The Seven Ways To Solve The Energy Problem (Business Insider)
Også publisert som How to Navigate Peak Fossil Fuels. . .And Profit (Energy and Capital)
Strålende oppsummering av situasjonen:
By the end of this century then, a mere 90 years from now, we'll need to have an infrastructure that runs exclusively on renewably generated electricity, biofuels, and possibly nuclear energy. That's where we're going.
Fortunately, there is more than enough available renewable energy to meet all of our needs, if we can harness it. Unfortunately, we're starting from a point at which less than 2% of the world's energy comes from renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.
Hydro provides about 6%, and nuclear about 6%, but for reasons too numerous to get into here, some of which my longtime readers have already heard, I don't believe either source will increase much in the future, and both could actually decline.
Our challenge then is to make that 2% fraction grow to replace about 86% of the world's current primary energy, in 90 years or less.
We are currently at peak oil, a short, roughly 5-year plateau which goes into terminal decline around 2012. All fossil fuel energy combined peaks around 2018, less than a decade from now.
All strategies for accommodating the fossil fuel decline require decades to have any significant effect. The now-iconic study "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management" (Hirsch et al., 2005) demonstrated that it would take at least 20 years of intensive, crash-program mitigation efforts to meet the peak oil challenge gracefully. Another study, "Primary Energy Substitution Models: On the Interaction between Energy and Society," (C. Marchetti, 1977) showed that it generally takes decades to substitute one form of primary energy for another, and 100 years for a given source of energy to achieve 50% market penetration.
[...]
The final and most important factor is population. The few population models that actually take fossil fuel depletion into account assume that global population increases roughly out to the global fuel peak, and then stabilizes at that level or declines naturally while economic development promotes lower fertility rates and renewables and energy efficiency increase to fill the gap of declining fossil energy. I understand why this assumption is made—because the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate—and for the immediate purpose of this article I will go along with it. I will note however that history and scientific observation of populations suggest some sharp episodes of decline are more likely, and in my estimation we will end this century with a considerably smaller population than anyone forecasts, at some level well below today's.
Jeg er veldig, veldig glad for at jeg bor i Norge, som dekker kanskje 40% av energibehovet sitt med vannkraft (og ved ta enkle grep - som å forby "snømåking" vha varmekabler i oppkjørselen - kan redusere energi"behovet" betraktelig), som har rikelig med ferskvann, som er langt mindre overbefolket enn de fleste andre steder på kloden, som har en distrikspolitikk som i lys av PO framstår som clairvoyant, som faktisk bevilger penger til bygging av toglinjer og vindparker til havs... (Ja, det er vindparkene som skal bygges til havs, ikke toglinjene, altså).
Norge, kjempers fødeland!
Innlegg
