Bulk storage and transmission are both solved and have been solved for a while.  For bulk storage its just a question of how you want your storage to work.  The problem isn’t a lack of technology, it’s a lack of someone having built large amounts of it.  And transmission is the same as always with new generation.  If I go build a GW of solar, Oncor (the transmission company) and I are going to have a discussion about transmission lines.

There of course are technologies for moving and storing bulk power. Transmission lines work fine — however, you can’t get much more capacity out of the current grid without building new towers, and that’s politically impractical in much of the country.

You can talk to Oncor about power lines*, but there isn’t a lot of spare transmission capacity in most of American. To build more, someone has to talk to every zoning board and gang of NIMBYs on the way. Any scheme that relies on moving power long-distance (more than a few hundred miles) has serious political problems. As a result, powering the coasts with solar power from the southwestern deserts is not currently practical.

Storage is the same story — possible in theory, but not yet practical for real use. Large-scale pumped storage turns out to be at least as hard to site as any other large-scale hydro, and maybe more — and that means you’re paying a serious environmental cost, dislocation of residents, etc. There’s a reason it’s so rare.

Basically, the fossil fuel base plants have to go away. Not today or tomorrow — just don’t build any more of them. Ever. Conservation can make a huge dent immediately (click my name) for residential, which is just a tiny fraction of total power consumed, but still — conservation can bridge the gap as renewables start building out. Who knows — we might even get to see stars again.

As you point out, conservation helps. But Industrial power demands aren’t really shrinking; power demand for electronics is going to be rising for a while yet. So we’ll still need base load plants. They’re not going to be solar, and they probably won’t be wind, due to the reliability issues. That doesn’t leave a lot of renewable options, particularly since there isn’t room for major new hydro construction.

Fortunately, there are large capacitor banks out there already for producing VARs (reactive power). Power factor is a problem, and the EU has been putting rules into place to deal with things that have lousy power factor. As with real (non-reactive) energy wastage, VARs are “wasted” in that a lot of equipment was designed on the assumption that reactive power was just always going to be there. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a poorly designed and built machinery problem.

Capacitor banks, as you point out, exist and are straightforward to build. There are difficulties though in hugely ramping up our installed base of reactive power sources — in particular, figuring out who should pay for it, and building a control architecture for it. You can describe those problems as not “technical”, but they’re significant problems in practice.

* Wikipedia tells me that Oncor is in the distribution business. My impression is that transmission in Texas is run by ERCOT, not by the utilities. They might handle a kilowatt — I don’t believe they could handle gigawatts.

Bulk storage and transmission are both solved and have been solved for a while. For bulk storage its just a question of how you want your storage to work. The problem isn’t a lack of technology, it’s a lack of someone having built large amounts of it. And transmission is the same as always with new generation. If I go build a GW of solar, Oncor (the transmission company) and I are going to have a discussion about transmission lines.

Basically, the fossil fuel base plants have to go away. Not today or tomorrow — just don’t build any more of them. Ever. Conservation can make a huge dent immediately (click my name) for residential, which is just a tiny fraction of total power consumed, but still — conservation can bridge the gap as renewables start building out. Who knows — we might even get to see stars again.

A more technical problem is that solar panels (and many wind turbines) don’t generate reactive power, and that means you need to go to a good deal of trouble to supply the appropriate capacitance to avoid grid voltage collapse.

Fortunately, there are large capacitor banks out there already for producing VARs (reactive power). Power factor is a problem, and the EU has been putting rules into place to deal with things that have lousy power factor. As with real (non-reactive) energy wastage, VARs are “wasted” in that a lot of equipment was designed on the assumption that reactive power was just always going to be there. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a poorly designed and built machinery problem.

Actually, going with solar and wind power generation is much faster than nuclear ever could be. As soon as you put them up they are generating, and you don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket. They don’t pollute like nuclear does, and the worst that can happen is a wind tower could fall on a bunch of cattle standing under it.

There’s benefits and drawbacks to different sorts of power plants, and even aside from cost issues, you probably need a mix. Solar and wind can be quicker to build, but they’re less reliable, and in the case of solar, never available at night. Bulk energy storage, and long-distance transport, are basically unsolved problems, so you really do need base-load plants to satisfy night-time demand.

A more technical problem is that solar panels (and many wind turbines) don’t generate reactive power, and that means you need to go to a good deal of trouble to supply the appropriate capacitance to avoid grid voltage collapse.

The site also matters. Wind turbines, and most forms of solar deployment, are quite space-intensive. That’s an issue in many places. For instance, there isn’t a lot of land near New York City for wind or solar farms, there’s quite limited long-distance transmission capacity, and there are political and technical obstacles to building more.

In sum, I don’t think it makes sense to be too dogmatic about power sources; different sites and needs demand different blends of generation.

Then, if we push more hybrids and electric cars, the oil could be used for food generation uses. It would go much further that way.

If you want to change people’s diets via government action, one quick way to make a whole lot of changes would be to remove government subsidys for sugar, etc., especially for farms that are owned by public corporations rather than by individuals. If pricing for corn, sugar, etc. depended solely on market forces, you’d see a real realignment on what gets produced and what gets used.

All that would do is make it worse.

We have plenty of oil in the ground — about as much as what we’ve taken out since the beginning of the Oil Age. However, because we’re near Peak Oil, annual production will go nowhere but down from now until eternity. Each year that we put off the shift to renewable (and corn ethanol is not renewable, unless you include deaths due to starvation in the formula) fuels, the more difficult it will be to fill the gap between where oil production is heading, and the demand for oil.

Ten years back I bought a car that’s a real testament to wasting oil — it gets 12MPG and goes like nobody’s business. A real throwback to the decade it was built — the 1970’s. As long as the wealthy (or upper middle class) have the money to buy gasoline at whatever price, the poor and working classes (and middle class with kids) are screwed. The solution isn’t for the upper classes (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, DINKs …) to buy Hummers, it’s for those people to buy Teslas and leave the gasoline to people who have no choice. Or at least, have no choice until someone makes something more stylish than a Prius. Rich people can afford to buy expensive cars — and they should, that way everyone knows they are rich. And aren’t wasting the dwindling supply of readily accessible oil that has to last until we replace all the things that can’t be cheaply replaced by battery power or big long electric wires. Like airplanes. Drilling in ANWR is like giving crack addicts free bus passes — sure, they get their crack, but at the end of the day, they are still a crack addict.

While it certainly is true that the middle class and the poor (and the wealthy too) in America and other wealthy countries need to get back to basics and cut down on prepackaged foods, the bulk of people in poorer countries still eat the old fashioned way. Personally, that’s one reason why I have shifted to doing more shopping at 2 local markets that cater to immigrants. That prepacked food is not only bad for us nutritionally (usually high in sodium, sugar, and fat), it’s also bad for our environment given the packaging it takes.

The problem with nukes isn’t running out of the fuel, it’s dealing with the processes, which are environmentally messy at best. Easier to deal with those than to deal with starving millions, though.

Easier still to drive a little less. But that could still be somewhat inconvenient at times, so best to rest the blame on “greenies who file lawsuits”.

The problem with nukes isn’t running out of the fuel, it’s dealing with the processes, which are environmentally messy at best. Easier to deal with those than to deal with starving millions, though.

The packaged vs. prepared things is certainly a valid point in the larger sense, but the people who are suffering from crisis in food prices now aren’t Americans on food stamps who keep buying Kraft dinners, it’s Mexican campesinos who used to be able to buy 10 lb of corn flour for fifty cents but now need $2 (that they don’t have).

NotACookie said:

As a matter of engineering, trying to change people’s habits and preferences is usually a mistake.

As a matter of tax policy, we try to do this all the time.

We do try it. My sense is that we often make a mess — witness the whole ethanol debacle that started this conversation.

Also, tax-based incentives work differently well for different things. For something as stable and ingrained as food preferences, I think you’d need really steep tax incentives to cause a big swing against meat, and people would push back.

As a matter of engineering, trying to change people’s habits and preferences is usually a mistake.

As a matter of tax policy, we try to do this all the time.

So I answer them by saying, “just ask your Mom or Dad how they make your favorite meal, and we’ll make it on a campout.” Turns out that the way that Mom or Dad (about 100:1 Mom, BTW) make the kid’s favorite meal is either to order out or to open up a prepared meal and heat it up. I actually went shopping with one kid and his Mom once (ran into them by chance in the grocery store and she asked me to tag along) when they bought the food for a campout. Mom didn’t have a clue how to buy individual food items and assemble them into a meal. Except for a steak dinner, but you can’t eat that every meal.

Back in ancient times, when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was in college, I worked as a checkout clerk in a grocery store in Cambridge, Mass. in Central Square. It seemed like there was a direct correlation between the amount of prepared meals purchased in an order and the proportion of it paid for by food stamps. When I was a kid I went to the grocery store a lot with my Mom. She used to have me do the math to keep track of how much she was spending (this was before hand-held calculators), so I got a pretty good handle on what kinds of things you buy to make various types of meals. I knew that these folks would save a lot of money by buying the raw materials instead of the finished meals, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.

Well, not to be too radical about it, but we could probably do quite a bit to increase availability if we all switched to vegetarianism (since meat is 10x less efficient, or thereabouts.) We could also, of course, reduce population or at least population growth: demand has a lot to do with cost.

I’m sure we can’t directly reduce population in a way that isn’t monstrous. I don’t think we can even really reduce growth rates that easily, since most of the world’s population growth is outside the First World.

And generally, we could simply switch a lot of things from luxury to caloric production. A given acre planted with baby carrots or watercress will produce far fewer calories than one planted in soybeans. It’s a lot more efficient to make tofu than it is to make cheese.

Who’s “we” in that sentence? I have a bunch of friends who are allergic to soy, but who do try to eat their vegetables. I’m not sure I like the idea of centralized, top-down planning for food crop production. I don’t even really like the idea of top-down incentive structures. I’d much rather let people buy what they want.

As a matter of engineering, trying to change people’s habits and preferences is usually a mistake. I don’t believe people are prepared to shift their diets radically, without extreme pressure. There’s a lot of people who really want to eat meat, and they’ll push back, hard, if you try via public policy to take it away from them.

I don’t think “we all become vegetarians” is a sensible approach; there’s a bunch of less drastic approaches that we could implement much more easily without requiring an extraordinary level of social mobilization.

The public aren’t fools; they’ll notice if the government is mandating corn diversion into a biofuel boondoggle, while prohibiting feeding cattle, and they’ll be irate.

If we are really thinking long term on the fuel issue we need more renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear are not good long term solutions–solar, geothermal, and wind would be where I’d want to invest money.