(1) Plant breeders: (a) better varieties to meet expected changed conditions in 20+ years. (They really, really want better regional climate predictions.) (b) Perennials rather than annuals for major grains. Here we do wheat for which wheatgrass will be bred into varieties suited to high yields in local dry-farming conditions. [This will be a major energy saver. Only necessary to replant the fields every 7 years or so.] Maybe ready by 2030.

(2) Biodiesel from agricultural wastes. The processes are well-known and probably detailed elsewhere. The local wheat rancher have to cut the stubble off the fields after harvest each year. The resulting straw makes a (poor) animal feed, which has to be trucked about 150–200 km, but the farmers would probably prefer to see it converted into biodiesel for their monster tractors.

(3) Biomethane from agricultural wastes. This needs to be of high enough grade to feed directly into the natural gas pipelines. The biomass is likely to be the materials left over from the harvests of fruits and vegetables and also animal manure. Will be ready for deployment before 2015.

I am quite sure that every College of Agriculture in the world is doing similar research, but I don’t have any details.

And I certainly hope that biochar takes off in a big way ASAP.

I think if you look at CCS closely, the infrastructure investment required would rival that required for total conversion to renewables. What’s worse is that powering CCS requires 15-40% more fossil fuel to burn at a time when it (even coal) is running out and becoming more expensive.

A diversion of investment from renewables to CCS will be a great folly, we should use the remaining relatively cheap fossil supply to build renewables and nuclear. Building enough nukes is going to require a lot of fossil fuel for the steel, special alloys, mines and concrete.

Lastly, massive deployment of current renewable technology is only half the solution. The rest of the solution is a reduction in profligacy and a contraction in settlements. We need to stop turning precious energy into single use junk and stop wasting so much energy travelling great distances for everyday living.

From this I see that a 10kW residential system is possible. Judging from the space required for the larger systems, this would require .05 acres of space, which is something like the area of a typical house. It is conceivable that a .25 acre lot could handle this. This 10kW system would work in direct sun so one could expect an average of about 6 hours. This about fits with the daily load. So there would be a battery system, or the utility company would handle the time of availability issues.

This would be ok as a way to reduce usage of natural gas fired peaking generators, which are used in California to handle the hot afternoon loads in the summer time. But this is not so great timing for handling the new loads of electric cars that would mostly be charged at night. I have yet to find data on hour by hour fuel usage in power plant operation.

So what needs to be done to develop the Stirling engine for this size system? Are there cost estimates?

As to the 6000 mW now operating or under contract, how were these projects funded? What did they cost?

1. Dry clothes on a line not in the tumble drier. Unbelievable as it sounds this is BANNED in much of goody-goody two shoes oh so green California.

2. Turn the C/H off and put on a woolly jumper.

3. Turn the A/C off. If Florida in August is too hot move to somewhere sensible.

My understanding is that the main impediment to wide deployment of concentrated solar-thermal power plants is the time-dependence of their financing requirements. A natural gas or coal fired power plant requires a relatively small up-front investment (for the plant itself) and a long, constant rate input of capital to purchase fuel. Concentrated solar thermal is just the opposite, requiring a large up-front investment to build the plant, and very little in the way of ongoing operational costs, with expected plant lifetimes in excess of 50 years (based both on the real-world experience of the concentrated solar thermal plants built in the early 1980s in the Mojave and still operating today, and on accelerated weathering experiments. Because the payback time on the large up-front investment in concentrated solar thermal power is long, most utilities will not finance the projects without regulatory prodding, or government loan guarantees. If I recall correctly, the up-front/operational capital split is something like 20/80 for gas and 80/20 for concentrated solar thermal. As future gas prices become uncertain, there is a hedging advantage (locking in a known cost) to investing in concentrated solar thermal… but you can also just use coal, if you don’t care about CO2 emissions. Amortized over the lifetime of the power plant, CST is (I believe) on par with natural gas in cost, and produces power during the same peak hours.

All night power generation is also possible, with heat-storage facilities. There is a pilot plant currently under construction in Spain that will use molten salts to store heat for nighttime generation. Combined cycle gas turbines can also be installed for nighttime use (as with Nevada Solar One).

There are currently cost-reduction efforts under way, trying to bring down the initial capital required per watt of solar-thermal generation capacity. See http://www.esolar.com for one example (they’ve been funded by Google.org to the tune of $10 million). So it seems likely that, at least in sunny places like the American Southwest, the Middle East, Australia, and North Africa, concentrated solar thermal will be a cost-effective alternative to peak-power requirements currently met by natural gas. What amount of base-load coal generation it can displace remains to be seen.

Switching meat production from animals with high methane emissions (cattle) to animals with low methane emissions (chickens, pigs, kangaroos etc.).

Industry now:

There is an aluminium production technology available now that is underutilised and uses far less energy than conventional technologies and far less energy than future technologies such as ‘inert electrodes’. It is aluminum recycling. One policy measure that would encourage its use would be container deposit legislation (where people are paid 5-10c for returning aluminum cans). Another very important policy measure would be a carbon price from a carbon tax or emissions trading. This will work best if the aluminium industry is not given free permits.

“As I sit here in my woolly jumper, it strikes me that the way to make alternatives competitive is not to make fossil fuel more expensive. It is doing a pretty good job of that right now by itself.”

But the problem is that globally we are consuming more fuel and emitting more CO2 each year. Price is irrelevant to this - high prices are just an indicator of strong demand from a booming global economy. They are certainly NOT an indicator that fossil fuel use will decline.

As I keep saying (any everyone refuses to engage in the discussion) we won’t start using less fuel until, er…, we decide to limit and progressively reduce extraction.

Most of the debates I see on this blog are akin to letting the air out of the rear tyres to steer your car round the next corner when what you should really be doing is fixing the steering.

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If alternatives could be developed which could out-compete fossil fuel on a level playing field then I believe the market would have exploited them. This has not happened to any great extent yet and the signs are not good that it ever will.

My main point is that, even if alternatives could become competitive I don’t think it will be enough to stop us eventually consuming the majority of the available oil, coal, gas and other sources of hydrocarbon, in which case we have lost the battle against climate change. James Hansen is saying that we need to leave the rest of the coal in the ground, otherwise we are sunk.

http://www.columbia.edu/ ~jeh1/ mailings/ 20080401_DearPrimeMinisterRudd.pdf

http://terraverde.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/20technologies/

or

www.greenthoughts.us

@Jim Bullis:
“… data on hour by hour fuel usage in power plant operation.”
You can find that in a large number of huge files with hour-by-hour data for every power plant in America. Go to this URL and pick your data — the files are limited by the size of an excel spreadsheet, so there are lots of files to cover every hour of the day, every day of the year for all ~4700 power plants in the U.S. — 24*365*4700=41,000,000 hours of data (read, rows in spread sheets which are limited to 65,000 rows each). But it’s worth it. You will find the operational patterns, fuel, fuel consumption, and all the federally-regulated emissions that friendly power plant near you. Lots of options on how to download the detailed files. Be careful, you WILL get what you ask for.

Joe
“Landfill methane recovery; waste incineration with energy recovery; composting of organic waste; controlled waste water treatment; recycling and waste minimization.”
and
@Peter Woods:
Low methane meat production, yes! AND less consumption of meat too! Does anybody really need to eat as much meat as Americans and Europeans do?

Methane is given a 25 GWP by UNFCCC and IPCC, but that is based on a 100 year time frame. On a 20 to 25 year time frame, it should be more like 50. It’s important to address methane soon because 1) you can make money doing it — burn the stuff to power the equipment at your land fill, dairy, or barn, 2) its CC impacts are so immediate, and 3) it’s actually very easy to eat less meat or even no meat at all. I gave up meat 36 years ago simply because I didn’t want it any more, and I have not been tempted to revert. It’s obviously better overall for your health and that of the planet not to eat it. At 66, my health indicators as reported by modern medical science, such as it is, are outstanding.