Journal Entry
Portugal: 45% renewable energy
The Infrastructurist has an article up called Portugal Has Embraced Renewable Energy, So Why Can’t We?. Money quote:
“In the New York Times, reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal writes of Portugal’s swift and remarkable energy transformation. In just five years, the nation has cut its dependence on fossil fuels dramatically, with nearly 45% of its grid electricity coming from renewable sources this year, up from 17% in 2005″
45%! Holy crap. Whenever global warming denialists and anti-green grouches talk about the ‘extreme costs’ of catering to hairshirt environmentalism they make it sound as if the entire economy comes to a cratering halt due to efforts like this.
Portugal saw 10-15% increase in electrical costs.
Forget doing the right thing environmentally, wouldn’t 10-15% to reduce your dependence on terrorist-funding oil drilling be well worth it?
So let’s run that out, the worst case scenario of 30% to completely eliminate it?
Conservatives are okay with Enron and energy traders/speculators manipulating the price of energy well past 30% just for shits and giggles in the name of unregulated pro-business circle jerking.
I’d take a 30% hike for energy independence and no money being sent to terrorists in a fucking heart beat.
Philip Brewer modifies my hasty calculations with cold hard, and better, science (it works bitches!) when he points out Portugal uses 2/3 less energy and is already paying 2X what we pay, meaning the price of energy independence would be at least double and then some your electricity cost. And Steve Bucheit points out that most of the US’s electricity is generated by coal, not oil)…
Filed under the topic Uncategorized on August 11th 2010 at 12:57 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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1. SMD on Aug 11th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Remember the other day when I said we’d be left in the dust? I rest my case.
2. Steve Buchheit on Aug 11th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Well, first of all converting electrical energy to renewables really doesn’t do much to take us off “terrorist-funding oil drilling” (unless you count the coming liquified natural gas market that’s getting it’s infrastructure together for a large leap – hello Qatar!). It just pisses off the homegrown natural gas market and coal producing states.
Oil, oh sure, we want to kick off oil. Damn those Canadians for being so clever with their oil sands and being our primary importer. You know, we want to find the “just right tech” that will reduce out oil dependency on what we can produce domestically. Lower than that (like eliminating oil as fuel), and then we get the same special interest crap halting progress.
3. Wyman Cooke on Aug 11th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
I’m all for energy independence from dangerous states such as Iran and Venezuela. But it won’t stop terrorists. They’ve been getting most of their money from the drug trade. I know, the disconnect is wider than the Grand Canyon.
4. Josh Gentry on Aug 12th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
No, kicking oil won’t stop the funding of terrorists, but if they don’t have something we want so badly, we are much more likely to stop meddling in their home lands. Then they won’t want to kill us so badly.
5. Wyman Cooke on Aug 13th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Fish, barrel. Must resist.
6. Jason Block on Aug 14th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Portugal has an easier time making the conversion to begin with, they use about one third the electricity pre capita that we do. Unless we reduce consumption, I’m not sure that kind of shift is doable, certainly not that quickly.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?action=select_countries&theme=6&variable_ID=574
7. heteromeles on Aug 17th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
One other problem for solar: water. And homesteading.
Trouble is, solar panels (for any generator) need to be washed regularly for peak efficiency. The water reportedly evaporates, so it can’t be recycled.
Where do they want to put huge solar plants? In the desert. Where people fight over what water is left. So right now, one big problem with solar is whose water they are taking.
Second problem: homesteading. There’s this principle (from our homesteading tradition) that unimproved land is the cheapest land available. Once you have done anything to that land (such as homesteading, or euphemistically “improving” it), certain water and other rights are attached to that land, and its value goes up.
Solar speculators want to find the cheapest possible land in the deserts. This would be Bureau of Land Management wilderness land. Every single acre of wilderness within the “maximum solar zones” has been targeted by speculators for potential solar plants.
Problem? Well, the desert wilderness is full of now rare species, as fast surveys are finding. No one had looked before.
You object? You point out that most of the American desert has been trashed by various ill-conceived developments and it would be perfect for solar? Yes. You are absolutely right. But that land costs more per acre than wilderness, thanks to the archaic legal principle of homesteading. Our society now values wilderness, but that value is not reflected in the price of wilderness land.
And there’s this rush on, because the Obama administration has money for solar projects so long as they break ground before November 2010. Therefore the speculators have been trying to push through at least a few plants before the biological surveys are completed. And environmentalists in the desert areas are really upset about the whole thing (yes, I’m one of them).
Oh, and how much better is desert solar? About 15% more energy than what you can get on a rooftop solar panel in Los Angeles. This is about the amount of energy lost in transmitting the energy from the desert plant to the house.
I don’t know how to put a monetary value on shoddy ideas, enshrined legal principles, and putting the needs of speculators ahead of the needs of citizens, but I think you can see that the cost is titanic. I wish that the feds had simply subsidized solar panels for houses in sunny areas of the US.