell
the American consumer that these kind of cars are available. See this and this.
Indeed,
as I've previously noted, running equipment using alcohol should not
increase food prices:
The leading proponents of alcohol
as fuel are not talking about corn. Corn is a lousy crop for making
alcohol, and there
are many other crops that are much more efficient. Indeed, the
leaders in this field promote growing a wide variety of crops
(appropriate for whatever specific climate you live in) , and many of
the crops they suggest are also valuable food crops.And you
don't even need to use plants . . . you can make alcohol fuel out of rotten fruit, stale soft drinks or donuts.
And as I pointed
out last year:
Heat
can be used to generate electricity. This is true not only on the
industrial scale, but even on the level of your home faucet. Indeed,
inventors have already built home faucet kits which turn the unused heat
from your hot water into electricity.In hot climates, black
thermal-electric mats could be installed on roofs to generate
electricity.Heat is a byproduct of other processes, and so
nothing special needs to be done to create it. Just about every human
activity and many natural processes create heat, so we just have to
utilize it.***
Another use of a free, wasted byproduct
to generate electricity is piezo-electric
energy. "Piezo" means pressure. Anything that produces pressure
can produce energy.
For example, a train station in Japan
installed piezo-electric equipment in the ground, so that the foot
traffic of those walking through the train station generates electricity
(turnstiles at train, subway and ferry stations, ballparks and
amusement parks can also generate electricity).
Similarly, all
exercise machines at the gym or at home can be hooked up to produce
electricity.
But perhaps the greatest untapped sources of
piezo-electric energy are freeways and busy roads. If piezo-electric
mats were installed under the busiest sections, the thousands of tons of
vehicles passing over each day would generate massive amounts of
electricity for the city's use.
***
Scientists have figured
out that solar
collection is much more efficient if you focus the sunlight:
And see this.***
One
day, virtually every surface will be turned into an energy-production
medium. Instead of having discreet energy-producing machines, roofs,
exterior walls, sidewalks, roads and many other surfaces will be
coated with "smart materials" which convert light, heat, pressure and
other inputs into useful energy, which are then collected, stored and
distributed as needed.Hundreds or thousands of years in the
future, mankind might even learn how to collect the virtual particles
which are constantly popping into and out of existence.Harvesting The Ocean of Energy
Perhaps
the biggest evolution needed in people's thinking - in any area of
life - is how we think about energy.
The current paradigm is that
energy is produced expensively by governments or large corporations
through gigantic projects using enormous amounts of money, materials and
manpower. Because energy can only be produced by the big boys, we
the people must bow our heads to the powers-that-be. We must pay a
lot of our hard-earned money to buy electricity from them, and we can't
question the methods or results of their energy production.Our
life will become much better when we begin to understand that energy
is all around us - as an ocean of electromagnetic forces and as a
byproduct of other processes in the form of heat, pressure, etc. - and
all we need do is learn how to harvest it.The Gulf oil
spill disaster must not be in vain.We must use it to finally
find the vision and the will to make the switch to alternative energy.
Note: While energy conservation is not as sexy as
generation, it is worth noting that power usage in American buildings could be reduced by 50%,
largely by programming
unused appliances to be shut off.
Moreover, approximately 6.5% of all power transmitted in the U.S. is
lost through transmission line losses and other inefficiencies every year. By improving
the efficiency of transmission lines, energy conservation can be greatly
improved. There is alot of money to be made by those who can invent more efficient electricity transmission systems.
- advertisements -
Iberdrola is a for-profit company. Obama gave them a $500 million dollar cash "grant" that they get to use to build wind farms for their own private ownership. "Putting people to work in clean energy" was the excuse. Shit. Give me $500 million, I'll put people to work. Oh wait, I'm not a politically correct socialist multinational power company based out of Spain. Get a clue, dude. This stuff is a scam. It is not commercially viable.
Oh, nothing much: just the whole damn economic and ecological models of this so-called "green" fever... (oh, and also its underlying "scientific" model, too!) ;)
How's that say about good intentions and hell?
I would watch those Science Channel films where the Earth was sized up against some spewing solar flare. The amount of energy coming from that flare was a bazillion times (approximately) more tham all energy ever to be consumed by this planet's inhabitants.
go figure out a way to bring that energy to earth and you will own the planet. Until then, we are fucked...
I do that and I'll be having central bankers and Rothschilds cleaning my toilets.
"I do that and I'll be having central bankers and Rothschilds" killing your ass.
/you are welcome back to reality/
LOL, there's your motivation. But first go to a mexican restaurant and eat a few weapons of ass destruction!
Carbon buttprint problems.
AlGo and Goldman will tax me.
Yeah, baby!
Our current lifestyle is simply going to end and we will have to replace it with something that requires a fraction of what we use now. What will be "all over" is our current way of life- to be replaced by something that is cosmically plausable. Mahtma Gandhi perhaps had it right after all.
Have less, BE more! Anti materialism , the new fad. Pride in poverty.
I got nuthen, nuthen got me
When you get bored, you can use your Alice in Wonderland sized Fresnel lense to burn ants, or start a fire.
Hooray for ramrod. Nice to hear from a realist. Alt energy on a scale whereby it can support our current metropolistic lifestyles is still a glint in the milkmans eye. It will take decades to fully realize. Who knows, maybe the defunct US/western world empire could swap it's financial paper shuffling for an honest profession and embrace alt energy for the good of all. The clock is ticking...
Thinking that alternative energy sources can replace oil, coal and NG is beyond delusional. This is simple math...
Just replacing the 20 million gallons of gasoline used daily in california would require 75 1GW Nuclear reactors producing 24 hours a day.
The amount of alcohol produced from all the waste products couldn't produce enough to power a small city. Its reading this kind of crap that makes me realize why we are so doomed. The financial crisis is going to run head on into the energy crisis and then it going to be all over. Because we can't do simple math.....
Don't worry, baby. Mescaline will take the edge off your troubles, senor. And the OP wants you to plant cacti in your garden and sell good stuff to your friends.
OP basically checks off people re-inventing the free standing wood stove... taking us back to a happier time when every "buiding" was self-sufficient, baby. No need for desperate gold hoarding, my friends, when you're chopping wood all day long.
Another technology that should be in use right now but, sadly, isn't, is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor or "LFTR" called "lifters". It's a nuclear reactor that uses thorium instead of uranium. The benefit is that you cannot produce material that can be used in a nuclear weapon from it. A lump of thorium can actually be held in your hand without harm and the U.S. has tons and tons of it. You could have a LFTR in the middle of Manhattan, harmlessly. It doesn't require a massive surrounding compound and uber redundant security and safety measures.
So, why don't we have them?
Circa 1972, the powers that be chose to have the nuclear industry go solely down the uranium road in order to produce material for our nuclear weapons. And the environmentalist religion took a blanket "all nuclears are bad" attitude instead of being intelligent and pushing LFTR's instead of our uranium using reactors. Here's a brief recap of the facts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
Thorium reactors are one of a number of breeds of "new" reactors that are now gaining some serious attention. Bill Gates recently also promoted a standing wave reactor designed essentially to use the tailings of existing large scale reactors. The cost is still not cheap - on the order of $1B per reactor - but cheaper than the current $20-$30B for the large scale reactors currently active, and designed as a "distributed" reactor.
Biggest problem with alt energy is that a significant portion of our energy usage comes down to transportation and agriculture, both of which have strong requirements for the high energy density/high portability profile of oil. We can produce electricity - it's becoming evident there are any number of ways to produce electricity, as it happens - but until we get transportation off of the petroleum grid we're vulnerable.
I haven't heard of liquid fluoride thorium (I'll take a look), but I know you can have safe nuclear reactors which simply run at lower temperatures using uranium.
I always enjoy your content.
Start with this for MSRs, its the best primer out there.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/ppt/GreenEnergyForum_20080725.ppt
Cooter
Thanks. Very informative.
The more decentralized the better. But why isn't all this on the market? We could have used it after the big ice storm when the lights were out for a week in Comanche County.
It's not economically feasable yet, when gas is $5-10 then you will see new technoligies. I have been living off the grid for 10 years and it's not all it's cracked up to be. If you want to do anything other than a omish existance you need the iron genny powered by oil. It's not always sunny or windy, few folks have land that supports hydroelectric. The time will come but not for awhile.
+1. What we need to do is stop trying to ram alternatives up our own asses, when it doesn't work worth a shit yet. Solar is cost prohibitive unless you want to live as a minimalist, wind isn't feasible unless you're talking about small individual turbines, and even then it's inconsistent. Burning alcohol in cars is such a scam it's unreal. Until we start powering the farm equipment to produce the grain with alcohol, it's nothing but a huge industrywide subsidy/scam. Instead, we burn almost as much diesel as we create methanol in the first place, and farmland is being used for fuel instead of food.
When the shit works, I'll use it, and gladly. Until then, I'll continue to get a chubby every time I fire up all ten cylinders on my 3/4 ton 4x4 pickup.
You're right, this article is full of mostly pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams.
Instead of trying to make the switch to alternative energies right now, when the technology isn't ready, we should be looking into ways of using fossil fuels more efficiently.
Instead of trying to run a car on a battery (not ready for prime time), we should be making full use of start-stop technology, fuel injection, cylindar shut-down, brake energy recapture, etc to get more miles out of the gasoline we do use. Or use natural gas, which we have in abundance in North America (particularly in Washington - zing!).
This article should have been entitled: 20yrs ago was the Time To Switch to Alternative Energy.
Unfortunately Big Brother had other plans so suppressed alt and free energy developments. Alternative energy will only be pushed through once the crisis is here and that's exactly when it's then too late.
Wow! This article proves Leo is a genius,
LOL.
Let all the lemmings follow Leo, the Pied Piper/Pauper of Solar Dreams.
A revolution in energy production will coincide with the self-immolation of the post-Bretton Woods, OPEC world order.
It can't be commanded by government fiat or by provisions of tax credits. Innovation is best guided through price signals.
OPEC world order? Come one, you know better.
As a legacy of the coal era, contrary to what many screamed, the oil industry never played the scarcity card. On the contrary, they played the plentiful card. Based on the fact that more and more oil fields were discovered every decade. This helped them to defuse any attempt to avoid the coal dead end that was predicted during the coal era. As oil was plentiful, it was easier to enter a scheme of vaster and vaster distribution.
In the 1960s, the rate of discovery plummetted dramatically, removing the shield from oil industry and supporting countries.
While unchecked distribution of an unlimited resource can be envisioned, that is another story for limited resources.
Therefore the failed attempt by oil rich countries to regain control over their resource. Failed because the US put into its pockets the swinger producer that is Saudi Arabia.
Later, the credit economy is implemented. Because in a consumption game, nobody can beat the guy who can go the deepest in debt.
or aliens
Using alcohol for cars? which is produced on lands which otherwise could have been used to grow food. I dont like that
I get ya unky. Also just checking functionality as a brand newbie. Have not posted to this beautiful site before and am a bit frustrated.
Cough, cough, testing?
you're 10 by 10 ISSEIT, over
Donuts and soda. Please re-read.
The author is a complete moron; it's typical "dream think" from an indoctrinated enviro-freak who has no knowledge of physical science whatsoever. Why was this published here? it's unmitigated rubbish.
"The author is a complete moron; it's typical "dream think" from an
indoctrinated enviro-freak who has no knowledge of physical science
whatsoever. Why was this published here? it's unmitigated rubbish."
Roger that!
Well..if you can't even bother typing in your own comment I can see why you can't bother checking the author's ideas..You might be surprised to know that for example Malta(yes tiny Malta) is refining it's used cooking oils to produce diesel and has been doing so for many years. Rudolph Diesel intended his engine to run on Vegetable oil before the Corporat(p)ists hijacked the production.
George Washington you always pack a lot of info on your posts. Great job, thanks a bunch.
just think if we harnessed all the jerking off that goes on in the world???
what would your mom use as face cream ?????????
The time to switch for alternative energies is written on the walls: when oil is no longer an option.
Alternative energies are that revolutionary that most of them were already in use for thousands of years. Now after decades of brainwashing by capitalists and their mantra the free market will provide, well, somehow, it is believed that the technological leap afforded by coal then oil is enough to boost those revolutionary alternative energies.
Because guess what? Coal and later oil both competed with those alternative sources of energy (excluding nuclear reaction) and coal and oil won.
Energy is not produced. But collected.
This piece made me laugh.
First in human history, other human beings as a source (and reserve) of energy. Later, animals with draught animals and stuff.
Technological leap 2000 years later: hook a gym to generate electricity. Time to re introduce the squirrel...
If oil were removed as an option humanity would survive. The 'market' would correct. We would collect by other means. Seems to me that most will always seek the path of least resistance, which as it turned out, has been so called fossil fuels. If the fossil fuels were not an option then other avenues would be harvested.
If my anger produced energy then you could collect a little something as I ponder your disdain for capitalist?
Yessiree, George, just throw the switch and make the change to something that doesn't yet exist. California dreamin'. Leo and George have a lot in common: delusional idealists.
Don't forget Bloom Energy's fuel cell solution that several multi-nationals are already using:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrApTMCWyEw