Energy Sufficiency

[DickDavid]

Energy independence is one of the main agendas of every country. With the world energy demand rising and the supplies decreasing, it has become necessary for the countries to seek alternate sources of energy. The dominant source of energy for the world continues to be the fossil fuels. But the rising prices and the inability to refurnish these sources has made it a precious commodity.

The world energy demand is all set to rise further. It is estimated that by the year 2030, the demand for energy is all set to rise by 40% across the world in the coming years. Owing to this, the investment in the energy sector has gone up. The world pumped in 155 billion dollars into this sector in the last year.

Along with the monetary rewards, security is one aspect that the investors are seeking in these times of recession. World energy research helps the investors in making investment in a secure way by reducing the exposure of the investors to vulnerabilities in the market.

[dynosor]

Apparently, the US is saving its oil for later:

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

[justCNCit]

McCain said publicly during the debate against Obama that he would like to put up 100 new nuclear power plants. The reason for this as stated was millions of jobs in the immediate future, and the eventual goal of putting electric cars on the road.

And they voted for Obama.

[webworld]

The concept of energy sufficiency combines the technical aspects of increasing energy efficiency with the objective notion of ‘having enough’ energy – in terms of sustaining development and improving quality of life, comfort and well being. New technologies alone cannot deliver the carbon cuts demanded by climate science in sufficient time. The cheapest and most rapidly deployable solution is for the developed world to consume less. This starts us down the path of energy equality – a shift of energy use from North to South which is long overdue.

* Climate stability
* Energy security
* Cleaner air
* Lower energy costs
* Fair and just access to energy
* New economic opportunities

Web developer

[fizzissist]

Originally Posted by webworld The concept of energy sufficiency combines the technical aspects of increasing energy efficiency with the objective notion of ‘having enough’ energy – in terms of sustaining development and improving quality of life, comfort and well being. New technologies alone cannot deliver the carbon cuts demanded by climate science in sufficient time. The cheapest and most rapidly deployable solution is for the developed world to consume less. This starts us down the path of energy equality – a shift of energy use from North to South which is long overdue. * Climate stability * Energy security * Cleaner air * Lower energy costs * Fair and just access to energy * New economic opportunities Web developer

Blah, blah, blah.

So let's get this straight. The U.S. should use less energy so that it's ok for India to use more energy? What exactly makes that equitable? What makes it equitable that the U.S. is subject to more stringent pollution laws and controls than India?

Who exactly is PREVENTING "Fair and just access to energy" in India?

"....carbon cuts demanded by climate science.."....Where did you cut and paste this from?

[TomB]

Energy Sufficiency is the really key concept in all the ongoing ‘green’ discussions.

Some phrase it in terms of Global Warming but that is a crock. The earth’s temperature has been declining for the past 10 or 100 thousand years, but the decline is noisy function. Sometimes the slope is sharply positive and sometimes it is sharply negative but on average the maximums and minimums decline. The local oscillations tend to happen for periods of about 100 years so it would be expected that alarmists might make a 175 year sample and say the sky is falling only to discover that we hit a local maximum and the next 10 to 100 years data shows no warming.

Some phrase the problem in terms of oil depletion in 40 or 140 years. That number is valid but is does not mean that oil is all gone then. Typically the fine print in those studies say that peak production will occur then and after that the cost of recovery will increase on a per unit basis.

Some phase the problem in terms of the unfairness of energy usage. The bad Americans and Europeans use all the energy and the developing countries get none. That may be true but my grandmother use to say “The first man up is the best man dressed.” The Americans and Europeans invented the process by which we use energy to provide a high level of standard of living. It India had developed and energy based economy in 1700 they would be the big users today.

Many argue that the solution is energy conservation. If we just use less energy then the problem goes away. That argument seems to lack good footing in that it does not address what happens if we use less energy and the world’s producers restrict supply. It does not address the tradeoff between using more energy and producing more goods versus reducing energy use and production ; thus having nothing to produce high living standards.

The core problem is that we need cheap energy that is producible anywhere and that breaks the strangle hold on the world’s standard of living currently maintained by existing energy producers. All of the talk about green energy sources is focused on this issue even if nobody says it up front. Clean coal is really about how we can use abundant sources of relatively dirty burning coal and somehow capture the pollutants. Wind Energy is about how we can make big machines to capture the energy of the atmosphere. Solar panels and solar mirror farms are the same thing, expensive machines to capture energy. Biofuels are efficient processes yet to be invented to convert solar to energy. Nuclear; a controllable process to make energy with some bothersome and poorly understood pollutants. From the viewpoint of do they attack the existing control oligarchy for energy production they are all good. The next question becomes which is most affordable and how much will it cost? Finally we should get to the conservation question, if energy costs X will it improve things to X+Y (where X & Y are positive numbers) should we spend the X.

In sorting all those questions out we as a society must understand that discovery, invention and understanding occurs because we do something not because we talk about it. To me clean coal seems like building a perpetual motion machine, dig out carbon coal, burn it, burry the carbon oxide and get energy out on the side. I know that over simplifies but it does address the fact that it will take much of the burning energy to sequester and bury the CO2 so just where is the byproduct? Wind and Solar is going to involve a lot of energy to produce the machines. Each wind turbine or solar collector is small but we would need billions of them. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad trade because nobody impartial has published the numbers. Biofuel from corn seems to be a negative energy source, from sugar in Brazil it seems to be positive, from algae people say it can be positive, and from specially engineered bacteria who knows? (Dairy farmers around here seem to get most of their energy from solar and bacteria using the cow’s digestive track as the machine.) Nuclear today has the lowest ‘marginal energy production cost’ (that is the cost of producing an additional kilowatt given an operating plant). But the average cost is higher than for other types of fuel because we as a society have imposed overwhelming nuclear taxes in terms of construction permitting fees, spent fuel disposal costs, system multiple redundancy cost, etc. Again we really don’t know enough to rule it in or out because any discussion of the topic immediately becomes emotional and ill founded. (Some place in the really big thread there is a sequence where I said nuclear is the only viable solution and a responder told me that we could not use nuclear because of proliferation problems. In his objection response he did not address how one separates Pu339 from the Pu240 that both occur in 3 year fuel cycle spent fuel yet that separation is required to produce bomb grade material. Hence I think of the objection as emotional and ill founded.)

I avoid political comment here but this is a political topic. McCain was probably correct in calling for 100 new reactors, I would argue for 1000, but we can’t vote for that aspect of his plan and not get the other characteristics. He lost my vote when as an old man (like me) he picked an idiot as is potential successor. I thought Carter was a good candidate yet he got into office and was a wimp. The worst decision by any president ever was Carter’s decision to terminate nuclear fuel reprocessing because ‘then the US would be leading by example’. We did not know all the reprocessing answers then and we have done no more work since so we now know no more. But much of Europe had started up reprocessing based upon the marginally effective PUREX process that we shut down. Could we have cracked that nut and developed a workable reprocessing process? Maybe but we will not know until we do the research.

If we can address how to produce energy in a manner that makes us beholden to no dictators then we will have put a major piece of learning into the library. Then is the time where discussions of energy production versus energy conservation will be relevant. If I could stay around long enough to settle the wager I would take bets on the idea that inventive humans will make energy so cheap that it is not worth considering its conservation.

Tom

[dynosor]

Your post is not so much about energy as it is about advertising:

Originally Posted by webworld Web developer

I think you are the same person advertising web development under a different user name here:

Originally Posted by rgwebworld software developer

You should use more imaginative names, old chap...

[fizzissist]

Remarkable coincidence........

I love the irony of telling us that we need to reduce our energy consumption, and at the same time advertising a service that depends on energy consumption...

[justCNCit]

When Stephen Harper went to the G8 summit that's exactly what he said - that North America contributes about 10 percent of all green house gas emissions, and the rest comes from developing countries.

A smart move followed by killing the Kyoto protocol which systematically took money away from parts of the economy that still actually produced something.

I would have liked to see the Americans mirror Germany and France in a strong persuit of alternative energy in an effort to rid itself of the oil demon.

IIRC they have the largest percentages of any economy besides Israel thats fed directly from alternative energies. I mean if you want to keep up to date with technology, that's what all the growing countries are doing.

green peace is a side effect and isn't measured anyways.