Sustainable energy??????

[greenalien]

Mr Mackay should be heralded as the man with the real facts?

The information that he quotes in the book is from many sources, but we're talking about stuff like population density, available land area, energy demand, that sort of thing; i.e. verifiable data. His arguments seem to me to be sound when he discusses the validity of that information; he deliberately doesn't present some dogmatic viewpoint, just tries to summarise what may - or may not - be realistic strategies for future energy policy; however, I am interested in what other people think of his interpretation of the material.

[matty-hodgson]

all i'm really getting from reading this book is a load of graphs and HIS opinion about everyone ELSE'S data, he doesn't have any of his own data from anywhere, he's just decided to take the data he 'believes in the most' and written it into a book.

decent read, but no more worthy of a read than anything else on this sort of topic.

[Whiternoise]

Ok, let me put some facts down.

1. Renewable energy is a solution, but with the UK infrastructure (i.e. the Grid) it is useless.

We get the majority of our electricity from fossil fuels, a little from nuclear (likely more in the future) some of it from Britain, some piped under the Channel from France. Now, renewable energy is in principle good. It really is unlimited for all intents and purposes and it's true that if you covered a reasonable proportion of Saudi Arabia in solar panels (at current efficiencies) you could power most of Europe even with increased demand. Indeed once the oil runs out or becomes too expensive to be practically useful, we may see the Middle East piping pure electricity to us instead from solar power.

The downside? Well, currently we need steady power output. The way the grid works is that it's basically a massive circuit. When demand rises, the electricity boards can simply divert extra electricity to where its needed. Similarly we use gas power stations when demand spikes unexpectedly. Renewables produce unreliable output at best. So to compensate for the dips in output when we need a lot of electricity, say a football cup final, we turn up the gas power stations (very simple way of increasing output). This of course means that when the gas runs out, we can't use renewables.

One way to get round this is to simply have enough renewable power stations/modules so that the minimum output is above the peak expected demand at all times. This would mean building a lot of power stations!

2. Nuclear is the way to go, but not like we know it. We WILL NOT last forever running the current generation of power stations.

Currently we use Thermal Reactors. These work by the well known, chuck neutrons at U-235, fission, energy, heat, steam, drive turbine method (all power stations eventually boil down to making steam to drive turbines). Using this and mining the planet's entire Uranium reserve (contrary to popular belief, the amount of unenriched uranium is finite) and allowing for a increase in demand of 50% we could last for 100 years.

If we switched to Fast Breeder reactors - still in development and somewhat trickier to make - we could last for thousands. The problem is, we have no fast breeder reactors (commercially used) in the world and we don't plan to build any soon. They are expensive to run (for the moment) and no one has produced any designs with any kind of reasonable power output sustainably - think 1GW. The French designed a 1.2GW station, but shut it down due to the cost of running it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_ne..._fast_reactors

3. Energy consumption is going to increase whether we like it or not.

This is logical when you think about it. We're all, eventually, going to switch to either hydrogen/hybrid/electric cars. All three need batteries charging up. What does that mean? Well sure you're not using petrol or diesel and the water your car emits is good enough to drink, but all that electricity comes from somewhere. And whoops, currently it's all nasty fossil fuels.

This isn't so much of a disadvantage. Although it means that even by switching to "green" vehicles and so on we're going to be even more energy dependent, but the amount of power it takes to convert crude oil, refine it, mine it and so on could be cut significantly if the fuel trade decreases massively.

Oh and there are bio-fuels.

Do not get the idea that by buying an eco car you're going to cut your electricity. You may cut your emissions, but that's a different kettle of fish. Think of it like entropy, you can decrease the emissions of your little part of the system, but overall (think the power plants providing you with electricity) the entropy of the entire system increases.

Technology is certainly doing its best to go green, and why not? It means lower electricity consumption, more efficient devices and most importantly - green sells. We could do a hell of a lot more than just switching off things if we actually made those things more efficient. Take the PS3 Slim, it's practically twice as efficient as the PS3 Phat and that's no mean feat from Sony. If everyone's PC took 100W less power, we would save a fortune in both electricity and bills.

all i'm really getting from reading this book is a load of graphs and HIS opinion about everyone ELSE'S data, he doesn't have any of his own data from anywhere, he's just decided to take the data he 'believes in the most' and written it into a book.

decent read, but no more worthy of a read than anything else on this sort of topic.

That's not the point of the book. It's not him trying to make some amazing conclusion about data he's collected. What he tries to show is that you should be wary (on both sides) of people making spurious scientific claims and that a lot of the figures quoted in newspapers and the like aren't trustworthy.

He's trying to make people consider both sides of the argument carefully instead of just siding up with one party without understanding the facts.

I cant find the source, but there was an article on nuclear energy stipulating that if we converted all of our energy useage to it an used up all known reserves. It would last about 3 hours.

That's bunk. It'd take 100 years with increased demand for all the mineable Uranium to undergo fission and provide us with power. That's not a good thing, we'd only be staving off energy death for a while (perhaps long enough to invent fusion ) but anyway...

http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html

If i get time i could probably run through a 'back of an envelope' calculation to prove it, but maybe later. Just work out how much uranium there is, how much enriched uranium you'd get out of that and then just bung it into e=mc^2 and multiply by the fraction of energy out (i believe it's about 200MeV per Uranium atom so times that by the number of atoms we can produce for fission).

[matty-hodgson]

That's not the point of the book. It's not him trying to make some amazing conclusion about data he's collected. What he tries to show is that you should be wary (on both sides) of people making spurious scientific claims and that a lot of the figures quoted in newspapers and the like aren't trustworthy.

He's trying to make people consider both sides of the argument carefully instead of just siding up with one party without understanding the facts.

yeah, i seen that in the book too, quoting from him:

People who want to promote renewables over nuclear, for example, say "offshore wind power could power all UK homes;" then they say "new nuclear power stations will do little to tackle climate change" because 10 new nuclear stations would "reduce emissions only by about 4%." This argument is misleading because the playing field is switched half-way through, from the "number of homes powered" to "reduction of emissions." The truth is that the amount of electrical power generated by the wonderful windmills that "could power all UK homes" is exactly the same as the amount that would be generated by the 10 nuclear power stations! "Powering all UK homes" accounts for just 4% of UK emmissions.

this is one of the pitfalls of reading statistics and other articles in the news, they always find a way to make their argument seem very strong, when really it's proving nothing.
so yeah, the book is good in some ways, but the way that he uses other people's data to make his book look good doesn't go down that well with me.
he could just be doing exactly the same as what i've just quoted tbh.

[Whiternoise]

But by extension, no one is telling the truth?

You can read the articles that he's quoted from if you need proof of what he says. Everyone takes everyone elses data in science, it's why referencing is so important. If he'd drawn up his own figures he would have had to take measurements around the world over periods of many years, this just isn't practical for one guy - let alone the fact that he doesn't have access to the kind of data collection 'robots' that energy companies and organisations like the OECD do.

If you read any article on climate change, emissions, etc. The reference will likely be some landmark survey done by an organisation such as the OECD. Everyone then uses those statistics to base their arguments around.

Some of the figures quoted by governments are ballpark figures, and some are just lies - or heavily embellished truth. So when the government says we need to work out how much energy we're going to use, they have to take in a variety of factors to get the answer. You could do an inquiry twenty times and get wildly varying answers every time.

If you want a really unbiased view, look at the raw data for yourself and base your conclusions around it, not the round the bushes arguments spewed out by climate change protesters and government panels.

[greenalien]

He's trying to make people consider both sides of the argument carefully instead of just siding up with one party without understanding the facts.

That's my take on the book as well - I don't see it as an ego-trip or a vested interest, just someone who understands maths, carefully weighing up the available data, and drawing some conclusions. I think his motives are altruistic, and we should be grateful for that.

[scaryjim]

3. Energy consumption is going to increase whether we like it or not.

Let's all be honest, this is the big kick in the teeth in all this.

Sustainable energy is useless unless we can acheive sustainable energy usage, and a constantly increasing energy demand is not sustainable. Energy efficiency is great, but basically creating more energy efficient versions of something just means people run more of them (hands up who has a nice low power HTPC at home and still has a gas guzzling beast that they pull out for gaming? ) or are less careful with the way they use them (again, show of hands on who's left a light bulb on and tried to justify it by saying "but it's only an energy saver"). Unless we, as a planet, can reduce our energy usage / demand, then it won't matter how much we invest in sustainable technologies, it won't be enough.

[greenalien]

At least someone's doing something about the problem :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...urope-desertec