Saturday, May 08, 2010

"Green" technologies and renewable energy do not significantly reduce our dependence on oil!

The title of this article is deceptive in that none of these technologies could replace oil. In fact, the rapid development of any or all of these technologies would displace only a small percentage of US oil use. Roughly three-quarters of our petroleum usage is in the transportation sector (read: gasoline), while none of these technologies are viable as a fuel replacement. The other quarter of petroleum energy usage is primarily commercial and industrial CHP (combined heat and power) for which trash burning would be the only potential replacement of the four techs discussed here.

In the end, this idea that these clean renewables like wind, solar, and tidal are going to reduce our dependence on oil is an unfortunate misconception. Even if we increase out output from renewables by an order of magnitude, we've displaced some energy use from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, but done very little to put a dent in oil usage.

If you take oil out of the title (4 Energy Technologies That Could Replace Oil) , the claim that these technologies could replace coal or nuclear is still erroneous. Coal and nuclear are used as base load power sources, while wind and solar are not base load viable. In the case of wind, peak output (nighttime) is very much mismatched with peak demand (daytime). Yes, you can absolutely reduce our dependence on both coal and nuclear with these green technologies, but no amount of solar panels on roofs or wind farms is ever going to shut down the coal mines or the nuclear reactors. There's no silver bullet here. Green is good, but its nowhere close to a solution. Numbers came from http://bit.ly/C2Eh6

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