Intressant tal om energi

Bra läsning är detta tal om energi av Keith Rattie, VD på energibolaget Questar. Det hölls den 2:a april på Utah Valley University och Brigham Young University.

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Talet nämner en del som bör kunna ge aha-upplevelser...

"Taken together, wind and solar power today account for just one-sixth of 1% of America's annual energy consumption today. [...]

I'm holding a pie chart showing total U.S. primary energy demand today. PowerPoint won't even create a thin slice for wind and solar – it's just a line. [...] Thirty years and $30 billion in government subsidies and all we get for all the wind farms and all the solar electricity plants in operation in this country today is a thin line on a pie chart.

President Obama has proposed to double wind and solar power generation in this country by the end of his first term. I would first point out that the line on this pie chart will become a slightly thicker line by the end of his first term. I would also point out that wind and solar power doubled in just the last three years of the George W. Bush administration. I'll grant you that W. started from a smaller baseline, so doubling again over the next four years will be a taller order. But if President Obama's goal is achieved, wind and solar together will grow from one-sixth of one percent to a combined one-third of one percent of total primary energy use [...]

The problems with wind and solar power become apparent when you look at their footprint. To generate electricity comparable to a 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant
you'd have to build a wind farm with at least 500 very tall windmills occupying 40,000 acres of land. What about solar power? Well, here's a photo of "America's most productive utility-scale solar electricity plant". It has a capacity 8.2 MW, and it's located on 82 acres of land in southwest Colorado. When you take into account the fact that the sun doesn't always shine, you would need roughly 250 of these plants, occupying roughly 20,000 acres to replace a single 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant.

By comparison, a 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant can be built on about 10 -15 acres."

Lite längre fram:

"Even if America does cut CO2 emissions, the same computer models that predict manmade warming over the next century also predict that Kyoto-type CO2 cuts will have no discernible effect on global average temperatures for decades, if at all. The models show that Kyoto reductions would prevent only a small fraction of one degree of warming over the next 50 years. When was the last time you read that in the paper?"

Questar är inriktat på bl a naturgas och Rattie nämnde som en av flera punkter om hur CO2-utsläpp kan minskas (kärnkraft inkluderad) IPCC:s förslag om att ersätta kol med naturgas. Och vidare detta:

"...we can now say with confidence that America and the world are "swimming" in natural gas. U.S. onshore natural gas production has grown more than 20% over the past three years, a feat that most energy experts thought impossible a few years ago. America's known natural gas resource base now exceeds 100 years of supply at current U.S. consumption – and that number is sure to get bigger. Abundant supplies mean that natural gas prices over the next decade and beyond will likely be much lower than over the past five years."

Och så lite Lomborg (lägligt, med tanke på att USA i sitt Cap and Trade-system tycks kunna kosta bortåt 2000 miljarder dollar till 2020):

"...the media dwells on the potential harm from global warming, but ignores the fact that the costs borne to address it will also harm us. We have a finite amount of wealth in the world. We have a long list of problems – hunger, poverty, malaria, nuclear proliferation just to name a few. Your generation should ask: how can we do the most good with our limited resources? The opportunity cost of diverting a large part of current wealth to solve a potential problem 50-100 years from now means we do "less good" dealing with these other problems."

En punkt där jag inte kan hålla med Rattie är om att lagring av koldioxid måste ske. Jag är snarare tveksam till att det går att göra säkert. (Questar utvecklar visst tekniken.)

Läs hela det utmärka talet här!


(HT: curiousgeorge på solarcycle24 forum)
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