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(continued from previous page)
Scheer's folly of self-contained homes with PV on their roofs is a great dream, and he touted the benefits of not needing a grid and its associated costs. Maybe a small percentage of the environmentalist diehards will be willing to live without power when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing and enjoy the romance of sustainable living--or pay the thousands of dollar for battery storage locally (or tens of thousands of dollars for the typical American home for those rainy weeks' worth of standby power).
Will the average person in Mississippi miss the NFL just because the sun went down? In fact, despite the four times or more greater capital cost of solar photovoltaic, we will still need the grid investment and we will still need what the utilities call "spinning reserve" power plants (and their associated capital investment, which somebody will have to pay for) so that when a cloud passes overhead or we have a rainy day (or week) we don't miss out.
Only when we meet utility-grade power will green technologies start to replace fossil electricity at any scale. Along the same lines, we will only get to India and China when green tech meets these requirements and gets cheaper than fossil electricity--and only then will we start to make a real dent in the acceleration of global warming. The technologies I am personally interested in as greenhouse gas solutions are ones that have trajectory and scale to meet these criteria. Many more technologies are of interest to me as investments than are interesting as true scalable global economic solutions to carbon emissions.
Is PV likely in the U.S., China and India at a big enough scale to matter? With all the solar talk around today, all the government subsidies and incentives, solar comprises less than 0.1 percent of worldwide electricity. Individual self-sufficiency and renewable energy being practical at a small scale have been a dream pursued for many years. I agree with the basic belief that each community should be self contained, though that bears little resemblance to reality (especially for older communities) of what is likely to happen. Try telling a poor family in India that they should pay much more for power (maybe give up food in return?) or to rebuild their homes to be self sustaining. Should we do it with new communities? Absolutely, and wherever and whenever we can sell the idea and finance it.
One of our investments, LivingHomes.us built the first
I am a huge fan of (eco-architect) Bill McDonough's efforts to design model sustainable buildings and cities and hope that his best ideas creep into all new cities we design or evolve. This is what "should be," and Bill's efforts in China will be role models and they will make a difference. But is the bulk of the world's evolution going to happen this way? I hope so, but I doubt it. Sustainable cities are likely to be a great investment area for some developers, but it is unlikely that a significant portion of the world's population will live in such cities in the next 25 to 50 years.
Is wind an alternative? Wind is a wonderful technology and a great investment. It is very appropriate for certain locations and would benefit a lot from a national high-voltage electric grid so it could be transported to where it is needed (as will all sources of electricity). It is a classic technology that started with high costs but was on a rapidly declining cost trajectory and is now cheaper than coal generation in some locations. The devil unfortunately, lies in the details. Power is only available when the wind blows, and storage is difficult and expensive.
Additionally, most utilities don't need power in the middle of the night but are forced to take it today. It is off-and-on power generation in highly variable ways, though it can be averaged across multiple locations. It is unlikely to scale beyond about 10 percent (20 percent optimistically) of our grid electricity needs partly because of its high variability and partly because of other technical issues. That is a big help, but not enough in weaning the global power generation system away from coal.
What about geothermal, biomass and other alternatives? These are good alternatives and should be developed further. Geothermal can provide another 10 percent, and because of built-in heat storage, it can meet many utility requirements if it can be produced cost-effectively. Biomass is also appropriate for certain locations (like rural India). But in my view, biomass should be reserved for making cellulosic biofuels for transportation. Oil is a problem to which cellulosic biofuels are a good solution, and maybe the only solution. (When we have a clean grid electricity source maybe we can move to electric cars, assuming they don't cost an extra $20,000 per car for the 400-mile range most consumers demand.)
Solar thermal: The facts
Solar thermal plants were fashionable in the early 1980s. The idea is to concentrate the sun's rays to heat a fluid to generate steam that can then run a regular steam turbine. In fact, some old coal power plants can be retrofitted to get their steam from "concentrated solar power" (often called CSP) and feed into existing turbines. Even natural gas plants which were built before gas prices doubled and are now sporadically used or idle (because of high costs) can be outfitted to be cost effective again.
The great advantage is that, in certain configurations, the heat can be stored either as steam or hot water or in molten salt or hot oil and reused when the sun's heat is not available (as in the evening). Doing this "storage" with batteries would be prohibitive in cost. Power can be delivered when utility customers demand it and not just when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. In utility lingo "capacity factors" or the percentage of time the power plant can provide power, can reach their design goal (65 percent is often an ideal target for base load plants). The power becomes "dispatchable" to utilities--they can get it when their customers demand it, often during peak load times.
Biography
Vinod Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems and was the founding chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems. He currently is a general partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
See more CNET content tagged:
plant, wind power, debate, goal, China
nuclear energy research and development was short-circuited by
misguided environmentalists. Have you looked at the work that was
done between 1984 and 1994 in the Integral Fast Reactor project at
Argonne National Laboratory (and the fuel recycling process that
continues now)? If so, I'd like to know what you think of it.
An MIT innovation.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html?sa_campaign=rss/cen_mag/estnews/2007-01-03/kb_nuclear
China is looking to add 100GW by 2030 and 300GW by 2050 of nuclear power.
India is also building a lot of nuclear and planning to add more.
Vinod indicates that he thinks nuclear is good but is just concerned about getting it implemented fast enough. Unless Vinod is indicating that his CSP and other solutions will eliminate all coal energy usage within 20 years, then it seems that we should hedge and continue to push ahead as fast as possible with nuclear power as well.
Note: For nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95%) unburned uranium. Japan and France reprocess their waste.
For proliferation. There are already 443 nuclear power plants. US, China, India all have nuclear weapons. 40 countries already have the knowhow and the material for nuclear weapons. Iran and N Korea were proliferated with knowledge to in the 1980s from Pakistan. What is the incremental risk from more nuclear power ? Nuclear material for nuclear weapons is better made from reactors that are not designed for nuclear power.
There are better nuclear plant designs such molten salt reactors.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
===
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/nuclear
Integral Fast Reactor?
An MIT innovation.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html?sa_campaign=rss/cen_mag/estnews/2007-01-03/kb_nuclear
China is looking to add 100GW by 2030 and 300GW by 2050 of nuclear power.
India is also building a lot of nuclear and planning to add more.
Vinod indicates that he thinks nuclear is good but is just concerned about getting it implemented fast enough. Unless Vinod is indicating that his CSP and other solutions will eliminate all coal energy usage within 20 years, then it seems that we should hedge and continue to push ahead as fast as possible with nuclear power as well.
Note: For nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95%) unburned uranium. Japan and France reprocess their waste.
For proliferation. There are already 443 nuclear power plants. US, China, India all have nuclear weapons. 40 countries already have the knowhow and the material for nuclear weapons. Iran and N Korea were proliferated with knowledge to in the 1980s from Pakistan. What is the incremental risk from more nuclear power ? Nuclear material for nuclear weapons is better made from reactors that are not designed for nuclear power.
There are better nuclear plant designs such molten salt reactors.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
===
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/nuclear
People are also made sick by coal. the people who are sick before they die from cancer and heart disease and those who are just made sick from asthma and other illnesses. This makes the entire medicare problem worse.
40% of all freight rail traffic in the US is to move coal. So a large part of the diesel fuel usage is also linked to coal power. Over 1 billion tons of coal per year is in used each year in the USA alone. 40% of rail subsidies and maintenance are thus coal related.
60,000 people die early deaths each year in the united states because of coal pollution. The immediate step is clean up the coal plants and there are some bills to help about 25%-50% in the USA.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/04/support-clean-air-bills-to-save.html
But to get the rest of the way we need to replace coal completely.
Anyway two points i'd like to make here.
1) if you can't make rome at home take rome to where you can build it and make the most use of it industrialy.
2) what about heat effected nano crystals to collect up heat.
Did you know that George W. Bush uses geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool his house in Texas? I am betting we can build even bigger geothermal heat pumps to provide electricity by turning water into steam and using the steam to turn generators which crank out electricity.
It seems if you want a greener house, George W. Bush has a greener house than Al Gore has. While Al Gore continues to bash people for not being green enough, George W. Bush is leading the way by example and made his house greener in hopes that others would follow his example.
While I agree with most part of the article, I cannot agree with this point. We only need to look back to our history. If there's no nuclear meltdown accident, there will not be enough R&D goes into handling the meltdown, nor nuclear waste. It's simple economy -- no problem, no demand, and there will be no money flow into handling those issues. There WILL be money trying to get more output, or build a bigger plant w/ minimum money, however, because if there was no accident, people would find the idea the best thing discovered ever, and would like to squeeze every bit out of it.
The primary reason why nuclear plant doesn't fly is because economically there won't be enough money to make it safer until disaster hits, but when disaster does hit, it's so scary and affects us so much that people will demand we abandon the idea altogether, instead of finding ways to fix it.
Even if a nuclear plant was to blow up like a nuclear bomb (which they cannot) it would not take out one million people because they are not that close to that many people and would be blowing up on the ground.
The coal plants collectively generate 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium fallout every year. Parts per million of the 6 billion tons of coal waste that gets thrown into the air.
Why are you not more scared of the 1 million dead every year from coal ?
Air pollution is killing 3 million per year. This includes all of the fossil fuel pollution.
Even if a nuclear plant was to blow up like a nuclear bomb (which they cannot) it would not take out one million people because they are not that close to that many people and would be blowing up on the ground.
The coal plants collectively generate 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium fallout every year. Parts per million of the 6 billion tons of coal waste that gets thrown into the air.
Why are you not more scared of the 1 million dead every year from coal ?
Air pollution is killing 3 million per year. This includes all of the fossil fuel pollution.
one thing i noticed after coming to the US is that there are 100s of lights turned on (in offices, etc) where they really only need 50% of them. at least, they can replace these with the new energy efficient LED lights which also last longer. temperature in the water heaters can be lowered, motion sensors could be set up to turn on/off lights and air condidtioning. you know.. little things like these would make a big difference in the long run.
Mahurshi Akilla
I think they should understand people want to see the world preserved, species protected, the air clean and
society harmonious. Basically we need to understand that improvement will not come by increasing income but by reducing losses. I can see no difficulty in backing up solar systems and the target should absolutely be that no fossil fuel is beeing burned on a sunny day.
- Eye opening rebuttal
- by Allan338 May 12, 2007 9:31 PM PDT
- Well reasoned and well thought out.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(20 Comments)I'd never looked at green power through the lens of 3rd world perspective.... Thank you.