Canute Get There From Here
Andrew Revkin at the New York Times Dot Earth blog does his best to annotate Al Gore's latest climate hysteria. From the perspective of an engineer who has worked in the utility area, I think Revkin misses an important point. Simply put, Gore has no clue - whatsoever - what he is talking about. None. Take this quote:
To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles. At present, for example, we do not have a unified national grid that is sufficiently advanced to link the areas where the sun shines and the wind blows to the cities in the East and the West that need the electricity.
The fact is, we do have an interconnected grid - or nothing would be working the way it does. The other fact is that the laws of physics dictate how line losses work. It is not possible to transmit power from "where the sun shines and the wind blows" to anywhere all that distant from those places. This has to do with the pure physical constraints of how electricity is produced and transmitted. All those overhead transmission lines have real - and absolute - physical constraints on them. Al Gore cannot wave his magic wand and remove those constraints.
When Gore can pull off what King Canute could not and repeal the laws of physics that govern how things work in the real world, I'll listen to him.
I rahter doubt I'll ever have to.
Energy, Junk Science, Left Wing | Gaius Thursday, 17 July , 2008
By lynndh, Thursday, 17 July , 2008 @ 10:14 pm
I use to work in the department that bought coal for power plants. Gore does not have the slightest clue about energy and the generation of electricity.
By Bill Franklin, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 5:02 am
I assume he’s talking about a superconductor grid. The Chinese are making serious progress on this front. A room temperature superconductor material doesn’t yet exist, but it will within five years given the current rate of progress.
So, let’s get the grid exoskeleton designed and buried nationwide, then when the material is ready, we install it. It actually makes sense to start now instead of waiting for the material to be developed, if we wish to break our dependency on foreign oil.
By Rich Horton, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 6:36 am
Trouble is (for Gore) if they do develop a superconductor material it would do away with the need for more expensive alternatives like wind and solar power. We could be so efficient with existing coal plants we wouldn’t need to invest in anything else….thus making the notion heretical by Gore’s own "standards. "
By Sam L., Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 7:44 am
So when the first fool digs up that superconductor line to steal the metal…how much of him do you think will be left for identification purposes?I like your new top-of-the-page photo.
By Sam L., Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 7:48 am
Minor prob here, Gaius: I double-spaced between those sentences, but the programming deleted it. Two thoughts there, and the no space between the "?" and "I" adds a confusion factor.
By martian, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 11:41 am
I am all for finding viable alternative energy sources. Let’s face it, oil is a non-renewable resource and, no matter how much is in reserve today, it will eventually run out. Maybe not in our lifetimes nor those of our children but certainly within the generation after that, especially if demand keeps rising at the current rate. I do look to the future of my grandchildren. I am actually for a combination of what has been proposed by McCain and by Gore. Start a massive effort, subsidized by the government (using the $300 million proposed by McCain as a prize for the inventor as a starting point) similar to the Manhattan Project or the Moon Race to find a viable, non-polutting (or minimal polluting - I don’t really believe there will ever be a fully non-pollutting source) alternative fuel to use for transportation - to power vehicles.
That said, what the heck do we do in the meantime? Any effort like I mention above must be accompanied by efforts to ease the burden we are all facing today. I love to watch the Obamessiah and his fellow Dems when they complain that easing drilling restrictions won’t have any results for years. They are absolutley right in that (although the time interval could be drastically reduced with enough effort) - opening new areas for exploration and drilling won’t affect prices at the pumps tmorrow, next week, next month, or even next year. But the logic here is somewhat faulty. What the Obamessiah and his cohorts are saying is, "This won’t give us relief tomorrow, so let’s do nothing at all because it will take too long to give us relief". Instead, they propose pouring all of our resources into alternatives like wind and solar power. Really? Have they designed a car with a windmill on it to power it? Have they designed a viable solar vehicle that can transport the whole family plus baggage on a trip to the beach? No, they have not. The truth is that wind and solar power are extremely limited in the amount of power they can produce and neither one will make my car take me from home to work. They are useless in the current fuel crisis.
The simple fact is that neither one solution or the other is a viable answer. If we are going to maintain our technolocical lifestyle at the current level and advance it in the future, we must have three efforts working in parallel:
1. Open new domestic areas for exploration and exploitation to reduce our dependence on foriegn oil as sson as is practically feasible. No, Barrie, it won’t happen overnight and it won’t affect pump prices tomorrow, but it will make a difference in the near future - how soon depends on how quickly we get started.
2. Start the program I suggested above to find a viable alternative energy source to eventually eliminate any dependence on oil, whatsoever.
3. For power needs other than vehicular - immediatly start an effort (as suggested by McCain) to build new, safe nuclear power plants that will relieve the need for coal (another non-renewable resource) to produce power for everything else.
Anything less than attacking the problem from all three of these directions will fail to produce the kind of future we want and need for ourselves and future generations.
By Quilly Mammoth, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 11:50 am
Bill, my first thought was superconductors. But I think we are a lot farther away than five years. The beauty of superconductors is that it does away with NIBYism. You can put the plants far out of sight. The down side of doing this is that the grid becomes a greater target.<b><p>Let’s say in twenty years that all the power generation is done in the central and southern plains then shipped to the coasts, and the Coastal Elites do something really stupid. Then a mob of irate flyovers desperately clinging to their God and their Guns could grab their pitchforks and torches and….never mind.
By sam, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 1:02 pm
Gaius, I certainly echo your contention that Mr. Gore hasn’t a clue about the electric power industry. The quote you excerpted should be enough to disqualify him from any serious discussion of the subject. I have almost 30 years of experience in the electric utility industry as an engineer, and spent many years in planning and development of the transmission system in the western interconnection. Mr. Gore has no concept of the amount of planning, analysis, time, and money that goes into even small enhancements to the grid. And that assumes that you are not blocked from doing the upgrade by funding, environmental opposition, or government obstructionism. I see some of the proposals being thrown out, like a nationwide superconducting grid, or covering the southwest US with solar panels, and just shake my head. I like windmills and solar panels as much as the next guy, but hey, let’s get real. Boone Picken’s plan is probably the most realistic of these grand schemes, but even he just hand-waves at the problems involved in expanding the grid.
By Gaius, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Gee, Bill. Do you buy your furniture before you figure out what house you can afford, too? It makes NO sense to get started on building something that does not even exist. We were only a few years away from room temperature super conducters two decades ago. We were only a few years away from practical fusion generation - 20 years ago.
Investing based on hope is pretty flimsy. And you’ve shown how little you actually know about practical engineering and the laws of physics.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 6:50 pm
A room temperature superconductor material doesn’t yet exist, but it will within five years given the current rate of progress.
The history of science and engineering is littered with "can’t miss" ideas that … missed. Affordable vacation trips into space and to the Moon, humans living several hundred years or more, manned exploration of Mars, cures for AIDS and cancer, power by nuclear fusion, computers that mimic human intelligence and behavior (like HAL 9000) - all of these were widely predicted in the 1960s and 1970s, yet none of them are even remotely close to reality today. On the other hand, the widespread use of personal computers and a massive world-wide network like the Internet were predicted by almost nobody back then. Predicting the future of science and technology is risky business.
It seems foolish to invest heavily in infrastructure for a technology that could take 50 years or more to develop instead of five. Even more foolish if the technology never happens. When the first working room temperature superconductors are built let me know.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 7:12 pm
I should make a correction to my post - all of the things in my list were widely predicted in the 1960s and 1970s to be available by the year 2000.
Gaius - I have heard of high temperature superconductors ("high temperature" being in the range of 80-130 K). That is still extremely cold, and I would imagine those temperatures would require a lot of power to maintain.
By George Kimball, Friday, 18 July , 2008 @ 10:56 pm
As a credentialed scientist (PhD, physics, Caltech) whose technical area is dead center on the physics underlying GW, I can tell you unequivocally that the whole thing is, scientifically, complete and utter BS. The alternatives Gore is promoting will not work on the scale needed - they simply don’t have the kind of power oil does. The things that WILL work are conservation and nuclear power.Outside of my area, I would only observe that it is believed so fervently because it is a religion. Mother Nature is the god-head, so anything that is not ‘natural’ takes the role of Sin. Zealotry abounds - serious proposals for world government control of emissions (to save us from Satanic carbon). Etc.So: here is some basic fuel for the heretics:1-Temperature trends this century HAVE NOT followed the increase in CO2 from fossil fuel consumption, which grew rapidly starting in ~1950.2-Naturally occurring temperature changes in the atmosphere have occurred for millennia, frequently on a scale vastly greater (1 degree per year for a decade) than what anyone says is happening now (half a degree in 100 years). Greenland didn’t get its name from nowhere - it was farmed by the Vikings.3-Nobel committees from leftish countries notwithstanding, the original studies on GW that are the basis (the "hockey stick" graph supposedly showing environmental disaster) for the whole fandango are fraudulent and scientifically wrong. The one data set that shows GW uses a plant known not to work as a historic temperature indicator - bristlecone pines (in Nova Scotia). IPCC hero Michael Mann’s computer codes, when run with random numbers instead of data will still produce the hockey stick.Once you grok that GW is a religion, it all makes sense. The lack of understanding and the state of scientific education and knowledge in the US is the biggest culprit allowing such raw ignorance to flourish.Here is a proposal that everyone can support: put a real, substantive, peer-reviewed research effort into better means for cleaning coal combustion (more practical than current electrostatic collectors or scrubbers). This would, uh, empower electric cars (which run half from coal) and clean up domestic emissions. A second major goal of the research should be to find a technology that is low-cost and preferably simple that can be used to reduce pollution in China’s growing coal-fired electricity plants. If Al Gore is serious, this is the place where advocacy would really matter. Spread the word!