Solar thermal electricity makes a huge positive difference....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 8-20-2008

Last Thursday, I went to a presentation by John O’Donnell, Executive Vice President of Ausra Inc which manufactures and builds solar thermal farms and electricity generation.

(See www.ausra.com .)

The number & value of the useful facts I learned was impressive. And, these were in addition to the positive things I already knew about renewable energy and the importance of switching our economy to it.

Many people believe that only tiny amounts of renewable energy can be developed or that it is not cost effective or both which results in their belief that it won’t do as much for our economy or lowering our cost of transport and driving as drilling for more domestic oil.

The facts do NOT back this view.

Wind power can provide a surprisingly large amount of our electricity. Depending on how you calculate it, it can provide 10 to 20% of our electricity use, perhaps more. And, somewhere in the United States the wind is blowing 24 hours a day.

And, solar photovoltaic panels can provide up to 100 % of our current electricity use.

But both wind power and solar photovoltaic power are variable power sources. Solar photovoltaic power is not available at night. And, unless inexpensive and energy efficient batteries or other forms of electricity storage are developed, we would need something more reliable on a 24, 7 basis in addition to those sources.

In addition, solar photovoltaic is not quite to the cost level needed to be less expensive than electricity produced by fossil fuels. And, it will need to be installed in literally thousand of locations across the country.

But when you add solar thermal to the equation the picture changes dramatically for the better in every respect.

1. Electricity generated by solar thermal farms of the kind already being built by Ausra and its many competitors world-wide, is ALREADY cost competitive with electricity produced by fossil fuels.

2. In addition, just this one source alone can provide over 90 % of our current energy use in the United States or more and do it 16 to 17 hours a day.

a) This is achievable from solar farms that it’s doable to build in the Western and South Western United States alone. If you add those that could be build in Baja California and Northwest Mexico, you can just about double that output.

b) It seems that storing the heated fluid from solar thermal at night is over 90 % efficient and far more efficient and inexpensive than saving that much electricity in batteries would be. So by building solar thermal farms and generation facilities in this entire area may be able to achieve electricity very close to the 24 7 availability we need with 16 hours a day being quite doable.

3. It’s not generally known but we already added about 25 % of our current electricity generation from natural gas over the last 15 years or so without any subsidies from government.

So, if we add some government incentives to build renewable energy & some disincentives to using fossil fuels, moving to 100 % renewable energy in 10 years WOULD be extremely challenging. But doing it in 15 years is doable. And doing it in 20 years would be easy.

In addition, if we start now and push we can add so much new cost-competitive renewable electricity within 5 to 10 years that electric cars and plug-in hybrids will begin to lower the demand for gasoline a good bit MORE than drilling for more oil will do in twice that time. And, the auto makers have already announced plans to produce those cars.

Also, John McCain spoke about nuclear power as an alternative solution. It seems that the industry has been mothballed to such an extent due to opposition to it that if we are to build any significant amount of it, we are talking about rebuilding this highly technical industry and this is so much the case, we would have trouble adding more than a few nuclear reactors in the next few years. John O’Donnell made it sound like adding just 5 in the next 10 years would be a considerable challenge.

Adding the 45 proposed by John McCain is extremely unlikely. So much so, John O’Donnell thinks Senator McCain is seriously misinformed.

And, although it’s true that recycling inside a nuclear reactor instead or removing the uranium will turn it into plutonium and produce more energy over dramatically longer time periods and eliminate the need to move and store radioactive waste for tens of thousand of years, if a terrorist gets the plutonium out, it takes relatively little expertise or cost to make a nuclear device. So such reactors will be virtually too costly to operate safely due to the extremely high cost of adequate security.

And, if we go the route of NOT doing this kind or recycling or breeder reactor, we only have about 35 years of uranium left and WOULD have to worry about moving and storing radioactive waste for tens of thousand of years.

We may decide that using breeder reactors and providing the security needed even though it has this very large downside risk may be a lesser evil than having all the coastal cities of the world be under 50 feet or more of seawater and having our weather change for the worst so much it keeps us from growing food to eat.

But, the good news is that we CAN do it all with renewable energy. And, this is in part the case because of what large scale solar thermal farms and generators can provide.

And, what little we cannot do directly with renewable energy now, we may well be able to do at less cost than nuclear reactors with adequate security by using the new battery technologies now being developed.

To do this will require that government at least work intelligently with the renewable energy industry even if there are NO incentives from government.

Now, the Bureau of Land Management is apparently only processing applications in a timely manner for oil companies and is dragging its feet to the point of incompetence or deliberate obstruction, possibly at the direction of the Bush administration, when processing renewable energy applications.

John McCain has voted against or abstained from votes where his supporting vote would have allowed more solar thermal projects to be built soon, and this is true even when some of the solar thermal projects were in his own home state of Arizona.

And, he spoke of his belief that nuclear power is the best solution literally as he was being photographed at a large wind power project.

Here is my take on it.:

John McCain seems like a good guy personally. And, he has said he thinks global warming should be addressed.

But his actions predict that if elected he will continue the policies of the outgoing Bush administration: The deliberate lack of action on renewable energy and giving front burner support ONLY to the oil industry that have gotten us into this mess and are in part responsible for the lack of action to hold down gasoline prices is not desirable or even safe to continue.

Since the health of our economy and our way of life in the climate we have adapted ourselves to depend on action to install massive amounts of renewable energy, which is DOABLE NOW, I think John McCain is a risk we cannot afford to take.

Barack Obama is far from perfect and I don’t support some of his policies. But those considerations are secondary.

If our economy crashes or the effects of global warming cause both our economy and our ability to grow food to collapse, none of those considerations are at all important in comparison.

The energy economy and the policies of the next President and his administration will ruin us or save us. This is the single most important issue.

Obama will at least get us started on the right path. He even is willing to make some compromises with the backers of the oil industry to do so.

McCain’s actions suggest he is badly informed and will do little or worse, will prevent us from beginning.

And, at the moment, because Obama and the Democratic party have not yet communicated this information at all well, they are now running behind in the polls.

This is unnecessary since the facts are on their side and have been all along.

Will they show the voters in the United States this information and explain how it will impact these voters if they don’t know this information and act on it and support politicians who do?

They haven’t done it at all well yet. And, the clock is ticking.