Tag Archives: Conservation

China's Water Shortage and Power Plants (their power plants definitely have a drinking problem)

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In the previous post, I described how thermal power plants use a massive amount of water. This time we are going to explore a specific case. As usual, it's China.

Power plant water use can be a problem in a water-stricken area. Let's look at a case-study. China is a water-stricken area, and has a lot of thermal power plants. In fact, China uses more primary energy than any other country in the world. Unfortunately, their power plants are far less efficient than they should be. So they are wasting water, and this is unsustainable. Moreover, China has 1,350 million people. The US has 314 million.

First, let's look at the rainfall of China, compared to the US:

Rainfall in China, in inches

Rainfall in China, in inches

Rainfall in the US, in Inches

Rainfall in the US, in Inches

Looks pretty similar, right? Now recall that the US has 1/4 the population of China. And pretty much the exact same amount of area. Keep that in mind while we look at China's powerplant locations:

 

China's water stressed areas, compared to where power plants are planned. Source,

China's water stressed areas, compared to where power plants are planned. Source,

So. The places that have the most people and need the most power are the same as the dry places. In other words, China is building the bulk of its thermal power plants in the area that can't provide sufficient water to cool the power plants.

Before coming to the complete picture, let's check out the water use:

Fresh Water Use in the US. source

Fresh Water Use in the US.
source

In the US, 80% of water use is to grow food and to make electricity.

Finally, where is all this water coming from? Rain alone isn't enough, it comes from the ground. Fresh water from the ground is not unlimited, and we are running out of it. It's called Fossil Water, and here is what the situation looks like in the US:

Water withdrawals in the US

In other words, a huge chunk of our country is relying on water that will not exist in a few decades.

And looking at China:

China's groundwater depletion rate

In the US, the scale of groundwater depletion tops out around 400 cubic kilometers. In china, it tops out at 3,000 in regions. That's not to say that the US won't run out. It just says that China is in serious trouble.

Again, 80% of water use is for electricity and agriculture. And China has 4x the people of the US. There is not sufficient water. Would you rather run out of electricity, or run out of food? It's not an easy choice, but food can be imported. That being said, someone has to grow the food, and that country better have a robust water supply. Moreover, food growth is a low income industry. A country that marries itself to being a food supplier, unless it charges gouging levels of prices, is marrying itself to never being a high-income country. But charging price-gouging levels is a bad idea.

While this mental exercise was fun, let's look at some examples.

First, while Californians probably shouldn't have been growing water-intensive almonds in a dessert in the first place, running out of water has imperilled the world supply of all sorts of nuts and things. They are tearing up their farms because of lack of water.

That's only the start. Drought in Syria helped bring about war there. Syria is a tiny country that doesn't matter on the world scheme. India, China, and Pakistan face water shortages. Combined, they have 1/3 the world population. They also happen to hate each other. As climate change progresses, and some countries face droughts, people may not want to choose between food and electricity. They may try to divert water supplies, sparking tensions and even war.

So. Does your power plant have a drinking problem? If you live in China, it definitely does, and it's causing all sorts of strife.

Wrapping it all together: Yes, a country can import food. But you know how much of the world relies on the middle east for oil, and we talk about energy security? That's just stuff that makes your cars move. Remember how Russia threatens to shut off natural gas to Europe if they don't get in line with Russia's plans, and so much of Europe is cowed? That stuff keeps homes warm, but it isn't as important as food. Imagine a powerful country that is mostly reliant on other countries for food to stay alive. That's a really bad situation. The country in this situation has to either take dictations from whoever feeds them (not really a problem if you are getting your food from non-powerful nations, but still irksome), or has to take over a food-producing country.

One potential solution: Chinese power plants are notoriously inefficient. If you have a 25% thermodynamically efficient powerplant, it uses 30% more water than a 37.5% efficient power plant. China should either shut down inefficient plants and require new construction that is efficient, or require retrofits of old plants. It would be very expensive, but less expensive than the social and political cost of running out of water too soon. What about the US? Most of our plants are pretty efficient already. Especially our Natural Gas plants that much of the country runs on. We probably spend too much water on watering desserts to make food, but that's another story.

An almost-final note. While solar power and wind power use water in construction, their water use is minimal compared to that of thermal power plants. Barring solar-thermal (it's thermal, it uses water), these renewable resources are the only answer to the reducing the choice between electricity and food. In other words, expansion of wind power and solar PV is the only cheat code we have to deal with this impending water shortage.

One last thing. Why did I single out China? Only because I know a lot about China. Pakistan will have water shortage issues, but they already don't have electricity. In the summer, they have blackouts for up to 20 hours a day cause they can't produce enough electricity. This is a country of 180 million people, bordering India, and sharing a strong mutual resentment with India. More on this later, though.

Thanks for reading,

- Jason Munster

Your Power Plant Might Have a Drinking Problem

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While at an energy conference (ARPA-E, 2014) I found out that power plants account for 40% of water draw in the US. Simply put, they use a lot of water. The good news is that it doesn't have to be fresh water. Brayton Point, for instance, uses grey water. In other words, it uses water that came from your toilets and sinks that has been reprocessed. Others use saline water from oceans (all water in the oceans is saline, cause it is salt water).

No math this time, just review the math from my thermal power plants post.

Why do power plans needs water? Cooling purposes. The way a turbine works is that high-pressure air has to drive through it. The way this happens is water is flashed to steam. Steam takes 1600x the space at 1 atmosphere compared to water. So it creates a massive pressure differential on one side of the turbine, turning the fans, turning the turbine, and generating electricity. The steam needs to be cooled on the other side to either create the vacuum that drives the pressure differential to turn the turbine, or, if it's a close cycle and the same water is used, to cool the steam back to water. It needs to be water again, otherwise it cannot expand and drive the turbine.

Schematic of a thermal power plant. It needs water to cool the water used to drive the turbine.

Okay. That was complicated. Let's break it down further. This section if very detailed, and most of you will want to skip this paragraph. Here goes: There are two major ways to run a thermal power plant. Combined cycle, and single cycle. Combined cycle is more efficient. How? It uses several turbines to extract energy rather than a single one. Think about it this way: when you have 300 degree celcius steam coming from the coal-burning reactor, it is all steam. There is no water-phase droplets in it. This is called dry steam. It can be directed to special high-efficiency turbines that can extract a lot of energy. The steam then loses pressure and temperature, and some water droplets begin to form. If this mix of steam and water were directed at the same turbine, it would pit and tear at the turbine blades, destroying it. Two things could be done with this steam. Either it could be directed to another turbine, or it may not be reused. The second turbine will be designed differently for steam that is lower pressure and lower temperature. Having multiple turbines like this increases efficiency. Inefficient plants use only one turbine

(everyone else should join back in now) Eventually you end up with a mix of water a steam. As I said before, this has to become water again, so it can expand to steam and drive turbines. Or, if a plant is doing a once-through cycle and expanding water from a stream, it needs to dump the water back into the environment. Dumping near-boiling water into the environment is a terrible idea. That would be a bit of a disaster. So, in either case, you need a lot of water from the environment to cool the water used for the steam cycle in the plant. An alternative scenario is using evaporative cooling towers. They evaporate water, which requires heat to go into the water, which then cools other water. No matter what, cooling a plant requires a lot of water.

So here we come back to the end point. Power plants use an insane amount of water. "Ahh, but Jason," you ask, "these are just thermal power plants. I use solar power. So my plant is water-efficient!"

Not so, I say! Solar plants also use water for cooling and cleaning. And this is from NYT, an ostensibly liberal paper that likes solar. This is because major solar plants use solar thermal, rather than solar PV. Solar PV is pretty much water-free, other than for cleaning mirrors. But that electricity is too expensive to be useful at the grid scale (recall from a prior post that it costs about 3-7 cents to produce a kwh of electricity, but we buy it for 20 cents, so it makes sense for us to put solar panels on our houses at the cost of 20 cents per kwh, while it doesn't make sense for power companies to use solar panels since they mark up prices 3x to get power to us).

How does this compare to coal? In the link above, we have solar power using 1.2 billion gallons a year to produce 500mw of power. Your average coal plant produces 600 watts of power. A once-through plant draws "between 70 and 80 billion" gallons a year. But a closed-cycle plant, the one that uses the same water in the plant and only uses other water for cooling at the end of the power cycle, uses 1.7 to 4 billion gallons a year. So the efficient ones are comparable to solar in water use.

So here we have a chart showing all this:

Water use by power plant type, source 

Note that you can find different graphs using different information sources, but the general point always remains: power plants use a lot of water.

Wind power, however, doesn't use water. Unfortunately, wind power is only available in a few places. How about hydro power? It passively uses water, so it doesn't really count. Great, right?

Not so fast. How much of the US power generation comes from thermal and solar sources? According to the EIA, 87%. I reproduce the info here:

In 2012, the United States generated about 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity.  About 68% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuel (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), with 37% attributed from coal.

Energy sources and percent share of  total electricity generation in 2012 were:

  • Coal 37%

  • Natural Gas 30%

  • Nuclear 19%

  • Hydropower 7%

  • Other Renewable 5%Petroleum 1%

    • Biomass 1.42%
    • Geothermal 0.41%
    • Solar 0.11%
    • Wind 3.46%

  • Other Gases < 1%

So yeah. Your power plant has a drinking problem.

thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

Apartment Rentals and Energy Waste

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Landlords usually suck. And they probably cause some notable percent of emissions by being lazy (I would guess like 1+%) and not modernizing their apartments (modernizing by 1980s standards).

Drafty rental unit?

Background

A few months ago, I wrote my most-trafficked article about why living in the suburbs is bad for your wallet, and bad for the environment.

A lot of people had some ridiculous responses.

The ultimate point of the article was that living in a city is better for the environment than living in the suburb. Many responses mostly ignored the environmentally friendliness part. These butthurt folk only cared about the size of their house (which, as we showed in the previous article, means they probably suck in terms of energy efficiency). If they did, they would have pointed out the giant gaping hole in my argument: most landlords don't give a care about energy efficiency of your apartment. They aren't paying for utilities, they only care about your rent.

Some Sources of Energy Waste in Houses

In my last article, I pointed out that all houses need some amount of venting. So bigger houses will likely need a lot more energy to heat and cool than smaller houses. The driver of this was how many times per day the house cycled all of its air. It will surprise most people to find that the amount of ventilation that is still considered safe will dump all of your heated / cooled air 15 times per day.

Drafty windows, much? (same disclaimer as below, burrowed image from a commercial website)

In most cases, your landlord doesn't care about how drafty your place is. On other words, the old place I lived in in Somerville probably exchanged all of its heat to the atmosphere about 100 times per day (we could perceptively feel drafts through every window and door). So the place took about 4-8x as much energy to heat as a well-sealed house of the same size.

What incentive does the landlord have to fix this? Absolutely none. He doesn't pay any utilities. He gets rent no matter what. Given that a majority of people won't ask what the air-exchange rate of an apartment is, he won't have to fix it.

What about appliances? Stoves are pretty easy. Electric stoves produce heat by using electricity to heat an element. They are pretty efficient at converting electricity to heat, but newer ones can definitely be more efficient and save you money. Gas stoves, as long as they don't leak, do pretty well despite age.

Remember these fridges? (note: I just burrowed this from a random site since I couldn't find a .gov site with an old fridge)

Fridges, dish washers, clothing washers, and dryers, or really any other appliance (including hot water heaters, etc.) are a very different story.

Just go here and play around with how much you'd save in electricity annually to figure out how much you'd save by buying a new fridge.

And then remember that 1 kwh of electricity requires 1 lbs. of coal. And then let's consider that replacing an early 1990s era fridge with a new energy efficient one in MA will not only save about $200 per year, but will save nearly 1300 kwh. Or 1,300 pounds of coal, if you get all your power from coal (or about 700 lbs. of methane (recall that methane produces a lot less CO2 for the same energy production)). I am going to repeat that again. Replacing a 20 year old fridge will prevent the equivalent of burning 1300 lbs. of coal in environmental change per year.

That's right. Your landlord being lazy and cheap is making us burn 1,300 lbs. of coal per year. And the energy savings from replacing other old appliances is similar.

What about replacing windows, doors, etc., for ones that don't leak? For ones that have a lower amount of heat transfer directly through the window (double paned, triple glazed, etc.)? It's huge. You can even get tax credits to replace old windows, making the payback time less than 5 years. But many landlords don't care about this, because they don't face the costs of heating a home. They would just be paying money for replacement appliances and windows, and they would never see a return on this investment.

I don't think I need to belabor this point. Old appliances and leaky housing are things your landlord doesn't care about, but they are things that matter in terms of energy use.

So how to fix it? That's for policy people to figure out. I'm not one of them. But I would suggest a few things:

1. Require that landlords report yearly costs of heating to 65F in winter, and cooling to 75F in summer, as well as electricity bills, every time they show an apartment to a potential tenant. This way tenants can add this price in to their monthly rent, and it will force landlords to make a correction for the market.

-or-

2. Require landlords to not have appliances that are more than 15 years old, and windows and doors that are not more than 25 years old

Obviously #1 is much better with market mechanisms, paperwork, etc. I would go with that, since there is pretty much no overhead involved.

Anyone else have any ideas to address this? Leave it in the comments!

Also, if you liked this, please subscribe & share. Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

*Recall from an earlier article that the energy use of heat from electricity depends entirely on the "energy mix" of the grid. If enough of that electricity comes from renewables (let's conservatively say 3/4), then the amount of CO2 produced from using electric heat will be better than gas heat (even if the last 1/4 is dirty coal, hence using the 3/4 conservative #).

Why Giant Houses Always Use More Energy

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Big houses use more energy to heat and cool, for reasons you might not suspect. Houses lose heat to the outside. Nearly all houses are drafty in some form or another, and they need to be somewhat drafty, as we will soon find out.

When energy prices skyrocketed in the 70s due to price gouging and market manipulation of oil (thanks, OPEC), there was a big movement to make it so houses didn't leak air (and leak their heat energy in the process). The idea is that for every bit of air you heat and then let out into the environment, you have just wasted energy. So the process of sealing houses began.

OPEC oil embargoes of '73 and '79. The prices of energy spiked worldwide.

Some groups bragged that they could build houses that only exchanged 1% of their air per hour with the outside. In other words, it would take 4 full days to lose all the heat or AC energy of a house to the outdoors. Excellent, right?

It was excellent in terms of energy savings. But anyone with a flatulent spouse/significant other can tell you that being stuck in a place that is producing unhealthy fumes is dangerous if you don't vent it. It turns out that a lot of basic human activity, like cooking and heating, produce things that are bad for humans and need to be vented.

Much more importantly for advanced cultures*, cooking (it boils water, yo) and breathing and sweating make the air inside a house humid. Humidity in a house causes mold that can make you ill or, in extreme cases, kill you. One of the most effective ways to remove all this humidity is to let the air exchange with the outside.

So here we have a problem. We need to seal our houses well in order to save energy on heating and cooling, yet we also need to allow loss of all this heated and cooled air so we don't sweat ourselves out and cause bad mold to grow.

And we arrive to the crux of the matter. A good exchange rate is .6, or that 60% of a houses air is exchanges per hour. Sounds like a lot? It kind of is. But it's what is healthy for normal technology (we aren't all going to install CO and CO2 scrubbers and dehumidifiers in our houses). So in 24 hours, we have

hours exchanges per day. Of your entire house volume.

So. You have to exchange air in your house. About 15 times per day. Otherwise you might start falling ill. If you have a gigantic house that is 2x larger than you need, then you will use 2x as much energy to keep the place heated and cooled as you need to. So, in short, living in a giant house is a bad thing for energy conservation (take notice, Al Gore**)

Next week we will suspend our assumption that all houses have decent exchange rates, and discuss why this is a huuuuge policy gap.

You don't really need to live in a place like this, do you?

Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

*Developing countries still use coal. By 2020 there will be up to an estimated 400,000 deaths per year in China from indoor air pollution associated with burning coal for heat and cooking in poor rural homes (160,000 median estimate). Obviously this is more pressing than mold.

**I was going to rip Al Gore a new one for having had a huge electricity bill just after making An Inconvenient Truth, but it turns out that in 2007, before it was cheaper or easier, he elected to power his home, in TN, with solar and wind power almost exclusively, jacking up the price to a level higher than most Americans pay. So yeah, he did have a much higher electricity bill than the average American, but he only used about 4x the electricity, apparently. Which is still a lot. Except that he and Tipper both also work out of their houses. And now they have solar panels all over it. So it's not that bad. Though it is still huge.

 

Nuclear Power: Savings lives

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Nuclear power has saved over 1.8 million lives by replacing fossil fuel power sources.

A nuclear power plant!

I've mentioned that fossil fuel power plants kill people and shorten lives by emitting not only particulate matter and smog normally associated with pollution, but also NOx (natural gas power plants produce almost no particulate matter, but any time anything is combusted, the combustion process in a nitrogen rich atmosphere (78% on Earth) produces NOx, so natural gas power plants do produce NOx).

Coal fired power plants, even clean ones, belch yuckies into the air.

Shortly after harping on exactly this for several posts, a journal article came out that exonerated my aggressive stance on how nuclear power saves lives rather than ending them through nuclear disasters. Nuclear power has saved over 1.8 million lives, according to this peer-reviewed research. The authors didn't include long-term health ailments and non-death causing heart attacks related to climate change. Only death: full stop. They go on to say that replacing nuclear power with natural gas would cause 400,000 deaths by 2050. Replacing them with coal would cause 7 million. Meanwhile, the best estimates of long-term deaths caused by radiation exposure from the Chernobyl meltdown, mining uranium, and building nuclear power plants stands at about 5,000 No deaths arose from Three Mile Island or Fukushima. What about the radiation that Fukushima is spilling out into the ocean? It's less than 1/20th the radiation levels found in a banana.

I am a banana. Eating one of me makes you ingest more radiation than Fukushima ever will.

I am a banana. Eating one of me makes you ingest more radiation than Fukushima ever will.

Critics are quick to point out that renewables like wind are cheaper and more effective at reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear. Great. Let's build more wind power. Except that there are not sufficiently good places to make wind effectively and cheaply. In an exhaustive (and depressing) article on the state of nuclear energy construction, it is pointed out that Germany has an installed capacity (recall, installed capacity is simply the name-plate power generation of a plant/turbine at best-case scenario) of 76GW of renewable energy. They then compared this to all of France's installed capacity of Nuclear at 63.1 GW. But, as we have talked about, renewables don't always work. While France's nuclear generators put out 407 TWh in 2012, Germany's renewables generated 136 TWh despite their larger capacity.

"Except like Jason's former manager at JPMorgan, I only work under ideal conditions!"

"Except like Jason's former manager at JPMorgan, I only work under ideal conditions!"

Moreover, Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima. What did they replace it with? Not renewables. Coal fired power plants. Meanwhile, as the US expands power generation from natural gas and ceased buying coal from the US, US coal producers are finding a new market for coal in Germany.

So let's look at Fukushima a bit more. Several things are bad about fukushima. First, it melted down when a tsunami overtopped its protective walls. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had told Japan 20 years ago that their Fukushima walls were too low and they could be overtopped by a very realistic earthquake scenario. And now after the disaster, groundwater contamination with (less than 1/20th of a banana's levels) radiation is all a concern. Guess what? The NRC warned Fukushima to get their groundwater issue under control three years before the Fukushima meltdown.

That's right. The US NRC predicted that Fukushima was going to happen, and told Japan to get their house in order.

NRC: Telling Japan what to do since 1980. "We don't have much of a job to do in the US anymore since we haven't built a power plant in decades"

The US has a nuclear meltdown, too. You know what the consequences were? Pretty much nothing. It cost a billion dollar to clean up. That is a huge sum. But the meltdown was well-handled. And a lot was learned from the meltdown.

My point is, the US has it's matters sorted out when it comes to nuclear safety. And we are good at identifying risks in other parts of the world.

Finally, here's the big one, new reactor designs wouldn't allow for either three mile island or Fukushima to happen. With these new reactors, in the event of mechanical failure of the passive systems, the worst case scenario of the new designs is that it would take 3 full days before even needing to worry about meltdown beginning, leaving plenty of time to deal with the situation.

So yes. There are risks with nuclear. But there are guaranteed deaths with coal and natural gas.

The best solution by far is avoiding building new power plants and to massively increase efficiency and conservation. But people are slow at changing, and we aren't gonna change our lifestyles fast enough in the western world to avoid expansion of power use, and the developing world needs to build a ton of power capacity.

So let's stop being scared of nuclear power, cause it's saving lives rather than costing them.

Thanks for reading,

- Jason Munster

Appendix

Oh, but what is this section? Just a bunch of extra information. Check out how long it takes for various countries to build nuclear reactors:

What are Pakistan and India doing that they can build nukes in 5 years?!?

Average, min, and max times of nuclear plant construction for countries that have built them. Source

Hokay, so. I need to acknowledge the bad parts of nuclear power. The real ones, not the fear-mongering that happens.

First, nuclear power is more expensive than on-shore wind (which is a limited resource, there are not infinite good places to put wind farms), coal, and natural gas. There is no doubt about that. If we switched everything to nuclear, many parts of the US that don't have high electricity prices will experience a rate shock. That is, their electricity bills will rise. But hey, remember what we said earlier about efficiency and conservation being the best way to save lives and to arrest climate change? Slightly higher electricity prices would promote this conservation. The initial rate shock would be a bit of an issue, but I am betting that nuclear power's opponents overstate it.

Second, there is an alternative to nuclear that I want to acknowledge, with a caveat. Renewables can't provide baseload power. But renewables paired with load-following natural-gas fired plants can (recall from a prior article that gas turbine based power plants can spin up very fast, and no other major power plant type can) (we don't count hydro as a major power type because we can't build more hydro in the US, we are tapped [punny]). This is by far better than coal, and better than gas alone. But it still burns gas, which produces CO2 and kills people and causes asthma.

Solving the Climate Problem

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I started this site to get practice in writing science for the general populace. I've slacked off because I am a bit bored of reaching for topics. More importantly, I've been playing rugby with HBSRFC.

So here it is. A generalized and very incomplete version of my view on climate change, who it will affect most, and what we can do about it.

CO2, The Ugly One That Won't Leave You Alone

CO2 stays in the environment for more than 40,000 years. That is longer than nuclear waste lasts. Moreover, its effects are experiences by every person on the planet. What we do now has an effect on the entire planet. Luckily, technology will probably be able to fix this eventually. We can't count on this now, though.

Energy and Climate Change, How They Relate

Climate change is caused by emissions of CO2 by energy use, methane by agriculture and other things, and a host of other very powerful chemicals that are emitted from industry.

How do we solve climate change? The answer is straightforward, but far from simple: use much less energy from sources that produce CO2. Either switch to "green" tech, or conserve. Buy less things that require all the energy to produce. Travel less, or travel in ways that produce less greenhouse gases. Make fewer babies. None of these are easily accomplished, unless you are poor and can't afford any of them. Even then, everyone is striving for a wealthier, more CO2-heavy lifestyle.

So let's assume for a second that people aren't going to change their lifestyles and conserve. We need ways to get energy without belching CO2 everywhere.

Live in Smaller Houses, Buy Less Stuff

You can't convince Americans to live in houses that are the size that Europeans live in and you can't convince them to give up their cars to take public transportation and live in cities (at least in the short term). Houses require energy to heat and cool. Smaller houses mean fewer drafts, leading to less heating and cooling needs.

How about green energy? We have reviewed those technologies. There isn't enough wind to provide sufficient wind power, and the wind isn't always blowing, so sometimes we won't have power when we want it. Hydro power is pretty much fully tapped. Tidal power is a joke in the big scheme. Solar could be an option, but it is currently far too expensive. It is not "deployable" in that with solar, you only get what the sun decides, so we will always need some backup power that can be turned on when we want. Solar doesn't work well at night, for instance. Moreover, the best places for solar are far from cities, so figuring out how to get the electricity from the countryside to the cities is a monumental task, especially in the US (even with eminent domain, getting the land to be the transmission lines through several states would be nearly impossible). So here we stand with three good reasons that solar won't solve our problem in the near future, and with the other resources insufficient. Pretty much, even if we do use solar to solve a lot of our problems, we still need some other energy source to provide baseline power.

Too small! Turn back!

What about buying less stuff? The amount of CO2 that goes into making cars, laptops, etc., is pretty big. How much stuff do you buy that you never use afterwards? Or you maybe use once a year or two? All of that, you could have rented, saved money, and saved space. Even better? The things that go into making electronics like cellphones are not easy to pull out of the ground. Tantalum in your cell phone is pretty much produced by indentured servitude in Africa. The other stuff that goes into electronics, the rare earth metals, these are not so rare. It just turns out that it is difficult to produce it without destroying the environment. The US has plenty of rare earth's the reason it is done in China is that they don't mind wrecking the environment and their workers (see bottom of that post). Yeah, we need electronics to communicate and keep things moving. We don't need a new iphone every 6 months. Those things last at least 2 years.

Energy for Transportation

This is a much larger hurtle. 35% of US energy consumption is in transportation. Transportation requires that the energy source be within the vehicle (unless you are in South Korea, where the energy source is induction and is beneath the road. Pretty badass, if you ask me). Batteries currently weigh a lot, don't have nearly as much energy per pound as gasoline, and require a long time to charge. The problem is not as bleak as it seems, however. Most driving in the US could easily be done with all-electric cars.

Your bus is ugly, but it charges while driving without producing its own CO2. Well done, South Korea.

Cars

I've also written about Electric Cars.

This is an area with a lot of potential. 120 million Americans commute to work by car. The average person lives fewer than 20 miles from work. Substantially all of them commute alone. The Nissan Leaf gets 75 miles before it needs to be recharged. The Tesla model S goes about 275 miles. No matter what the source of energy for an electric car, it produces less CO2 than a normal car. Going by the numbers available on these cars, we see that with the standard US energy mix (some renewables, lots of nuclear, a whole lot of natural gas), they produce between 33% and 50% the CO2 as a combustion engine.

Bicycles

I've written about bicycling. It's good for you, and saves the environment. Unless you eat only beef. Then you have other problems.

Power Generation: What Works

Wind power makes sense everywhere that there is a lot of wind, as long as it is onshore. Wind is pretty much going up everywhere that makes sense. It costs less than a new coal power plant, and is far cleaner.

Solar power is expensive. Is there anywhere it works well? Sure, just take a look at the electricity rates paid by different types of consumers. Commercial real-estate (stores, offices) and residential places (our homes) pay a huge premium on electricity. In most states, residents and commercial consumers pay nearly 15 cents per kwh, while industrial consumers pay closer to 7 center for a kwh. How does this stack up to costs to produce? Let's return to my favorite chart:

Table 1. Estimated levelized cost of new generation resources, 2018 
U.S. average levelized costs (2011 $/megawatthour) for plants entering service in 2018
Plant type Capacity factor (%) Levelized capital cost Fixed O&M Variable O&M (including fuel) Transmission investment Total system levelized cost
Dispatchable Technologies
Conventional Coal 85 65.7 4.1 29.2 1.2 100.1
Advanced Coal 85 84.4 6.8 30.7 1.2 123.0
Advanced Coal with CCS 85 88.4 8.8 37.2 1.2 135.5
Natural Gas-fired
Conventional Combined Cycle 87 15.8 1.7 48.4 1.2 67.1
Advanced Combined Cycle 87 17.4 2.0 45.0 1.2 65.6
Advanced CC with CCS 87 34.0 4.1 54.1 1.2 93.4
Conventional Combustion Turbine 30 44.2 2.7 80.0 3.4 130.3
Advanced Combustion Turbine 30 30.4 2.6 68.2 3.4 104.6
Advanced Nuclear 90 83.4 11.6 12.3 1.1 108.4
Geothermal 92 76.2 12.0 0.0 1.4 89.6
Biomass 83 53.2 14.3 42.3 1.2 111.0
Non-Dispatchable Technologies
Wind 34 70.3 13.1 0.0 3.2 86.6
Wind-Offshore 37 193.4 22.4 0.0 5.7 221.5
Solar PV1 25 130.4 9.9 0.0 4.0 144.3
Solar Thermal 20 214.2 41.4 0.0 5.9 261.5
Hydro2 52 78.1 4.1 6.1 2.0 90.3
 

Solar PV costs less in sunny areas than buying from the grid, as long as you are residential or commercial. A big industrial complex gets really cheap power, so they will never use something as expensive as PV.

The Future of Solar

Even if solar power is widely deployed in the future, it doesn't work at night. A lot of people in Houston, and other places that are unlivable without modern tech, would be unhappy if they couldn't sleep in AC. We don't have massive-scale battery tech  to compensate, so we will still need baseload.

Baseload Power

There are two viable places to get baseload power. The first is nuclear power. The second is burning fossil fuels and then catching their CO2 and putting it underground.

Carbon Capture and Storage

This is a very unproven technology. We don't know if we can hold the CO2 underground forever (which is what would be necessary) or whether we can find a place for it. And there are only a few test cases for it. The numbers above are completely unreliable in terms of cost. This might be better in the future, but I would guess that it isn't viable for at least 15 years.

Another issue? You can't just start capturing CO2 emissions from any old power plant. Retrofitting the plant is expensive or impossible. Power plants are built to last 50 years. Even when we figure out carbon capture and storage, we can't easily retrofit old plants to make them work well.

Baseload?

So we need baseload. There are no green baseload sources. Making coal based powerplants green is not currently viable. Nuclear power doesn't produce much CO2, but it has nuclear waste. Nuclear waste lasts a long time. But it is the only power source that contains all its waste. It's manageable. And it decays faster than the Earth will take down CO2.

nuclear power plants are my favorite

What's the biggest problem with nuclear? I'll describe this in more detail later. The long version: it can't get financed. Short version: people are afraid of Nuclear. Cause three powerplants have blown up. Fukushima was completely preventable. The US literally told Japan twice to get their house in order, cause there was trouble.The USGS warned that the walls of Fukushima were not high enough to prevent tsunami flooding years ago. Had they followed through with the USGS recommendations, Japan would not be spewing radioactive waste into their groundwater. Moreover, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Fukushima and Japan that they had a groundwater problem, and that a breach would cause widespread contamination; that if it ever melted down, it would dump nuclear waste into the ground through the water. They indicated Japan should divert the flow of the groundwater to prevent this. Still, no one died in this meltdown.

When Russia melted down a nuclear plant, it was a big mess.

When the US melted down a nuclear plant, no one was harmed and not much was released. It was just expensive to clean it.

Short version? The US is good at nuclear. Korea seems to be good at it. People shouldn't be afraid of it.

But they are. So the plants don't get financed, they don't get built, they aren't allowed to go forward.

As a result, if someone did want to finance them in the US, they would have to pay such massive interest rates that it would never pull a profit.

You know who is building them? Korea. China. Korea is also building power plants in the middle east. Other countries will follow suit. We need to get our house sorted out so our country can build power plants here and elsewhere, too.

Summing it Up

Live in smaller houses, it won't make you less happy. Buy less stuff, it also won't make you less happy. You also don't need to drive an SUV. Or drive as much as you do. Commuting sucks anyways.

Until all that happens, we still need a ton of electricity. Nuclear is probably the best way to do it for now.

That's my rant

Seriously. I'm pretty much done.

Thanks for reading all along. There might be a few more posts on this stuff.

- Jason Munster

Bicycles

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1

The DOT says that bicycling is awesome, and has a happy dude in a suit to prove it. see site.

Make sure you make it all the way to the bottom for the funny comic!

What's the big deal about bicycles? Everything! You get exercise and you get around. MrMoneyMustache has a great post on bicycles that you should check out if you have time.

So what's this doing on a climate change website? This one is easy. Unless you eat only beef all the time, a bike produces less CO2 per mile than a car.

Maths!

Good news! The maths this time are super easy! Also, great news! You can eat bacon and then bicycle and it is better for the environment than driving a car!

Burning a gallon of gas gets you about 20 miles and produces 8kg of CO2. Let's assume you weigh 175 lbs and bicycle 20 miles. Most calculators show you burning about 1000 calories to do this. Let's further assume you eat potatoes to get that energy. Potatoes are about .2kg CO2 per kg potato, and a kilogram of potato has about 500 calories that we can use (it has many more, but we can't consume them all perfectly). So you need to eat 2kg of potatoes in order to gain 1000 calories and then bicycle a mile. This equates to .4kg of CO2, or literally only 5% the emissions of a car.

Let's go to worst-case scenario. You eat only beef (note that you will likely die young) which makes way more CO2 in its production than potato (just picture how much cows fart, and that they produce a very strong greenhouse gas). Luckily cow is very energy dense, and you only need to eat .6kg to get 1000 calories. Unfortunately, a cow makes 29kg of CO2 equivalent per kg of meat, and 1000 calories produces 20kg of CO2 equivalent. So you are pumping the equivalent 20kg of cow farts into the air to get those 20 miles (more seriously, it is probably like .5kg of cow farts, plus some CO2, cause them cow farts really are strong greenhouse gases).

So good, but not worth it for the environment

Okay, so I have good news! before you go all vegan on me, Pigs are much more efficient! You only need to eat .3kg of these bad boys to get 1000 calories, and they only produce 8kg of CO2 per pound (pigs don't fart as much methane, I guess? Actually they require less feed and less water to make meat). So you produce about 3kg of CO2 if you eat bacon and bike 20 miles, which is still better than a car. Moral of the story: eat bacon and buy a bicycle. Or you could eat potatoes and veggies and be really good for the environment, but let's be realistic, Americans aren't gonna eat much less meat, so at least they can substitute pig in there.

Eating bacon and bicycling: the only way to eat bacon and get sexy.

Eating bacon and then bicycling is still better for the environment than driving.

Other important stuffs (like getting fit and sexy)

I bike in Boston and Cambridge. I bike to work every single day. I never have to worry about finding parking. Better yet, I get to go straight from my door to the door of work. I go shopping with my bike, and that's even better. Nearly all stores have a place to park my bike right at the door, and I can usually fit all the foot I need into a large backpack.

I bike to bars at night, I bike home from the same bars. When I go to a friend's party, I always bike. I pretty much never drive anywhere, and usually don't take the subway. It turns out that biking takes less time than nearly any form of transportation. One great example: my friend Erik and I were walking home from a party (I was walking my bike). He hailed a cab, I jumped on my bike as soon as he was in the cab. Erik lives next door to me. Going at my usual after-party biking pace I beat him home. And then I waited for the cab to arrive, arrogantly leaning my bike against his apartment complex like it wasn't an effort. I had just saved a $10 cab ride and a few minutes.

This is not rare. If traffic is heavy, I beat friends in a cross-town trip by about 20 minutes. I live a mere mile from work, but I can get there faster than any other form of transportation. It's faster than driving cause I don't need to go pick up my motorcycle from the garage and then find parking at work.

Biking is faster than the subway in nearly all cases, and more convenient in Boston cause my bike doesn't shut down at midnight (nor has it been stolen). Also, every time I take my bike instead of the subway, I save at least $4 round trip. Usually it is more like $20, cause I don't have to take an expensive Boston cab back home after a night out. So let's say I go out twice per week and save an average of $10 every time. That is $20 per week, for 50 weeks, or $1000 per year. Just paid for several of my bikes, yo. Or like 3 beers a week.

What's the best part about bicycling everywhere? Being fit. Your clothes will fit better, you will have more energy, and people find you sexier. Including your spouse or significant other. Yes, yes, they do say that they love you as you are. They are lying. Get on a bike.

So wait. I just said you could do something that saves time, saves money, saves the environment, makes you more attractive, and will get you the ladies/men and/or make your relationship spicier? Why isn't everyone biking right now?!?

More seriously, people might have three reasons: you work too far away (this is a bad idea to start with, both environmentally and from a money perspective), up front cost, and safety concerns.

The first: future post. Too big to include in this one. Suffice it to say, if you don't live close enough to work to bicycle there, you live too far from work. If your job is in an area where you don't want to raise your family, you are probably either in a rough place financially or maybe you are financially well-off financially and are still making poor life decisions (more on this later, too).

The second: A bike costs a lot less than a car. Buy a cheaper car and then buy a bike. More legitimate: you have enough money to afford monthly subway fare, but not a bike. And/or you live in an area where your bike gets stolen. I got nothin' for you here. Try to take public transportation or walk, cause driving is still bad for the environment. If you can afford a car, you can afford a bike and a lock.

The third: Safety! Wear a helmet. Everyone on a bike should wear a helmet. I know helmets make you sweat and mess up your hair. You know what is worse than having bad hair from a helmet? Becoming a vegetable from getting smeared on the road.

Back to accidents. Bicycles do have a slightly higher accident rate per mile. But if you live near work and bicycle, you drive few miles. If you then consider that you cover 6x as many miles on your average car commute as your average bike commute, your death rate per minute is actually equal to that of a car. Mr Money Mustache does a great job of describing this, so I won't go farther. Moreover, If you factor in the health benefits of bicycling, you gain health and actually increases your chances of living longer (same link describes this).

Okay, this is getting long. Time to Summarize!

Bicycling will save the environment, save you time, prolong your life, make you sexier, and save you money. It's a damn miracle drug, and if you aren't on it, you are doing something wrong with your life.

Bicycling

 

-Jason Munster