solarmaven asked:
rebuttal to a nuclear power advocate (Jesse Ausubel) who not only brushes aside renewable sources of energy, he claims they will cause serious environmental harm. His argument is based on a measurment tool of his own making on which he builds improbable scenarios and implicity rejects future conservation efforts and the impact of the acceleration of current and future technologies. … solar energy photovoltaics biomass biodeisel wind power micro hydro concentrating nuclear sustainable alternate …
Refrigerators and freezers are amazingly more efficient today then they were a century ago, but they consume far more energy.
Building in a reduction in energy demand is dangerous. As developing nations lift themselves out of poverty and mega-scale desalination becomes widespread were going to need massive amounts of energy.
Rebound/Jevon’s paradox is very real. First you had your refrigerator; when it became more efficient everyone could afford one. Then came freezers. Then came air conditioning. Then the size of the refrigerator/freezer assymptotically approached the size of the doorway and people got a pair of them
I consider hydrogen a red flag because it’s such a terribly wasteful way to store energy. Real world you’re only going to get about 1/4th to 1/3 of the energy back that you put into the electrolysis and there’s not a whole lot that can be done to improve this.
There’s not remotely any hope of beating gasification and watergas shift of natural gas and coal for hydrogen production; the predictable result is a whole lot more coal and gas burning.
Nanotechnology in particular is a huge red flag. There’s no Moore’s law for a solar cell; there’s only a factor 3 or so available.
Solar cells are always going to be fairly bulky. Thin layers are fragile. If they’re going to both absorb most light of a particular frequency and have many junctions absorbing light of different frequencies, they’re going to have to be pretty thick.
Then there’s the issue of doing it without wasting scarce rare-earth metals like indium and tellurium.
What a coincidence, those are almost the same red flags I have but I attach a very different meaning to them.
When you start waffling about energy demand it means you have given up talking about the merrits of your energy supply. It also means you’re going to be talking about human nature(rebound effect/jevon’s paradox in particular).
Excellent series of videos!