The chart popped off the page of a recent Business Week.
It is titled OF GREENBACKS AND GREEN POWER,
One heading: total gigawatts of green power - and the US with its sizable energy economy is tops at 53.4 gigawatts. But China is fast closing on the US at 52.5 gigawatts.
More telling is the category of green power as a share of total capacity. It begs a glaring question. The US stands at 4 percent, while Brazil is at 11 percent and Germany and Spain hover around the 30 percent mark. One-third. That is quite a sizable slice of the pie.
Why - is relatively well known. When the US was porking out on its ever-rising-tide of property values during the last few decades of bubblemania, some of our European friends were indulging in old-fashioned pump-priming. Government subsidy. Heck, you may even want to call it socialism. Those nations were spending a good hunk of their income on business technologies that could not stand alone. Yet.
But now the race is on. The final chart stat tells that story. Clean energy investment from 2005 through the first quarter of 2010 amounted to $121.9 billion in the US, double the level of Spain and 40 percent ahead of China. The dice are being thrown. If old renewable technologies dominate the US may never catch Europe and a surging China.
BUT if researchers and scientists now hard at work in the USA on next generation solar and wind - and energy storage - capture the momentum, then the global clean energy may yet be headquartered in America. I cannot help being patriotic about our prospects. Call it the after image of those dazzling sparklers my kids and their cousins lit up in a Dallas driveway on the Fourth.
The sheer power density of gas turbines, combined cycle plants, and even conventional steam plants means that on a MW-for-MMW basis, the capital costs of renewables are a heck of a lot larger than fossil-fueled plants.
China has some pretty sizable advantages when it comes to plant construction--1) Their government decides where to put the plant regardless of who already owns the property-oh, sorry, there is no private property; 2) labor is really cheap--the people are darn near slaves to the government; 3) the government does not have to contend with public objections and lawsuits interferring with plant construction--they just make dissenters part of the prison labor gang or run them down with tanks; 4) the Chinese are still busy building and starting up coal-fired power plants; and; 5) the lack of national interest on the part of American corporations and (until recently) the Chinese government's refusal to float the yuan combined to hammer industrial output in this country.
Are we willing to give up our liberties--give up the basis on which America was founded and which made us the top economic power in the world--to match China windmill for windmill? How much help did China give to Haiti, Indonesia, Thailand and the other countries impacted by disasters?
Lobbyists do have a great deal to do with everything, and many people are paid a great deal of money for a particular reason - that does not however mean that its the right direction, neither does it mean that large investments actually become sustainable.
US, actually still has the capacity to do things in a big way, but that does have to be built on a solid foundation. Nobody can construct a wall without one, or the most expensive bricks will actually hit the ground. The same is true with renewable energy. For now, it seems that the globe has taken the view that nothing more than wind or solar can really have any practicality. Our level of thought seems to end at the bar scientists, lobbyists and celebrity commentators tend to set.
Big business just hops on what seems the next bandwagon, and use their lobbyists to confound many. Thousands fall prey to mass advertising, and begin to see only what is projected, ignoring all the carefully disguised realities.
Do you often see pictures of wind farms standing motionless for days? No, you always see imaging of wind turbines whizzing away, churning out gigawatts of power. A stark reality - the wind, does not really blow consistently all the time except in a few places. From my own perspective, I cannot see exactly where such farms will continually fit, because the amount of space required is fantastic. Wherever environmental concerns can be steamrollered, they are.
The greatest summits with what some call ' the world's leading thinkers' have to date really produced nothing in the way of a solution, either in energy security, or economic security. The next economic ' boom' will probably coincide with the movement of big business to Vietnam. Knowing fully well that this will again add to global unemployment will not stop anything..all that matters is the almighty quick buck. Are we then to assume that renewable energy costs will be dropping with this thought in mind?? The reason costs can drop, are because they were outlandishly overpriced in the first place.
As the middle class is being systematically erased across the globe, stability in all countries comes under threat. It doesn't matter that actual governments and banking institutions have become corrupt, its now a matter of global interest at the top rungs to see how the middle and lower class can pay for the mindblowing and staggering ' losses' . I always think money is a bit like energy...it can never really be destroyed, but is just temporarily moved to new destinations...in this case, it resides in the pockets of a few sophisticated thieves. ''Bankruptcy'' for some today still means being able to get on a private jet, shop in Paris and be home in time for dinner in New York.
Countries may seem to be forging ahead, but yes..numbers do lie, and that should become evident within the next 12 months.
Here are some other numbers that are useful to consider:
The cold fact is that we have about 5% of the world's population here in the US, and we use about a quarter of the world's petroleum production - over 20 million barrels a day - for everything from plastic bags to bug spray and from gasoline to medicine.
Yet we rank #11 within the top 16 oil countries, with just 2.33% of their total - in other words we have about 22.7 billion gallons. Ok, that's a whole mess of oil, but if we ever need to rely on it as our sole source, we've got just 1100 days until the needle points to 'E'.
(Note: I don't count Canada in those 16 countries. Why? All but six billion barrels of the oil up there is bound up in tar sands, and pulling it out is a bad idea in terms of the raw cost, the low energy return on energy invested, and the extreme pollution that extraction carries with it as stark realities.)
80% of the oil in the world is inside those 16 nations, and 69% of that total is in the Middle East, where exploitive extraction strategies would quickly come to an end in any country where a true democratic republic ever took hold.
China and India each hold over a billion people who are tired of riding their bikes, and they're looking thirstily at our consumptive Western lifestyle. That accelerated demand will quickly outstrip production worldwide, and our honorable and cherished men and women in our military services will be increasingly hard pressed to defend our access to prehistoric sunlight energy drawn out from under Arabian feet.
Dyed in the wool conservatives should be hollering incessantly about the national security threat this situation presents, and they should realize that with that 2.33% we can't ever hope to drill our way back into cheap energy abundance.
Since the days of Nixon and Carter we've been waiting for a nationwide energy strategy that breaks our oily "addiction" (to use GW Bush's word), and we've failed to approach that goal ever since, in spite of every subsequent president's public calls for progress.
We have available to us a two-fold solution: Firstly, all our 2,776 conventional power plants - nearly all of which burn fossil fuel - can be replaced by one hundred solar thermal plants dotted across our Sunbelt, transmitting very efficiently via high voltage direct current to the rest of the nation. Each plant will use molten salt for energy storage, and will measure 10.5 miles square (for a combined total of only 0.3 % percent of our land area). The melted salt stores heat for down-time power production, and makes this a reliable night and day all season and all weather solution for all the whole country's electricity needs.
Google recently developed a process for creating solar thermal mirrors that is likely to cut construction costs by 50% and bring the price of the power to around five cents per kWh.
Check out the article on that here:
http://www.ecogeek.org/solar-power/3090-google-dev...
For those interested, here's a little more discussion of the potential of solar thermal:
http://2greenenergy.com/solar-thermal-leader/2534/...
http://2greenenergy.com/utility-scale/2499/
Secondly, we move to strongly incentivize the rapid replacement of our national transportation fleet - individual, mass transit and shipping - with new technology all-electric vehicles that are far more energy efficient than the 15% to 20% we get from internal combustion.
The various elements supporting this transformation in transportation are already in existence and coming together rapidly. Here's more on that:
http://2greenenergy.com/electric-vehicle-adoption/...
http://2greenenergy.com/epa/3003/
The hurdles between us and these two solutions are not based in science or in resource scarcity. The most challenging hurdles are political and financial. Yet we've got to get moving to a workable solution while we still have fairly cheap dirty fuels available to allow us to build the clean system without too much sacrifice. If we wait until the crisis breaks, it will be too late.
Our government now subsidizes dirty fuel interests to the tune of about $550 billion a year - take just half of that, and put it into this clean solar/electric combo, and we'll be sitting pretty in no time.
Oil rich nations across the globe are already seeing the wisdom of developing and implementing clean energy technologies to sell to the world when their current major export runs dry. We (with our measly 2.33%) are already paying them $700 billion every year for the slippery stuff - are we going to be on the hook for the clean energy tech, too? C'mon people! America is better - and wiser - than that.
Craig Shields
Editor
2GreenEnergy.com
http://www.sunrisesolarnow.com
The context is clear. Wind energy has otbe popuilar and in the distance future match with gas and coal energy.The chances of it can be successful only if the wind equipmwents are competitively prices-almost at par with gas and coal equipments on a kwh basis.If at all anything- subsidies will hve to go to this area. Wind farm developers have to be subsidised significantly provided they buy their equipments from domestic plants and not import. This will also aid manufacturing companies in a big way and perhaps create a lot of employment. Once USA shows the way -other countries can follow- paddy8@gmail.com: visit me at energyblogs.com/paddy: