The Rational Middle Energy Series: the Episodes.

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EPISODE 10

The Great Transition

DESCRIPTIONS & RESOURCES

Now that we know where we are and what's at stake, let's take a look at the future of energy and what the challenges are of getting there. The Great Transition is just a stepping stone to a wider discussion about the energy future and offer a look at some of the discussions we need to have and decisions that need to be made in order to get to the cleaner energy future.
  • http://www.facebook.com/brian.repko Brian Repko

    Don’t disagree with any of this but would recommend that you look into nuclear from Thorium in molten salt reactors. That is a clean and safe form of nuclear that we developed in the late 60s and then dropped. Investors are ready to get into it but we need to look at how nuclear energy is regulated in this country to break it from the uranium/plutonium (weapons) companies that are in lock-step with regulators. This is well documented in the book “Super Fuel”. Natural gas and conservation as a first step, now. Transition from natural gas to thorium-based nuclear for long-range. Then we would be complete renewable and carbon-free. Hell, thorium / MSRs can burn up the nuclear waste of the existing plants.

    • therationalmiddle

      MSR or LFTR has issues of its own and there hasn’t been a new MSR plant in 40 years. There were issues with it back then that have not been resolved. We are in agreement that there are all sorts of technologies including micro-nuclear, MSR, battery technologies, etc that need to be developed and assessed for their safety, environmental impact, etc. But MSR in a best case scenario is 20+ years away from being ready to bring to the table as a research vehicle, let alone being commercial and then turning around and having commercial reactors built and come on line.

      We need solutions that are ready today or are almost ready). Things like efficiency in heating and air systems (generally the largest draw on a house), proper insulation, existing solar cells with smart battery technology (say liquid metal), using solar thermal or geothermal to reduce demand for electricity in the home where viable all while developing new technologies like advanced solar, wind and other sources like MSR or hydrogen cracking, EV infrastructure, smart grid, better and more mass transit, etc. There’s no silver bullet. We have options today that will get us down the road (efficient homes and less vehicles would get us a long way down that road) and working on technologies as we go, knowing there are looming issues on the horizon – namely climate change and increased population which will constrain resources.

  • rob pforzheimer

    Wind turbines kill birds and bats, drive people from their homes from their noise, destroy forest habitat, streams and wetlands and devalue property.
    Wind’s intermittent and unreliable, requiring natural gas turbines for backup. Ramping gas turbines up and down to follow the wind is inefficient and releases more emissions. There’s no evidence from the hundreds of thousands of industrial wind turbines installed around the world, that any emissions have been reduced or coal plants shut down. Industry claims are theoretical and unproven.
    Wind power will not save the world from global warming.

    No viable battery storage for grid scale electricity currently exists. The third fire, at a prototype battery storage for a wind project on Oahu, Hawaii, completely destroyed it. Hope they pay back the $119 million federal loan guarantee.

    Conservation and efficiency will be of far more benefit than building expensive, subsidized wind generation that will never replace anything and that we don’t even need. There’s a surplus of generation and transmission constraints in New England & many parts of the country.

    Without the 1705 loan guarantees, 1603 grants (1/3 of project cost paid upon completion of construction), arbitrary state mandates and the Production Tax Credit (PTC) ($.022 per kwh for first 10 years), no one would be building these environmentally destructive wind factories.

    The PTC pays the $.022 per kwh for all power produced whether it’s needed or not, as in times of low demand. The PTC is set to expire at the end of this year. Hopefully congress will have enough sense to not extend the PTC, corporate entitlement waste, and in the process reduce the budget deficit by billions. This would seem like a no brainer if congress is serious about the deficit.

    Look at the countries in Europe that have subsidized wind development: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland. They are bankrupt and have high electric rates.

    Please stop destroying rural habitat and communities with these useless wind projects which are nothing more than expensive “green” symbolism.

    Would you buy a home or property near 400-500 foot, loud wind turbines?

    • therationalmiddle

      Would you buy a house next to a coal mine or a fracked well or a field of solar panels as far as the eye can see? If we want energy, it has to be harvested somewhere and someone’s going to be looking at it. What’s the solution?

  • http://www.facebook.com/harold.quigley.3 Harold Quigley

    So what is the “Rational Middle?” Is it burning more coal while exacerbating acid rain and global climate destabilization? and believing in the mythology of “clean coal?” Is it unrestrained fracking that will poison or air and water supplies? Is it chasing after more oil in increasingly hostile environments at ever increasing costs? Is it so-called “safe” nuclear power leaving us a radioactive legacy into perpetuity? For all of the money spent on nuclear power– including clean-up costs for accidents that no insurance company will ever pay for; for radioactive waste depositories that no one wants in their state; for decommissioning costs that will exceed the original costs of construction and result in power plant entombments with armed guards 24-7 nearly forever– FOR ALL THAT MONEY the capacity for generating electric power could be installed as wind and solar providing distributed generation relying on a completely renewable source of energy that would have sufficient surplus for stored hydro and/or fuel cell charging to correct for intermittencies in a smart-grid system, and at same time free us from reliance on foreign oil sold to us by people who don’t even like us, while putting millions of Americans to work in a truly sustainable economy.

    • therationalmiddle

      The rational middle is understanding the challenges we face (climate change, environmental disturbance, human health, economic and security challenges, etc) and knowing that there are things we can be doing TODAY to move the needle on our consumption and the impact we have, but also understanding that there is a challenge in switching to a more sustainable set of resources which, in fact, have their own set of challenges. Wind, solar, batteries, electrification distributed generation, new-age nuclear and beyond. Not every solution is going to work in every region and each region has a unique set of resources. The goal is to promote a general understanding of the issues, light a fire and invite people to discuss, openly, what they think works best – to weed out the problems and find where compromises can be made.

      No one wants the negatives, but tradeoffs are tradeoffs. There is no perfect energy solution (right now) and so we have to understand where our consumption needs are, how we can reduce them, and make a commitment as a society to stop messing around and fix these problems.

      We can talk crazy numbers and “if we just covered the Sahara in solar panels” all day long, but that doesn’t make it realistic or affordable or environmentally responsible. Have we stopped to think about what kind of materials are used in solar panels? Have you seen a rare earth metal mine in china? How do you plan to ship those materials and the completed panels? How do you make the batteries? How do you melt steel to make the power lines and frames for the panels to cover that desert? So current sources will be needed to build the future. Once we get there, and as we go along, we can start abandoning dirty sources of energy.

      But even then you’re then faced with using coal or natural gas to make steel for buildings, railroads, etc. Restaurants prefer natural gas for certain types of cooking. Oil and gas are used to make plastics for computers, medical equipment, etc, etc, etc. It goes on. Solving the energy problem through changing sources is the right thing to do – and it will take time to do that. And even after that, we’ll have to find alternatives to manufacturing that don’t require these raw materials and that will take time. That’s rationality – understanding the challenges and not screaming for ignoring the issues nor pushing for immediate change. Ignoring the issues is NOT acceptable and immediate change no matter the cost isn’t responsible to the society or the environment until we figure out the challenges that face even our cleanest options.

      We think a well-planned approach that moves us quickly down the path while tackling the challenges is the way to go and rationality is a part of that equation.

  • therationalmiddle

    We have aimed not to come down on one solution as an answer because, indeed, there is no silver bullet. It will require new technologies, new thinking, new resources, and a willingness to change our lifestyles and understand that we aren’t the only people who want energy on a finite, spherical planet. We certainly don’t intend at all to decide for you as one resource may be more suited for one area than another.

    To us, it’s more about understanding the problems, the gamut of solutions, and placing goals and milestones that will get us there. And if climate change is a challenge that needs to be over come (we think it most certainly is) then we need to be ready to accelerate the timeline we are already on, and be willing to bear the burden of that acceleration in the form of adjustments to our personal lives and increased costs either in the form of a tax (carbon or otherwise) or be willing to pay into additional research and development that will make these technologies more affordable and accessible.

    • Lee

      Thank you for your reply! I won’t argue with anything in your reply. Frankly, your response was a little more “progressive” than I thought it might be. You seem to be holding open the possibility of a carbon tax of some kind, accelerated R&D in renewables, and adjusting our American lifestyle. I will let friends and associates know about THe Rational Middle.

      For everyone, I apologize for posting my questions (above) several times. I think I “get” now how a moderated site works. Can you remove a couple of my repeated messages? Thanks again!

      • therationalmiddle

        Lee, we like to think we are very forward thinking – even moreso than just thinking about renewables. The efficiency and conservation discussion is about to re-emerge, hopefully without the Carter-era stigma of sacrifice. We are all for finding solutions so that generations to come aren’t having to carry the load we have created for them without giving them the tools to do so.

        Climate, pollution, population growth, etc are all problems that are bumping up against each other and we have to address all simultaneously. Some will say climate is the most important problem and it certainly is one of them, but we think that food, water, energy, social justice are all highly important. If we want a future where everyone has access to a quality of life that is acceptable AND live on this planet with its limited resources, we have to be willing to be rational, compromise, and tackle the problems at hand.

        Feel free to join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/rationalmiddle

        P.S. – We’ve removed your duplicate posts as requested.

  • beegdawg007

    There is a hard reality here which all should be aware of. Control over atmospheric CO2 whether it is or isn’t a global climate change agent, is not in the hands of America, or even the entire developed world. The future of atmospheric CO2 will be determined by China and India. Combined, these countries already burn 4 times as much coal as the USA and, by 2035, that will increase to 7Xs. If all of the developed world, eliminated all CO2 production, by 2050 the impact would be hardly measurable. Link below to source of that.

    What does this mean? Well the determination over which fuel sources will be used to create energy in China and India, where the amount of atmospheric CO2 created could actually impact the level of atmospheric CO2, will be determined by China and India only. And that decision will be based only on the national benefits and economic benefits to the 2.5 billion people who live there. What is done or decided in America or Europe does not matter.

    Yes, the world should develop shale gas, and it will. And yes, the world should, over time, move toward safe nuclear or even solar if the storage problem can be solved, and if left to the market place, it will. But doing anything here that is either dramatic or immediate will result in the squandering of more trillions of dollars/euros on an effort which can accomplish nothing.

    http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/state_by_state.html

    An excerpt from this article.

    “”Using assumptions based on the Intergovernmental

    Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports*, if

    the U.S. as a whole stopped emitting all carbon dioxide

    (CO2) emissions immediately, the ultimate impact on

    projected global temperature rise would be a reduction,”

    or a “savings,” of approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050

    and 0.17°C by the year 2100—amounts that are, for all

    intents and purposes, negligible.”

  • therationalmiddle

    Hydrogen needs electricity to be separated from elements it is connected with – usually water. In all cases, hydrogen electrolysis takes more electricity to create than it puts out. What creates the electricity to perform electrolysis? There’s no free lunch.

  • therationalmiddle

    MSR and LFTR are technologies seeing investment around the world, including China and the United States. You’re right, zero-carbon and zero-emissions plants are needed and scaling renewables is a tough nut to crack without backup or utility-scale storage solutions.

    We don’t see what was polarizing about our post – we simply acknowledge that many people take issue with energy production near them no matter the source and that kind of thinking has to be replaced with the idea of taking responsibility for our consumption and creating low-impact, high efficacy solutions that meet our needs. Exporting our problems to the next town or across the globe is not a sustainable or fair solution.