There is no such thing as an energy crisis...

[Qacer]

Energy crisis is due to economic woes.

This is from a presentation I attended three years ago from an IEEE Life member:

Energy Sources
------------------
Solar
Wood
Biomass
Solid waste
Fossil Fuels
[*]Oil
[*]Natural gas
[*]Coal
[*]Oil shale
[*]Tar sands
Solar radiation
[*]Thermal panels
[*]Solar concentrators
[*]Photovoltaic
[*]Ocean thermal gradients
[*]Solar ponds
[*]Photochemical (artificial leaves)
Hydropower
Wind

Atomic Nuclues
Nuclear fission (natural)
Nuclear fission (breeded)
Nuclear fusion

Stored
Geothermal
Tides


Energy Source | Source Potential Quads | Currently Available Quads without economic consideration
All solar forms (current) | 5,000,000/Year | 2,000/Year
Oil | 70,000 | 13,000
Natural gas | 25,000 | 4,000
Coal | 240,000 | 24,000
Shale oil | 20,000 | 10,000
Tar sands | 10,000 | 2,000
Nuclear fission | 100,000,000 | 400,000
Nuclear fusion | near infinite | 0
Geothermal | 100,000,000 | 2,000
Tides | 4/year | 0

Note: A quad was a made up unit representing a huge amount of energy..most likely billions... Edit ... BrownTown pointed out that a quad is quadrillion BTUs..


The bottom line of the presentation was that there are many sources of energy. We just have not come up with the tools to harness them economically. So, if you want to make your mark in history, study hard and be creative in coming up with the right tools to harness these sources easily.

Edit 1: I am an IEEE member, but I am not a Life member. You only get that when you are old. Let's be mature about this topic.

 

[JS80]

thank you mr obvious

 

[Gibson486]

Quick, get this guy a PhD in common sense.

 

[neutralizer]

Wow, you are so smart. You're an IEEE Life member who went to a presentation. You must know EVERYTHING.

 

[Alienwho]

It must be 'reply like a douchebag' day today.

 

[Qacer]

I was expecting a more mature crowd who was willing to discuss this presentation... not a bunch of sarcastic 13 year olds.

 

[OSX]

I need more fuel for the Mr. Fusion.

 

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: JS80
thank you mr obvious

It may be obvious to you, but apparently, it's not obvious to many others. Grow up.

 

[illusion88]

Originally posted by: Qacer
I was expecting a more mature crowd who was willing to discuss this presentation... not a bunch of sarcastic 13 year olds.

Try Highly Technical.
And to help spark debate...
Isn't it a crisis if we demand more energy then we create? You suggest that this is due to economic woes, but it amounts to the same thing, not enough energy to meet current demands.

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: Qacer
Note: A quad was a made up unit representing a huge amount of energy..most likely billions

WOW, lmao at that statement. A quad is a quadrillion BTU, not some fanciful made up term.

EDIT: aparently everyone else is replying like an ass too, so now i feal a little bad about doing the same.

 

[SlitheryDee]

So there are lots of quads... That tells laymen like me absolutely nothing.

So how long does one quad of energy last? If you add 'em up how many would it take to power the world for a year?

How long are the sources you mentioned going to last? If/when some of them run out can the other sources take up the slack?

 

[BrownTown]

Doing 10 seconds of research shows that the world consumed 382 quads in 1999, so that should give you some idea.

BTW, google is your friend, if you don't know what a quad is, type it into google, if you don't know many quads the world uses, type it into google, im sure you can find as many pages of data on how many quads are used and produced by different industries and countires as you want.

EDIT:

convert quads to whatever you like

Pretty pictars

 

[Qacer]

The guy who presented this 3 years ago was involved in a government funded project to extract oil from coal (?). Something similar to that nature. He said the project happened during the oil crisis in the 70s or 60s .. if I remember correctly. When things went back to normal, the project was abruptly cancelled.

Anyway, this presentation was given because at that time someone posed a question what our grandchildren's grandchildren will use for an energy source. It is trully amazing that we have access to 5,000,000 quads of solar energy per year, but yet are only using 2,000. Sometimes we just need to bang our heads and let the ideas flow about how to harness them more effeciently.

 

[LS20]

tell the peak oiling quacks who are buying tinfoil hats and 50-years reserve of canned food

 

[Qacer]

There are many quacks out there, but surprisingly, some of those quacks have interesting ideas eventhough some of them are proven to be wrong later.

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: Qacer
The guy who presented this 3 years ago was involved in a government funded project to extract oil from coal (?). Something similar to that nature. He said the project happened during the oil crisis in the 70s or 60s .. if I remember correctly. When things went back to normal, the project was abruptly cancelled.

Anyway, this presentation was given because at that time someone posed a question what our grandchildren's grandchildren will use for an energy source. It is trully amazing that we have access to 5,000,000 quads of solar energy per year, but yet are only using 2,000. Sometimes we just need to bang our heads and let the ideas flow about how to harness them more effeciently.

No, thats not what that is saying, the 5 million quads are all the light that is incident on the planet. The 2000 quads is the amount of that which is possible to be extracted (given that 2/3 of that light hits the ocean, and alot of it also falls into farmland, cities, forests, etc that are also important). In terms of actual production today you are looking at more like .01 quads of solar production.

 

[Qacer]

I actually had a thought. I was watching Nova and they had a special on the race to come up with a Space Elevator. At the end, they mentioned carbon nanotubes and Van der Waals' forces. The idea is that if you pull one carbon nanotube out it will pull its neighboring nanotubes as well, and the neighboring tubes will do the same thing to its neighbors.

It may be possible to use this phenomenom to get the carbon nanotubes to vibrate a piezoelectric material while being pulled. The piezoelectric material would become a voltage source and that can be coupled to an energy storage device like a carbon nanotube based supercapacitor. Imagine being able to charge up a battery simply by pulling a string of carbon nanotubes.

I wonder if that's feasible.

 

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
No, thats not what that is saying, the 5 million quads are all the light that is incident on the planet. The 2000 quads is the amount of that which is possible to be extracted (given that 2/3 of that light hits the ocean, and alot of it also falls into farmland, cities, forests, etc that are also important). In terms of actual production today you are looking at more like .01 quads of solar production.

Oh yeah, you are right. I'm not even reading my posts correctly.

I remember talking to a graduate student once. He said he was trying to develop a control system that will efficiently position a solar panel at the optimum angle. Then again, I still have not heard of solar cells with 70% effeciency. So, really, his control system had to use some effecient components to not use up more energy than the solar panel produces.

 

[Rogodin2]

THe primary problem is that humanity is lazy.

There are many forms of energy-we just need to be rocked out of our dependency on light crude, heavy crude, and coal. Until this happens none of those small carbon footprint energy sources will gain traction.

Rogo

 

[PowerEngineer]

There are many challenges that we can meet when "cost is no object" (e.g. putting a man on the moon in the 60's).

IMHO real engineering is finding cost-effective ways to apply technology to solve problems. While it's certainly true that there are plenty of energy sources out there that are technically accessible, the "crisis" has everything to do with the costs of accessing them. To say that we "just have not come up with the tools to harness them economically" suggests that this is the easier part of the problem, when I see it as by far the hardest.

My 2 cents...

 

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
THe primary problem is that humanity is lazy.

There are many forms of energy-we just need to be rocked out of our dependency on light crude, heavy crude, and coal. Until this happens none of those small carbon footprint energy sources will gain traction.

Rogo

There are some smart ATOTers here. Maybe they can come up with a creative solution. Laziness is just part of the problem. I've actually met plent of motivated individuals with creative ideas. It's just that funding is very limited and normally the ones who get awarded are sometimes the best marketers. It doesn't mean they have the best idea.

 

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: PowerEngineer

There are many challenges that we can meet when "cost is no object" (e.g. putting a man on the moon in the 60's).

IMHO real engineering is finding cost-effective ways to apply technology to solve problems. While it's certainly true that there are plenty of energy sources out there that are technically accessible, the "crisis" has everything to do with the costs of accessing them. To say that we "just have not come up with the tools to harness them economically" suggests that this is the easier part of the problem, when I see it as by far the hardest.

My 2 cents...

It's very true. If I had an unlimited amount of cash flow, my bank account would not be in the negatives. I knew someone who used to work for a power company. He suggested adding a 200 kVA transformer to a new circuit branch because in the long run it would save the company money. The powers that be nixed the idea and eventually let him go. Well, about 2 years later the area experience a big boom, that 200 kVA transformer sounded really good then. They actually spent more money adding new substations than sticking with a 200 kVA transformer.

 

[AbAbber2k]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: Qacer
The guy who presented this 3 years ago was involved in a government funded project to extract oil from coal (?). Something similar to that nature. He said the project happened during the oil crisis in the 70s or 60s .. if I remember correctly. When things went back to normal, the project was abruptly cancelled.

Anyway, this presentation was given because at that time someone posed a question what our grandchildren's grandchildren will use for an energy source. It is trully amazing that we have access to 5,000,000 quads of solar energy per year, but yet are only using 2,000. Sometimes we just need to bang our heads and let the ideas flow about how to harness them more effeciently.

No, thats not what that is saying, the 5 million quads are all the light that is incident on the planet. The 2000 quads is the amount of that which is possible to be extracted (given that 2/3 of that light hits the ocean, and alot of it also falls into farmland, cities, forests, etc that are also important). In terms of actual production today you are looking at more like .01 quads of solar production.

Wouldn't that mean this presentation assumes there will never be the potential to harness tidal energy? Or is that 0 simply an infinitely small number that's been rounded down for simplicities sake?

 

[Gibson486]

Originally posted by: Qacer
I was expecting a more mature crowd who was willing to discuss this presentation... not a bunch of sarcastic 13 year olds.

What is there to discuss? Any person with a brain knows that there other plenty of other alternatives in the world. It does not take an IEEE member to know that. Do you expect this thread to hold the answer to a problem that we will likely fight for the next 10 years. To say that the challenge is just finding the tools to do this economically is just wrong.

 

[BrownTown]

Hmm, a 200kVA transformer isn't exactly a big thing, I am somewhat confused by the need to build new substations in order to simply provide that small an mount of power. I guess that might be because in my summer job they design substation which use banks of 3 transformers totalling 1200 MVA in their substation and 500kVA transformers are needed simply to run the fans to cool the larger transformers.

EDIT: also, like PowerEngineer suggested, the difficulty isn't in recognizing the avaialability or theoretical ability to harness this energy, the difficult comes in producing systems which can do it ecnomically. For all you put on there you might as well put on matter-anti matter reactions, i'm sure we could get alot of energy out of harvesting anti-matter from deep space and reacting it with matter here on earth. All we need are some warp drives, anti-matter containment fields, anti-matter reactors etc. But CLEARLY those are just a simply step once we stop being lazy, surely we should all jump for joy that I have jsut solved our energy problems with this post, and it just takes a little inginuity to get us to energy dependance. Too bad big oil will never allow production of warp drives since that would break their stranglehold on our economy!