Experts outline the increasing momentum that the renewable economy is gaining, despite Republican efforts to deny climate science and keep the US from leading the greatest industrial revolution of the new century.
I spoke to veteran journalist Keith Schneider, one of the sharpest and most perceptive observers of the renewable scene globally, as well as Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Andy Hoffman at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
India has an ambition to go free renewable energy. Who wouldn’t????
It’s f***’ing free. Forever….
WHY IN THE WORLD aren’t we here going for free renewable energy????
Why in the world aren’t we all in for FREE renewable energy??
It’s Fu** Fr**
I’ve lived in Texas…there has never been bad weather there that I’ve seen…
Global Warming is real and entirely man made!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hearing the figure of 225 GW of renewables as the goal for India by 2030: These “giga” nubmers sound so impressive when part of a pump piece, but again – let’s put in the context of what’s actually required. We need to install 1 GW of new non-carbon power generation capacity EVERY DAY (that’s AFTER any correction for duty cycle, like the standard 20% for solar or 30-35% for wind)… so I mean 1 GW of continuous power generation…. EVERY SINGLE DAY, just to keep up with the growth in global economy. In other words, that’s what’s needed just to keep global CO2 emissions CONSTANT, at the ~38 Gt of CO2 per year that we have these days. So India’s “lofty” goal of 225 GW of renewables by 2030 is enough to offset a mere 225 DAYS of emissions, and that’s by 2030, 13 years from now.
225 days/13 years = less than 5% of the intervening years emissions during this time, at constant emissions rate going forward.
don’t forget that as we replace, for instance, combustion engines with electric ones, the increased efficiency causes a marked decrease in power needed for delivered service.
100 percent renewable scenarios assume that this effect will be major on a global scale, resulting in very significant savings, even a decline, in global demand.
Don’t forget that SAVINGS are not saved – they are spent to enhance civilization, and that means new energy consumption to create and maintain that expansion. We are not a Spartan species, we are a spend-thrift / max-the-credit-card species. Until that changes in some magical way, these assumptions of increasing efficiency being our salvation are not to be believed. In my pdf on the Thermodynamics of Civilization here – http://www.cabrillo.edu/~rnolthenius/Apowers/A7-K43-Garrett.pdf on slide #29 you’ll see that the energy expended per $ of GDP has declined dramatically since 1950 in the U.S., from 16,000 BTU/$ to only 6,000 BTU/$ in 2014. Energy efficiency is nothing new – we’ve been doing it and doing it well for not just decades, but centuries. Has it saved us? No! On the same slide, our energy expenditures over this same period went UP – by 300%! We don’t tighten belts and enjoy our lowered energy with a static lifestyle, we take our savings and use it as down payment to multiply it before we SPEND the leveraged multiplied savings anew. I’m continually amazed at how this obvious fact is consistently and completely ignored as utterly taboo by policy cheerleaders. It takes scientists who are willing to be unpopular (I’m thinking of Tim Garrett here) to point it out.
Spraking of “enhancing civilization, look back to an article I mentioned over a year ago—-The World Is About To Install 700 Million Air Conditioners. Here’s What That Means For The Climate (Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, May 31, 2016) Some excerpts:
“In just 15 years, urban areas of China went from just a few percentage points of air conditioning penetration to exceeding 100 percent – “i.e. more than one room air conditioner (AC) per urban household,” according to a recent report on the global AC boom by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And air conditioner sales are now increasing in India, Indonesia and Brazil by between 10 and 15 percent per year, the research noted. India, a nation of 1.25 billion people, had just 5 percent air conditioning penetration in the year 2011.
A study last year similarly found “a close relationship between household income and air conditioner adoption, with ownership increasing 2.7 percentage points per $1,000 of annual household income.” For Mexico in particular, it therefore projected a stupendous growth of air conditioning over the 21st century, from 13 percent of homes having it to 71 to 81 percent of homes.”
“We expect that the demand for cooling as economies improve, particularly in hot climates, is going to be an incredible driver of electricity requirements,” U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in an interview.
“Overall, the Berkeley report projects that the world is poised to install 700 million air conditioners by 2030, and 1.6 billion of them by 2050. In terms of electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions, that’s like adding several new countries to the world”.
Thanks DOG, I have a slide on air conditioning among my Presentations, as it occurred to me that the energy cost of air conditioning is something I’d not seen anyone worry about and yet would be significant, being as it’s significantly more expensive to cool a space by X degrees than to heat it by X degrees. Glad someone is putting numbers to it. Good find. I’ll make use of it in my teaching materials.
“! We don’t tighten belts and enjoy our lowered energy with a static lifestyle, we take our savings and use it as down payment to multiply it before we SPEND the leveraged multiplied savings anew.”
Are you arguing that we should demonstrate good proper belt tightening by not allowing poor people to use air conditioners? I don’t think you are, but what the heck is “belt-tightening” supposed to look like?
Yes – global energy use is going to go up! This, I would argue, is a good thing, an example of how free photons and free breezes will work to raise the quality of life for *everyone* – without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
And when we can manufacture an air conditioner with renewable energy, and smelt the metal for it with renewable energy, and move the materials for it with electric vehicles run on 100% renewable energy, it will not raise greenhouse gas levels either.
So even the poorest people in the world will not have to die in heat waves. And the concept of “belt-tightening” goes the same way as “buggy whips”.
this is an often made argument.
The extreme expression of this would be, “I saved so much gas on my commute to work, I think I’ll do it twice.”
Peter, your comment IS exactly what policy people who refuse to grasp the point often give. They’re quoting the original circa 1865 Jevon’s Paradox as he applied it to coal fired steam engines, which simply does not apply. Of COURSE if you save money on gasoline with a more efficient engine you’re not going to go out and take all those savings and spend them on even more driving (except perhaps a bit)! But you WILL spend those savings somewhere. And that’s the point. The Garrett Relation is confirmed in the data – all spending incurs energy expenditure to support it and the expansion of civilization that it enables. That’s why I’ve taken to calling the actual real-world result “Jevon’s Revenge”, and not “paradox”, which is the apples-apples original formulation which does not apply. ANY spending. Really, it’s just not that hard to grasp. The resistance to acknowledging the claim is astounding to me. The insistence on rewriting the claim into something false and never part of the claim just in order to knock it down and indulge the wishful thinking we all want – is astounding. It’s right there in the numbers. Check out the many links to the published research on this, in the .pdf I linked in my earlier comment. I have yet to hear ANYTHING except ad hominems and expressions of disbelief from the doubters. Yet Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s feelings or need for “positivity”. Better look at human nature and take it seriously. This idea that somehow we’ll all violate our millions of years of evolution – the drive and compete, the imperative to grow at all costs and dominate as effectively as possible, are somehow going to dissolve in a Kumbaya moment… is just New Age fantasy as far as history has shown us. There are a few who have, through discipline and practice, used their forebrains and are convinced enough by what they see that they advocate a global pushing back from the Greed Table, but that is a tiny and climate-insignificant minority and I fear will always be. We learn “the Hard Way”, but with climate inertia, it’ll be far too late when we are finally forced into desperation (as Joe Romm terms it) and are actually willing to take the draconian actions of population control, economic growth reversal, together with the turn to renewables. Instead, we’re all like teenagers with our first credit cards, and moping and begging and pleading for Dad (that’s the scientists and engineers) to c’mon and PLEASE put more cash into the past-due account before disaster strikes me. The extent “Dad” does so, he makes the ultimate tragedy worse, on this very finite planet.
One of the most insightful and cogent comments ever made on Crock. Until the GOOD people stop their denial, wishful thinking, and “bright-sidedness” and face the facts and numbers that are staring us in the face, we will never make adequate progress.
And yes, Mother Nature doesn’t give a rodent’s rear end about what we humans consider to be our “exceptionality” and technological skill—-she bats last, and we are making her job easier by ignoring her rules.
In the early days of computers there were unused (or underused) computrons overnight, so we started setting up nonurgent tasks to run as background processes (and backup/maintenance at 2am). Eventually programmers began constructing long-term automated projects that ground away at problems, filling up much of the machines’ idle time.
Likewise, I see applications that can be fitted to the back end of wind turbines or solar plants to use energy when grid demand is low. Private owners of, say, a wind turbine can hook up small autonomous tea cozy factories*, adding yarn and machine oil as needed, providing them with a side crop of energy-enabled goods.
Bananaway…
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*Won’t dwell on the horrific Tea Cozy Shortage of the seventies….
This is where electrolysis-produced hydrogen may come in. Maybe. Its usefulness is that it is a universal fuel at a community level. It can be burned in a furnace to make steam heat that can be piped into people’s homes, or run a tractor or a boat.