[Veritas]

Until recently I've been in the camp that sees peak oil as a catastrophe waiting to happen. Simply put, the only plausible replacements for petroleum energy are coal and/or nuclear, and frankly we don't have the facilities being constructed for a seamless transition even if this was the plan.

When people bring up alternative energy sources I cite the usual - turbines and PV panels require petroleum to produce, they currently provide almost no energy in the big picture (1%? 5%?), and again we're not producing them at a rate that will enable them to pick up the slack lost by petroleum following PO.

Now the question I have is, if we aggregate all the viable alternative fuels - wind, biofuel, solar, TDP, tidal, geothermal, along with the employment of energy-saving technologies and practices that we know we can do - then do we have a sustainable future? Or is it still hopeless?

I know that ultimately we're talking about modes of living. Could the current setup be more or less left in tact if we just retrofitted our buildings, changed all our light bulbs, used cold water in our washing machines, installed solar panels on our rooves, put windmills at every rural house to power that house, turned off our computer monitors when we're not using them, etc etc etc?

I had one figure from a colleague that suggested new buildings can be made 60% more energy efficient than their older "non-green" counterparts without adding any appreciable cost to the construction.

Suppose we could cut our energy demand across the board by 50%. Could we then bring enough renewable fuels online to sustain our way of life?

Is it really a matter of being "there's no way to resolve the problems associated with PO" or is it a matter of political will to curb energy use and bring more renewables online?

I know that world energy demand is on the rise, but lets have a hypothetical situation where we could reduce demand drastically - how much would it have to be reduced by in order for renewable energy to fulfil our energy needs?

There's a big move towards more sustainable practices here in Canada, although its being marketed as a defense against further climate change, it also affects our energy outlook. Curious if this type of strategy could in fact resolve some of the PO catastrophes that await.

[billp]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')side from the Irak quagmire, energy problems continue to dominate Bilderberger discussions. Oil and natural gas are finite, non-renewable resources. That’s because once used up it cannot be replenished. As the world turns, and as oil and natural gas supplies dwindle while demand soars dramatically, especially with Indian and Chinese booming economies who want all the trinkets and privileges of an American way of life, we, as the Planet, have crossed the midpoint of oil production and discovery. From now on, the only sure thing is that supply will continue to diminish and prices will continue to increase. In these conditions world conflict is a physical certainty. End of oil means end of world’s financial system, something which has already been acknowledged by Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, two full time members of the inner circle. Goldman Sachs oil report, [another full time member of the Bilderberger elite] published on March 30, 2005 increased the oil price range for the year 2005-6 from $55-$80 per barrel to $55-$105. During 2006 meeting, Bilderbergers have confirmed that their short range price estimate for oil for the 2007-08 continues to hover around US$105-150/barrel. No wonder Jose Barroso, President of the European Commission, announced several months ago during the unveiling of the new European energy policy that the time has come for a “post-industrial age.” To bring the world into the post industrial age, you first need to destroy the world´s economic base and create another Great Depression. When people are poor, they don´t spend money, they don´t travel, and they don´t consume.

[Windmills]

Our way of live depends on fossil fuels in a myriad of ways, beyond just energy use. Given that our current way of life is based on huge inputs of finite natural resources, there is no way to continue it sustainably. There is an end to everything finite, especially in a capitalistic system designed to exploit those finite things as rapidly as possible. Even if we some how manage to replace the just energy we are losing, the substitutions won't be perfect because oil and natural gas provide more than just energy. Change is going to come regardless of how many renewable sources of energy arrive. I think a better question is not can we somehow continue with what we're doing-- because we can't--but how can we best manage the changes that will inevitably come? How can we proceed from this point in the most enlightened manner?

A huge factor in the equation that people almost always neglect in global warming or peak oil conversations is population growth. Until we can manage our reproduction in a decent way, even the best of mitigation schemes is almost pointless. Perhaps there should be a boiler plate disclaimer in all these conversations that states, "assuming zero or negative population growth, what if we..."

[mkwin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', '
')
When people bring up alternative energy sources I cite the usual - turbines and PV panels require petroleum to produce, they currently provide almost no energy in the big picture (1%? 5%?), and again we're not producing them at a rate that will enable them to pick up the slack lost by petroleum following PO.

[Veritas]

I was under the impression you need petroleum to lubricate the ball bearings of wind mills, and that petrochemical products are necessary to create photvoltaic cells... is that not accurate?

I guess what I wonder is how much of our current energy demand is completely unnecessary and could be easily cut back just by changing certain practices (i.e. using solid state lighting, not leaving computers/televisions/lights on when not in use, using lighter more fuel-efficient vehicles, better public transit, etc etc etc). If we "tightened our belts" (without radically altering our way of life), how much would energy demand fall ?

It strikes me that peak oil itself is meaningless without the context of demand. If we somehow cut our energy needs by 90%, suddenly having maxed oil and gas production today means a lot less than it used to, and we can continue as usual for centuries into the future.

The main problem with renewables/alternatives I see is simply the lack of capacity - it doesn't seem reasonable to expect to meet CURRENT demand with solar/wind/bio/tidal.

But if renewables provide X amount of energy, and we change our behaviour to only require X amount of energy, then we have a sustainable energy system don't we?

THe problem however may be that the global economy is based on cheap abundant energy, and in the absence of either cheapness or abundance the system will simply collapse. All the conservation efforts in the world won't mitigate the fatal flaw. I think here of suburbs and the logic of mass production, will fuel efficient biodiesel cars enable suburbia to continue? or shipping potatoes from Mexico to Canada? Or is this simply impossible to continue in an era of expensive and/or scarce petroleum?

[mkwin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mkwin', 'T')he problem, as Pstarr says, is a liquid fuel problem not an energy problem. The only solution is the electrification of our transport system. i.e. electric car/vans/trains and hybrid trucks as hydrogen might never be commercially viable.

[Veritas]

Couple points...

we aren't running out of electricity, but we can convert electricity into portable fuel (batteries and hyrogen being the obvious ways). So when gas and oil give out - we will turn to electricity or nothing (horses? sailboats? bikes?). That makes peak oil at least in part an electricity problem. There are certainly a host of technical problems with hydrogen - flammability, density, platinum needed for fuel cells, EROEI, to name a few. But let's assume we could develop ways around enough of the problems and develop a half-decent hydrogen vehicle. The problem then is the energy to convert water to hydrogen, aka an electricity issue. Cutting your demand for electricity elsewhere would liberate it to be used for transportation.

You mentioned storage a couple times, how do we store excess energy at the moment? I really don't know how the grid works. I do know that most plans for residential type windmill/solar find ways to use or store energy being generated when it isn't immediately needed. Be it to heat water, or convert water to hydrogen which is then used as fuel for appliances, or to charge batteries.

I also envision that petroleum is going to be with us for a long long time. What will change is the cheapness and abundance. So I'm not that worried about needing some of it to do windmills, PV's, and batteries. If we stopped burning it as transport fuel there'd be plenty around for petrochemicals and the like.

But it sounds like you, pstarr, think that capitalism and conservation can never coexist, and therefore the writing is on the wall.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', 'I') was under the impression you need petroleum to lubricate the ball bearings of wind mills, and that petrochemical products are necessary to create photvoltaic cells... is that not accurate?

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', 'S')uppose we could cut our energy demand across the board by 50%. Could we then bring enough renewable fuels online to sustain our way of life?

[Veritas]

point taken on the question of who constitutes "we". Because oil reserves, production and consumption are looked at globally I tend to think of the problem as a global - or humanity level one.

Ultimately for this question "we" is whoever wants to be included. Households, Neighbourhoods, Townships, Cities, States, Countries, Continents.

It could be my house powering itself via solar panels, or a city powering itself via wind farms, or a nation with a comprehensive renewable strategy of all types of energy. I think what you're suggesting is in many ways location determines whether you can a) reduce consumption and b) produce enough renewable energy to meet your needs.

Colder climates require more energy for heat and to clear roads in the winter (heavy machinery). Coastal areas have access to tidal energy and probably more wind than many landlocked areas (not sure about wind patterns but I remember always hearing that we ought to ring hudson bay with windmills due to the good winds coming off the water).

I guess I was thinking that theoretically as a country we (Canada) might be able to cut our demand for energy by a lot - in the range of 30-50% (?). If we did that, would renewables be able to supply us what we need? If not how big would the gap be? I find frequently the main strike against renewables is how much infrastructure would be needed there to produce energy levels to meet today's needs. But maybe we could bring that level of need down to something renewables could meet.

I don't want to be naiive, nor do I want to be unduly pessimistic. I'm willing to accept that we're screwed - IF that's the case. However I'm wondering if the combination here of renewable/alternative energy and conservation couldn't paint a far less bleak future.

Sounds like while it MIGHT address the energy issue itself, it's problematic and maybe even incompatible with economies predicated on non-stop growth and cheap, abundant energy to fuel that growth.

[keehah]

A look at the larger renewables picture Excerpt from :
Feels Like I'm Dying...From that Old Used-to-Be$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ecause most people don't grasp that solar panels, or wind generators or ethanol aren't a magic bullet unless they represent a self-perpetuating system. Oil was nicely self perpetuating, at least for a good long time - you used oil based equipment to get oil out of the ground in a nice ration of energy returned over energy invested (EROEI) of 100-1. But we don't have the infrastructure, or the grid system, or the renewables, or the tools, or in some cases the technology to make things like solar panels or wind generators entirely out of renewables. They take fossil fuels at 20-50 different spots along the ride. When you add up all the fossil fuels involved, the EROEI of most renewables is somewhere between 1 to 1 and 20-1, probably on the low side for most of them. That means that even to match our current energy needs, we'd need 5 times as much power generated from wind as coal and 50 times as much generated from solar as natural gas. Do you begin to grasp the scale of the problem?

And these alternative energies aren't a permanent solution - it is true that a solar panel might last 20-30 years. It is also true that they might not, and that the batteries certainly won't. That grid intertie that keeps you from having batteries - that uses lots of fossil fuels quite regularly and needs quite a lot of regular maintenence and other energy inputs. And even if your windmill lasts you two decades, unless we can make them again with renewables, that means that we're just sticking the problem on our kids.

That is, let's say we do a massive build out of windmills and solar panels, enough to keep our whole society going (never mind that we could never fund it or engineer it). We use up a huge amount of our remaining fossil reserves to keep everyone comfy and in their cars, and we go into massive debt to do it. Well, five years from now, all the solar panels need new batteries. But we don't have any manufacturing plants that make batteries from solar panels. So we need to do it again, with fossil fuels, plus fix the solar panels that got broken and replace a few parts on the windmill. And all the metal, and the chemicals and the little pieces need to be made, mined, manufactured...with fossil fuels. And then five years later we have to do it again, and then a decade after that we have to do it on an even bigger scale - to replace all the worn out windmills and solar panels. And as we go along, supply constraints are increasing, and prices of fossil energies are rising. Capital costs go up, investment costs go up, and remember, since energy costs are way up, there may not be as much money around to invest.

Where is the energy and the money for all these fossil inputs going to come from in our nice, "renewable" society? In order to keep things going on renewables, we'd have to vastly *expand* our existing infrastructure - not only would we have to make enough windmills to keep the grid going, but also to run the electric cars, to power the mining equipment, to make bioplastics, and smelt aluminum, to manufacture titanium parts - all things that were done comparatively efficiently with oil and gas (because they are heat intensive) now must be done much less efficiently by electricity. So we'd have to build enough windmills not just to power things as they are, but to produce 3 times as much electricity - and rebuild the grid. This would costs trillions of dollars, tons of oil and natural gas...and in a few years, we'd have to do again.

Whenever I bring this up from people looking for techno solutions, they all tell me that eventually we'll be able to make things from renewables, of course. Hmmm...of course. That is, we're betting our kids lives on the hope that at some point renewables will become self-perpetuating, even though we have no idea how that will happen, that would require major, multiple large scale technical breakthroughs in many cases that might or might not happen, AND, we're not willing to do it now, when we have energy to burn, lots of money and no crisis - instead, we're going to bet the farm (and lives) on the fact that we'll be able to do this 20 or 30 years into a depletion crisis with much less money, much less oil, much less availability in a society that we simply don't know the shape of. That is, we're going to stick the next generation with the problem, and hope it isn't too serious. But if we can't do it now, when we have lots of energy and lots of money and all the time in the world, the chances are excellent we won't be able to do it.

[mkwin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')Uranium supply is not a "technicality" and is not the only argument. There are lots of other arguments against nuclear, eroei, security, nimbyism, time-lag, etc. Breeder reactors are always just around the corner. I would not depend on them. Perpetual energy system? Other than thermodynamics and reality there are other impediments to this techtopian dream: an entire investment, industrial, economic world paradigm built on petroleum which is in decline.

[Veritas]

I'm not an expert in metallurgy but tell me again why it is we won't be able to make things like windmills without oil... pretty sure the greeks were smelting bronze a few thousand years ago, and I don't think they were doing it with canisters of gasoline?

[mkwin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', '
')
I don't want to be naiive, nor do I want to be unduly pessimistic. I'm willing to accept that we're screwed - IF that's the case. However I'm wondering if the combination here of renewable/alternative energy and conservation couldn't paint a far less bleak future.

Sounds like while it MIGHT address the energy issue itself, it's problematic and maybe even incompatible with economies predicated on non-stop growth and cheap, abundant energy to fuel that growth.

[mkwin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', 'I')'m not an expert in metallurgy but tell me again why it is we won't be able to make things like windmills without oil... pretty sure the greeks were smelting bronze a few thousand years ago, and I don't think they were doing it with canisters of gasoline?