Coal power

[JSH]

Originally Posted by sendler

..and in Germany, electricity is only is only about 20% of primary energy. The other figures I quoted are right from the charts. only 22.4% of Germany's electricity is solar and wind. And only 4.1% of primary energy is solar and wind.

"I quoted right from the charts"

Not quite - at least not the chart you posted. You seem to be adding up Nuclear, Renewables, and Other to get 21% and claiming that is electricity's percentage of Germany's primary energy.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by JSH

"I quoted right from the charts"

Not quite - at least not the chart you posted. You seem to be adding up Nuclear, Renewables, and Other to get 21% and claiming that is electricity's percentage of Germany's primary energy.

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Originally Posted by JSH

You forgot the other option they are pursuing - renewables. Renewables are by far the fastest growing segment of Germany energy production and currently stand at 33% of total production.

Whether the percentage of primary energy in Germany that is electrical is 15% or 30% is completely secondary to the important fact that even after the massive $580 Billion build out of solar and wind in Germany, they only account for 4.1% of the primary energy.
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People have been greenwashed by the media to think that we have it made in the face of the approaching reduction in availability of liquid fuel (20 years) by putting up some wind and solar.
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We are nowhere close to replacing all of the energy we use. Thing will be much smaller and simpler in the future.
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I looked at the % of electricity that is solar and wind-22.4%.
And compared it to the % of total primary energy that is solar and wind-4.1%.
To get the percentage of primary energy that is electricity-21.3%
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Feel free to find other sources to check this. Mid 20's is common for most countries. But the important take away is that after an intense and expensive, decades long build out of wind and solar in Germany, it only amounts to 4.1% of total primary energy.
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Solar and wind are not dense enough, soon enough, to seemlesly replace the 17 TeraWatts we are blowing through now. Things will be much smaller and simpler again in the future.
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There are hundreds of pages of good info in the other thread so I don't have to repeat it here.
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https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...sts-32842.html
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[JSH]

Originally Posted by sendler

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Whether the percentage of primary energy in Germany that is electrical is 15% or 30% is completely secondary to the important fact that even after the massive $580 Billion build out of solar and wind in Germany, they only account for 4.1% of the primary energy....

You are right. The numbers don't matter because you are continuing to talk about primary energy... then the end of liquid fuels .... the climate change. The rest of us are talking about the production of electricity.

Sorry, but I have no desire to debate the end of the world as we know it or climate change online.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by JSH

You are right. The numbers don't matter because you are continuing to talk about primary energy... then the end of liquid fuels .... the climate change.

I know it is a shock to most people when they first learn about total primary energy consumption and I am sorry. But it is important to know about.
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So many people that even think about these things have the impression that all we have to do is replace electricity (they call it POWER) with solar and wind and then we will have it made. But this, as challenging as it is, only gets us 1/5 of the way there to continuing our current growth based economy.
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And by the way:
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The original poster has also mentioned the option of going back to coal powered steam ships and trains and coal heat, as oil gets more remote and ridiculously expensive in 20 years, in the other thread if you want to read through it.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by JSH

you are continuing to talk about the climate change.

And:
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I never mentioned anything about climate change. Because I understand the 1:1:1 relationship between primary energy consumption, economy, and population. And the debt burden we have placed on the world economic system with $275 Trillion in "quantitative easing" which can only be paid back with continued exponential growth.
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We have a much more pressing problem than too much carbon. Which is too little carbon (liquid fuel).
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[oil pan 4]

Yes I expect to see a return to coal fired Transoceanic ships with in my life time, trains possibly and coal heating if the price of natural gas doesn't stay low.
But I expect natural gas to stay affordable for around 50 years, the main way natural gas would become unaffordable is with a huge increase in deman.
Trains may stay diesel electric with the addition of over head power.
2050+ trains would probably be coal steam turbine electric, not steam piston direct drive like in the Victorian age.

I think I mentioned "saving the world" in the op.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

I expect to see a return to coal fired Transoceanic ships with in my life time, trains possibly and coal heating if the price of natural gas doesn't stay low.

Coal-fired ships? Not so unlikely at all, as long as they could also resort to other solid fuels. Trains? Who knows... Home heating? I wouldn't really hold my breath for that.

But I expect natural gas to stay affordable for around 50 years, the main way natural gas would become unaffordable is with a huge increase in deman.

With so much organic matter rotting around the world, recovering the biogas and processing it into biomethane might become more competitive and allow much of the same pipelines to remain in use.

2050+ trains would probably be coal steam turbine electric, not steam piston direct drive like in the Victorian age.

You mean something like a miniature of a coal-fired powerplant? That would be interesting to say the least. Sometimes when I drink too much I wonder how a modern vehicle could fare with a steam powerplant...

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by sendler

I know it is a shock to most people when they first learn about total primary energy consumption and I am sorry. But it is important to know about.
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So many people that even think about these things have the impression that all we have to do is replace electricity (they call it POWER) with solar and wind and then we will have it made. But this, as challenging as it is, only gets us 1/5 of the way there to continuing our current growth based economy.

In another forum I follow, I saw the following posted:



https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37233

What surprised me was that states with the largest portion of their power coming from wind tended to have about average utility rates. California and Vermont were outliers, and I wonder if that suggests that solar is expensive. Anyhow, I figured high adoption of solar/wind would correlate with higher utility rates since that's what happened in Germany (50% increase in 10 years).

Price of electricity by state:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electri...ates-by-state/

Source of electricity by state:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.d44570a3c35b

One thing that stands out from this data is that states with the highest portion of electricity coming from coal all have cheaper electricity than average.

States with large natural gas electricity generation tend to be lower than average utility rates.

Hydro heavy states tended to have cheap electricity too, with Vermont being an outlier. Perhaps Vermont loves to "feel the Bern"

Wind heavy states seem about average.

Nuclear heavy states also seem about average.

Solar is such a small fraction of electrical generation that it's hard to attribute cost to them.

Hawaii gets 67% of their energy from oil, and they have the highest electricity rates by far.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

Home heating? I wouldn't really hold my breath...

I remember people saying wood pellet burners were just going to be a short lived fad in the 1990s.
Now they are everywhere.
Most hardware stores and some grocery stores sell wood pellet fuel now.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

One thing that stands out from this data is that states with the highest portion of electricity coming from coal all have cheaper electricity than average.

States with large natural gas electricity generation tend to be lower than average utility rates.

That's odd because the green washers say that solar is the cheapest and that nuclear is the most expensive.
But I doubt they looked at any numbers that didn't agree with their predetermined narrative