Reply #15: Sounds fuzzy to me [View All]

[Dogmudgeon]

First, maybe you can clue me in on the M"W" thing, which you also referred to as a game in an earlier post. My attendance on DU has been hit-and-miss lately, and I certainly missed that one. I try to use identical units in data I post. Since I consider myself to be very weak on math, I try to keep it as simple as I can.

Second, for the BIG question, I detest citation flame wars, so I'll ask nicely:

:loveya: :grouphug: Where did you get those numbers? :grouphug: :loveya:

The EIA still shows the overall proportion and growth of non-nuclear renewables as pitifully small. The world data (also scattered across the EIA website) are similar. Here is a simplified spreadsheet. Notice that it makes no provision for a peak fossil fuel scenario and combines solar, wind, and tidal with hydroelectric, making the figures artificially high and flat for the purposes of analyzing alt-energy production.

The minuscule proportion of alternative energy capacity gives me no joy -- I think it's disgraceful. We should be encouraging the building of nukes, certainly, but we should also be straining at the bit to fund and build non-nuclear renewables, getting as much technology both on and off the grid as we can as fast as we can.

The growth rates for some of these industries are encouraging, but it will still take much of the next decade before solar/wind/tidal power can contribute more than about 10% of our total energy needs. A "Manhattan Project" for energy production would help speed this up, but since it would include nuclear power development, it would probably get enabling legislation killed. You can be sure that such a poison pill is going to be worked into any energy legislation, and that the anti-nuclearists will get some big, fat, well-concealed contributions at the same time. The Powers That Be want a Free Market, and no price is too high for US to pay. As it is, we're at the mercy of a market in the hands of a generation of self-absorbed yuppies who came up during the era of "Greed Is Good". And that's in every industry.

I'm sure that you can find some fortuitous trends in the data. They would make me happy, too. But the overall picture is not hopeful.

And you're barking at the wrong bad guy. I'm not anti-non-nuclear; I'm merely anti-anti-nuclear. My first academic, expert-mentored, peer-reviewed scientific paper was on the development of solar power. So what if it was a fourth grade science report from 1967? It had Extraordinary Evidence AND Falsifiability. And a real live working solar cell of crudely annealed copper that generated close to one one-hundredth of a watt from basking in the full light of the sun.

If I could have increased that output by 36% per year, I could be getting gigawatt yields by now.

--p!
More Bona than Fide.