Sustainable Energy, USA and worldwide

It can be attempted to harvest more solar energy than 1,3 %, but maintainance of energy gathering devices will be rising enough to cause losses. 1,3 % is simply the reasonable number with current technology. And the other problem is that our regions that have highest demand for energy cannot harvest as much solar energy as less developed regions. Solar energy here cannot power large scale industry and huge cities. Maybe countryside of the Eastern Poland where prospects for harvesting solar power are more favorable (by 9 %).

edited 8th May '13 10:18:31 AM by CaptainKatsura

Poland is within the Arctic circle mainly so that doesn't surprise me at all.

We're making plans as far 2050; current technology is merely a guideline.

The only country in the world that is mainly within the polar circle is Greenland. You fail geography (and google-fu).

edited 8th May '13 10:20:34 AM by TheHandle

Close enough. Our geographical position is similar in many ways to Ontario's.

edited 8th May '13 10:22:08 AM by CaptainKatsura

Not nearly close enough!

I am an idiot sometimes. But yeah that's still pretty far North. I can imagine sun being much more of an issue than in more temperate regions.

Move Poland to southern Canada and we will get similar sunlight, more or less.

Take into account that between 60 and 70 % of the year the sky here is completely overcast, limiting available solar energy drastically. In some regions it reaches 80 %. Favorable conditions make up for no more than 20 % of the year, during summer. And energy demands during winter are greater for obvious reasons.

PS. Greenland is not a country. It's an overseas territory of Denmark (but not within EU unlike French and Dutch colonies).

edited 8th May '13 10:28:51 AM by CaptainKatsura

Greenland is not a sovereign State, that doesn't make it not-a-country.

And if the Scandinavians and Germans can manage it, so can you. It's not because you have coal that you need to burn it.

edited 8th May '13 10:49:21 AM by TheHandle

A bit less than half of Finland is within the Arctic Circle but it would be stupid to say that Finland is an arctic country. Poland is nowhere near the Arctic Circle.

It's misleading to say that it's similar to Ontario - Europe benefits from the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream's warmth extends to some parts of Northen Russia, so even if you take a ruler and draw a line from Canada to Europe the temperature won't be equal on every part of that line. (Sunlight, though, would be closer to equal than temperature.)

Our main source of sustainable energy isn't solar, though. We use wind power, water power and biomass - the last item on that list being the most significant.

Yeah, Toronto is roughly equivalent to Rome in...latitude? Is that right? But we have much colder winters because we don't have the gulf stream or the Mediterranean.

And Poland is equivalent to Northern Ontario. There's a big difference.

And in terms of renewable energy, the Toronto-Hamilton area has the assistance of Niagara Falls, but the skies aren't consistently clear enough for solar energy, and anywhere with long cold winters won't be great for solar energy anyway.

They are right, humanity uses 72% of the energy earth takes in from the sun daily, while we need to abandon oil, unless your willing to cover the majority of the planet in energy generating equipment nuclear is a necicity, the current generation of devices though are stupidly idiotic though, there needs to be a push twords molten salt, and pebble bed, with the long term goal of fusion, short of anti mater which is pure science fiction at the moment, there is nothing known that would do us better then a SSFR.

edited 8th May '13 12:50:34 PM by imca

Yeah, regardless of our differing methods it just a waiting out game for fusion energy. I doubt though oil will lose importance dramatically. There is more to it than fuel, lots of stuff can be synthetised from it. Of course, it won't get cheap unless we reach Titan and devise a transport ship that can bring back enough of Titan's methane to make the journey pay off.

You can turn biological waste into oil....

Which can then be synthesized into the other products, if you know how much use it has though, seriously burning it is just wastefull.

Going "We're just waiting for fusion to come along" sounds like a bit of a cop out to me. Unless Poland is actually heavily investing in developing viable fusion technology it's just an excuses. As for the idea that Poland is to far north for viable use of renewable energy, there are plenty of EU countries just as far north and we're still trying. the UK is further north, Norway (I know it's not EU but work with me here), Denmark, Iceland (again not EU, but work with me), Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. These are all countries that are just as far north as Poland, now you guys may have unique condition that make thing harder (the UK is an island so it can use lots of wave power) but that's no reason to not try. So maybe Poland can't get itself to 100% renewable by the target date, it can still try and reduce its emissions by building as much renewable as it can.

Its only a copout if you dont have a plan to wait it out, which solar and wind is not a viable waiting plan, sure they can cover residential, but they cant even scratch industrial power use.

More modern methods of fission however are a damn good plan, molten salt burns off its own waste, is intrinsically safe, and has controllable power-flow.

Pebble bed is intrinsically safe, very simple, and requires very little machinery.

Both are much nicer then what most people think of when they think nuclear, both exist now, and both are in use in some areas.... just no one wants to update 60 year old nuclear power plants for some reason....

What other section of industry could you get away with a factory that has not been updated in a generation, and thats really what a powerplant is, just a factory for electricity.

edited 8th May '13 1:22:42 PM by Imca

More accurately: at least as far North as Poland.

Even if we can make it all work on sustainables (and we should try), fast breeder nuclear reactors should be adopted just because they burn up existing nuclear fuel and can make it go away faster.

The "some reason" is often regulations that make it prohibitively expensive (and I don't mean "we make a little less profit this quarter", I mean more like "we don't make any profit at all this year"), mandating that they can't make incremental updates, but have to update everything at once (particularly in the oil refinery business).

Where regulations don't do it, harassment lawsuits by environmental groups who use the law to effectively prohibit building new plants will do the trick.

On a related note, earlier today I saw a trailer for the movie Pandora's Promise. TLDR version, from the trailer, is that it's a documentary about pro-nuclear environmentalists. If the trailer isn't lying I imagine it will at least make all the hyper-enviroweenies explode into a frothing rage... which I personally don't see a problem with.

Regarding profitability...energy generation doesn't have to be a for-profit enterprise. Just sayin'.

As long as a major part of a given country's voters and/or politicians are fiscally Conservative you're going to have to include profitability in any plans you propose for energy development.

I do understand the point about changing the political environment of a country - I'm a political activist myself - but to some extent, if you want to be practical and realistic, you have to figure out the framework within which your solutions will have to exist - and that comes at the expense of ideology.

And as long as capitalism exists, no one is going to foot the enormous bill needed to make electricity, unless they make money in return.

Except the goverment, as with certain other industries that wouldn't work at a sustainably high level if they were privatised.

I dont think I have seen many government subsidized businesses that work well besides rail....

what ones am I missing?

Also from what I have seen, the US in particular has a really nasty fear of the government running or subsidizing businesses...

^ It tends to come and go, really. The agriculture industry, for example, is a perennial favorite for Washington's largesse, from both sides of the political aisle.

As for government owning power production, government industries don't exactly do all that well in efficiency, as they don't really have to care what J. Random Shmuckatelli thinks. The environmental concern of government industry usually tends to be lacking to varying degrees as well, with the Soviet Union and its puppet states being extreme examples (f'rex, since the Germanies were reunited, W. Germany has spent untold amounts of resources cleaning up the unholy mess left in the GDR by state industries, and IIRC are still paying for it).

I feel increasingly certain that Soviet Russia was a bit of anomaly when it came to government run industry, a model of the worst that can happen, not what's always going to happen.