TALKING ENERGY POLICY, ENERGY SECURITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE Carbon dioxide emissions are rising, dramatically so, and that will continue; the world will need vastly more energy in the decades ahead to raise the living standards of those in poverty; and if ever we needed smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper, the time is now. Robert Bryce, a maverick and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute argues “if oil didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. No other substance comes close to oil when it comes to energy density, ease of handling, and flexibility.” Coal is sure bound to be around for a long, long time, as a cheap source of electricity across the globe…Is nuclear power the most sensible long-term answer to the world’s unquenchable thirst for electricity? Will natural gas, a relatively abundant cleaner fuel source, suffice as the magic fuel on the way to a more nuclear world? “From studies of wind farms Robert Bryce calculates that the average power density for wind energy is about one watt per square meter. A wind farm large enough to power just one data center for Facebook would require nearly 11 square miles of land, he says. On a far larger scale, the United States has about 300 billion watts of coal-fired generation capacity. So to replace it by wind power would sop up 300,000 square kilometers of land, about the area of Italy… If an acre of switchgrass yields about 17 barrels of oil equivalent a year, then achieving that 23 percent [that the United States will draw 23 percent of its power from biofuels by 2050] would take up 342,000 square miles of cropland, the equivalent of Texas, New York and Ohio combined.” #TheEnergyDebate Story: nytimes/2014/06/08/business/energy-environment/review-of-smaller-faster-lighter-denser-cheaper.html?ref=international&_r=0
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:43:27 +0000
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