Thank you, this is much more pleasant than arguing about the past.
living sounds said:
The key is a large smartly-regulated high performance grid and lot's of storage. The wind always blows somewhere, the sun shines most of the time in southern Europe and northern Africa, the tide, biogas, hydroelectricity, geothermics can be relied upon constantly. The other side of the equation is to safe energy, a low-energy house /passive house /zero-energy-house for example isn't unreasonably expensive and will safe money in the long run. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
I am not completely sure how much is involved in a smart grid. It seems we need a smart energy controller where each consumer connects to the grid.
A lot of the discussion here about grid investment is to connect wind farms or solar farms that are rarely close to populated areas that need to energy, to the consumers at significant distance. We also need to hurry up and perfect superconductors, since you can't just email that electricity from Northern Africa to Europe without losses. Finally this infrastructure need to be paid for by consumers who will not see payback for a very long time if fossil fuels remain inexpensive for decades. I do not appreciate artificially inflating energy prices based on political sentiment. A tax is a tax, only good if government is smarter than the people. I know that isn't true here.
Also off-peak management has utility to help utilities and consumers... more about that later.
We're already at 18 % renewable energy in Germany, now investments need to be made for energy storage and the high performance grid. Technology gets better all the time, there have been recent advancements in solar panels and fuel-producing bacteria etc., green energy is getting cheaper and makes more sense economically all the time.
Sometimes it is hard to parse out what is truly economic and what is government picking winners and losers. There was a lot of activity in bio fuels converting things like animal fats to fuel, ignoring that those fats were not discarded before but used in other products (like cosmetics for one). A sub economy has grown up around repurposed used cooking fats, that get the additional economic boost of escaping pump taxes. it is worth reflecting that the original diesel motors were designed to run on simple fuels.
Ethanol from sugar cane may make sense in some regions while ethanol from corn does not. Ethanol from cellulose sounds better yet but in many cases this cellulose was not completely waste but plowed under to be recycled into next years growth. Removing this means the land will require more fertilizer to maintain the same productive output. Harvesting cellulose from trees and the like, get into economy of scale issues since it is inefficient to just harvest yard waste, so we are back to growing stuff to extract energy from that growth.
We need to take a sharp pencil to all of these programs. Of course the natural resources within a given nations boundaries often plays into the decision making, and there are potential political negatives associated with importing energy.
In an ideal world (not ours) energy should always be drawn from the most economic sources wherever they are, and exchanged for fair value in goods from countries that are better equipped to manufacture. A quick glimpse at the news suggest how far we are from that ideal world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Now the government may be forced through public pressure to abandon their plans for prolonged nuclear power, and investments in the new technologies seem possible. Energy is expensive here, but part of it is profits pocketed by the large energy providers (whose quasi-monopolies - ironically - were brought upon us by the left leaning government in power in the early 00s).
In Europe I would also be a little concerned about over reliance on Soviet gas supplies. While they only make money when they sell it to you, they are not beyond pressing whatever advantage may arise.
Nuclear energy using modern breeder reactors are almost renewable, but not quite. I expect them to be phased out and shut down too, when they get eclipsed by something cheaper, cleaner, better, (like Mr. Fusion) but more like 100 years from now than 25-50. Of course I won't be around to be proved wrong.
A huge challenge is the NIMBY (not in my back yard) sentiment, which - again - ironically often comes from the same parties locally who generally support green technology. Sacrifices will have to be made, it's likely to get messy, but with the implications of climate change there isn't a viable alternative in sight. Nuclear fusion isn't much nearer now than it was decades ago.
I am not completely sold with the premise of climate change being of man's making, or that current temperature trends would ever notice our meddling with carbon emissions. Getting energy policy right has more than enough reasons to get it right, and it doesn't need any more advocacy.
In a twist on NIMBY, I think the future direction of smarter energy use will focus even more on smart homes. Not just passive systems to waste less energy, but why shouldn't every exposed roof be a solar collector? It seems there is merit in developing short term (daily) and longer term (seasonal) energy storage for individual homes. In the short term power could be pulled from central distribution off peak, and perhaps pumped back on, to meet peak demand if needed. Seasonal storage could hold the heat we often have too much of in the summer, to warm us in the winter months. Of course there are two problems with this. #1 I don't know how to do it yet, and #2 even when we do figure it out it will take several decades to propagate these changes into our installed base of housing. The good news is energy is still relatively cheap right now, and free market forces can drive these changes that make both dollars and sense, when entrepreneurs think them up.
BTW, Germany does not need to be energy-independent in that 100% of the energy is produced right here, huge solar farms in the Saharan desert (there are concrete plans) could produce a lot of Europes energy and bring prosperity to the region. It needs to be stable politically first, of course.
I'm not sure how much long term prosperity solar farms will bring to the Sahara, but at least it should provide some much needed shade. 8) Also, unless we solve the transmission loss issues there will be some advantage to locate huge energy consuming industries (like steel or aluminum makers) closer to cheap energy sources. However right now solar electricity isn't all that cheap, but it should follow the cost trend it is on (getting cheaper) for a while. There is still room for improvement in solar technology, but many are just waiting and expecting fossil fuels to get more expensive. They will, eventually, but that could also be much later as extraction and exploration technology are also improving dramatically.
JR
