100 Percent Renewable Energy......

Is it possible to reach 100% renewable energy on ten years? Yes, No and why do you think that.

 

Fossil fuel is so plentiful here in the U.S. it should be considered "renewable". So to answer your question. Yes.

 

Yes...the perpetual engine is in development.

 

NO
There are three laws of thermodynamics:
1. You can't win-energy cannot be created from nothing;
2. You can't break even-every action results in a loss of energy
3. You can't quit-no device can produce absolute zero temperature

 

Cold fusion.

 

You have #2 wrong. There is no loss of energy. It's just in a useless (for a given purpose) form.

 

At what level and considering what areas?

If you mean can a house go off the grid for 10 years, the answer is yes and we know this because people did it for centuries.

Can a city go 100% renewable energy? Maybe, it depends on the size of the city and the willingness of the population to give up a few things.

Can a country do it? No, not yet. At a larger scale, there isn't enough energy available yet.

 

When will Elon Musk start tapping active volcanoes for their geothermal energy?!

 

Burlington is there. Denmark is trying to get to 100 % by 2050.

 

Not the way we use energy. If you mean solar and wind they will never supply all our energy needs. Nuclear is probably the closest to unlimited power but we haven't figured out how to run our cars and airplanes with it.

The best solution for now is to continue aggressively pursuing fossil fuels because the more markets aggressively pursue them, the better the technology for extracting them which lowers pollution cost and environmental impact and the cheaper they become as we see in the U.S.

 

I actually like to see what the markets could do with nuclear if there weren't so many regulations killing it from the start.

 

It depends on how much of an investment individuals and society want to make in installing more solar panels, wind turbines, and hydro-electric dams (1 and 2 being the main ones). My general thought is no.

I've been considering putting solar panels on my roof since buying my first house in PA over 12 years ago. To date, the only time it's made sense was to put solar heaters for the pool on our roof in Ohio. That worked very well for the task at hand, but I don't really count it. The incentives mostly work for businesses, not for individuals enough to make it matter.

Despite Kent's love of Tesla, electric cars aren't practical. People like me will also resist conversion as long as is humanly possible. I don't even like ABS or traction control. I can live with ABS if I have to but I prefer not having it.

 

How fast do you think a V-tail will fly with one of those?

 

True, energy is constant but for a given system, in every change, there is a loss of energy-you can't break even.

 

Until there is a viable ambient temperature super conductor, renewables will lag hydrocarbon fuels on a number of levels. I think the current super conductor operates at 215K in a pressurized unique environment.

 

Dun know....at least faster than a Mooney.

 

There will be a way eventually.

There is an almost eternal burning ball of gas lighting our sky, there is lighting bolts of zillions of watts of power and constant molten rock just under our feet yet we have to burn oil to spin a little thingy to generate power.

There is a breakthrough out there somewhere.

 

Yes. Because coal and oil are renewable.

 

You forgot the part about energy can't be destroyed.

 

I'm pretty sure Ice Man has the answer.

 

Big hurtle for renewables currently is the lack of adequate battery type storage to even out the production fall offs and demand peaks during the 24 hour cycle.

Nuclear is the only bridge we currently have to allow us time to find another viable large energy source. We need to invest in 4th Gen Nuclear like Thorium Salt and scrap these 2nd Gen plants.

Energy Positive Fusion is still years away.

 

Nothin’ uglier than wind power.

 

No don't think so. Why is that important

 

FTFY

Fusion will not violate Newton's laws. So if it appears to be energy positive, the question needs to be asked as to why it appears that way. Where is the energy coming from?

And Ted, my electric car is very, very practical.

 

All they need to do is harness the energy from all of the hot air coming out of Washington DC

 

Possible? Yes, given a sufficient investment into it.

Probable? Hell no. It's too easy to burn stuff, nobody wants to spend money they don't have to.

I don't see there being any growth in hydro in that timeframe, but wind and solar are both relatively mature technologies that are already being deployed at a pretty good rate, and that could easily cover the generation aspect.

As far as storage to cover the fluctuating nature of wind and solar, Tesla has already put in an 80MWh battery facility in California (in 90 days) and a 129MWh battery facility in South Australia (in 100 days). Construction has been continuing at their Gigafactories in Nevada (which currently produces batteries) and New York (which currently produces solar products), so they should be able to produce enough batteries for a large number of similar installations in 10 years. They've already purchased land and I believe are starting construction on Gigafactory 3 in China.

There are also other methods of large-scale energy storage. Pumped hydro is probably the biggest, and is already in widespread use for stabilization even of non-renewable sources.

Within 10 years, other generation technologies like tidal hydro could be expanded significantly as well.

So again - Technologically, it's quite possible. The main barrier is cost and politics.

I know of a couple of people who have managed to effectively use various incentives and some creativity and sweat to put in solar arrays at prices low enough to have a payback time in the 5-year range. That certainly wouldn't be the norm for most people like me, though, who are more likely to call up a solar company and say "I want you to install this for me."

Most likely the only incentive for me would be the 30 percent tax credit, which drops to 26 percent in 2020 and 22 percent in 2021 before going away entirely (solar is predicted to cost little enough at that point that it's worthwhile without the tax credit).

Not for 100% of uses. Give it a few years, and most non-commercial uses will probably be covered. The Tesla pickup is likely going to fill a big gap, and there are a lot of electric models coming out from other manufacturers to fill various other niches as well. Tesla, Freightliner, and I'm pretty sure International and Paccar (Kenworth/Peterbilt) are all working on electric semi trucks. One of the bidders to replace the US Mail delivery truck fleet is electric. Things could look vastly different within 10 years, again, given sufficient investment.

I won't get into the practicality of the current Teslas here, we've been over this already. And don't tell me it's not practical until you've actually tried it.

Not really. Both batteries and pumped hydro are in reasonably widespread use already.

 

I remember a nuclear physicist, whom worked on many boiling water reactors in his career, posted about cold fusion and he was pretty convincing that it ain't gonna happen.

 

Not unless you hate the poor and love the rich.

Cheap Energy is why our “poor” have cars cellphones and TVs.

 

Yep, an eye sore at night to with all the red beacons lit on them. I’ve never been close enough to hear, but I’ve heard they’re quite annoying to listen to if they’re in your backyard.

 

NEV-AH!

 

If you've been to Maui they got them all over the West Maui Mountains...definitely an eye sore, but whatever floats your boat I guess. According to Hawaiian Electric, 80% of their energy still comes from fossil fuels.

 

Only place I’ve seen fields of them is out in Abilene, TX. I went up in the tower there and my brother was pointing out the blinking lights on the ridge and how annoying it is to see that while working in the tower. I guess it’s a trade off but I sure wouldn’t want to see that in my backyard at night.

 

No, not in 10 years. Probably not ever. People want to use what's easiest and cheapest to access. Places that have a geographical advantage will do it faster. Water and elevation change are necessary for hydro, wind power needs a breeze, and it can't be too cloudy if for solar. I agree with a poster above that energy storage is the key.

For those who have the opinion that fossil fuels are renewable, yes they are, but the easily accessible sources are renewing at a much slower pace than they are being used.

 

A better wording would've been that they don't have the universal practicality that a gasoline powered vehicle has. About the only situation where an electric vehicle has a practicality advantage vs. gas power is for a 100% off-grid setup where you have enough solar/wind power to power the electric car, with no gas stations nearby. Otherwise, you can do anything with a gas powered car that you can do with an electric car in terms of basic fulfilling of the mission.

Whenever I've looked into it, the payback was still going to be in the 10-20 year timeframe, even with incentives.

Internal combustion engines satisfy 100% of uses because of the easy access to fuel. Can electric get there? Perhaps, but the recharging hurdle is great. I can refill my tank in any of my vehicles in 5 minutes. Even with one of the high-power chargers for electric cars (which aren't as available as gas stations), there's nothing close to that level of energy transfer available.

It doesn't take a test drive to determine whether or not something will fill some of my needs.

1) Ability to hop in my truck and tow up to 15,000 lbs. The furthest I have done this from home thus far with my current Ram is about 300 miles round trip in one day, but 1,000 miles/day was common with my old Ram
2) Ability to hop in a vehicle and drive up to 450 miles one-way with easy access to refueling if required along the route (again, 1,000 miles/day was common in my olden days). Right now I can hop in my truck, hook up the trailer, and drive to Alaska if I wanted to go pick up whatever I felt like. Am I going to do that? Probably not, but heading across state to pick up another piece of heavy equipment is entirely likely.

Right now it takes me about 5 minutes to refuel any of my ground-based vehicles. That's not feasible with electric currently, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Like I said, currently you can do basically anything with an internal combustion engine vehicle that you can with an electric vehicle in terms of fulfilling the mission. There's a lot that electric vehicles can't do. Now, I see a lot of good uses for them, and items like local busses and local semi/delivery trucks make some excellent uses, especially with frequent starts and stops as well as engine restarts/shutdowns, plus less of a required range.

The fact that I personally don't like the characteristics of electric is irrelevant. I don't like ABS and traction control, nor do I like the electronic interventions on my truck that intentionally slow down the turbo spool, nor do I like automatic transmission. The market as a whole doesn't care what I think since I'm in the minority, and that's fine. But there are a lot of scenarios where it doesn't work yet.

 

With all the complaints about windmills being an eye sore, making noise, and the shadow flicker effects from it, I was always surprised we never did more to capture ocean currents. Sure, ocean currents are far slower.. 1-3 knots, but water carries so much mass that you could surely get some serious energy out of harnessing that.. and as long as we have the moon it is free energy

Update: looks like this work is being done

 

This (easiest and cheapest). But you cannot count it if you are subsidizing it. It might seem cheaper when government subsidizes wind or solar but it isn't because the cost still exists in the system somewhere.

 

There are always unintended consequences with new developments. Windmills cause headaches and other health issues for some people. They kills millions of birds and bats. Harnessing ocean power is likely to upset organism lifecycles in some ways, maybe seriously. Besides all that, the energy required and the pollution resulting from the manufacture of things like windmills and solar panels and the like can outweigh any savings of environmental impacts. Windmills are also so feeble and expensive that they require huge inputs of taxpayer money to convince companies to build and operate them.

In BC where I grew up, there's a hydroelectric dam not far from my hometown that generates around 2500 MW. A big windmill generates about 1.5 MW, so it would take nearly 1700 windmills to replace that dam. They would need an area far larger than the dam's reservoir. Thousands of acres of forest would need to be cut down and thousands of miles of roads and powerlines built for them. And if the wind doesn't blow, or blows too hard, you're without power anyway. Battery banks can't store that much energy.

A BC Hydro exec was heard to say that if everyone in BC bought an electric car, they'd need 15 more dams (BC has 28 now). "Which valleys would you like flooded?" he asked.

Market forces will drive any changes in energy development. Sucking taxpayers dry to force the changes, and then having to charge as much as five times for the electricity to pay for their grand experiments (as in Ontario) is not the way to get it done. You just end up with the current inadequate technology.

 

Even with the subsidies the cost is high enough such as to discourage most private users (which is why I haven't done it). What I've seen more of are corporations for which they can use a different structure to make it more feasible.

 

This is really it in a nutshell. The density of energy in wind and solar simply is nowhere near that stored in fossil fuels.