Arthur, your patronising attitude doesn't become you.
You know very well the 'we' I'm referring to,...if I really have to spell it out, HUMANS!
Not meant to be patronizing, I just was wondering if you meant a specific country like the US vs the World as not everyone takes a global view.
As, far as free energy, you know, the sun - the great shower of gold that pours squidbillions of kilowatts of energy upon the Earth every day, and the wind which blows its lungs out too. Yes, I know infrastructure has to put in place but the payback period is just not that long.
But that's the problem it's not free anymore than pumping oil out of the ground is free. Get a quote to put PV on your roof to replace the Grid and you'll find out how expensive FREE can be.
Same goes for wind. Those turbines are very expensive and have low capacity factors even in good wind areas and worse, as we install more and more of them the good areas with high average winds and siting close to distribution lines tend to be gone, upping their costs.
The U.S may only have a fractional percentage of its energy produced by renewables at present but it increases every year and with a little momentum it could snowball and make massive impact within ten years
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Hardly enough to keep up with our growth though even with decades of subsidies.
Consider (Source EIA):
The US used 72,638,657 Billion BTUs of primary energy in 1996 and 7,164,759 were from Renewable sources, or 9.9%.
But in 2008 we used 73,421,316 Billion BTUs and yet only 7,380,966 were from Renewables or 10.1%, a TINY annual increase, barely keeping up with our growth in energy use.
More importantly, most of our renewables still come from Hydro and yet that's dropping not rising. Indeed, our share of renewables is essentially no greater now than it was over a decade ago and considering the extra 50+ million people we will add by 2030 it is not very likely that we will build and install enough renewables sufficient to meet that additional demand.
Consider, over the LAST decade, US production of Renewable energy has grown by 1,503,832 Billion BTUs.
So let's say we double that growth over this decade, adding an additional 3,007,664 Billion BTUs and then we double that again next decade adding 6,015,328 Billion more BTUs, or a total growth of 9,022,992 Billion BTUs over the next 20 years (Which is an impressive 6 times the growth rate of the last decade, particularly considering that nearly all the renewables we added this last decade will have to be replaced as well during this same 20 years).
Now if the 50 Million people we add to the country in that time use 20% LESS energy per capita than we do today, they will need an additional 9,340,162 BTUs, or in other words, at that growth rate the percent of energy from renewables will sorta keep pace with our growth. Of course if the 310 million people already here also cut their energy use per capita by 20% over that same time frame, then the absolute percent of energy from renewables will about double to ~20%. Unfortunately, since we aren't building any new nukes, the percent of our energy from fossil fuels, even under these very optimistic projections would remain about the same as it is today.
But those are VERY optimistic projections, particularly the expectation that we will reduce our energy use at 1% per year for the next 20 years, since our track record has been the opposite, and we have increased our energy use by about 1/2% per year over the last 20 years.
So much for momentum and that's even considering that the US is the largest producer of renewable energy in the world (We generate about 5 times as much electricity via renewables and over 10 times as much Biofuel as Germany, indeed, I believe China would be the closest to us followed by Brazil (Figures are a few years old and so China with it's large committment to Hydro may have passed the US by now).
Impossible you say! Come on Arthur! There's an elephant in the room,....
Somebody has already done it....in the space of a decade....despite having one the lowest insolation rates in the developed world...
....Shhhhhh!,... not too loud now ....FUCKING GERMANY!!!
Sorry, but your Elephant is but a mouse.
Wiki said:
Germany is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world. In 2009, it consumed energy from the following sources:
Oil 34.6%
Bituminous coal 11.1%
Lignite 11.4%
Natural gas 21.7
Nuclear power 11.0%
Hydro- and wind power 1.5%
Others 9.0%
So NO, Germany has NOT "done it" as 79% of it's energy comes from Fossil Fuels and 11% from Nuclear and only 10.5% from others, virtually the same as the US. But their plans are to cut back on Nuclear and so they plan on building a lot more coal plants.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070321_923592.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Arthur, I did think you were a bit more aware than that!
Sorry if I'm being condescending now. Sorry!
You might want to reconsider that stance since it's a lot easier to be condescending when you're right.
And by the way, in the time it took me to write that post, China just churned out another city's worth of solar modules. And how do you cover the world with PV? One town at a time.
Solar PV power has great potential, but you need to keep this in perspective.
In 2008 Solar PV supplied almost nothing compared to the world's total energy supply. Indeed, the amount of new Wind power tends to be much higher then the amount of new PV.
So renewables and Nuclear are ~20% of our energy, but of the renewables, about 70% of that is Hydro and traditional biomass, mostly wood.
About 6% comes from all other forms, and by far the largest of that is Solar hot water heating.
Arthur
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