Tech | August 25, 2010 | 18 comments

A global shift to renewable energy: But will it be fast enough?

source: http://www.grist.org/article/a-global-shift-to-renewable-energy

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JanforGore
A new energy economy is on the horizon.


As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced by one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago. And it is a worldwide phenomenon.

Consider Texas. Long the leading U.S. oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California in 2006. Texas now has 9,700 megawatts of wind generating capacity online, 370 more in the construction stage, and a huge amount in the development stage. When all of these wind farms are completed, Texas will have 53,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity -- the equivalent of 53 coal-fired power plants. This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 25 million people, enabling Texas to export electricity, just as it has long exported oil.

Texas is not alone. In South Dakota, a wind-rich, sparsely populated state, development has begun on a vast 5,050-megawatt wind farm (1 megawatt of wind capacity supplies 300 U.S. homes) that when completed will produce nearly five times as much electricity as the 810,000 people living in the state need. Altogether, some 10 states in the United States, most of them in the Greatt Plains, and several Canadian provinces are planning to export wind energy.

Across the Atlantic, the government of Scotland is negotiating with two sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East to invest $7 billion in a grid in the North Sea off its eastern coast. This grid will enable Scotland to develop nearly 60,000 megawatts of off-shore wind generating capacity, close to the 85,000 megawatts of current electrical generating capacity for the United Kingdom.

We are witnessing an embrace of renewable energy on a scale we’ve never seen for fossil fuels or nuclear power. And not only in industrial countries. Algeria, which knows it will not be exporting oil forever, is planning to build 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal generating capacity for export to Europe via undersea cable. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their vast desert to power the entire world economy. This is not a mathematical error. A similarly remarkable fact is that the sunlight striking the earth in just one hour is enough to power the world economy for one year.

Turkey, which now has 41,000 megawatts of total electrical generating capacity, issued a request for proposals in 2007 to build wind farms. It received bids from both domestic and international wind development firms to build a staggering 78,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity. Having selected some 7,000 megawatts of the most promising proposals, the government is now issuing construction permits.

In mid-2008, Indonesia -- a country with 128 active volcanoes and therefore rich in geothermal energy -- announced that it would develop 6,900 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity, with Pertamina, the state oil company, responsible for developing the lion’s share. Indonesia’s oil production has been declining for the last decade, and in each of the last five years the country has been an oil importer. As Pertamina shifts resources from oil into the development of geothermal energy, it could become the first oil company -- state-owned or independent -- to make the transition from oil to renewable energy.

These are only a few of the visionary initiatives to tap the earth’s renewable energy. The resources are vast. In the United States, three states -- North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas -- have enough harnessable wind energy to run the entire economy. In China, wind will likely become the dominant power source. Indonesia could one day get all its power from geothermal energy alone. Europe will be powered largely by wind farms in the North Sea and solar thermal power plants in the North African desert.

The goals for developing renewable sources of energy by 2020 that are laid out in my book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, are based not on what is conventionally believed to be politically feasible but on what I think is needed. This is not Plan A, business as usual. This is Plan B -- a wartime mobilization, an all-out response that is designed to avoid destabilizing economic and political stresses that will come with unmanageable climate change.

snip Just as the communications and information economies have changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, so too will the energy economy over the next decade.

There is one outstanding difference. Whereas the restructuring of the information economy was shaped only by advancing technology and market forces, the restructuring of the energy economy will be driven also by the realization that the fate of civilization may depend not only on doing so, but on doing it at wartime speed.

Adapted from Chapter 5, “Stabilizing Climate: Shifting to Renewable Energy,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
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18 comments // A global shift to renewable energy: But will it be fast enough?

  • MrMxyzptlk
  • Wetdog
  • MrMxyzptlk
  • Wetdog
    • 0
      Wetdog  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      I lived in Riga, Latvia for a long time before I came back here. A large portion of the power there came from wind power.

      Electric power cost less there than it does here.

    • 1 year ago
  • MrMxyzptlk
  • Wetdog
    • +1
      Wetdog  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      You will have transmission costs and maintainance no matter where the electricity comes from.

      Electricity is electricity. Lights and video games don't care whether it came from coal, nuclear or wind. It all tastes exactly the same.

    • 1 year ago
  • MrMxyzptlk
  • Wetdog
    • +1
      Wetdog  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      You can afford air conditioning, food, washer and dryer, hot showers but if your electric bill went up 3 cent/kWh you'd have to go live in a cave?

      I suspect you are not very good at handling money. It also sounds to me like you are not very good at handling energy. Clothes can be washed just fine in cold water.

      How many kWh a month do you average on your electric bill?

    • 1 year ago
  • MrMxyzptlk
  • Wetdog
    • +2
      Wetdog  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      What you are talking about is a Feed In Tariff(FIT). If you install a grid tie wind or solar generation capacity----your system will power your home when it is on. It will generate power that will be used in your house----if it does not generate enough power to completely serve your house or it is shut down(for instance, it is night and no solar power is being generated) your meter runs forward. If you system is generating more power than your house uses, then it switches and feeds electrical energy into the grid. Your meter runs backwards. The less power you use, the more power you have to sell to the utility.

      The utility is required to pay you 3.32 cents per kWh that it receives from your system. In order to receive power from your system----your system is already powering your home to the amount that you are using. Otherwise, it would not feed power into the grid. The power that your system is providing means that you are not buying power from the utility. The utility is paying you for the power that you feed in.

      If, at the end of the month, you used more power than you produced, the bill from the utility will charge you for the amount of electricity that you used that was in excess of the amount that your system produced. If your system produced more electricity than you used, the utility will send you a check for the amount of power that your system fed into the grid.

      The more power you use, the less power available to send to the utility. The less power you use, the more power available to sell to the utility.

      FITs are great for consumers. You own the system. You become a little mini-utility selling power. The higher the price of energy goes, the better it is for you---you've already locked in the price that you pay for power by purchasing and installing your system. If the price of electricity from the utility doubles in the next ten years, it doesn't matter to you----the fuel your system uses, wind or sun, is free.

      Grid tie systems and FITs are also excellent ways to encourage power conservation. Every kWh that you conserve means one KWh that becomes available to feed into the grid by selling electricity to the power company. What you spend to use less power to do the same things you've always done starts coming back from the utility each month---you take money out of the column that you owe them, and put it in the column that they owe you.

    • 1 year ago
  • MrMxyzptlk
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      OH MY GOD, A WHOLE DIME! You might not be able to buy enough beer or rent DVDS. How tragic! Please, we all know you are just afraid of change because you think to do so would mean you would have to turn into a "hippie" in your mind. You probably already spend most of your money on junk food and crap you don't need anyway, so what would even ten to twenty cents a KWH hurt you to know it could keep your child healthier and give him mountains to look at as he grows? And just think, if we actually get a grid you can buy or sell back into because you actually grow a moral spine and not use it like there's no tomorrow because you just don't give a damn you might actually make money from it. My God, you have such a negative attitude about the future.

      This post and Lester Brown's book show clearly how average Americans can save money over time by switching to renewable energy, and with Peak Oil approaching there may be no choice. So seeing what we are now seeing taking place in the world you are going to argue over a freaking dime? Do you care about the TRILLIONS spent on war? Get a clue already and stop clogging up these threads with your " hippie fear." Wetdog is right, you are wrong and this is an opportunity to have cheaper energy at greater health for our environment and ourselves when it is more aggressively placed out here to give coal and oil which are priced disingenuously without indirect costs added the competition they deserve. You of course, failed to mention the health effects to humans, species, and the environment. When they are taken into account however, renewable energy is a win win, and it WILL come. I suggest you save up your dimes for it then and take Wetdog's advice. Shut the refrigerator door and turn out the lights and start taking responsibility for your actions instead of whining and blaming the imaginative hippie living in your head for all of your problems in life.

    • 1 year ago
  • Wetdog
    • +1
      Wetdog  
    • MrMxyzptlk:

      If you are in an electric co-op, you are already a part owner. You should be receiving checks from the co-op in the mail for your share of the profits when a periodic distribution is called.

      Grid tie wind or solar is in your own best interest. You need to attend some co-op shareholder meetings.

      Grid tie solar power is good for the co-op. It means less miles of wiring(generation at point of use), less overhead maintaining typically older and less efficient peak load generation capacity----and since they are buying power from their OWN shareholders, the money that would have gone out to outside companies at higher rates stays in their own community in their shareholders pockets. Keeping rates lower.

      Co-ops are not new ideas----they go back to the middle ages. They became especially popular during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as a way of bypassing monopolistic business practices of banks and railroads which hit small farmers hardest.(sound familiar to today's situation?----substitute banks, oil and energy companies, and agribusinesses) The Grange was an early attempt to organize small farmers into an effective unit and co-ops to locally own needed infrastructure was a very important tool.

      Patchouli? Phhhhtttt I'm sixty one years old and about as far from a hippie as you can get. The hippies jumped on co-ops as a good idea----and they ARE a good idea. Because they work. They keep ownership and profits in local communities and in the hands of the people who do the work.

      You need to open your mind a little, something might seep in.

    • 1 year ago
  • IceKat
    • 0
      IceKat  
    • JanforGore:

      I've seen some pretty rancid ad hominem attacks but what you wrote just oozes with bitterness. If you're trying to win anyone over you're going about it the wrong way.

      "...renewable energy is a win win, and it WILL come."
      Yes, you are right (to an extent) but renewable energy is not good enough, reliable enough or as available as other forms of electricity generation. Yes, it will come, just as all the other technological advances arrived when the time was right, but until then you'll just have to accept that the world does not run to your timetable.

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
    • -1
      JanforGore  
    • IceKat:

      This doesn't concern you. I talk as I am spoken to here. When he stops harrasssing and calling names here he will get the same treatment. Until then why don't you mind your own business?

    • 1 year ago
  • IceKat
    • 0
      IceKat  
    • JanforGore:

      When someone writes public messages on a public website which encourages other people to add comments (that's why there's a reply function) I'll make use of that facility as and when I please. This is not your website. These are not your rules.

    • 1 year ago
  • Wetdog
    • +1
      Wetdog  

    • Changing technology helps to solve specific problems.

      Changing ways of thinking is the only thing that can transform the world.

      Energy conservation is needed at the same time. Doing more with less.

      For instance, fluorescent electric lighting produces the same amount of light as incandescent lights and uses about 25% of the energy.

      The largest single energy use in any home is heating water. Solar thermal heating is simple, low tech, and easy to manufacture, install and maintain. The cost to install and use solar hot water heating would be a fraction of the cost to use electricity generated by wind turbines.

      Two very simple, easy to do and relatively inexpensive things to do. And if done in every home, would double the number homes that each wind turbine would serve.

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  

    • Anyone who says we do not have the infrastructure to do this now, you are mistaken. We are already doing it! All we now need is the will, courage and knowledge to understand that this is indeed the way to not only lessen the impacts of climate change but the impacts on our planet and our health due to toxic dirty fossil fuels. We are approaching a point where this is now a matter of necessity.

    • 1 year ago
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