Why the Green Energy Transition Won’t Happen

kbd512 · 2023-02-22 11:59:13

We need to have a conversation about what solutions can work at scales and over timeframes that actually matter, with respect to "green energy" technology, and which solutions actually make the problems with increased CO2 emissions worse.

Peter Zeihan's insight into climate change.

We have never, in any decade in human history, doubled the amount of a mainline material production in 10 years. - Peter Zeihan

We are so woefully short of both production and production capacity of "green energy" materials, that it's not even funny. There is no break-neck pace of new capital investments into the mining sector.

If we want this to happen at all, then we will have to be very pragmatic about which technologies are feasible from a material production standpoint, and which have little to no chance of happening at all.

For electric vehicles to be "carbon neutral", they need to be primarily made using non-fossil fuel sources, and they need to be primarily recharged using non-fossil fuel sources. If they are not, then they're worse for CO2 emissions than gasoline and diesel.

For photovoltaics, the amount of metal to make them all is astonishing. The amount of Silver and Copper and Aluminum is jaw-dropping. In spite of how cheap they've become, deploying enough of them to matter is becoming infeasible for want of Silver and Copper. I have them on my own home, along with two Tesla Power Walls, and I can attest to the expense and difficulties of making them work properly. They do work, though, but I notice that we're the only house across many many neighborhoods and none of my Democrat acquaintances have them because they are expensive and it's better to bash other people or buy a fancy electric car than it is to start with the fundamentals of powering a home using wind and solar.

For wind turbines, these are some of the most fossil-fuel intensive objects we make. The blades of a singular decently-sized wind farm that can power a large town or small city contains more plastic than all the shopping bags in America. Their towers are high-grade steel and their bases are substantial steel-reinforced concrete pads that anchor them to the ground.

If we are going to transition to anything except back to burning coal and wood, then we need solutions that actually work from a basic math perspective. This means respecting material supply constraints and production capacity constraints, this means choosing more pragmatic ways to achieve the very desirable end goal of less over-reliance on fossil fuels, this means choosing when and where to pursue alternative energy generating strategies, and oh yes, this means transforming unreliable energy (all wind turbines and photovoltaics qualify) into reliable energy from the source (using heat engines that source their power from the Sun, geothermal sources, or nuclear thermal sources). There is nothing wrong with having aspirational goals, but there's something deeply disturbing about saying you believe in science while ignoring basic math!

Some of us would like something better than fossil fuels, but we're willing to be far more diplomatic about what practical solutions are and how they can be applied. When the Earth gives you lemons, you don't complain about it or pretend that you weren't given lemons, you acknowledge reality and then you make lemonade!

Furthermore, this has nothing to do with the "evils of capitalism". All that green energy tech came from capitalism, not socialism. If we were all socialists, then we'd still be burning wood and coal if we had any, ruining the environment the way the communists always do, and if you had a car at all, then it would be belching a trail of smoke a mile long. The communists have created nothing of lasting value to modern society. They did not invent anything except pervasive poverty and mass death where there was no definable reason for such conditions to exist. Their ideology is every bit as religious in nature as Catholicism or Judaism or Islamism.

This is one aspect of modernity where no "isms" will help us, unless it's basic mathism. All other "isms" are anathema to mathism. Mathism is the ideology that says all other aspects your ideology, from communism to environmentalism to futurism, don't amount to a hill of beans if it runs afoul of basic math.

The basic math on this issue is crystal clear now. There is not enough metals mining in refining capacity in the world, nor any relevant new capital and labor investments into the same, to support a transition to anything except heat engines that use any otherwise unreliable energy sources like solar, to immediately produce more reliable forms of energy. Even if commercial fusion happens within the next 10 years, it changes nothing of the basic math. Said reactors won't be powering anyone's car or even the giant mining trucks. They might be capable of powering very large cargo ships, similar to how a fission reactor can do that today. The military uses nuclear power, but the commercial shipping industry does not.

There are no silver bullets to be had here. We need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, but we need to start recycling the CO2 from combustion engines and to stop extracting new hydrocarbons, instead transitioning to fuel synthesis, which is long term sustainable, and vastly more sustainable than trying to build enough electro-chemical batteries to power every moving machine.

Improved batteries will certainly have their place, and some promising new technologies like Sodium-ion are finally seeing commercial production, but trying to power entire cities using batteries is foolish in the extreme.

Our new society needs to be run on the "planned foreverance" principle (yes, I made up that term, but the concept is real enough), which differs from the "planned obsolescence" principle by asserting that a machine made once, with quality and durability and from readily recyclable materials, is preferable to constantly making new machines with marginal or entirely non-existent efficiency improvements which require more and more energy input over time. Technology can't save you from a consumption problem. The "new stuff" has to be built to replace the "old stuff", and there's nothing about the new stuff that is more durable or better quality or more recyclable than the "old stuff". It has improved cosmetics, but cosmetics alone are not a substitute for the qualities that make machines more sustainable in the long term.

We need to start thinking in terms of human lifetimes. A machine that only lasts for a few years is an extravagant waste of energy / labor / money that we can no longer afford, either individually or as a society or humanity as a whole. Rampant and thoughtless consumerism is not a virtue, in the same way that hating on your neighbor over petty differences in not virtuous. We will approach this problem as, "we built this machine to do X", we will maintain it for a human lifetime unless that becomes untenable, and we designed it to last for a human lifetime. If our children come up with something that is night-and-day better, and still in keeping with the "planned foreverance" principle, then they have carte blanche to change or replace it. During lifetimes, shrewd decisions about what to replace and why, need to be made by people who are dispassionate about the subject at hand, and only seek to replace that which simply does not work well enough.

If we can live by certain guiding principles like this, then we can still have little bits and pieces of incredibly advanced computer technology that make life more fun and interesting, but we must never let the latest technology dictate our lives to us. We must remain masters of our own technology, or it will enslave us to it. That's not a prediction, it's a certainty.

More than half of the people no longer have any faint idea of where their food and drink comes from, how energy is made, how the machines they use everyday operate at a basic level, nor are they able to repair them. We need to fix that problem now. Sustainability means the common man or woman can own, use, and repair most of the machines they use every day, such that building new machines is only required following catastrophic failures of the existing machines. Beyond population growth, most of the increased energy demands placed upon our energy supplies stem from the "new stuff is better stuff" mentality. If only that were true from a "big picture" standpoint.

At a macro level, we need to step back and ask ourselves what kind of world we're leaving to our children. Will it be transformed into something utterly unrecognizable to anyone who lived a few decades ago, because we went mad trying to fit round pegs into square holes, or will we accept our own technological limitations and stop mindlessly trying to transform large swaths of this planet to satiate our appetite for "new stuff" that is not meaningfully different or better than the "old stuff". As of right now, our world is primarily characterized by a lack of economic growth directly tied to energy starvation relative to pre-1980s levels (the last period of real growth, which was before I was even born), and what little energy we do have is being sunk into increasingly bizarre vanity projects that won't meaningfully improve our lives or the lives of our children. They can't, because they're artifacts of energy abundance levels that do not exist. Some measure of introspection is required to understand where we've been, where we are right now, and where we're headed. Energy starvation for billions of people is social and economic and ecological suicide.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2023-02-22 12:09:26

I take 'Peter Zeihan' with a pinch of salt, not that he's wrong but he's not always right either. For example on any conversation on 'Italy' I pretty much ignore everything he says or writes or any video he makes on Italy, I'm not sure what has his brain in a twist and maybe he met some guy at a bar who he wanted to be his boyfriend that dude said something bad to him and he's had issues with 'Italians' ever since. However 'Peter Zeihan' himself has stated himself that AI robot farming type tech will soon increase yield by 55 + or 60 % + %? ...and if food, tree can be made into fuel or or building, which means he himself has also contradicted his own statement on 'material' production in 10 years.

Don't take this as some Political Luddite Green position, the world moves forward and just because stuff can be grown does not mean the power of Nuclear or 'Cold Fusion' research should be neglected.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-02-22 19:30:25)

Mars_B4_Moon · 2023-02-22 12:35:14

kbd512 wrote:

We need to start thinking in terms of human lifetimes.

Some people think long and others think short in the now. At least every week for almost as long as I remember I have always dreamed long or tried to think in human lifetime and longer, maybe it was knowing Dinosaurs walked the Earth and died off or that our Sun will one day expand eat Venus and scorch the Earth or watching scifi and reading books of fantasy and science fiction. I'm not sure what makes some think in the now and some look far away to the future or far into the past. Perhaps culturally chasing the next high the constant 2 year election cycle does not help. When people get to Mars a different Sheriff Government Official and Town Mayor and Robot-man will maybe one day help run the show and Martian year 1.88 Earth years. A Presidency of 4 years that gets elected twice that becomes 15 years...did America think that long when it thought about bringing Democracy to rioting jihadis of Afghanistan, maybe not, but maybe the Taliban thought about how much blood they would pay to keep Afghanistan islamist and they also thought and even in their own Stone-Age Cultural ways planned in the span of human lifetimes.The strengths of America are its freedom, its ability to re-invent itself, its innovation. However if you look at long term Urban Planning even a poorer Spain looks far better at certain projects for example at installing a high speed rail system to move its people across all of Spain. A country with 7-year terms, or 6 year or 5 year would not be the USA of today, a country with a Dictator or Monarchy would not be the United States of America. However maybe having someone in the background with longer influence for a longer period of time would have positive influence on political constitutional policy and good influence on industry and companies. I understand there are already groups like the Hoover Institution, Ford Foundation that hoped to advance America positively or promote the USA's Liberty but I feel some of these groups get corrupted over time. Maybe there could be a Deputy or Federal Minister non partisan position in place where a guy or girl that two main parties agreed on would help influence things for the good, some sort of Secretary of the US Constitution or whatever position but it would not impact negative on parties it would not be be royal, he would not sell out America and outsource and he / she would not be corrupt or not be regal like a Chief Executive of a company, it could be a simple title like 'Speaker of the Union' but not political, they only make a big tv broadcast speed once every 2 years and used to add positive visionary energy to the United States. Spain can boast better trains but they have lots and lots of problems, Communists, Fascists and Franco ruling up until 1975 as a dictator. Maybe there is no perfect answer, maybe having a cultural connection to a Monarchy like Japan helped them build their car companies or having Three 4-year terms helps you plan 'longer' as a people but it will also cost your democracy.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-02-22 13:30:42)

Terraformer · 2023-02-22 13:08:10

>the "planned foreverance" principle (yes, I made up that term, but the concept is real enough)

Vinay Gupta (Mattereum guy, amongst other things) calls this concept "permafacture". As in, permanent manufacture -- you plan for things to last.

One thing that is appealing about the vision you're sketching out in these posts is that it is *less* complex than the current infrastructure we use, not more. When complexity has significant costs of its own that's a very important thing. Leaving aside skills and IQ... The stuff you're talking about doesn't need someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering to make it work, so there are a lot more people available who can make it. It would be a step back in complexity, which when you've reached the inflection point and aren't just getting diminishing returns from complexity but actually degrading your capacity is what you need to do. Could be kept working by a single city's workforce using, what, interwar technology?

I have no idea what -punk you'd call this. Inspires me though. It's like, solarpunk if you put the dieselpunk mechanics in charge...

Calliban · 2023-02-22 16:06:53

Kbd512, a worthwhile thread I think. I will attempt to make meaningful contributions in the days ahead.

This presentation by mining expert Simon Michaux discusses the amount of minerals needed to produce just 1 generation of green tech that replaces fossil fuels in energy and transportation. For some important elements, we would need 10-100x more resources than are known to exist, to produce just 1 generation of infrastructure. Clearly, that isn't going to be workable as a solution to our problems.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc

SpaceNut · 2023-02-22 19:25:50

To get the frame correct on green means making use of what we got from the sun and for the scale of time that it formed.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation

The formation of oil was significant to form millions of years ago in which 70% of oil deposits existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).

That said we are short sighted to compare time scales for the energy of what we are creating as being equal.

Much like solar we are looking at an exposure window of energy to be collected within. Sure, we know approximate the amount on a clear day but it's not always clear so again we are on the wrong time to volume scale to be able to conclude efficiency of creation. It's that conversion of living component that slowly began and builds up with time. With that as a comparison what we are doing is following that same prediction of history since it's from the same sources.

Edit.

The point is if we are using the sun for the input for the past and now for the future all we are then only looking at efficiency of collection for how long to the same volume of stored product. With the only difference between oil and synthetic oil is the later has less carbon content.

While we know that nuclear is part of a higher energy ramp it is not a comparable source for what create the oil of the past with the same input being the same for the future.

.

tahanson43206 · 2023-02-22 19:39:07

So SpaceNut ... in post #6 you seem to be saying it will take millions of years to convert to the "Green Energy" state (whatever that may be).

(th)

kbd512 · 2023-02-22 21:11:06

I've already watched that presentation from Dr. Michaux. There's a French Professor of Engineering, named Jean-Marc Jancovici, who told the French government back in 2013, most of what I've said on this topic, especially this farcical idea that there is such a thing as "clean energy".

French engineer schools politicians on the physics of energy

Thus, there is no such thing as "clean" energy. Since energy means to transform and transformation can not by definition ever be clean because being clean means leaving things in the state they were in before you arrived. - Jean-Marc Jancovici

Stated differently, without fossil fuel, we would require 200 planet Earth clones on each of which 7 billion people would drudge all day. That’s what would be required for us to live the way we currently do. - Jean-Marc Jancovici

I haven't come up with anything fundamentally new. I've merely put some puzzle pieces together in a way that ordinary people can understand and act on the information they've been given. I'm otherwise unremarkable. Almost anyone could figure this out over time if they were truly interested, but most people aren't. I did reasonably well in school because I was genuinely interested in learning for sake of knowledge, but not a day goes by that I don't learn a little bit more about aspects of the world that happen to interest me, mainly how technology / labor / energy are applied to solve problems. You could call this the "work smarter, not harder" principle, or the"if you can't or won't learn anything new, then unless you fancy being a robot going through the motions, then you might as well be dead" principle.

I know how to count and I'm not ideological when it comes to where my energy comes from. I don't have a dog in that fight. I want my energy to be reliable, affordable, and available on-demand. I won't ask for more than that. If it can be made cleaner using some other process which provides a like-kind product for reasonable cost, then that's a very desirable added bonus. I do not hold the false belief that my energy is or ever will be completely clean, or that there's some magical new technology that will make it clean. I can, however, figure out when something isn't working as advertised. That skill is not at all unique to me. A lot of other people know that something is wrong, and that our societies are not operating as if there's a "bigger picture" to take in.

More and more technology and complexity aren't solving our energy problems, because they're basic math and engineering problems. Moore's Law applies to microchips and their number crunching capacity, not photovoltaics or wind turbines or batteries. You don't need an engineering degree to figure out that a widget that lasts for a few years before it has to be replaced, is probably more expensive in the long term than one which lasts for decades, because the replacement widget requires more energy and labor to make.

The energy losses, essentially exergy destruction, from "planned obsolescence" are now wildly in excess of the energy we'd consume if we were all driving Ford Model Ts, as superficially inefficient as those seemed. We make engines with vastly more horsepower now, but the national average fuel economy is nearly identical to what it was when the first mass-produced car was created by Henry Ford. It's about 3mpg better overall (21mpg for the Model T vs 24.2mpg national average now). Modern engines are better in every way except how much they consume, on average, and now there's a car for every adult in America. We definitely "advanced" since the Model T was invented, but to where? We added a lot more horsepower and a lot more cars to the roads. We did not take our newly found knowledge and endeavor to make 45mpg Model T Fords, despite the fact that some random redneck who goes by "Thunderhead289" on YouTube figured out that a Ford 302 V8 with a lawn mower carb made his beat up 70s era jalopy / daily driver about twice as efficient as the Model T, with about 5X more rear wheel horsepower to boot, despite using the same basic engine technology (carburetor and distributor) on top of an all cast Iron engine. He choked it off, plain and simple. The thing will still go faster than 75mph on the highway, which is the maximum legal highway speed limit in nearly every part of America. How much power do you need?

There's also an intrinsic valuation statement at work here, with respect to how we approach purchasing decisions. We're outright stating that we don't value quality, but will pay heavily for wild excess despite almost no legal way to even use it. All the advanced computerized tools we now have at our disposal are leading to inferior quality for sake of short-term gain, or analysis paralysis instead of better / faster solutions. I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that more engineering effort was devoted to the electronics gadgets or cup holder placement in a vehicle than making the things reliable and maintainable cars. Well... This wild excess is finally biting us in our rear ends. The vehicles get older and older every year, because nobody can afford to buy a new one. If we're insistent on treating very energy-intensive products as disposable appliances, then it was better to make them as simple and easily recyclable as possible. That is very clearly not what we did.

We keep searching for a new "miracle technology" that will solve all of our problems, without accepting that none of the prior miracle technologies actually replaced what came before them. All new technology and all new energy sources are additive in nature. Technology improvement, which is unbelievably expensive, is a byproduct of energy abundance, not scarcity. There are almost no instances where a new technology has entirely replaced what came before it. Lots of farmers still use farm animals or human muscle power to work fields, for example. We have AI-enabled supercomputers, but we still use certain types of stone tools. Do chefs actually require AI-enabled computerized mortars and pestles, or was stopping at the basic stone-based tool technology set for a mortar and pestle sufficient for their next culinary masterpiece? As Terraformer noted, we've already reached a point of diminishing returns with new technology.

When we used people power, one farmer could feed himself and maybe one other person, probably his own children. A farm animal could help feed a few more, but for the most part, that was a subsistence existence. There's an example where technology really did dramatically and radically improve productivity. The combine-harvester basically ended slavery, because it made the practice uneconomical.

Over an 8-hour work shift, an average, healthy, well-fed and motivated manual laborer may sustain an output of around 75 watts of power.

A single 600hp / 450kW John Deere combine-harvester is roughly equal to having 6,000 slaves working for you, except that you feed the machine, 2,143lbs of diesel fuel to work for 8 hours. To keep those 6,000 slaves operating, you need to feed them at least 14,000,000Wh worth of food. To feed the machine, you supply 11,275,200Wh of diesel fuel. Notice how remarkably similar those figures are. Equal energy for equal work. Physics doesn't make exceptions for ideological beliefs. The machine can do the work of 6,000 men, probably more if we account for the fact that it requires no rest breaks for water and food. When we account for the fact that the machine consumes nothing when it's not in operation, and that the machine can continue functioning day after day, year after year, with "rest breaks" of a few days every 10 years for an engine and transmission rebuild, we can see how utterly unsustainable slavery would be by way of comparison.

If we had 6,000 extra people to spare, then we could harvest a lot more food and cotton by having them repair those combine-harvesters than having them toil away in the fields. In fact, it would be altogether pointless to do that. The only reason to do something so silly was to maintain an artificial scarcity economy that benefited the wealthiest in society, despite the fact that they'd become unimaginably wealthier by freeing their slaves and purchasing combine-harvesters instead.

As it pertains to inappropriate uses of technology, we have horridly over-complicated simple tasks by trying to find ways to insert electricity and computers where they don't belong. A window or door handle does not need to be motorized, let alone computerized. It would be equally inappropriate for me to purchase a 20hp chainsaw to trim branches only a little bigger than what a pair of lopping shears can cut. I can certainly do it if I have the money, but most people can think of better uses for their money. Similarly, I can think of better uses for my money than buying a new car, a car that's double to triple the price of comparable models, every few years. That's insane. Energy and the proxy for energy transforming raw materials into useful products or services, which we call "money", has better uses. Continuing to incinerate perfectly good money on this failed economic principle of "planned obsolescence", is yet another aspect of the sunk cost fallacy mixed with mindless rampant consumerism that has utterly failed to lead to better outcomes for the majority versus the privileged minority.

There are very few fundamentally "new" things to come along in my lifetime. Cellular telephones and AI would be examples of "fundamentally new things" that basically didn't exist at all when I was a child, outside of sci-fi entertainment movies. Beyond that, pretty much everything else we have today, we still had a comparable version of it when I was growing up. That should tell everyone how rare fundamentally new things truly are. You might see one or two completely new inventions per lifetime, or perhaps none at all.

To reverse these unsustainable trends, we will go "Back to the Future". Everything old is new again. We will use machines we can understand and repair, we will use judicious dashes of incredible new technology where it makes the most sense, and we will refrain from following the current trend of putting technology in places where it has no real reason to exist. We're not going "back in time", we're going "back to rationality" about how energy and money are spent. In the past, energy scarcity forced us to adhere to more rational decision making. We did not believe that computer programs were acceptable substitutes for real expertise and intelligence, because we knew that a computer program could only ever be the sum of its programming and operating environment. The moment it's exposed to something it doesn't understand, the response is unpredictable at best.

This is not the same as, "business as usual". We are making real and substantive changes, but ones that we can all live with, which means ones that don't require turning the entire planet into a giant strip mine. I can think of few futures less sustainable or ecologically friendly than that. Whenever someone can't answer, "When that machine finally breaks, what are you going to do to replace it?", that's a sign that their thinking is all about perceived short-term gain, with no real thought given to the future. We don't need platitudes and flowery assertions, we need recognition that tomorrow is still coming.

You can position yourself to do something productive or you can toil away without much to show for your efforts, much like the slaves did / still do (the practice never entirely ended, even after nuclear reactors and moon rockets were invented). Your cell phones and solar panels and cheap military weapons are all still made by what is effectively or actual slave labor. Net energy growth, therefore economic growth, ended in the 1980s because we did not commercialize the synthesis of storable liquid hydrocarbon fuels. We blew mad money on batteries and photovoltaics and wind turbines instead. It made environmentalists and Hollyweird socialites feel morally superior because they drove more expensive cars, but has done little else to positively affect living conditions. Funny enough, it still subjected them to energy poverty, because now the government won't let you charge your car. It was always and only about control, not the improvement of society. A quick listen to any members of the Sierra Club will cement that concept in the mind of anyone who is even modestly rational and able to comprehend plain language.

Environmentalism is akin to a superconducting magnet for every type of oddball looking for a way to share their most bizarre beliefs about the natural world and personality quirks with people who are equally nutty and irrational. They quit practicing Christianity, but not religion as a concept. They invented their own religion as a way to feel like they belonged to a bigger group that accepted them, because anything and everything terrifies them and they're at least smart enough to know that they don't know how to make rational decisions for themselves, hence why they need socialism to come and remove all choice and thus personal responsibility. Basically, they want to be absolved of their sins and they want "god" (government) to take over. Our Democrat Party was ready and waiting to take advantage of them, because pitting people against each other so they can continue to rob us blind is their game, pretty much all of it. On top of that, our Republican Party was ready and waiting to do the same thing, but from the other side of irrational reaction to and of fearful religious people.

Conflating activity with accomplishment is one of the greatest issues with humanity. Every person on this planet having clean drinking water and food would be an accomplishment. Whether the power was generated by a gasoline engine or a solar panel is an activity. I worry far more about keeping people alive than fixating on how we did it. Actually keeping them alive is what matters the most.

kbd512 · 2023-02-22 23:29:03

Mars_B4_Moon,

It's a function of where the money is going. It's clearly not going into mining, so there won't be "green energy", as the green energy enthusiasts define it, without a LOT more metal. All this stuff is a matter of priorities and selecting options that can work without requiring technologies that don't exist or performance never demonstrated in the past.

However maybe having someone in the background with longer influence for a longer period of time would have positive influence on political constitutional policy and good influence on industry and companies.

This is what those of us on the political right call "the deep state" and "monied special interests". They have little to no discernible positive effect on American prosperity or culture. They're very fickle and very self-centered. So, I'll have to disagree on this point.

We have light rail here in Houston, but few people use it because it's inconvenient, there are people on it who are rude or violent or probably belong in an insane asylum, and it lacks the flexibility of cars. I'm not disputing that it's more efficient, but we don't use rail as much because America matured with a lot more energy prosperity than most European countries, distances are vast, and in terms of population, Spain is larger than California but generates less than half of California's GDP. We'd have to completely wreck large parts of our existing cities to install more train tracks, and then you still have to have giant parking lots to ride the trains.

America made the mistake of thinking that people in the Middle East wanted freedom and democracy, similar to what we have, with their own cultural accommodations. That's not what they wanted. They only wanted a dictatorship that they agree with. The ones who don't want that flee to America or Europe. It's easy to understand why we made that mistake. The Europeans wanted freedom from nazi Germany, later from communist Russia, the South Vietnamese wanted their freedom from communism, the South Koreans wanted freedom from communism. We are forever fighting the last war we engaged in.

True freedom is more rare and exceptional than any other competing form of governance. Vanishingly few countries are remotely like America. That's why America is called "an experiment in freedom and self-governance".

Try criticizing the Queen of England and see where you end up. The British describe themselves as subjects of Her Majesty or His Majesty. In America, we call ourselves citizens. There is a profound difference. America is also predominantly a religious nation. Some believe in Jesus or Allah, others believe in money, fame, fortune (not the same thing as having lots of money), conquest, or whatever they're into, but they treat it as a religion nonetheless. It's very strange dichotomy to those on the outside looking in, but somehow it works, or at least it has for the past 250 years. We have endured great contentious issues of the time, yet none have changed the character of our nation as a whole. That is a very good thing, because otherwise the world would've slipped into chaos and war without our leadership, as it did twice in a single century, after which we'd seen enough and decided to chart a new course. Our Constitution always points to "True North". It's a guidon, a homing beacon if you will, that no amount of darkness can extinguish. It's been imperfectly followed at many times and in many different ways, but it does not deceive and it is not wrong.

America has the longest continuously serving form of governance in modern history. All other industrialized nations have undergone radical changes in their own governance during that same time period. Most European and Asian nations were monarchies and some still are, even if they have little real authority. America elects a new President every four years, even if it's the same man. The only instance in our history where parts of the nation refused to recognize the President's authority was during our Civil War, wherein there were still people in the South who recognized the authority of our elected Commander in Chief. The scenery changes in America, but the governance methodology largely remains the same. There are good and bad aspects to it. One peculiar aspect of our system is that whether you're a foreigner, a citizen, or second-class citizen, your rights and privileges are almost identical, apart from voting and immigration matters. We have different rules for different people in those narrowly defined circumstances, but they are largely congruent. Nobody is fleeing America for the "safe haven" of communist China or North Korea, though.

kbd512 · 2023-02-23 01:06:53

According to Associate Professor of Mining, Simon Michaux

Required years of metals production at 2019 pre-COVID annual production rates to transition entirely to wind turbines, photovoltaics, Lithium-ion batteries, and Hydrogen fuel cells, in order to completely phase out use of all fossil fuels:

Mainline Metals - Years of Production - Metric Tons of Metal Required*1
Copper - 189.1 - 4,575,523,674
Nickel - 400.2 - 940,578,114
Lithium - 9,920.7 - 944,150,293
Cobalt - 1,733.0 - 218,396,990
Graphite - 3,287.9 - 8,973,640,257
Silicon - 5.9 - 49,571,460
Vanadium - 7,101.2 - 681,865,986

Rare Earth Metals - Years of Production - Metric Tons of Metal Required*2
Neodymium - 40.4 - 965,183
Germanium - 29,113.0 - 4,163,162
Lanthanum - 166.8 - 5,970,738
Praseodymium - 31.4 - 235,387
Dysprosium - 196.2 - 196,207
Terbium - 59.9 - 16,771

* Note #1 - for 1 generation of "green energy" machines, using current technology
* Note #2 - for 1 generation of "green energy" machines, using current technology

It’s estimated that 700 million metric tons of Copper have been mined between 4,000 BC and 2020 AD, so average rate of refining was 116,667t per year. We will need to mine another 700 million metric tons of Copper over the next 22 years, which equates to 31,818,182t per year. That means we will increase the annual production rate by 272.7X. Needless to say, that has never happened throughout the entirety of human history for any metal, not even Iron.

Basic math, aka "counting", is a real bummer, ain't it?

In this case, I directly copied the numbers from a presentation slide provided by a PhD in mining technology, so any quibbles over the numbers should be taken up with him, not me. Long story short, we ain't using photovoltaics or wind turbines or Lithium-ion batteries if we're going to transition to anything but more oil, gas, and coal. Lithium-ion cells belong in cell phones / laptops / flashlights / drones, NOT cars / trucks / trains / ships / aircraft!

It turns out that all of our environmentalists in both the United States and the European Union never did the most basic of homework before asserting that we would replace fossil fuels using wind turbines / photovoltaics / batteries. They thought someone else did it, and they just used made-up numbers in their reports, with no attempt whatsoever made to do basic verification of assertions, also known as "fact-checking". Whenever ideology / religion overrides basic math, you're in trouble.

When I submitted my proposals, I did a lot of basic math, otherwise known as counting. I even stepped away from the problem and came back later to do some trade studies. I used number generated from real world solar thermal power plants, which were already located in places where I want to put the hydrocarbon fuel synthesis plants. I probably still have some incorrect estimates and figures, but there should be no "failures to count". I'm a bean counter with some programming knowledge, which means I count beans for a living. Since I've been employed as such for the past 15 years and counting, it means I know how to count beans well enough to hold down a regular job doing it.

I considered solar thermal with molten salt or hot rock, wind turbines plus photovoltaics plus batteries, and nuclear thermal. I did not consider the aesthetics of my proposals, nor whether specific vendors would be pleased with my conclusions, only that they were workable from a material inputs and labor perspective (CAPEX), without coming anywhere close to straining global supplies, and what they cost to operate (OPEX).

There were only two workable solutions from a material inputs perspective. The first is solar thermal, which has the highest material inputs requirements but lowest CAPEX and OPEX. The second is nuclear thermal, which has the lowest material requirements but highest CAPEX and OPEX. This was all done using real-world numbers from actual plants built and actual materials costs, not theoretical BS that has no bearing on the real world. Solar thermal resulted in the lowest cost by a lot, so I went with solar thermal. I've been a proponent of using nuclear technologies on this forum, and it has many admirable qualities, but lowest possible cost is not one of them.

I wanted to know that these plants, if built by the government using the Climate Change spending bill, would be commercially profitable, that they could be built using unskilled labor, and then handed off to a for-profit company to operate. This is how the government arsenals are run. The government owns the production hardware to contain cost, but corporations actually run them to ensure that the lowest possible cost is achieved while still conforming to government quality standards for munitions. The corporation bids to run the plant, then operates it for a specified contract term, and in so doing receives a modest but guaranteed profit. I realize the gasoline buying public is the target market here, but the government spends trillions of their money on weapons procurement, so why not procure the fuels as well since the government is the single largest customer for fuels. If trillions of dollars are being spent in our name, then we should substantially benefit from that spending. Uncle Sam can start by providing affordable liquid fuels for transportation. We need gasoline, diesel, and kerosene.

Existing supplies of natural gas are sufficient for the present time, and tremendous pressure would be taken off the petroleum industry if all they needed to come up with was natural gas and Propane for cooking / heating / plastics / rubbers / lubricants / derivative chemicals.

I did not consider other potential technologies like fusion because nobody has a working fusion reactor.

I did not consider district heating, compressed air, liquid air, or other forms of energy storage that I still know little about. I'm interested in substituting these forms of energy if they're at least comparable in terms of cost, because they emit nothing and consuming nothing that we cannot obtain in functionally unlimited quantities. If we can run home heating / cooling / cooking using some combination of water and air, that's the lion's share of domestic energy usage. We need not go through multiple energy transformations if we can use it directly.

The math on solar thermal is very "cut-and-dry". If you know how much sunlight and surface area is required to generate a given amount of power, as well as what metals and other materials are actually used or suitable, then you can come up with a very realistic cost estimate. The great thing about having examples of large scale commercial implementations is that you have enough data to make reasonable inferences. For example, I can tell you what a 1GWe PWR nuclear thermal power plant costs, because we've built a couple of them very recently. They run about $5B USD per copy. The exclusion zone around the plants makes it difficult to co-locate infrastructure to make use of the waste heat, which is a real bummer, but the government has strict rules whenever the word "nuclear" is involved, and they're not open for debate.

For us to do wind turbines and photovoltaics and batteries, we need Russia and China, but in case you were living under a rock for the past year, we're not on friendly terms with them right now. Moreover, all investments into unstable countries go to zero after they get froggy with their neighbors. The major oil companies have all learned that unpleasant fact during the past year. There are no more western oil companies operating in Russia and no plans to ever return, even if the sanctions are lifted. All metals, minerals, petroleum products, and other petrochemical byproducts like fertilizers which were previously sourced from Russia or Ukraine, are effectively gone already. If China jumps off on Taiwan, then you can also kiss most of the supply of advanced microchips goodbye for about the next 20 years or so, plus the entire global supply of functional chips used in computerized devices. Therefore, whatever solution we come up with has to be only a few steps removed from Stone Age technology. It has to use abundant materials that are globally available, without inputs from Russia and China, which have both proven to be very unreliable business partners in global trade.

Almost half of the Chinese labor force will be gone in the next 20 years, according to their own official numbers. India could pick up most of that lost labor capacity, but their neighbors are still highly problematic. If fuel supplies are limited, then shipping massive tonnages of materials or manufactured products from India and China becomes its own issue without any other supply chain or political problems. South American labor will also be in limited supply because their birth rates have also fallen. That means we'll have to make and build most of our own infrastructure, and even with the illegal immigrants we're woefully short of labor. AI and robots may partially offset some of that labor shortage, but every technology has its limits, and our people still need gainful employment.

Much like President Trump, President Biden is really good at pissing off our enemies, which I do not fault him for at all, but this is our last decade interfacing with Russia and China. We tried being diplomatic, we tried to be generous, and we tried to ignore their bad behavior, but they simply want to take stuff from their neighbors. We can't have that, because it's bad for business. They already have plenty of their own stuff, but they're not satisfied with what they have and we can't give them what they want because it's not ours to give.

Edit: Current known Copper reserves are 880 MILLION metric tons. We need 4.57 BILLION metric tons for that 1st generation of "green energy" machines. Someone had better light a fire (not coal or petroleum based, mind you) under the rear ends of the people doing the exploration.

Last edited by kbd512 (2023-02-23 01:13:20)

Terraformer · 2023-02-23 08:43:21

I suspect a big part of the problem solar thermal has getting traction is that it's... too old. Solar panels are shiny and futuristic and fit the Star Trek future we are destined for. Solar thermal systems are centuries old technology and fit far more into Star Wars.

See The Twilight of the Monofuture, John Michael Greer. We can't have solar thermal because that entails going *backwards*, not forwards to the shiny Future(tm).

SpaceNut · 2023-02-23 21:00:37

Aluminum can work in many places that are using copper.

How long have we been using oil and its distillates?

I know that solar PV is relatively recent in comparison and Solar passive have been in use for quite a bit longer in one form or another..

It still as KBD512 notes it's about resources and scale of need to creation for how much an individual will need for use. Can we use less sure we can as we did not have electricity with static some 2000 years ago while we got a bit more in the 1700's but even then, we lived for the most part well into the 1800's before it really became an Everday convenance.
We lived without autos and trucks until as noted the late 1800 early 1900's as well so we can lower our real levels of energy needed.

kbd512 · 2023-02-24 11:15:20

SpaceNut,

Aluminum's embodied energy is roughly 4X higher than that of Copper. That right there is a significant problem with substituting Aluminum for Copper, because it means you need more energy. Aluminum maybe be lighter and more conductive than Copper for a given unit weight, but NOT per unit volume. Aluminum requires about 2X more energy to carry the same current as Copper. We only use it when the conductor isn't required to make a lot of sharp turns (electric motors) or be repeatedly deformed (extension cords) or we intend to make extremely long conductors and string them along overhead, where weight matters far more than volume because something is supporting that weight from below.

However, total volume affects the weight of a machine enclosed in a casing, such as an electric motor. A lot of the weight of smaller motors is everything but the conductor wire. As the motors get bigger and turns in the windings are not as sharp, then you might see an advantage using Aluminum. That said, most of the electric motors we use are of the smaller variety. It wasn't until we created these ridiculous green energy machines that total tonnage of materials required became a big problem.

AC motors average 7-9 percent copper; DC motors have 15-18 percent copper content. Making the machine larger to accommodate an Aluminum conductor increases the weight of all the other materials required, namely Iron or more Aluminum for the casing, the weight of the steel for the output shaft, the amount of plastic or enamel or other insulator used, etc. So, we reduce the weight of the windings, which were clearly not a significant contributor to an electric motor / generator's total weight in most cases, but substantially increase the volume of the windings (by at least 60% for equal resistance in the conductor wire used), which means we increase the dimensions of every other part, and that does what for us, exactly? The greatest percentage of weight allocation wasn't the conductor. If you assert that we'll just use Aluminum motor casings instead of steel to economize on the weight of the "everything else", there again you also require more energy.

Copper is used primarily because Copper is ductile and can be bent several times before it work hardens to the point of requiring annealing. This is critical for these electric motor driven green energy machines, because it both speeds up manufacturing time and reduces the energy required to work the conductor around the sharp turns found in nearly all windings in electric motors. Copper doesn't get annealed multiple times, which involves heating the metal up to relieve internal stresses from being cold-worked around mandrels.

If you assert that we'll use better geometry like square / rectangular profile conductors to increase fill rates, then you'll really need annealing.

As a power cable material, Aluminum will never be as flexible or as durable as Copper. It's the nature of the metal. Aluminum works best when it's preventing flexing through increased stiffness of thicker cross-section parts that are less subject to flexing because they're much stiffer than parts made from thinner / denser metals. Almost all automotive wheels are now made from Aluminum forgings or castings to decrease deflection of the wheel under load. It's great for that use case, because it can also be repaired by welding if it cracks and it mostly avoids the need for repairs to begin with by not flexing. To top it all off, it doesn't rust. That said, using it doesn't "save energy" over steel, which is why it costs a lot more.

All higher forms of materials technology require more input energy. Carbon Fiber wheels can also be made and they're much lighter than any metal wheels, but they're mostly not made and not used in production cars, because the energy and labor sunk into making them is enormous, the defect rate is very high compared to any kind of metal (Magnesium, Aluminum, steel), and the embodied energy of Carbon Fiber is substantially higher than Aluminum. That is why they cost so much more. The cost is reflected in the energy and labor required to create them. This point seems lost on our green energy fanatics.

A major portion of cost is cost per pound or kilo, and since almost none of this stuff exists right now, it has to be created from scratch. Steel and concrete win that argument almost every single time, with flying machines being the only notable exceptions to that rule.

In terms of unit area, my proposed solar thermal green machines are inordinately cheaper than photovoltaics loaded with technology metals, thus they cover a lot more surface area per unit cost. Since surface area is the name of the game for solar power, he who has the lowest cost by a lot per unit area, has the correct solution. It's not because I say so, it's because math and physics says so. Whether or not you find that solution pleasing to your eye is not relevant to how well it works.

I can make one of your green machines for a lot less energy and therefore money, which means more people get to benefit from it, because more energy can be devoted to other things, or the machine can be built much larger for a given energy input if that's what we require. I proved that I can cover about 64X more surface area for a given cost, as compared to photovoltaics, and the fluid flowing through my green machine can store thermal power in bulk, because it costs so little compared to an electro-chemical battery.

The wind turbines are largely irrelevant. They're going after that 1% to 3% efficient conversion of solar radiation to air molecule movement generated by convection. The wind has real power in it that can be extracted, but only with a wild increase in total cost. My machine thermalizes photons, which is much more efficient than the photoelectric effect because the "energy conversion" dumps the waste heat generated directly into a material that both transfers and stores thermal power at a volume unachievable by any kind of battery.

So, my chosen technology is 64X more cost effective, it uses abundant materials for appropriate uses thereof, it requires very little technical skill to produce and operate, and it lasts inordinately longer in operation than a photovoltaic cell or wind turbine blade or electro-chemical battery. When it finally does wear out, as all machines eventually do, recycling it is incomparably easier and less energy-intensive. In short, what I actually "invented" was "no new or intractable problems to solve", but I didn't even do that much because mirror and hot rock technology goes all the way back to antiquity. The only "dash of spice" that I added was modern materials quality, mass manufacturing, and aerospace coatings technology (hot dipping the steel in Aluminum and white paint to protect steel tubing from corrosion). Since I'm storing or consuming most of the thermal power onsite, aka "direct conversion to reliable on-demand energy", I don't need a radical electrical grid upgrade, either.

It's the total weight and type of required materials, it's the service life of the machinery, it's the recycling methods for said machinery since none of it will last forever, it's the actual engineering aspects of an intended application (not trying something marginally feasible using scarce materials and expensive / energy-intensive production processes), it's the number and type of energy conversions with their relative efficiencies, and it's the relative cost using an economic system (capitalism) that puts a value statement on labor and energy consumption that differentiates what we have been doing from what we should be doing. This is a math-based solution. Math is the foundation of all valid science. Any proposed solution which is not math-based will be very expensive and very short-lived as a result.

Rather than continually moving the goalposts, I've firmly planted the goalposts, laid out how to move the ball down the field towards the goal, and refrained from engaging in any diversionary activity that doesn't get the ball to the end zone. Accomplishment matters. Activity is only useful when it leads to accomplishment. If accomplishment is defined as a long-term sustainable energy solution that does the least amount of damage to the environment, then that will be solar or nuclear thermal power converted into on-demand forms of energy, namely heat or hydrocarbon fuels, for which there are no viable replacements at the human civilization level.

The greens will never admit that their electronic toys are not "saving the planet", but are in fact accelerating rates of resource depletion while ruining great swaths of the environment with the monuments to their frivolity. They are emotionally invested in their favored solutions, irrespective of outcomes. I have no emotional investment into the aesthetics of the solution. I could care less if the power plant next door is coal / nuclear / solar thermal, so long as it functions reliably and is in no danger of ever "running out of energy". This is not a beauty pageant from my perspective. It either gets the job done or it does not.

I am willing to try alternatives if they're reliable and no worse for humanity than the existing energy generating systems. Photovoltaics and wind turbines and electro-chemical batteries are not reliable because they cannot make or store power at the scale required to actually replace anything. Since they're mostly made by slave labor and burning coal, they're neither "green" as the greens define "green", nor do they show any compassion for humanity, which is why they're made almost exclusively in a communist country. The communists don't respect humanity or the environment because their ideology only cares about absolute power and control for entirely selfish reasons. In 50 years since serious development on these "green machines" began, that has not changed one iota. They're as non-viable at a planetary scale today as they were when development work began in earnest. Whether others have the intellectual honesty and personal integrity to concede that point is irrelevant to reality. It takes real courage and integrity to confront the shortcomings of your own beliefs, but most of our greens lack the moral character to admit to the failings of their ideology and then move on to something that has some chance of actually working, which would be a real and enduring accomplishment.

SpaceNut · 2023-02-24 19:57:39

Of course, the energy required to get it from another planetoid is even higher but at least we have a moderate substitute for copper.

I agree use what makes sense cost wise if it is reliable for sure but even the solar after looking at the level of cloud free days make you wonder.

kbd512 · 2023-02-25 18:44:25

SpaceNut,

Where are all those graphs of investment dollars being poured into new mining capacity? It must be hiding somewhere, because I can't find it. I already posted that graph in another thread. It looks like money is being cut from both coal / oil / gas and mining. Either quit making excuses for these unsustainable techno-fantasies, or show me the money. None of this works without investment.

We make about 3 billion metric tons of Iron-based products per year, of which about 2 billion tons becomes steel. We make somewhere between 65 and 70 million metric tons of Aluminum per year, which means we'd need to devote 28.5 years of production, at 4X the energy cost of mining and refining Copper. Producing 1 metric ton of Aluminum consumes about 17MWh of electricity (and that's not all the energy required), so 1,105TWh for 65Mt of Aluminum metal, and 31,492.5TWh for the 2Bt quantity of Aluminum that we'd need for these green machines. 75% of electricity is produced by burning something. Global electricity consumption is 25,000TWh. Aluminum production is one of the most singularly energy-intensive industries in existence.

In 2019, we produced 283Mt of salt. Highest production was 290Mt in 2019. So much for Sodium-based batteries. If you try to dump all of that into making batteries, that's about the closest thing to global-scale suicide that I can imagine. Take note of how little Lithium was produced, because we are going to run out of that metal long before we run out of demand for Lithium-ion batteries. We use Lithium because it's the best material and it's not used for much else. You might want to think about that if you still want to have laptops and cell phones and lightweight flashlights. This is where our "technology rubber" meets the proverbial road. If you can't source enough material, then your idea isn't viable.

If you have to invoke mining asteroids for these green machines to do their thing, then you've already conceded the point about not having enough materials here on Earth. There is no energy transition anywhere outside of fantasy-based thinking. We lack the materials to do it in the foolish and bizarre way it's currently being pursued. We're going to have a "great simplification" in addition to a "great reset".

Solar makes little sense where you live. It makes no sense where RobertDyck lives. All of these green energy machines will only ever be circumstantially appropriate, if they're appropriate at all. In many places, such as Germany, which is neither particularly sunny or windy, it's quite clear that they're wildly inappropriate. That's why I said we need to put these machines in the desert, instead of on peoples' homes (the solar thermal, only the photovoltaic systems are suitable for rooftops).

The key difference between what I would attempt and what others are attempting is to IMMEDIATELY convert intermittent energy into on-demand storable kind of energy, mostly in the form of heat which is then used to make new synthetic hydrocarbon fuels (because these require tiny storage volumes compared to any kind of battery, and they don't "loose charge" when they're not on a charger). Since we're sourcing the CO2 from the sea and sky, not making things that are functionally not recyclable for any reasonable energy cost, and are using the most abundant materials we make (steel and concrete) to do it ("it" being synthesis of even more incredibly abundant Carbon from Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen from water), I can't think of a more appropriate or sustainable way to use the energy being generated.

The world won't become a giant arcade game to satisfy the techno-fantasies of pseudo-environmentalists because there's not enough energy or materials to do it. That much is quite clear to me, even though I would also like "something better". It turns out that gasoline and diesel are really hard to beat from an overall usability standpoint.

SpaceNut · 2023-02-26 16:58:07

Here is confirmation of much of kbd512's post on where the increase is to create materials to be used in the green energy path sources for the typical Ri/Ro for the life cycle of the product made.

The typical strip-mining operation where the removal is just the tip of the process to gather and then refill for a more natural appearance.

Mining our Green energy future

Increase in mining required to power the green energy revolution, says study

Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check

The material which makes up the green are not true renewable but are recyclable for the most part, but some have a great difficulty in doing so.

Terraformer · 2023-02-26 18:02:18

Well. Nuclear is experiencing something of a renaissance right now. I have my worries, but that's because my plans are measured in centuries, a timescale where uranium depletion is a real problem (and of course the civilisational issue that it's a complexity increase -- we're just about developed enough to manage it, but South Africa demonstrates that such capability can be lost by a nation). Rolls-Royce are at the review stage for their design, and 13 EU countries including France and Italy have broken with Germany over the matter and are working together to go nuclear. No doubt the Germans will be happy enough to buy their cheap(ish) power though.

So between that and the liquid air energy storage being built, we could see our natural gas consumption fall quite a lot, whilst restoring grid reliability. Just so long as the government doesn't do a South Africa and fire the engineers for being the wrong skin colour I think we'll be able to maintain our *existing* infrastructure. Our problem has mainly been I think that the population has grown significantly and the infrastructure hasn't been allowed to. For the country of 60 million we would have had absent mass immigration it might have been enough, but the country of 70 million we do have it's struggling somewhat.

Calliban · 2023-02-26 19:35:16

The quadrennial technology review carried out by the US Dept of Energy, gives a good breakdown of the materials requirements of 1TWh of electricity generation from various different sources.
https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-tech … 15-omnibus

Go to Chapter 10, Table 10.4. Notice how huge the resource requirements of PV and wind are compaired to fossil and nuclear power. The huge material budgets are the inevitable consequence of low power density of wind and sunlight. To produce the 25,000TWh of electricity used by the world annually using nuclear power (light water reactors), would require about 19 million tonnes of steel. That is less than 1% of global annual steel production. The are no physical challenges to carrying out an energy revolution based on nuclear power. The problem, quite simply, is that people are frightened of it. And because people are frighrened of it, it ends up being regulated in ways that end up up pushing up the cost.
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Oops! That is 160 tonnes of steel per TWh, not 760. So producing 25,000TWh of electricity using pressurised water reactors, would require 4 million tonnes of steel each year. If we could recycle 3/4 of that steel, then all of the world's electricity could be produced with an expenditure of just 1 million tonnes of steel per year. That is <0.1% of global steel production.

It is hard to find accurate figures on the amount of concrete the world uses. Back in 2009, it was estimated at 24 billion tonnes per year. According to DoE, 1TWh of nuclear electricity requires 760 tonnes of concrete. So producing 25,000TWh of electricity each year would consume 19 million tonnes of concrete, again <0.1% of annual concrete production.

From a steel and concrete perspective, producing the same amount of primary electricity using wind power would consume a dozen times more steel and concrete. But as a percentage of total global production of each, it would still only be around 1%, assuming we can recycle 75% of the steel. Dealing with intermittancy would increase the total steel and concrete requirements. The storage solution itself will require substantial investments of both and inefficiencies in storage would inflate the amount of generating capacity needed. So I think steel and concrete requirements for wind would roughly double when building a system that can meet varying consumer demands.

The real materials problem with wind and solar PV is the substantial requirements for materials other than steel and concrete. Elements like copper, aluminium and rare earths. With wind power, we could partially mitigate this problem if we built turbines that operated mechanically. Individual turbines could produce compressed air, pumped water or hydraulic oil or even be coupled to a rotating shaft that serves multiple turbines. We then build an electric generator on the ground which converts the mechanical input from dozens or hundreds of turbines into electric power. Another problem with wind and solar power is that the best resources tend to be far from demand centres. Air liquefaction provides a potential solution that could mitigate the intermittency problem as well. If wind and solar powerplants power an air liquefaction plant where they are built, then liquid air could be shipped to storage tanks close to demand centres. We would then also need tankers that would transport the liquid air. But this would allow wind turbines built in Greenland or solar plants in Sahara, to ship power where it is needed in Europe or the American east coast.

Thermal systems generally seem to give us the best solution for meeting our energy demands. Solar thermal power shares the problem of low power density with PV that makes total embodied energy relatively high. But solar thermal shifts resource requirements from rare earths and copper, to steel and concrete. These are at least abundant materials. Thermal systems appear to be the best option for energy storage. It is hard to imagine cheaper storage mediums than hot rock and hot water. Liquid air is relatively energy dense and can be stored at ambient pressure in tanks. Hot rock energy storage would reclaim power using steam plants. These will generate waste heat that can either be used to heat district heat networks, or as a source of heat for raising power from stored liquid air. Large hot water tanks could be installed in houses and buildings and could absorb excess electricity as heat during periods of energy abundance. Again, an insulated tank is going to be far cheaper than any battery of the same storage capacity. Dedicated hot rock storage could be used to heat very large buildings. Intermittent electricity would be used to heat the rock. A steam plant would generate steady power for input to the grid, with waste heat used to heat the building and provide hot water.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-02-27 04:04:42)

kbd512 · 2023-02-27 04:01:48

Nuclear can supply the power if we can tolerate the cost, but it's also the most difficult to scale up. I see reactors as more useful for powering cities than transportation, until we start talking about ships, and then nuclear is the best solution if total resource consumption is the figure of merit. At the scale we're talking about, total consumption has become an intractable problem. If nuclear will supply the energy to power our vehicles, then it will come in the form of compressed gases created through use of waste heat, such as liquid air. This represents the fewest number of energy conversions, the simplest technology set, we're not deliberately making rocket fuel inside a nuclear reactor, and there are no material constraints to prevent such a solution from ever being viable to begin with.

The combination of the material requirements for photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles are unsustainable in every sense of the word, and they're already hitting material supply limits much faster than with hydrocarbon fuels. Whatever the energy solution is for transportation, it won't be based upon batteries, whether Lithium or Sodium chemistries, because we don't make enough of either metal and scaling up to the degree required is physically impossible when there is not enough Copper on the planet to do so.

Edit:
My point about Copper is supplying the fantastic quantities of electricity to do the seawater electrolysis required, since we could consume 100% of all the known Lithium reserves, yet come nowhere close to meeting demand. So, you have to get the metal somehow if you're going to use it, and the only other known method is extracting it from seawater.

I keep coming back to compressed air as the only long term viable alternative to batteries and hydrocarbon fuels, despite its inefficiencies and limited stored energy, simply because there is not enough of anything else to go around. If we truly want to stop depending entirely upon hydrocarbon fuels, then all the technology products (semiconductors, plastics, composites, scarce technology metals) that depend entirely upon hydrocarbon fuels must go with them.

Liquid air or LN2 can store around 200Wh/kg. If that's good enough for a Tesla semi-truck that will take hours to recharge, then it's good enough for an air powered truck that can recharge in minutes. No technology metals are required for this. A stainless steel vacuum thermos, plus a high pressure expansion tank, are sufficient. The truck will require 1,150 US gallons of liquid air for a 500 mile driving range, or about 5m^3.

That's a lot of weight, but the truck is burning nothing, making a stainless steel vacuum thermos is nowhere near as energy-intensive as a Tesla battery, as it requires about 1,000kg of stainless steel tankage per vehicle, and when I last checked we were in no danger of running out of air or steel or heat energy to compress and liquefy the air. It will be almost as heavy as a battery powered truck when fully "fueled", but then it gets progressively lighter as it drives down the highway. I estimate that 1,150 gallons, at $160 per metric ton for LOX (this is what NASA pays), would cost $696. That's about double the cost of diesel, but when we start producing liquid air in bulk quantities, this cost should go down since it's air vs LOX (no separation process involved).

The liquid air is, obviously, use/lose, and that is its major drawback over electro-chemical batteries or diesel fuel. When it comes time to recycle the truck, it's a rolling pile of steel that weighs no more than an ordinary semi-truck. It will use an Aluminum air motor, an Aluminum high pressure expansion tank, and it requires new refueling infrastructure similar to the existing one, but not a massive expansion of the electric grid or quantities of metals that are unobtainable. Any heat source can supply the input power for compression and liquefaction- waste heat from nuclear reactors, solar thermal, or geothermal. The waste heat generated during compression can be dumped into making hot water for home heating or industrial processes.

Regular passenger cars which do not see 24/7/365 use can consume compressed air, with a liquid air system for those few long range driving excursions that Americans take a few times per year. It's a hybrid that runs on compressed or liquid air, dependent upon the required driving range. If we're okay with wasting energy that would otherwise be wasted, then we can run pure cryogenic air and just vent whatever cannot be used at the end of the day, to the atmosphere. LAES was purely a byproduct of waste heat energy storage to begin with, so even if quite a lot of it escapes, nothing irreplaceable is lost and the environment is not harmed in any way.

LAES could also be used for AC in hot places like Texas, instead of electricity or gas, so whatever you have left in your tank can supply AC since those units run 24/7 during the summer. The only thing you need electricity for in an air powered truck is the lights and electronics. The vehicle's drive motor is air powered, the brakes are pneumatic, and the refrigerator unit could also be powered by liquid air if it's a reefer truck.

This is a major part of what a real circular economy looks like, not one based upon impossible expansion of metals mining to create one giant global arcade game which requires legions of massive diesel powered machines, to the point that it becomes the single greatest contributor to global warming. Trying to make everything electronic is where we went wrong, under the false premise that energy generation and consumption was anything like advancements in computing power. There is zero evidence for that, as you are already aware, but the green religious cult was never very good at counting.

Since we're not converting energy to another form, such as electricity / gasoline / diesel / kerosene, the amount of materials-to-work that my proposed solar thermal system can perform is pretty extreme. It's more than enough for a wholesale replacement of internal combustion engines for everything but ships and aircraft, which remain completely impractical to convert to use any other form of energy. The cargo ships can be nuclear powered since they're bathing in their coolant supply, but this requires a major education / training / manufacturing effort.

We could finally make simpler vehicles that don't cost so much to purchase, hopefully less to operate over time, which would drive sales towards machines with lower embodied energy costs, higher resale value, and greater longevity. It looks anachronistic, but it's not. We didn't have the motivation to do this before, but maybe now we do as we discover the limits of natural resources and labor.

Last edited by kbd512 (2023-02-27 04:06:57)

Calliban · 2023-02-27 08:30:28

I did a few checks on the fuel consumption of large freight transport ships in order to guage what would be possible in terms of fuelling them. This is from my copy of the Maritime Engineering Reference Book, which is about 20 years old now.

'For a Capesize transport ship [i.e larger than typical for the Suez and Panama canals], cargo capacity is 150,000 - 180,000 tonnes. Typical size is 280m length, 45m beam and 24m height. Nine holds hold some 180,000 cubic metres of grain in total. The speed is 15.5 knots (30kph) on 14MW power.'

Liquid air has energy density 0.2MWh per cubic metre. Some 23,333 cubic metres would be sufficient for a range of 10,000km. This is equivelant volume to 13% of payload capacity. It should therefore be possible to build large ships that are powered using liquid air produced on land, using ocean water to provide heat in the evaporator. A ship of this type would need to be ~50m longer, assuming liquid air is housed in a cylindrical tank some 24m in diameter. This would amount to an 18% increase in ship length for a range of 10,000km.

For aircraft, one alternative option to the vastly impractical idea of an electric aircraft, is to use either liquified natural gas or liquid propane to fuel gas turbine engines. Both of these have lower density than kerosene, but higher mass energy density. A renewable methane source could be synthesised from recycled CO2 using solar thermal or nuclear energy. Alternatively, biogas could be liquefied by cooling.

Another option would be for a plane to carry the oxygen needed to burn its fuel, storing it as LOX. Doing this dramatically reduces the effective energy density of the fuel. However, it also eliminates compressor energy consumption and eliminates the weight and drag associated with engines. Instead, compact gas turbine engines would be built into the wings or tail and streamlined. The GTs would drive turbo-props to generate propulsion. For short to medium distance flights, this would cut effective fuel consumption by half. Nothing comes for free of course. The other half of the energy required would be the energy needed to produce the LOX, which would be generated by a ground based power source.

For trucks, a hybrid propulsion system could achieve a compromise between range and sustainability. In a hybrid, the waste heat generated by the diesel engine would heat the evaporator, raising extra power from the liquid air. Exhausted, cold air would also provide the intake to the diesel engine. By pre-cooling the air into the cylinders, better compression ratio can be achieved, boosting the efficiency of the diesel. The truck would still burn diesel (or petrol, LPG or gasoline), but fuel consumption per mile could be roughly halved.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-02-27 08:57:06)

kbd512 · 2023-02-27 10:40:36

Calliban,

That's why I stated that liquid air was NOT a practical option for aircraft or ships. Aircraft need gasoline or diesel or kerosene to operate as they do, which is why engineers selected those fuels to power them. Can cryogenic LH2 or LCH4 provide the same power? Yes, but only if the aircraft is a rocket. Otherwise, it requires wholesale changes to airframes that are impractical to implement in the next 10 years. Improved unducted propeller designs are already being tested and those should be implemented first.

This is another case of people with one and only one tool in their tool belt, which happens to be a hammer. They keep trying to hammer perfectly good screws into wood, resulting in bent screws and damaged wood, blissfully unaware that screw drivers were invented for a reason.

I'm impressed with how dogged they are in their pursuit of dead-end ideas with so little to show for their efforts, but apart from that I don't put much faith in their functionally nonexistent critical thinking skills. They have lots of half-baked ideas, they throw lots of crap at the wall, but the math and physics wall has an exceptionally thick superbraincrapophobic coating applied to it, otherwise known as "the universe demands that you learn how to count", so no amount of their BS ever sticks.

However...

The UW's Revolutionary, Liquid Nitrogen Automobile Could Put Electric Cars Out in the Cold. - December 1997

Abe Hertzberg wants to pull the plug on electric cars. The retired UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics rolls his eyes at the hype propelling these supposed vehicles of the future because, he says, they have just as many safety and environmental problems as gasoline-powered cars with a fraction of the performance.
Hoping to stall the electric car bandwagon, Hertzberg and his colleagues set out to create a better alternative to grandma's gas-guzzling Gremlin. Inspired by a Li'l Abner cartoon depicting a car that runs on smog, the UW researchers invented a liquid nitrogen vehicle which generates no harmful emissions. As a bonus, manufacturing the liquid nitrogen removes pollutants from the air.
"If you're going to talk about a truly non-polluting car, you have to do something different than gas or electric," explains Hertzberg. "We believe a liquid nitrogen vehicle can match the performance and range of an electric car, while still being affordable and easy to maintain and operate. And ecologically, it's a dream come true."
The UW vehicle--dubbed LN2000--works sort of like a steam engine, except it is powered by vaporizing very cold liquid nitrogen instead of steam from boiling water. The nitrogen vapor turns an air motor to propel the car and then exits the tailpipe. Since the atmosphere already is 78 percent nitrogen, the environmental effect of driving LN2000 vehicles--even millions of them--would be virtually undetectable, Hertzberg says.
What really excites this veteran researcher, however, is the potential of liquid nitrogen production to actually reduce air pollution. To make liquid nitrogen, Hertzberg explains, a plant would simply run air through a large refrigeration system and collect the liquid nitrogen as it condenses. In the process, pollutants such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide also are removed from the air and could be disposed of in a benign manner. One option is to pump the pollutants into depleted oil and gas wells or into the deep ocean where they are unlikely to spread back into the atmosphere and cause environmental havoc.
Fossil fuels would mostly likely be burned to power the refrigeration plant. But the exhaust from these plants would be trapped for use as the feedstock for the liquid nitrogen, so no pollutants would be released into the atmosphere.
"We are not trying to promise an environmental free lunch," cautions Professor Adam Bruckner, who is working with Hertzberg on the LN2000 team along with Professor Tom Mattick, research scientist Carl Knowlen and graduate students Peter Vitt and Helene DeParis. "We are simply trying to point out a significant potential environmental benefit of liquid nitrogen automobile propulsion. Compared to other supposedly green automotive propulsion systems, such as electric cars, we think our approach looks pretty good."

I was 17 years old at the time, but someone who was blessed with that "uncommon sense" gene, had already thought about the limits to batteries. Professor Hertzberg had enough of that uncommon sense to know that these electronic gadgets would be problematic. It would take another 30 years for the rest of our technophiles to finally figure that out through simple depletion of their non-renewable battery metals. They're still not quite there yet, but we've shown them the math, which won't change to suit their beliefs. I'm sure they'll come up with some new nonsense to satisfy the edicts of their techno-religion, but basic physics will still disallow their next non-working electronic gadget idea. They have no appreciation for how much energy we use or where it comes from. They seem to think energy is magic, and that electronics in particular are magic. I've worked with both, and none of it is magical to me.

Simple physics will force them to confront ugly reality much sooner, rather than later. From the responses I've received thus far, the more ugly reality they're confronted with, the deeper they descend into their techno-fantasies. We have repeatedly pointed out that there's not enough Lithium or Copper or other technology metals being mined across the entire planet to achieve what they wish to achieve, for which they have no actual answers, merely more fantasy-based thinking that refuses to address material limits. There's little doubt in my mind that we'll continue to pursue their non-solutions, until they finally become completely unworkable. We're almost there now.

Material limits is probably another reason why the original electric cars failed. The engineers of the early 20th century were not ideological in nature. They knew they couldn't mine enough metal to make all the batteries required to sustain production, and that the cars would be very expensive and have poor performance compared to the combustion engine alternatives, so they gave up on that non-working idea and moved on to more fruitful endeavors, because their end goal was to give a car to everyone with a job.

Terraformer · 2023-02-27 10:54:10

I wonder, what would an airliner optimised for fuel consumption look like? Obviously there's some tradeoff between fuel use and speed, and both of these contribute to cost so if one of them changes by quite a bit the optimal design to minimise cost per passenger will change.

Perhaps a 400mph turboprop would use far less per passenger mile than a 650mph turbofan. I don't know, and tbh what I care about is cheap flights. I don't mind taking 12 hours to cross the Atlantic; those days are pretty much writeoffs anyway, and perhaps the plane will have more space dedicated to passengers. I'd be happy to take 48 hours if a return ticket cost £200.

kbd512 · 2023-02-27 11:30:07

Terraformer,

450mph or less, you use a straight wing which generates more lift for less induced drag, which in turn allows you to use much smaller conventional turbofan engines. It can be powered by turboprops as well, and the turboprop can swing a larger diameter blade which generates more thrust for a given fuel burn. However, a turboprop will probably be forced to fly a bit lower, which also increases drag and subjects the plane to turbulence that it would otherwise fly well above. There will be noise and blade loss issues with the turboprop, which will make it heavier (to reinforce the fuselage where the blade may strike it), more complex to build, less pleasant to be in for long periods of time, etc.

The AGA-33 design concept is roughly correct:

Edit:
If you can fold the wings after the jet lands, because there's no fuel left in the wings, then airport real estate becomes less of a problem, two jets can literally pass each other on a taxiway, and damaging the aircraft's wings on the ground becomes less of an issue. If you can make the engines small enough, then you put the propeller or ducted fan in the tail so there is even less of a noise issue, you have centerline thrust so "engine out" doesn't change the flight characteristics, and less of a hazard to personnel and vehicles on the ground if you can then power the jet using nosewheel electric motors. Your wing is completely clean and there is no disturbed air around your wing or tail surfaces. You have a rifle bullet or long range artillery shell with wings attached to it.

Blended wing body (BWB) and box wings all look great on paper, but then you actually have to build, maintain, and operate something radically different from a conventional airliner. We have zero experience with this, and the blended wing bodies fail evacuation tests. So... Maybe BWBs are good for cargo but not so great for passengers and they require more space around the terminal and redesigned ground support infrastructure. BWBs and box wings can provide marginal, but meaningful at scale, efficiency increases over more conventional designs, if we're willing to completely redesign the ground support infrastructure and resolve the evacuation issues.

Last edited by kbd512 (2023-02-27 11:48:33)

Terraformer · 2023-02-27 12:06:32

[url=https://contest.techbriefs.com/2013/entries/aerospace-and-defense/3711]
AGA-33 Super Fuel-Efficient Aircraft[/url]

Hmmm... "191 miles per passenger per gallon". That would be 50 miles/L right (American gallons I assume)? So an 8000 mile round trip (transatlantic) would take 160 L of fuel per passenger. A round trip to London and back by car takes about 50 L of fuel...

Calliban · 2023-02-27 12:15:01

Liquid oxygen powered aircraft sound insane. But this isn't as impractical as it may seem as an aeroplane propellant. The energy density is much lower than kerosene. It could work for short to medium distance flights. It is a more practical idea than a battery powered aircraft, as refilling times are much shorter and the aircraft gets lighter as it consumes propellant. It would only be efficient as part of a hybrid engine concept. One of the things that it would allow is extremely high pressure ratio in GT engines. The pressure ratio of aircraft GTs is typically low, usually in single digits, because interstage cooling between the axial compressor stages would add too much weight. This limits engine efficiency. If you can feed the engine LOX, then pressure ratio can be enormous. This allows very compact, efficient and lightweight engines.

The AGA-33 was estimated to halve the fuel consumption per passenger-km, back when this article was written.
https://contest.techbriefs.com/2013/ent … fense/3711

That would be an outstanding achievement. I don't fully understand why it wasn't taken up, but I do have a theory. The aircraft would fly at 450mph. That is about 80% of typical airliner cruising speed (550mph).

Terraformer would be happy with a 48 hour flight time across the Atlantic, if the ticket were cheaper. The trouble is, it probably wouldn't be. A flight time of 48 hours from London / Paris to New York, is about the speed that the Hindenburg or Graf Zeppelin used to achieve. It is one fifth of the speed of a modern passenger jet, but was twice the speed of ocean liners in the 1920s and 1930s. In principle, we could build hydrogen filled rigid airships with modern technology. They would probably be more energy efficient than jets, but they wouldn't be any cheaper. The cost of a flight is more than the cost of fuel. If a vehicle flies more slowly, it is delivering fewer passenger miles per seat in any given year. You reach the point where maintenance and capital amortisation costs become more important than fuel costs. That may be why the AGA-33 was never adopted. Fuel costs would need to outweigh the added costs of reduced speed for a slower vehicle to break even. This is a problem that nuclear powered cruise ships would run into as well. When SMRs become available, it should be possible to build fast cruise ships that cross the Atlantic in a few days. But the marginal capital cost and operating cost of the ship per passenger mile would dominate the ticket cost, even if the energy needed to propel the ship were virtually free.

That said, people still travel by cruise ship even though we now have aeroplanes. A trip on an airship or transatlantic cruise ship, can be comfortable and enjoyable in a way that a cramped passenger jet never could be. That needs to be factored into any economic consideration as well. A cruise is more expensive, but also more valuable to people.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-02-27 12:35:53)

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