An Interesting Comparison of Renewable Power vs other options

[zoneblue]

Upon reflection isnt the thing here that the underlying assumption is that continued and enhanced centralisation, and its associated nicety: growth, are assumed. Thats the real issue with the OPs paper.

Whereas, concomitant with reducing demand, decentralisation is the way forward, at least to those of us planning on having a future.

[mtdoc]

Upon reflection isnt the thing here that the underlying assumption is that continued and enhanced centralisation, and its associated nicety: growth, are assumed. Thats the real issue with the OPs paper.

Whereas, concomitant with reducing demand, decentralisation is the way forward, at least to those of us planning on having a future.

Well said and absolutely true.!

Nuclear is a dead end for lots of reasons.  The real question is what is going to happen to all the on-site Fukushima type waste storage once centralized grid power becomes unreliable 

[laszlo]

There a couple of short thoughts here. First, I  agree storage is the issue for RE technologies. But with the electric vehicle market booming in the US (Tesla etc) it appears the solution for RE storage will come from transportation. So, call to action, drill you electric vehicle makers to generalize the storage technologies to other fields. And two, God Bless Australia and the keen and articulate Aussies we have on this forum.

[DevoDave]

.. and the keen and articulate Aussies we have on this forum...

I resent that!

[Westbranch]

If you missed it on NAWS, this pro solar /alt. energy article,   MYTH BUSTING Germany's Energy Transition

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/take/myth-busting-germanys-energy-transition/1275

[cpm]

I'm a bit less clear on storage being the achillies heel so oft described.

As a for instance, an old colleague is now the shop boss at a family run med sized manufacturing firm
based in Greenfield Mass. They built a new manufacturing facility and moved into it in the last few years.

One thing they did was size the shop according to any rational potential for growth in the timeline foreseen
by the family, and size the PV solar co-generation system accordingly, to provide power greater than what
would be used by the plant over the life of the system.

Since ALL of their product is custom built-to-order, they are able to define timelines for deliverables that actually
make sense, and while they keep regular hours, they do have the flexibility to only work when they are harvesting
sunlight. Now, they don't always do that, but they do it enough that *most* of the time, when the shop is running
full tilt, the power meters are either not moving at all, or feeding back, very seldom drawing from the grid.

This approach required a huge amount of vision, foresight, creativity and not to put too fine a point on it, financial
investment. And a staggering amount of effort.

Re-imagining an industrial base that is more attuned to fabricating stuff that actually fits, and much less attuned to the
'more, faster, cheaper, higher profits for the corner-office bonus package' mindset that currently nearly wholly dominates
industrial manufacturing and civilization is no small task. It's seemingly impossible, but it isn't. Examples exist.

Were society writ large to actually give a @*#&, and look backwards to the many thousands of years of history based on
sun powered systems, and realize that the only 'surplus' energy available is actually that, then there is very little that
couldn't be done, even without the benefit of storage capacity. Going back to the model of 'gather hay while the sun shines'
can be done at pretty much every level.

Look, if right now, today, we, as humans of earth, decided whole scale, to reverse the push to Atomic Power, we're talking
what, , a hundred years? longer? to power down, and decommission *most* of the power stations out there? Further,
to handle and re-process the existing fuel that has been refined to date, we'd have to keep some of these reactors in service
for further out in the future than I can even imagine. We cannot just merely 'undo' all that has been done chasing atoms.
That will take time and technologies not yet even invented, and that -of course- assumes that it's something folks want to do.

So, in the so-called '1st world', a certain level of base load power generation is required. Folks having light to read by, a low
level of electrical power to run that stuff that needs to be run for the good of the people wouldn't be /that hard/ to accommodate.

But with the rising of the sun in the morning, folks off to work, stuff getting done, yeah, that can be designed and shaped to
follow the sun, using nature as a model.

We have high unemployment, we have a seriously overstressed work force in all regards. Slow down, shorten the work day (keeping it to the day), hire more folks to work shorter days to keep the productivity up, align social outputs with social needs, and the slack required to have things like emergency services, blah blah can be handled without further damage to the planet.


It can be done, we have the technology, we just lack the will.

[zoneblue]

Thanks for that cpm, thats really quite apt. On a domestic scale this is exactly how we get by with 1.8kWp solar, no genset, and without discomfort.