Hi Keith,
There's much truth to what you say about start up costs for many of
these technologies. Yet I've read about few which don't pay off in the
long run. Ocean thermal energy conversion is one that can get off the
ground for about $1Mil.per station, and then costs of producing are
about half that of conventional hydro. Wind power, same thing. Back when
all of our current hydro plants and all other utilities were starting
up, the government created plants owned by the nation, payed for over a
couple of decades, and all was cheap enough. Then, because of countless
stupid government expenditures, mismanagement, poor accountability, not
to mention rising wages, salaries, and land values working in two ways
to complicate matters, governments began to sell off publicly owned
utilities which had already been payed for, then promptly put the sale
money into more stupid ventures. In BC, of late, we had a $2 Billion
Olympics, Ontario got the $2 Billion G8 Summit, and then we all continue
to be taxed for Afghanistan, etc. The point is that covering initial
start up costs from a pool of citizens' taxes was not only the sensible
way for governments to provide public utilities, it was very much one of
their most basic functions. Now they're behaving as if they are a bank
who earned all of the treasury themselves.
Certainly, better technologies are just around the corner. But so much
can be done even with what we now have. More can be done to educate both
residential and factory consumers. New laws for existing technologies to
be implemented, as with many currently introduced in the automobile
industry, need to be passed. Other laws to curb egregious use of fossil
fuels, such as in toy, automobile and furniture manufacturing, should
also be effected.
Perhaps you missed this exemplary posting by Ray a few weeks ago about a
town of 80,000 now using no oil, gas or coal to heat homes or businesses.
*Natalia*
*Why can't capitalism do this?...**...@#**#...............why
is capitalism so incompetent at crucial things like environment and brain
development?
REH
December 10, 2010
Using Waste, Swedish City Cuts Its Fossil Fuel Use
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
KRISTIANSTAD, Sweden - When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from
fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic
accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity.
But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and
surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil,
natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long
frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of
their heat came from fossil fuels.
But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka,
has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the
traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an
epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley
assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale
cookies and pig intestines.
A hulking 10-year-old plant on the outskirts of Kristianstad uses a
biological process to transform the detritus into biogas, a form of methane.
That gas is burned to create heat and electricity, or is refined as a fuel
for cars.
Once the city fathers got into the habit of harnessing power locally, they
saw fuel everywhere: Kristianstad also burns gas emanating from an old
landfill and sewage ponds, as well as wood waste from flooring factories and
tree prunings.
Over the last five years, many European countries have increased their
reliance on renewable energy, from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, because
fossil fuels are expensive on the Continent and their overuse is,
effectively, taxed by the European Union's emissions trading system.
But for many agricultural regions, a crucial component of the renewable
energy mix has become gas extracted from biomass like farm and food waste.
In Germany alone, about 5,000 biogas systems generate power, in many cases
on individual farms.
Kristianstad has gone further, harnessing biogas for an across-the-board
regional energy makeover that has halved its fossil fuel use and reduced the
city's carbon dioxide emissions by one-quarter in the last decade.
"It's a much more secure energy supply - we didn't want to buy oil anymore
from the Middle East or Norway," said Lennart Erfors, the engineer who is
overseeing the transition in this colorful city of 18th-century row houses.
"And it has created jobs in the energy sector."
In the United States, biogas systems are rare. There are now 151 biomass
digesters in the country, most of them small and using only manure,
according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. estimated that
installing such plants would be feasible at about 8,000 farms.
So far in the United States, such projects have been limited by high initial
costs, scant government financing and the lack of a business model. There is
no supply network for moving manure to a centralized plant and no outlet to
sell the biogas generated.
Still, a number of states and companies are considering new investment.
Last month, two California utilities, Southern California Gas and San Diego
Gas& Electric, filed for permission with the state's Public Utilities
Commission to build plants in California to turn organic waste from farms
and gas from water treatment plants into biogas that would feed into the
state's natural-gas pipelines after purification.
Using biogas would help the utilities meet requirements in California and
many other states to generate a portion of their power using renewable
energy within the coming decade.
Both natural gas and biogas create emissions when burned, but far less than
coal and oil do. And unlike natural gas, which is pumped from deep
underground, biogas counts as a renewable energy source: it is made from
biological waste that in many cases would otherwise decompose in farm fields
or landfills and yield no benefit at all, releasing heat-trapping methane
into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
This fall, emissaries from Wisconsin's Bioenergy Initiative toured German
biogas programs to help formulate a plan to develop the industry. "Biogas is
Wisconsin's opportunity fuel," said Gary Radloff, the initiative's Midwest
policy director.
Like Kristianstad, California and Wisconsin produce a bounty of waste from
food processing and dairy farms but an inadequate supply of fossil fuel to
meet their needs. Another plus is that biogas plants can devour vast
quantities of manure that would otherwise pollute the air and could affect
water supplies.
In Kristianstad, old fossil fuel technologies coexist awkwardly alongside
their biomass replacements. The type of tanker truck that used to deliver
heating oil now delivers wood pellets, the major heating fuel in the city's
more remote areas. Across from a bustling Statoil gas station is a modest
new commercial biogas pumping station owned by the renewables company Eon
Energy.
The start-up costs, covered by the city and through Swedish government
grants, have been considerable: the centralized biomass heating system cost
$144 million, including constructing a new incineration plant, laying
networks of pipes, replacing furnaces and installing generators.
But officials say the payback has already been significant: Kristianstad now
spends about $3.2 million each year to heat its municipal buildings rather
than the $7 million it would spend if it still relied on oil and
electricity. It fuels its municipal cars, buses and trucks with biogas fuel,
avoiding the need to purchase nearly half a million gallons of diesel or gas
each year.
The operations at the biogas and heating plants bring in cash, because farms
and factories pay fees to dispose of their waste and the plants sell the
heat, electricity and car fuel they generate.
Kristianstad's energy makeover is rooted in oil price shocks of the 1980s,
when the city could barely afford to heat its schools and hospitals. To save
on fuel consumption, the city began laying heating pipes to form an
underground heating grid - so-called district heating.
Such systems use one or more central furnaces to heat water or produce steam
that is fed into the network. It is far more efficient to pump heat into a
system that can warm an entire city than to heat buildings individually with
boilers.
District heating systems can generate heat from any fuel source, and like
New York City's, Kristianstad's initially relied on fossil fuel. But after
Sweden became the first country to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions
from fossil fuels, in 1991, Kristianstad started looking for substitutes.
By 1993, it was taking in and burning local wood wastes, and in 1999, it
began relying on heat generated from the new biogas plant. Some buildings
that are too remote to be connected to the district heating system have been
fitted with individual furnaces that use tiny pellets that are also made
from wood waste.
Burning wood in this form is more efficient and produces less carbon dioxide
than burning logs does; such heating has given birth to a booming pellet
industry in northern Europe. Government subsidies underwrite purchases of
pellet furnaces by homeowners and businesses; pellet-fueled heat costs half
as much as oil, said Mr. Erfors, the engineer.
Having dispensed with fossil fuels for heating, Kristianstad is moving on to
other challenges. City planners hope that by 2020 total local emissions will
be 40 percent lower than they were in 1990, and that running the city will
require no fossil fuel and produce no emissions at all.
Transportation now accounts for 60 percent of fossil fuel use, so city
planners want drivers to use cars that run on local biogas, which municipal
vehicles already do. That will require increasing production of the fuel.
Kristianstad is looking into building satellite biogas plants for outlying
areas and expanding its network of underground biogas pipes to allow the
construction of more filling stations. At the moment, this is something of a
chicken-and-egg problem: even though biogas fuel costs about 20 percent less
than gasoline, consumers are reluctant to spend $32,000 (about $4,000 more
than for a conventional car) on a biogas or dual-fuel car until they are
certain that the network will keep growing.
"A tank is enough to get you around the region for the day, but do you have
to plan ahead," Martin Risberg, a county engineer, said as he filled a
biogas Volvo.
*
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On 12/29/2010 12:28 AM, Keith Hudson wrote:
The reason why all the alternative energy technologies so far proposed
can never become long-term replacements for fossil fuels is very
simple. They can all produce electricity well enough, but the
equipment that's needed -- wind turbines or nuclear power stations,
for example -- can only be built if much cheaper energy is used.
At present, this is derived from the burning of fossil fuels, either
directly or via orthodox electricity generating stations. If
manufacturers of alternative technologies were to exclusive use the
electricity they themselves are able to make then the cost of making
the materials for their equipment -- concrete, steel and plastics, for
example -- would be anything between 20 and 50 times the present cost.
And this prohibitive cost will still be the same, relatively, whatever
the price of fossil fuels becomes in later decades and centuries.
The manufacturers of alternative technologies know this. They employ
scientists who are well-versed in thermodynamics. But so long as they
can convince the more credulous wing of environmentalists and the
public and, in turn, convince governments that they (or their
customers for electricity) need massive subsidies in the short term,
then they are laughing all the way to the bank. Thus nuclear power
stations cannot be built (or insured) by corporations unless
government supplies a large proportion of the capital cost (and
insurance premiums). Wind turbines can't be used unless governments
subsidize the electricity utilities for the proportion of the
electricity coming from the wind.
And, of course, government politicians (and their top civil servants)
also know this. But so long as they can disguise the subsidies in one
way or another -- which they do -- then they can convince their
electorates that they are being responsible providers of electricity
at cheapest cost.
But if the present alternative technologies (or anything else
requiring expensive mechanical infrastructure) are not the answer,
what is? As fossil fuels decline and become exorbitantly expensive in
the coming decades what can we do? Are there any genuinely long-term
energy technologies?
What if there were technologies which not only supplied energy (say,
in the form of hydrogen) but also built their own mechanical equipment
cheaply at the same time? Well, we have those already. They are called
plants, algae and bacteria. Nature has well-nigh perfected these
technologies for the better part of four billion years. From solar
energy they all produce stored energy in the form of carbohydrates --
the energy being easily released, of course. At the same time they use
solar energy to make their mechanical infrastructure -- proteins,
collagen and cellulose. And at the same time they use built-in
"software" procedures (epigenetics) which instructs, repairs and
replenishes its genes from one generation to the next -- DNA.
If we are not to throw our arms in the air in despair about the
long-term future of our descendents, then we must have faith in those
quirky mutations in our brain genes which enlarged our frontal lobes
and made us scientifically curious. Hundreds, if not thousands, of the
best young minds in the world are now actively seeking that first
biologcal machine that will re-package solar energy much more
economically than any alternative technology so far being tried.
Ultimately it will be scalable in order to replace fossil fuels but
only when world population is much smaller than it is now (a great
deal of land presently used for agriculture will be required). It will
also require vast amounts of freshwater now used by agriculture.
Although research biologists are now very close indeed to that first
practical bacterium which ultimately will give us all the energy we
need, the coming decades are likely to be tumultuous as nations fight
over fossil fuels (hopefully in non-military ways) and as world
population (hopefully voluntarily) shrinks to manageable size.
But we mustn't think that politicians are going to take us there
painlessly by leading us up the "alternative" garden path as they are
doing now.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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