Saturday, February 18, 2017

Heating with electricity much less efficient

Plans to use renewables generally means using electricity as distribution when talking about large scale application. However just switching from coal to electricity for heat is already a significant loss of energy.

The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion | Our Finite World: "The underlying problem is that burning coal in a power plant produces a better, but more expensive, product. If this electricity is used for a process that coal cannot perform directly, such as allowing a new automobile production plant, then this higher cost is easily  absorbed by the economy. But if this higher-cost product simply provides a previously available service (heating) in a more expensive manner, it becomes a difficult cost for the economy to “digest.” It becomes a very expensive fix for China’s smog problem. It should be noted that this change works in the wrong direction from a CO2 perspective, because ultimately, more coal must be burned for heating because of the inefficiency of converting coal to electricity, and then using that electricity for heating."

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Renewable society would spend 3 times as much for energy

Questioning “Our Renewable Future” – Resilience: "It would obviously be impossible to pay out anything like 29% of GDP for energy. Hall and Klitgaard (2014) find that when energy expenditure remains above about 5.5% of US GDP for some time recession occurs. In other words far lower assumptions than have been made in this exercise would have to be true before the costs arrived at could be affordable. And all this is for Australia, which has possibly the most favourable renewable energy conditions in the inhabited world. "
There are a lot of problems with renewables.
  • Jevons (whole human race must be in on it)
  • They depend on fossil fuel
  • They use up declining resources
  • Some pollute
  • They promote growth 
  • They cost more
  • They distract from the need for degrowth

Saturday, February 4, 2017

The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion

Our Finite World: "Unfortunately, a transition to such a short list of fuels can’t really work. These are a few of the problems we encounter:"


Friday, February 3, 2017

PM Pollution from electric cars no better than internal combustion cars

PM Pollution from electric cars no better than internal combustion cars: "Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Nonexhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic"

More bad news about electric cars

Free Transit Library: "Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Nonexhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic"