Baltic Dry Index. 726 -02 Brent Crude 71.55
Brexit October 31 (maybe.) Never-ending China trade war talks, day 136.
This
Sunday, a repeat of probably the most important energy review of the century so
far. Please take the time to review Mark Mills 24 page scholarly, master class,
on the energy reality facing the world, from the drivel generally presented by
the leftist, often loony, mainstream media.
Please
forward the link to all thinking people you know. Journalists, Members of
Parliament, Congress, Senators, other likeminded bloggers.
If
we allow our energy future to be seriously mis-directed next decade, hundreds
of thousands, possibly millions, of people won’t be lifted out of poverty in
this century, but condemned to an unnecessarily wretched life.
If
we make realistic, achievable energy decisions, the “planet can still be saved,”
whatever that banal left wing phrase can be twisted to mean, but millions of
the planet’s poorest and most disadvantaged will be elevated towards a higher,
and increasingly better standard of living. Not too bad for simply reading and
forwarding a 24 page realistic scientific global energy review.
REPORT | March 2019
THE “NEW ENERGY ECONOMY: AN EXERCISE IN MAGICAL THINKING
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of
Engineering and Applied Science, where he co-directs an Institute on
Manufacturing Science and Innovation. He is also a strategic partner with
Cottonwood Venture Partners (an energy-tech venture fund). Previously, Mills
cofounded Digital Power Capital, a boutique venture fund, and was chairman and
CTO of ICx Technologies, helping take it public in 2007. Mills is a regular
contributor to Forbes.com and is author of Work in the Age of Robots
(2018).
He is also coauthor of The Bottomless
Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out
of Energy (2005). His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, and Real Clear. Mills has appeared as a guest on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS,
and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2016, Mills was named “Energy Writer of
the Year” by the American Energy Society.Earlier, Mills was a technology
advisor for Bank of America Securities and coauthor of the Huber-Mills Digital
Power Report, a tech investment newsletter. He has testified before Congress
and briefed numerous state public-service commissions and legislators. Mills
served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan and subsequently
provided science and technology policy counsel to numerous private-sector
firms, the Department of Energy, and U.S. research laboratories.Early in his
career, Mills was an experimental physicist and development engineer at Bell
Northern Research (Canada’s Bell Labs) and at the RCA David Sarnoff Research
Center on microprocessors, fiber optics, missile guidance, earning several
patents for his work. He holds a degree in physics from Queen’s University in
Ontario, Canada.
---- Executive Summary, A movement has been growing for decades to replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It began with the fear that we were running out of oil.
That fear has since migrated to the belief
that, because of climate change and other environmental concerns, society can
no longer tolerate burning oil, natural gas, and coal—all of which have turned
out to be abundant.
So far, wind, solar, and batteries—the
favored alternatives to hydrocarbons—provide about 2% of the world’s energy and
3% of America’s. Nonetheless, a bold new claim has gained popularity: that
we’re on the cusp of a tech-driven energy revolution that not only can, but
inevitably will, rapidly replace all hydrocarbons.
This “new energy economy” rests on the
belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both
here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power and battery
storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in computing and
communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing efficiency. But this
core analogy glosses over profound differences, grounded in physics, between
systems that produce energy and those that produce information.
In the world of people, cars, planes, and
factories, increases in consumption, speed, or carrying capacity cause hardware
to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of
steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature
whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and
thermodynamics—not clever software.
This paper highlights the physics of
energy to illustrate why there is no possibility that the world is
undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a “new energy economy.”
Scientists have yet to discover, and entrepreneurs
have yet to invent, anything as remarkable as hydrocarbons in terms of the combination of low-cost,
high-energy density, stability, safety, and portability. In practical terms,
this means that spending $1
million on utility-scale wind turbines, or solar panels will each, over 30
years of operation, produce
about 50 million kilowatt-hours (kWh)—while an equivalent $1 million spent on a
shale rig produces enough
natural gas over 30 years to generate over 300 million kWh.
Solar technologies have improved greatly and will
continue to become cheaper and more efficient. But the era of 10-fold gains is over. The physics boundary
for silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells, the Shockley-Queisser Limit, is a maximum conversion of 34% of photons into
electrons; the best commercial PV technology today exceeds 26%.
Wind power technology has also improved greatly, but
here, too, no 10-fold gains are left. The physics boundary for a wind turbine, the Betz Limit, is a
maximum capture of 60% of kinetic energy in moving air; commercial turbines today exceed 40%.
The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s
largest battery factory, could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would
require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand. Meanwhile,
50–100 pounds of materials are mined, moved, and processed for every pound of battery produced.
More. Much, much more.
Thank you, if you can help to raise our critical energy debate.
No comments:
Post a Comment