[dohboi]

http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?207268/S ... ignificant

(Link to pdf of report in above-linked article.)

Solar PV power in harmony with nature – new WWF report says land requirements are insignificant

The report illustrates that PV technology, when well-planned, does not conflict with conservation goals and clarifies that no country or region must choose between solar PV and space for humans and nature.

”Research has found that PV power plants provide considerable environmental benefits, including a low carbon footprint and a short energy pay-back time.

Replacing existing grid electricity with PV arrays significantly reduces greenhouse gas and heavy metal emissions as well water usage,” says Lettemieke Mulder, First Solar vice president for Sustainability.

This new report supports WWF’s vision of 100% RE by 2050. “We are actively promoting investments and measures in Renewable Energy technologies that help to make this happen,” according to Jean-Philippe Denruyter, WWF’s manager Global Renewable Energy Policy.

“As climate change increasingly threatens people and the natural world, it is more important than ever to work for the rapid and wide-scale adoption of well sited, responsibly operated renewable energy power facilities. Environmental protection and renewable energy can and are developing in parallel,” says Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF’s Global Climate & Energy Initiative.

Something of an academic exercise, but perhaps helpful in dispelling one argument against solar. Again, it is on the demand side that the quickest and most dramatic reductions, which are demanded by our currents situation, are at least theoretically possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U

[ritter]

I'm not certain we have the resources required to produce the panels to go 100% solar. Or even 20% solar.

[dohboi]

Good point. That's why it is more of an academic exercise than anything. The authors certainly aren't proposing that we should depend on solar alone. I think they simply want to put to rest the tired argument that solar would take too much land space to be practicable on a large scale.

[sunweb]

It depends on who is assessing the ERoEI.
Solar and wind energy capturing devices are not alternative energy sources. They are extensions of the fossil fuel supply system. There is an illusion of looking at the trees and not the forest in the “Renewable” energy world. Not seeing the systems, machines, fossil fuel uses and environmental degradation that create the devices to capture the sun, wind and biofuels allows myopia and false claims of renewable, clean, green and sustainable.

Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is only a part of the equation. There is a massive infrastructure of mining, processing, manufacturing, fabricating, installation, transportation and the associated environmental assaults. Each of these processes and machines may only add a miniscule amount of energy to the final component of solar or wind devices yet the devices cannot arise without them. There would be no devices with out this infrastructure.

How else would we do it? There is always the old way. Who of us will go down in the mine first?
A story in pictures and diagrams:
From Machines making machines making machines
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/12/ma ... aking.html

[rollin]

Of course we have the resources. Mines run on electricity, silicon is purified by electricity and the fabrication plants run on electricity. So all they have to do power the base industries using the first runs of solar panels and after that the energy is not the problem. Silicon is abundant. As far as the doping materials, they seem abundant enough.

[SeaGypsy]

It's about density rollin. The density of energy required to do things like smelting metals and glass is extreme. To extract extreme concentrations of energy from diffuse sources attracts extreme costs and losses. Only nuclear beats fossil fuels in terms of density. Some of the equipment in smelting related industry must operate in an 'always on' mode- furnaces in particular can't be dependent on intermittent energy flows, they must be held above the crucible's annealing temperature or they crack- meaning they need to be shut down and rebuilt. The base idle temperature of these tools is about 3-4 times hotter than your kitchen oven can get running at max, operating temps about double that again. All this means is that you will need to cover half your suburb with solar panels and windmills then build in some not yet existent high capacity storage, to enable one small factory to smelt and manufacture enough solar and wind gear for renewal.

[sparky]

.
@ sunweb
you are quite correct ,
the present price of solar panels and wind turbines is based on the 15Cents\Kw of the present power mix
if one were to build the alternatives generators with alternative prices it would be three times
more expensive with no guaranty of having 8 or 10 hours of power uninterrupted
People don't understand industrial constraints ,
large plants are working 24/7 , some chemical plants like ammonia synthesizers or
or nitrogen oxide unit take days to get back to full production ,
a shut down voluntary or not is a very , very costly business

[ralfy]

There's also an "energy trap" involved:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/201 ... ergy-trap/

[dohboi]

Of course, currently, plants mostly use non-renewable energy to make renewables. It's the cheapest stuff around.

But there is nothing inherently impossible about making renewables with renewables. It's been done before for solar. As wind get cheaper and cheaper, it will be done there, too (already is, to some extent, given that wind is a growing portion of the electric energy mix in more and more places).

As the price of carbon sources rises, renewables could be more and more powered by renewables.

But I fully expect 'non-linear' disruptions to prevent any such smooth transition to happen in the real world.

[SeaGypsy]

The <1% line is trite. Call it 1000 miles by 1500 miles, 1.5 million square miles. Probably a similar area to the cities of the world combined. Like that is going to be easy.

[Lore]

The problem is for everyone on the planet dreaming of living like we do here in the US, we'd need the resources of another 4 - 5 earths. What we can expect is the game of musical chairs to speed up.

[dohboi]

The <1% line is trite. Call it 1000 miles by 1500 miles, 1.5 million square miles. Probably a similar area to the cities of the world combined.

True, but I think the larger point of the piece was that within every major region of the globe, the 1% holds for that area, too. And of course cities and solar panels are not mutually exclusive--you can put them on top of houses and buildings, over parking lots and highways...in many ways, cities are ideal locations for them (if you can keep them from getting stolen).

[peripato]

The <1% line is trite. Call it 1000 miles by 1500 miles, 1.5 million square miles. Probably a similar area to the cities of the world combined.

True, but I think the larger point of the piece was that within every major region of the globe, the 1% holds for that area, too. And of course cities and solar panels are not mutually exclusive--you can put them on top of houses and buildings, over parking lots and highways...in many ways, cities are ideal locations for them (if you can keep them from getting stolen).

Of course the main issue is one of growth. It is the knee-jerk assumption on both the Left and the Right that the answer to the problems of growth is just more of the same. 3% economic growth would require a doubling of this footprint every 24 years or so, with its attendant resource depletion and pollution...

[cephalotus]

I'm not certain we have the resources required to produce the panels to go 100% solar. Or even 20% solar.

I'm certain that those resources do exist. The main limiting resource is copper and we still have lots of it. PV industry now consumes around of 14% of the world silver consumption, but silver must and will not be necessary soon)

On the other hand we will soon have 1 billion cars and nobody questions if we have the resources for that...

---

btw:

Solar electricity production vs. overall elecricity consumption in 2012:

Spain: 4.3%
Germany: 5.0%
Italy: 5.3%

10 years ago people would have said that this is impossible. Saudi Arabia and China will follow soon...

[Dybbuk]

Rollin, only a few mining functions are electrical, specifically very large drag lines. The rest (trucks, bulldozers, freight trains, crushers, etc.) are not but still necessary to mine silicon and metals in PV panels and wind turbines,

The same can be said for all resource-extraction industries. No one except the tiniest, little, itsy bitsy CSA/farm stand has managed to run a farm on EV tractors. Can't log with electricity either. Or fix a highway. Or mend a transmission line, repair a pipeline, gather mushrooms or diva-spit.

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't ethanol an option for these applications? I know ethanol has its flaws, but if you need a (reasonably) dense energy source that's not going to be intermittent, there it is.

[davep]

Rollin, only a few mining functions are electrical, specifically very large drag lines. The rest (trucks, bulldozers, freight trains, crushers, etc.) are not but still necessary to mine silicon and metals in PV panels and wind turbines,

The same can be said for all resource-extraction industries. No one except the tiniest, little, itsy bitsy CSA/farm stand has managed to run a farm on EV tractors. Can't log with electricity either. Or fix a highway. Or mend a transmission line, repair a pipeline, gather mushrooms or diva-spit.

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't ethanol an option for these applications? I know ethanol has its flaws, but if you need a (reasonably) dense energy source that's not going to be intermittent, there it is.

Ethanol would have to be produced with a decent EROEI, which is far from the case currently.

[kublikhan]

Rollin, only a few mining functions are electrical, specifically very large drag lines. The rest (trucks, bulldozers, freight trains, crushers, etc.) are not but still necessary to mine silicon and metals in PV panels and wind turbines,

The same can be said for all resource-extraction industries. No one except the tiniest, little, itsy bitsy CSA/farm stand has managed to run a farm on EV tractors. Can't log with electricity either. Or fix a highway. Or mend a transmission line, repair a pipeline, gather mushrooms or diva-spit.

Of course. That's what our current infrastructure runs on so naturally that's what renewables are built with. But to suggest that it would be impossible for humanity to produce power without using fossil fuels is silly. Renewable energy has been around a long time before gasoline and will be with us for along time after. I would argue that producing power without fossil fuels is not only possible, it is inevitable(in the long run).

Ethanol would have to be produced with a decent EROEI, which is far from the case currently.

Not necessarily. Sometimes a negative EROEI is acceptable if the energy gets turned into a more desirable form. People might be willing to spend the extra cash/energy cost of ethanol because the energy is in a highly desirable form. Much easier to fill up your monster mining equipment with ethanol than coal or natural gas.

[kublikhan]

It's about density rollin. The density of energy required to do things like smelting metals and glass is extreme. To extract extreme concentrations of energy from diffuse sources attracts extreme costs and losses. Only nuclear beats fossil fuels in terms of density. Some of the equipment in smelting related industry must operate in an 'always on' mode- furnaces in particular can't be dependent on intermittent energy flows, they must be held above the crucible's annealing temperature or they crack- meaning they need to be shut down and rebuilt. The base idle temperature of these tools is about 3-4 times hotter than your kitchen oven can get running at max, operating temps about double that again. All this means is that you will need to cover half your suburb with solar panels and windmills then build in some not yet existent high capacity storage, to enable one small factory to smelt and manufacture enough solar and wind gear for renewal.

No need to build all that. Much of the power for smelting nowadays already comes from renewables: Hydro.

PRIMARY ALUMINIUM SMELTING POWER CONSUMPTION

Not to mention the fact that you can recycle the aluminum/copper/etc at the end of it's life at a fraction of the energy cost to produce it.

Recycling aluminum cans saves 95 percent of the energy used to make aluminum cans from virgin ore.

Aluminum cans distinguish themselves as the most recycled and most recyclable beverage container in the world. An awesome 105,784 cans are recycled every minute nationwide.

Used aluminum cans are recycled and returned to a store shelf as a new can in as few as 60 days. That means a consumer could purchase basically the same recycled aluminum can from a retailer's shelf nearly every 9 weeks or 6 times a year.

Using recycled aluminum beverage cans to produce new cans allows the aluminum can industry to make up to 20 times more cans for the same amount of energy.

America recycled enough aluminum cans last year to stretch to the moon and back 8 times.

recycling fun facts

[dohboi]

P said:

Of course the main issue is one of growth. It is the knee-jerk assumption on both the Left and the Right that the answer to the problems of growth is just more of the same. 3% economic growth would require a doubling of this footprint every 24 years or so, with its attendant resource depletion and pollution

Nicely put.

And not only do we have not grow, we have to de-grow.

Lot's of things become not only theoretically possible, but actually doable within reasonable time frames and with available resources once you drastically reduce the scale of what you plan to do. An economy that requires a quarter or less energy and resources of our current one could still house, feed, cloth and employ everyone adequately (if minimally, and without many 'frills') with the right policies in place.

Reduce energy and material needs to say an eighth of the current use, and suddenly you only need to double wind and solar production a few times for them to be adequate.

But this is the opposite of the mindset of nearly every economist and policy maker on the globe.

Hence the doom.

(And, of course, rapidly accelerating climate chaos is about to make even these decroissance dreams of sustainable power production vanish as all of society devolves into famine, starvation, violence and death.)