YOU ARE BEING LIED TO HERE

[oliver.rochford]

you should put your ultimate faith in Jesus

When did this turn into Jesus camp?

ollie

[Michelle in Ga]

For now I'm the only active admin, Fom Matt

Noogie,noogie,noogie

[Chip Haynes]

I'll be putting my faith in myself, thank you so very much. If you want to trust anything or anyone else (living, dead or risen), you go right ahead. Just don't expect me to tag along.

We'll be divving up yer stuff when you're gone.

[RobTzu]

World Energy Consumption 2003: 421 Quadrillion BTU (1).
Renenewables are at 8% of that total. (2)
Renewables need to make up 92% of first number, just to maintain at 2003 levels. This is not counting the 2-3% increase in consumption that has been forecast.  387.21 Quadrillion BTU.
How much output, and at what cost can windmills provide?
Do the math.  Include sources.  We will ignore for now the fact that not all areas of the world are suitable for windmills.  We will also ignore the intermitency problems.  I just want to know X windmills at Y dollars per windmills are needed to replace 387.21 Quad BTU costs Z dollars.


1 btu = 1 055.05585 joules




1 http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html
2 Ibid

[Michelle in Ga]

The cutest question I ever heard about religion was:

"Why did God invent mosqitoes?"

The answer: "Somethings we have to find out when we get to heaven."

[Jay Dee]

Ultimately, the big questions remain: 1 - how soon and 2- how hard will we peak or start decline. According to the second Hirsch report - posted today we can go a long way toward a smooth mitigation if we have twenty and some serious problems if we have only ten years to mitigate and serious chaos if we do not have any mitigation prior to decline beginning. Believing it silly to depend or palce the responsibility of pur existence  on the governemnt or the oil industry to get it right some of us choose to begin our own mitigation and some do not. The more we mitigte now the less we will have to later. If we have twenty years obviously those of us who have already begun will have minimal problems and so it will go on a sliding scale. This is based on the idea that indicates you believe the two questions above frame our problem. Any answers necessarily have to be based in specualtion but some speculation can be supported better than others. As for specific solutions as a part of the mitigation I am not the best person to offer much of anything - only generalizations.

[Syberberg]

you should put your ultimate faith in Jesus

When did this turn into Jesus camp?

ollie

The canon/cannon fodder were bound to show up eventually mate. It's just another form of denial: "I need do nothing, for God will." Or some-such other piece of claptrap.

[Dennis from Oregon]

Thanks for taking the time to do your homework RobTzu.  I like to see the research, its just so time consuming..  We should all try and do more, share more...  Expressed in your manner its obvious that there are defined quantitative problems in renewables huh???

[Dennis from Oregon]

Anybody know what one of them Danish windmills put out averaged over a year or two??  Would be good to know, we could start getting a cost estimate

[KhanCEO1]

did any of you stop to consider that the premise of thise site is defeatist?
a subtle by very damaging lie
you see getting off of oil is easy and that should be done instead of the paramilitary shit for brains attitude of getting solar panels and a gun and wait for the apocalypse.

in Denmark we have a few windmills and on a windy day we get more than 50% of the electricity from windpower (nationwide). a single mill can supply more than 50000 homes. the rest is done with electric cars which are 4 times as efficient as a bonus
problem solved...

cheap solarfilm is also an avenue of attack. essentially just plastic film and no more expensive to make. some activism to that end and voila

so don't panic, be constructive. give serious thought how to help. that's how we win. your sofa butt is the real enemy

and if you think electric cars are weak and can never replace gas car then you haven't been keeping up with current events
enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE01yUYq0_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qDZOBQs60w
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/tesla-roadster-pictures-and-video
http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/15/technology/disruptors_eestor.biz2/index.htm
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3974264721033016884&q=futurecrush

link 4 spells cheap long range which is the electric cars only weakness at this very moment. electric cars will not only match gas but outperform it. simpler design. more powerful (the 250HP tesla motor weighs 30kg). electric car needs motor, electronics box and batteries. try to make a list of all the components that wont be needed anymore. even the disc brakes and differential wont be needed when the production matures.
how can you help you ask. raise awareness, not only of the problem but also the easy solution. not only better but better.
you can also convert your cars to electric drive to show the people that it works. it's being done all over. google around. pick nice cars and not old wrecks, the impression matters. A used Mazda mx5 miata is a sexy cheap donor car. Audi A4 is nice too. you can even start a shop doing conversions for people and that can even be profitable since the large automakers haven't woken up yet. a bit of mechanics work is all it takes to mod a car. matter of hours with experience

the effort is how we do it. not cold hearted panic

to sum up. windmills, solar film and electric cars. problem solved. see what a little thinking can do

You sound like everyone I've talked to about peak oil, noob.

[RobTzu]

" When comparing the size of wind turbine plants to fueled power plants, it is important to note that 1000 kW of wind-turbine potential power would be expected to produce as much energy in a year as approximately 500 kW of coal-fired generation." (1)

Ok, best I could find.  20kW for 6,000 USD. (2)
First, how many do we need?    So lets convert 387.21 Quadrillion BTU into Kilowatts. (4)
Step one, goto joules.  4.08*10^20 KJ.  Or, 408,000,000,000,000,000,000 KILOJoules.
Step two KJ into KW.  (this is going from energy to power, essentially we assume that we are getting the same energy an hour, every hour) 1.13*10^14.  Or 113,000,000,000,000 KW.  So, we would need that number divided by 20, multiplied by 6000 dollars a unit.  We end up with: 3.4*10^16 or 34,000,000,000,000,000 which is 34 quadrillion dollars!  Yikes, the World GDP is 44,433,002,000,000.  Which is 44 Trillion.  So we would need 100% of the world's output for 765 years.  That is with no food. That is not counting diminishing returns.  That is not even seeing if that much windpower could be harnessed.  Assuming I picked a bad windmill, even if the price was 1/100 of that, we would still need 7.65 years. 

I would appreciate PeakEngineer or someone who has had physics class more recently than I to double check my methodolgy.



1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
2: http://www.emarkelectric.com/specials.html
3: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci797759,00.html
4: http://www.physics.uconn.edu/~hayden/refdata.html

[Chip Haynes]

I'm willing to say (gamble) that renewables like wind, solar, hydroelectric and biomass will be able to provide about 10% of the total energy we need at today's levels. I'll even be real generous and say that oil will account for another 10%, because it never will totally go away. I'll even go right off the deep end and give you a 5% allowance for some pie-in-the-sky alternative energy system we haven't even thought of yet, like fermented weasel spit. That's a whopping 25% of what we have now.

Can you get by on 25% of everything?

(Gas, oil, water, electricity- FOOD?)

Welcome to The Dim Ages.

[oliver.rochford]

For me personally the food issue is the greatest problem.

For one, much of the arable land wordlwide is essentially barren now, where it not for the petrochemicals we pour on them.

Then there's the weed and pest issue, which we also address with petrochemicals.

And of course the work we do with machines, from pumping irrigation water to ploughing the earth and harvesting.

However, as the major industries won't surive without cheap energy,  I will assume we will have alot of spare manpower.

The first generation will have it tough, as we're not used to such work.

Then we have the just-in-time issue and the fact that we are already currently using more than is made.

Grain harvests have gone down globally. if the Monsoon fails in Asia, the rice harvest will be a problem too.

Add to that loss of arable land through development (1/10th of the US arable land has been paved over) and climate change impact (desertification, flooding, loss of monsoons potentially) and climate change and we have some real problems to face up to.

Australia and India are already suffering from major water shortages. That has to do with PO because many of the technologies used to try and work around that are fossil-fuel based (pumps, irrigation).

Our global fish stocks are also more or less depleted, and hunting may feed someone for a while, but imagine the result if thousands of hungry people go after them.

ollie

[PeakEngineer]

Well, my good calculator went missing at work a few months back, but I'll give it a try anyway

Actually, I get slightly different numbers, but your methods are essentially sound:

387.21*10^15 BTU  = 4.09*10^20 J = 4.09*10^17 kJ 
(reference #4 has an error: it cites 1054 for BTU -> kJ when it should be 1055 for BTU -> J)

For world power consumption for one year:
4.09*10^17 kJ /[(365.25 d)*(24 h/d)*(3600 s/h)] = 1.3*10^10 kW
(I'm not sure what number you used for the total time in the denominator -- perhaps I've made an incorrect assumption here on what you wanted to calculate)

Number of solar arrays = (1.3*10^10 kW)/(20 kW) = 6.5*10^8

Cost = (6.5*10^8)*$6000 = $3.9*10^12 ($3.9 Trillion)
However, I see a problem with using reference 2 for the price: it says that units from 2 kW to 20 kW start at $6000 -- so I think the lower number is for the 2 kW unit.  We can either find a different source or use the 2 kW for $6000 (still low, I think), which gives us:
Cost = $39 Trillion

One more factor we're missing:  In the first line of your post, Rob, it says that wind turbine power is really half the equivalent coal power effectiveness over the course of a year.  So, multiply by 2:
Cost = $78 Trillion

Although this is significantly smaller than the numbers you calculated, the main point is still the same:  It is incredibly difficult and expensive to replace the entire world electrical grid with wind energy.  Even though the number I calculated is near world GDP, it would take at least a decade to scale up production to produce the required number of wind generators.  This is if we commit all our economic resources to the project, including food (as Rob pointed out).  And, this still doesn't account for what is required to meet current growth in demand.

[Bovine Blue]

This is if we commit all our economic resources to the project, including food (as Rob pointed out).  And, this still doesn't account for what is required to meet current growth in demand.

People might be able to give up food but wouldn't this also require them to give up the bare neccecities like ipods, cell phones and big screen TVs? 

Unthinkable.