(if not, why are they bothering with 106 comments…? *g*)

Thanks for reading! I’m afraid this post is about as good as you’re going to find from me on the sarcasm to data ratio, and I was fresh out of vitriol for this one. Couldn’t even rustle up vitreous humor.

As this wrting style may not be the apple of your eye, I hope it would not look discourteous or unempathic were I to recommend to you the other writers at Firedoglake. Among their excellent work in a variety of styles I dare to hope you will find the balance of vitriol and/or sarcasm vs facts which is most to your liking.

If it helps, Prof Jacobson’s paper is just full o’ factalicious goodies: the Stanford webiste with a summary of the paper leads to yet more. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and DOE have still more…

Bon appetit!

De gustibus non est disputandum

There’s not even an efficient method to store wind energy.

PLF, I think you raise a valid point about storage of wind energy. Concentrated solar power using molten salts, in contrast, appears to have solved the storage problem.

Prof Jacobson sure thinks well of it:

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass.

(btw, I’ve zero investment or other financial stake in csp or any other energy technology or sector.)

Even the WSJ has a glowing piece about one form of CSP

The company says plants using this method will be able to generate as much as 500 megawatts of peak power or run continuously at 50 megawatts. One megawatt is enough power to supply about 1,000 U.S. households.

“Due to the unique ability of the product to store the energy it captures, this system will function like a conventional hydroelectric power plant, but with several advantages,” said Lee Bailey, managing director of US Renewables Group. “This product is more predictable than water reserves, the supply is free and inexhaustible, and the environmental impact is essentially zero.”

…. According to the company, molten salt loses only about 1% of its heat during a day, making it possible to store energy for long periods of time. The salt is a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate.

The solar-plant technology was first demonstrated by Rocketdyne in the 1980s, using the sun’s heat to convert water into steam to drive generators. In 1994, the project was modified to include the use of molten salt for energy storage. In such a system, the molten salt is pumped through a tower, where it is heated by the sun’s rays. The salt is then stored in insulated containers until it is needed. It is then used to convert water into steam that drives turbines that generate electricity

Pretty neat, don’t you think? *g*

Of course, CSP siting indicates we’ll need new transmission infrastructure: we can build that and repeal the Cheney-era bribes regulations that allow new major transmission corridors to override enviro and local planning laws.

Pelosi was dead against the tax cuts and now look, they’ve bloomed in the elitist Senate to nearly half the bill. The stimulus has become political theater and I’m about as disgusted as I can be.

Whaddaya do, call her? Her peoples always ask if you’re a constituent. screw that, She’s the Speaker of the House and should take calls from anyone.

Could you please in the future write posts that contain more usable information than sarcasm and vitriol?

I know that most of the “commenters” here will agree with whatever you say, no matter what you say, but for those of us here who are actually looking for usable factual information, more would be helpful.

Thanks.

my bad.

Why are nuke worshippers such socialists?

PowerLineFan, meet the free market.

AMORY LOVINS: What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. And this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes climate change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly expensive. The costs have just stood up on end lately. Wall Street Journal recently reported that they’re about two to four times the cost that the industry was talking about just a year ago. And the result of that is that if you buy more nuclear plants, you’re going to get about two to ten times less climate solution per dollar, and you’ll get it about twenty to forty times slower, than if you buy instead the cheaper, faster stuff that is walloping nuclear and coal and gas, all kinds of central plans, in the marketplace.

And those competitors are efficient use of electricity and what’s called micropower, which is both renewables, except big hydro, and making electricity and heat together [cogeneration - kjm], in fact, recent buildings, which takes about half of the money, fuel and carbon of making them separately, as we normally do.

[Nuclear] is grossly uneconomic, which means the nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It’s a very carefully fabricated illusion. And the reason it isn’t happening is there are no buyers. That is, Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

AMORY LOVINS: It’s uneconomic. It costs, for example, about three times as much as wind power, which is booming.

…. 2006, the last full year of data we have, nuclear worldwide added a little bit of capacity, more than all of it from upgrading old plants, because the new ones they built were smaller than the retirements of old plants. So they added 1.4 billion watts. Sounds like a lot. Well, it’s about one big plant’s worth worldwide. That was less than photovoltaics, solar cells added in capacity. It was a tenth what wind power added. It was a thirtieth to a fortieth of what micropower added.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s micropower?

AMORY LOVINS: Again, it’s renewables, other than big hydro, plus co-generating electricity and heat together, usually in industry.

In 2006, micropower, for the first time, produced more electricity worldwide than nuclear did. A sixth of the world’s electricity is now micropower, a third of the new electricity. In a dozen industrial countries, micropower makes anywhere from a sixth to over half of all the electricity elsewhere. This is not a fringe activity anymore.

….Take a look at 2007, in which the US or Spain or China added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. The US added more wind capacity last year than we’ve added coal capacity in the past five years put together.

And renewables, other than big hydro, got last year $71 billion of private capital; nuclear, as usual, got zero. It is only bought by central planners with a draw on the public purse. What does this tell you? I mean, what part of the story does anybody who take markets seriously not get?