A report on an IEEE Spectrum article at Watts Up With That. I’m not going to discuss the article. It speaks for itself.
What I am going to do is to reprise a comment that I think is critical for understanding energy in all its forms.
TYoke
November 22, 2014 at 8:49 pm“losing $ on each sale and making it up with volume” is correct.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about energy. We would make better choices if it were more widely understood that no one “consumes” energy. By the 1st law of thermodynamics, energy is neither created nor destroyed. What we’re actually consuming is orderliness, or negative entropy, or neg-entropy. The most central cost analysis relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy.
Understanding neg-entropy is important because different energy sources do not have the same negentropy density by any means. In particular, the renewables such as wind, solar, wave etc. are typically are far more dis-ordered at the source. This makes it intrinsically very difficult to cost effectively harvest renewable energy.
In fact, this whole question has deep similarities with the age old attempt to make a perpetual motion machine. In both cases, there is a fundamental underestimation of the centrality of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
West’s last comment is also on target. The energy source that has far and away the highest neg-entropy is nuclear. In the 1950s the prediction was that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter”, and on a thermodynamic basis that should still be true. The bulk of the cost of nuclear power lies in satisfying safety and environmental regulations.
Thermodynamics is hard. It washed out about 1/2 my class at Naval Nuclear Power School. That is how the “renewable” snake oil got sold. The general public knows nothing about entropy and the politicians know less. And the engineers who touted the scam? Well you CAN do the impossible with enough free government money.
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8 responses to “Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’”
It also helps to understand that the word “renewable” is a misnomer also. Solar, wind and wave energy are manifestations of currently arriving energy from the sun. The sun is depleting its mass as it generates this energy stream. As such, nothing is being “renewed” and just the opposite is occurring. The sun’s natural fusion reactor will someday run out of fuel.
TomA,
I have been trying for years to get a definition of “sustainable”. No luck.
Definition of “sustainable”: A masturbation fantasy for liberals. Also see HOV lane.
I’d call all these alternative energy sources snake oil, but you cold probably gain more energy from burning the real thing than from solar, wind, etc.
The one I find really annoying is ocean thermal. Heat engines run on temperature difference, not total amount of heat. A few degrees difference between upper and lower ocean just doesn’t cut it, no matter how many billion gallons of ocean you have.
I agree thermo is a difficult course, but it shouldn’t be all that hard to pound some basics into the popular perception. Or at least for the remaining few who don’t expect something from nothing.
Civilizations run on energy. Giving up on proven sources of energy is giving up on civilization.
How difficult is thermo, anyway? effing Jimmuh Carter went to Navy Nuke School.
I’ve seen reports that the average solar panel takes more energy to produce than it will deliver over its life. Which might make sense if it’s used in some remote location with no other power source available, but not as a replacement for a primary power source.
Man Mountain Molehill
How difficult is thermo, anyway? effing Jimmuh Carter went to Navy Nuke School.
Most of us who have taken thermo courses have found it difficult. I did.
Thermodynamics is hard. It washed out about 1/2 my class at Naval Nuclear Power School.
25 people (nuclear engineers) took the challenge test to try and avoid having to take the 2 week refresher course. Only 2 of us (me included) passed. The other 23 had to retake it. I will admit to studying for a couple of days beforehand because it had been a challenging course in school and I had no illusions about being able to successfully pass the challenge after a couple of years between my class and the test.
An engineering Ph.D. will generally take thermo twice- undergrad and grad school. I have heard an engineering prof say that you don’t understand thermo until your third encounter with it- as a thermo teacher.
“you don’t understand thermo until your third encounter with it- as a thermo teacher.”
Sounds equally profound for almost any field. “You don’t really understand Finnegan’s Wake until your third encounter with it as a teacher”
The Dover edition of the Enrico Fermi thermo text is a good read for cheap, btw.
I still claim the basics can be made easily understandable. You can’t get more energy out of something than you put in. Which means you can’t expect to put a windmill on the hood of an electric car and use it to charge the battery. That’s very far from something like determining the number of available states vs occupied ones in a quantum system, but so what? Even a cartoon version is better than nothing if it’s at least approimately correct.