What is the green angle on plug ins?  Is there still a big efficiency gain on having the power generated by whatever means elsewhere and the transmission losses getting it to your house?  I haven’t heard that much on them.

I’m going to write a story showing how the Space Shuttle is more energy efficient than a Prius. It will probably get a lot of press.

In fact, an F-15 with afterburners on is probably better on fuel than a Prius. This is because the F-15 allows us to secure (steal) more oil, and therefore we can fuel the Hummer. Makes some sense....at least as much as koop-pook does.......

As the MIT study showed, a Homeless person is the most green in America. Therefore the current economic situation here is really a gov. policy to make our nation more energy efficient.

They have calculated that even with coal fired plants it is much more efficient ( and cheaper to Joe average you and me)
to use electricity to power your car. Hopefully we can use wind tidal solar etc to power more of the grid.

Most Americans have a 30 mile or less commute
Overnight charge (for $2-3) can charge the battery full give you 30 miles all electric
Gas is there for longer trips

Slap a solar panel on your garage and you have a genuine solar car.

Off Topic:

In Germany the govt has mandated that electrons generated by sun commands a price twice that by
coal or fossil fuels . This is for many decades so investors know they can get a ROI.

Tom

Adios Pantalones - 20 June 2008 08:50 AM

What is the green angle on plug ins?  Is there still a big efficiency gain on having the power generated by whatever means elsewhere and the transmission losses getting it to your house?  I haven’t heard that much on them.

The idea, which does have some truth to it, is that the future is largely going to depend on the grid - whatever the fuel...hopefully solar PV, wind, etc....also hydro, biomass, nat gas, geothermal......and for the foreseeable future, also coal. But, in general, it is much easier to clean up one giant central grid than 100 million separate engines.

Even the economics has some logic - plugs in’s get 2 to 3x the MPG as conventional cars, so even if PV Solar was twice the price of coal (right now it is 4x or more), things will work out.

Although no one really knows where technology is headed, my best guess is that the Grid will provide a lot of the solution…

Interesting that you don’t mention nuclear power.

There you go - more irony. The group of folks who are most gung-ho about being green overlap quite considerably with the group of folks who are most adamantly against the energy source that has the best chance of providing a good standard of living with the least possible environmental and aesthetic impact: next-generation breeder reactors.

The theory is well understood and the technological problems are being solved by France, Germany, and Japan. Not by us, though. If this trend continues, we’ll be hobbled by expensive, unsightly, and ineffective sources of power while the rest of the world moves forward with plentiful, cheap, and truly clean energy.

We idolize Europe for their foresight on the green issues that we like, but most folks miss the part that nuclear plays in their energy portfolio.

Velvet; I think you may have hit on the greatest “green” irony of them all…

Chris

velvetfoot - 20 June 2008 09:08 AM

Interesting that you don’t mention nuclear power.

I’m for Nuke power if they can truly solve the disposal situation and THEN come up with a true life cycle cost. The fact is, they cannot do this now...and if they would come up with the actual cost, it would be too high! Even the existing plants can only be there because the government has agreed to indemnify them against their actions (pollution, waste, etc.). If they had to buy insurance on the “free market”, they could not get it.

So all I would ask is the same standards be applied - life cycle cost. If they can store stuff for 10-20,000 years and show me the low KWH cost for doing so, I’m all ears.

Even so, the experts say that it will be 2030 before we’d be able to have any decent quantity of nuke power anyway.....so it certainly is not gonna help within the decade or two (or my lifetime, in that case).

nofossil - 20 June 2008 02:25 PM

We idolize Europe for their foresight on the green issues that we like, but most folks miss the part that nuclear plays in their energy portfolio.

NF, I have to call you out on this one!
We all know the crazy Frenchies went all-out nuke, but they are certainly not the ones you hear me talking about re: Alt energy.
Here are the facts......

“Denmark has no nuclear power plants”
“In 2000, the German government, officially announced its intention to phase out nuclear power in Germany - The power plants in Stade and Obrigheim were turned off on November 14, 2003, and May 11, 2005, respectively”
“Ireland presently has no nuclear power plants.”
“Voters decided to shut down Italy’s four nuclear power plants. The last was closed in 1990”.
“In 1994, the Netherland’s parliament voted to phase out nuclear power “
“No nuclear power plant has ever been established in Norway”
“n 1979, the Swedish Government decided, after a referendum, that no further nuclear power plants should be built and that a nuclear power phase-out should be completed by 2010.”

Specifically, Norway, Germany and Denmark are the folks I often talk about as to green initiatives.

Nuclear power scares people here (Long Island).

Anyone remember this debacle?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant

No wonder we pay so much for electric, we’re still paying for Shoreham !

10 minutes from my home, and 5 minutes from my home is Brookhaven Lab

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookhaven_National_Laboratory

The Germans may be phasing them out at home, but they’re still developing the technology. Fourth generation breeder reactors should be able to utilize better than 95% of the available energy in the fuel that they consume, rather than the 1% that current plants accomplish. They also should produce virtually no high level waste, and in fact use some of the existing waste as fuel.

The barrier is fear, not a rational decision making process based on comparative risks and benefits.

We’ve never built a plant as dangerous as Chernobyl, and even with that disaster the safety of nuclear power far and away better than any other energy source. Chernobyl killed about 40 people. I wonder how many people you would lose just falling off of roofs to install the equivalent capacity in PV arrays? How about coal mines, or the little squabbles that are carried out in oil producing regions? I think you’d expect to lose a few people on any large-scale civil engineering project as well.

Nuclear is certainly not zero risk, but it has the ability to give us large amounts of much less expensive and safer energy with virtually zero environmental impact. There really isn’t anything else that comes close. We just need to invest the money to bring the next generation from proof of concept (done) to full-scale production. The technical challenges are totally solvable. The political challenges will require someone with a spine. Someone will do it, and they’ll be the next economic superpower.

Basic facts of life: Conservation is good, and there’s no virtue in using a wasteful approach if there’s a more efficient way to accomplish the same thing. However, at any level of conservation, the more energy you can afford, the better your standard of living. Energy multiplies your ability to accomplish work. It keeps you comfortable. It allows you to travel, and it allows you to do things more quickly.

We’ve been spoiled by cheap energy, and we have a choice. We can use our brains and our ingenuity to figure out ways to enjoy the same comforts while using less scarce or nonrenewable resources, or we can retreat and accept a more impoverished lifestyle.

Many of the ‘green’ crowd seem to prefer the second option, perhaps feeling that we need to be punished for our sins. I’m firmly in the first camp. I want to be just as warm and comfortable, with just as much convenience as when I heated with oil. I don’t want to huddle in a small, dark and cold house. I want to figure out transportation options that get me where I want to go at my convenience without taking any more of my time.

It doesn’t appear to me or anyone else that there’s any prospect that wind/PV/tidal will be able to replace any sizable fraction of our current coal/gas/nuclear power base load generation mix. If carbon induced global warming is a real threat, then there are exactly two options:

1) Learn to live with a LOT less energy. See ‘huddling in small, dark, cold houses’ above. Forget long trips - once in a lifetime, like it was for out ancestors.

2) Develop next generation nuclear and have plentiful energy. We need this especially if we’re going to pursue pure electric, hydrogen, or plug-in hybrids.

I’ll stick with my irony: Folks promoting green and simultaneously stopping progress on the only viable environmentally friendly large scale energy alternative out there.

I’ll let you stick with the irony, but consider that you eat the words about the progressive green European countries pushing nukes....they simply are not.

It’s not much of an irony. Tell me when and where the nuke breeder is going to be, what it will cost to build, the life cycle and the actual fuel cycle from start to finish. Can you honestly expect people to just “trust you” about how good it is going to be? What happened to facts and proof?

Based on your analysis above, we can suppose that all those “green” countries in Northern Europe are stupid and that they will be living in dark and squalid conditions soon. Meantime, they are eating our lunch as far as installed wind and solar %.

Lastly, speaking of irony, what happened to the brilliant folks who told us - told us 100% - that they were going to solve the CURRENT waste disposal problems with reactors. Well, it appears they underestimated the problems.

To top is all off, lot of worldwide nukes means lots of worldwide nuclear proliferation. There may already be no way to stop it, but this will definitely speed it along.

Heck, a perfect nuclear reactor - or even one close to perfect with low total life cycle costs - would solve a vast percentage of our energy problems. But my guess is that other technologies will appear first which will win in the marketplace.....if not, I will be more than willing to plug my electric car into the breeder.

velvetfoot - 20 June 2008 09:08 AM

Interesting that you don’t mention nuclear power.

You HAD to ask, didn’t you?

Chris

It’s not much of an irony. Tell me when and where the nuke breeder is going to be, what it will cost to build, the life cycle and the actual fuel cycle from start to finish. Can you honestly expect people to just “trust you” about how good it is going to be? What happened to facts and proof?

Good thing my wife didn’t hold me to that standard before I bought our gasifier. Small-scale proof of concept reactors have been built, but political opposition has prevented progress, at least here. As I said, the science is understood at this point, while the technical and political problems need to be resolved. Your questions arguably have more to do with the effectiveness of political problem resolution rather than the technology. As to proof - google ‘generation IV nuclear’. There’s a huge body of literature and research out there. Believe it or not, there has been a lot of progress in the 30 years since we built our last reactor.

I suspect that the 2030 date that’s kicked around for these is a recognition of the current lack of political will. We built an entire space program from scratch and put a man on the moon in ten years. This isn’t anywhere near as hard.

For my part. I see that my mission is to attempt to educate people about technology that can improve quality of life for all of us. Just as a gasifier is a more sophisticated and vastly better solution than an OWB, so a generation IV reactor is better than burning coal.

I’ll grant that the Scandinavian countries aren’t doing anything with nuclear. Of course, they’ve got plenty of oil......

Based on your analysis above, we can suppose that all those “green” countries in Northern Europe are stupid and that they will be living in dark and squalid conditions soon. Meantime, they are eating our lunch as far as installed wind and solar %.

Last time I went to Europe, I was struck by how small the average house and car were, and that people seem to keep their travel much closer to home. Energy costs seemed to be a major factor in those differences. Installed wind and solar isn’t automatically a virtue, by the way. If PV consumes more resources than the value of the electricity it produces, then it’s wasteful.

Lastly, speaking of irony, what happened to the brilliant folks who told us - told us 100% - that they were going to solve the CURRENT waste disposal problems with reactors. Well, it appears they underestimated the problems.

Scientists and engineers often underestimate political problems. There are plenty of solutions for the technical problem. Fourth generation breeder reactors can reprocess spent nuclear fuel from conventional reactors, vastly reducing the amount of high level waste. It’s those pesky trans-uranic elements that are the real problem, especially when it comes to proliferation. Unlike current designs, generation IV reactors can reprocess all such byproducts on-site. For other waste, there are technically sound solutions - deep sea subduction zone disposal would be one example: encase it in glass, and drop it into the seabottom mud in a plate subduction zone, where it will be recycled under the earth’s crust, not to be seen for many millenia.

To top is all off, lot of worldwide nukes means lots of worldwide nuclear proliferation. There may already be no way to stop it, but this will definitely speed it along.

One of the benefits of generation IV reactors is that they don’t have to generate any fissionable material as part of their waste stream. That would be a big step forward from where we are now. The vastly improved efficiency also means much less demand for uranium enrichment - not a bad thing.

The US and China are both sitting on enormous quantities of coal. Here’s a political reality for you: Before people resign themselves to shivering in the dark, they’re going to demand that we use the coal that we have, as they’re currently doing in China. We need to develop an attractive alternative.

The only way we’re going to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is to have a safe alternative that can provide similar quantities of energy at a similar price to coal. We need to finish the development of those alternatives, and we’re not doing it.

I wanna plug into nofo’s breeder.  Wait, that didn’t come out right…

Chris