Well, you can't accuse either side of the political spectrum of hanging around while gas prices have opened-up the debate on America's energy policy, or lack thereof. While President Bush has removed the executive order against off-shore drilling (over to you congress), former Vice President Al Gore has asked Americans to help foot the bill for a ten-year, three trillion dollar "moon shot" effort to switch to "clean" electricity from solar, wind and geothermal power. While this is an extremely inconvenient solution for coal mining states that leaves pro-nuclear partisans in the cold, I mention Al's plan here because it's implicit that the transition would enable a nation of plug-in hybrids or pure EVs. Hey, what about hydrogen? Big Al made no mention of water vaporware. But The Boston Herald reports that a group of scientists have priced-out a U.S. switch to hydrogen-powered vehicles at $200b. No mention was made of the energy source for the fuel, but apparently the the Committee on Assessment of Resource Needs for Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Technologies have bigger fish to fry (deep freeze?). "The cost of platinum is approximately 57 percent of the fuel-cell stack costs and represents the greatest challenge to further cost reductions," the study said. "Future platinum supply is a critical issue in forward projections of fuel-cell costs." If it's not one thing, it's another.
Find Reviews by Make:
Read all comments
3.2 billion to solve all the oil problems? fine. you want me to pay for it? um, how about we just put ye olde iraq adventure on hold for 10 days. that should give us the needed 3.2 billion.
i believe it’s supposed to be trillion…
3.2 trillion…
even if that’s the number, should be doable with 10-15 years – SERIOUSLY…
oh, wait–you said trillion, but your numbers say billion. i think you need three more zeros.
The title says 3.2 billion but the body of the article says “ten-year, three trillion…” which I believe is the correct number
$200b to switch to hydrogen-powered vehicles isn’t that much, imagine if the money spent on Iraq went there…
Sorry guys. My fingers/wallet recoiled from typing such a large amount of money.
Headline amended.
I just don’t get this knee-jerk emphasis on full, disruptive, paradigm-shifting change. Life is incremental.
So let’s work on switching away from gas, to diesel & hybrid, then towards pure electric & plug-in hybrid (and more nuclear power), then add some hydrogen fuel cell in the mix. Also, some LPG and CNG wouldn’t hurt.
Diversification sounds like the right solution to me. And let’s start by working with the infrastructure and expertise we already have. That doesn’t grab the headlines, but it also doesn’t result in such huge numbers with “$” in front of them.
It would be interesting to compare the amount of platinum in a viable fuel cell (is that an oxmoron?) and that in a typical catalytic converter.
There’s a part of me that loves the “moon shot” idea and another that hates it. The Apollo program had a pretty clear set of design limitations that made it achievable (no depending on wild new technologies such as nuclear fusion for example). With so many variables and an unclear future, making big bets now on unproven technology is a very bad idea.
I think a much better approach is to provide tax credits for energy savings and carbon-neutral investments both for purchase and research with metrics that increase the benefit for measurable gains while phasing out benefits for those approaches that prove to be less effective. Let the market decide which specific technologies are the most viable, not lawmakers.
I believe that we should begin with conservation as the largest benefactor and use the prize model (as Nasa recently did with their contest to design a better space suit glove) to achieve specific technological benefits. No one can accurately predict which particular technologies will prove to be the best solution, we need the fire of the market to do this and the incentive of reward to fuel that fire.
Also, I would immediately revisit our idiotic paranoia about fast breeder nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing. We have the means to both radically improve nuclear fission plant efficiency and convert the exisiting stockpile of long-lived radionucleotides to new fuel with short-lived half-lives. In my opinion, it’s insane that we are not “burning” the existing waste in next-generation fission plants.
Talking about making such changes in 10 years just makes the whole idea a joke to most people.
Realistically, “Life is incremental” says it all.
John
10 years with the right people in place is not unobtainable. We managed to develop a solution and actually put men on the moon in 10 years back in the 50s/60s.
That amount of money really isn’t that bad for such a major change to take place. The problem is that the oil companies won’t like the change, which means that all the greasy bastard politicians won’t want to be the leaders in making such a change. The US spends a lot of money on useless stuff (such as Iraq), so if some or all of that money could be diverted to such a large project, good things could happen. But I can’t see Barack being excited about this “change”, even though he loves that word. I can’t see John McCain taking a leadership role on this either.
Holy Opportunity Costs, Batman
Here’s a link to a Washington Post story from March 08 which lists the cost of the war in Iraq at $3 trillion plus. (I have a feeling that Gore’s figures and the Iraq war cost aren’t just coincidentally equal.)
Nevertheless, which would you rather have, sustainable energy independence with an updated infrastructure and domestic technology base that addresses a problem that could make much of the world uninhabitable OR a bottomless pit war that does nothing but kill people and throw our grandchildren’s money down a sinkhole?
All you that are okay with this, open your own wallets first! LOL
That elitist Al Gore telling us what to do and how to spend our money is a joke, when after he “greens” his posh Tennessee mansion, his energy bills go up! He’s a hypocrite and frankly America probably deserves him.
Al Gore’s Personal Electricity Consumption Up 10% Despite “Energy-Efficient” Renovations
Energy guzzled by Al Gore’s home in past year could power 232 U.S. homes for a month
http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=764
I would say more realistically that “life is catastrophic”. It only seems incremental when we see it from our perspective. This is true from the meteor that killed the dinosaurs to the industrial age.
The paving of the earth has been cataclysmic in that it’s taken “just” 100 years in terms of history and geology. The internet has arisen from a few sites to millions in ten years; that’s not incremental that’s explosive! Not to mention that gas has more than doubled in a year. Is that incremental?
We’ll get to the tipping point and do something with or without Al Gore, but I hope that we do the right thing.
I agree with Bunkie. Carbon based market incentives could lead to the best tech choices to solve the problem. Except that we, as a nation, are crazily paranoid about nuclear power.
I also agree with Bunkie in that I kind of like the moon-shot idea. At least it is more exciting than incrementalism. The big question, in my mind, is, “What approach is most likely to be implemented?”
I fear that we will do nothing at all.
Typical.
Cost is no object nor considered. Government fiat is supposed to replace market forces.
And to think he was almost president. Thank God for hanging chads.
“I kind of like the moon-shot idea. At least it is more exciting than incrementalism”
GM vs Toyota
Volt vs Prius
I don’t think either there is any necessity to bring ideology into the debate either (although we are debating it). There are times that market forces do the trick (most of the time to be honest) and there are times when the moon-shot is the solution… would we have gone to the moon purely by commercial motivation? We have learned a lot of valuable scientific and social information in getting to the moon.
What is to be asked is: is global climate change, world resource allocation and economy worthy of a moon shot project? I for one, think that it is. Sure is better in my eyes than spending all that money on wars fought in far off deserts.
See that DVD-player under your media center?
During its active life, 85% of the electricity it consumes goes to power stand-by.
Yup.
During the coming ten years we’ll be taking a hard look at the energy equation – what’s available, and how we’re using it. And we’re going to price energy consumption according to tiers: necessary, unnecessary, criminal.
Things will get better. :-)
Stein X Leikanger
I actually just put my entire entertainment center on a power strip, which is now off 16-18 hours a day. It has already made a difference in consumption (subwoofer, amplifier, TV).
The weird thing is how little effort has gone into this sort of thing in the US. IIRC, just about every modern wall outlet in the UK has a switch on it–for both money savings AND fire safety. Further, it’s not uncommon there to see household capacitors that draw extra current during non-peak times and store it for peak-time usage. All of this stuff is out there, ready to be had, and already up and running in modern society. Which is good in that we don’t have to be the guinea pig.
For all you hydrogen guys, the source is rather key. The oil companies couldn’t care less about a switch to hydrogen if it’s produced by using oil and natural gas (which is presently the only way we could meet the demand for transport).
Bunkie has a pretty good handle on it. The platinum question is a valid one. Also, the prize system works well, it’s been proven several times. The tax thing will likey end up being a great outlet for legislative graft, but it may work anyway. There will just be a significant loss of funds to the friends and families of those in power. Nothing new there.
I also think we need to drill, drill, drill, and research, research, research, and not forget about either one when oil drops back to $100 a barrel. I won’t hold my breath or even cross my fingers though.
Lastly, we can probably save the world if we can get guys like Ash78 to settle for a single little speaker. After all, it’s anybody really “needs”. (just kidding Ash, and yes, I am going to flog this equine long after it dies because no one seems to learn).
“And to think he was almost president.”
Ah, but look who we got instead!
The US has been worshiping at the Market God since Reagan, and by and large it has given us a horrible hangover. Imagine if we had staid on a mission to replace foreign oil like Carter started when the US imported less than a quarter of it’s oil needs. Now, the import number is up at around 70% of US demand.
Remember all that talk about persistence and long term views visa-vis the GM/Toyota battle? It isn’t just US executives who have a head-in-the-sand get-me-through-the-month outlook.
Life is not necessarily incremental. During WWII we managed to crank out 300,000 planes and 1.5 million tanks, at a time when the US was much smaller and poorer than it is today.
I’m sorry, but this is just a ridiculous idea. Any energy infrastructure based on solar or wind will need contemporary sources to back it up because we have things like night, rain and non-windy days. Conventional coal, gas or oil plants just can’t be switched on when sun goes down or the wind drops. It can take days to bring a boiler up to temperature which means the plants must still be operating in a standby capacity; using fossil fuels to keep the boilers hot but generating little to no power. Furthermore, as the need for electricity demand increases, you must have excess capacity from non-weather dependent sources. This means conventional plants must continue to be produced.
trk2: I agree with you to an extent–however, one presumes that our grid infrastructure would have to be modernized as well (it’s not in great shape as is), which could address some of your issues. But any kind of distributed, non-renewable power generation requires a well thought out backup system, which could include nuclear or thermal storage to my mind.
But any kind of distributed, non-renewable power generation requires a well thought out backup system, which could include nuclear or thermal storage to my mind.
Fair enough, but I challenge you to build, approve and have even one nuclear plant online within the next ten years:) And if you do have the nuclear power plants constructed, why do you need solar or wind?
I think it is very noble that Al would be willing to do all that work for a salary of only $3.2 trillion.
D. Holzman, In those days, the US had the industrial infra structure necessary to produce and ship the materiel. Not any more. Incrementally, starting today is the way to go. It flies in the face of quarterly statements, and instant gratification. But a coherent, long range plan, using available technology will do it. Graduallism, should allow affected industries to shift priorties to embrace the goal. Texas is building wind fields and the transmission lines to centers where the power is needed. T. Boone Pickens has an ad on tv about some energy scheme. It has started already. What is needed is the political resolve to see it through, not let it die as it did in the 70s.
As for the greenies, they should be hammered by the “silent majority” until they realize that their altruism is misguided and hypercritical.
10 years with the right people in place is not unobtainable. We managed to develop a solution and actually put men on the moon in 10 years
Wrong, it would be wholly and completely IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish what Gore wants in 10 years. It cannot be done. You cannot rebuild the entire US electrical infrastructure, serving 330 million people (pop. in 10 years) across a whole continent — using only solar and wind, since Gore refuses nukes and hydro is tapped out — in 10 years, that’s totally absurd.
This little project is many orders of magnitude greater than sending rockets to the moon or cranking out liberty ships and fighter aircraft in WWII. There is not enough time, money, capital, or human resources to even think about that time frame.
You could not even TRAIN enough people to BEGIN the necessary infrastructure building in 10 years, even assuming suppliers could give you enough wind turbines and solar equipment — which they absolutely could not do under any circumstance.
Moreover, even if you accomplished a miracle by doing this in, say, THIRTY years, it’s insufficient because you need other generation sources to augment wind and solar when the sun and wind are not cooperating.
BTW — I say this as someone who’s got a skunkworks project of my own to get into wind power.
Al Gore is as much of an embarrassment as George W Bush has proven to be. The difference is that many of us have been convinced Gore is right.
Problem is, Al Gore is a hypocrite. When he says reduce consumption, he means for everyone but him. This guy has a serious credibility problem.
Kind of like Obama saying he wants thermostats set at 78 degrees, but I’m sure his will stay at a nice comfy 72 during those hot Chicago Summers.
I, for one, welcome our new platinum-baron overlords.
Whatever else you can say about Al Gore, he’s definitely succeeded in getting climate change front-and-center, for better or for worse.
@GS650G:
Government fiat is supposed to replace market forces.
And to think he was almost president. Thank God for hanging chads.
Thank God for Supreme Court fiat. Imagine if Gore were president, we might’ve had to endure competent leadership.
So we know about the potential costs of the “green challenge.” Beyond the almost quaint concern of how getting off the dino juice will affect one’s “wallet” (apparently some haven’t noticed how gas prices are currently affecting their wallet) What are the costs of not doing anything? How does that affect one’s wallet in the long-term? For the myopic and ideologically blinkered, that question probably doesn’t mean a whole lot, but for anyone with a shred of insight and objectivity, it’s a question we should be (and thankfully, are) seriously discussing.
John Horner:
“The US has been worshiping at the Market God since Reagan, and by and large it has given us a horrible hangover. Imagine if we had staid on a mission to replace foreign oil like Carter started when the US imported less than a quarter of it’s oil needs. Now, the import number is up at around 70% of US demand.”
Really? It’s given us a hangover? It seems that the horrible ‘Market God’ is starting to work, as our demand for oil has slackened given the insanely high price. Further, it has curtailed the sales of SUVs and trucks, so it seems to be doing its job (a job which years of CAFE regulations failed to do). So we now import 70 percent of our oil. Let’s think, how can we change this? Oh yes, either reduce our demand or increase our domestic supply. The evil market is taking care of the first part, and wants to take care of the second part; unfortunately, the ‘Government God’ won’t let it drill! Boy, that evil market, what an entity! Al Gore wants renewable energy, and I’d love to see it too. I’m convinced that we will…when it’s economically viable! As a great first step, market forces (oh, there they are again! Tricky buggers…) have driven hybrid demand through the roof. Curse you, Market God!
And I love-LOVE the implications of your juxtaposition of Reagan and Carter. Boy, things sure were great under the Carter administration. Let’s abandon all of these silly conveniences…all we really need is a closet full of sweaters and a garage fully of bicycles.
Andy D.,
Here is the rub with ole T. Boone’s plan, and Al’s.
Solar is manufactured using lot’s of energy. Wind turbines are manufactured using lots of energy, out of petroleum byproducts and usually transported halfway across the planet to be inistalled. Nuclear similarly takes lots of petro to be built.
All of these are currently less efficient in the medium to long run than petro and coal.
If you want to use them, you REALLY need to drill more. Then figure out a way to incentivise them like pollution tax schemes. That way you keep energy cost at current levels for petro while providing increased demand to make the future energy sources and while providing the incentive to use those sources.
I haven’t heard any well thought out solution that doesn’t take these facts into account.
I would also like to see the math on how much land we would need to use solar and wind to generate the amount of energy we use during the day that is above the rate we use at night (at present tech or likely near future tech, not Al’s dream tech).
Lastly, couldn’t you use solar most of the night if you put a mirror out in space?
trk2:
“Fair enough, but I challenge you to build, approve and have even one nuclear plant online within the next ten years:) And if you do have the nuclear power plants constructed, why do you need solar or wind?”
Maybe because no one solution is going to solve the problem? Including using all the ideological hot air that’s being generated in this thread:-)
The waste issue for nuclear is yet to be resolved, so relying only on that wouldn’t work even if the political consensus was there.
The US spends a lot of money on useless stuff (such as Iraq),
Unless you don’t think that freeing 25-30 Million souls from the clutches of a murdering madman and his insane sons, smack in the middle of the ME oil fields is useless… I certainly don’t. All you lefty bastards will thank the day we spent that money there now than having to do it later to secure the entire ME. And you know and I know that we will not be entirely weaned off of oil within our lifetimes, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. A safe and secure Iraq… as the card ad says… PRICELESS.
“$200b to switch to hydrogen-powered vehicles isn’t that much”
No it isn’t. Problem is that it is short a few zeros. At $20,000 a copy, it would only buy about 10 million new cars. Even in this stinky year the OEMs will sell 15 million units.
I would also like to see the math on how much land we would need to use solar and wind to generate the amount of energy we use during the day that is above the rate we use at night (at present tech or likely near future tech, not Al’s dream tech).
I saw an engineer’s assessment of this very situation a few years ago, have been trying to find it again with no luck. He basically said that there was no practical way that solar and wind would ever be more than a fraction of our energy use, ever. There’s not enough land here to make it work, the technology is not advanced enough and may never be. And, as we saw in Mass. the enviros in the guise of prominent families and legislators (coughKennedycough) and other assorted tree huggers, save the whalers and NIMBYs will tie it all up in court so bad that there will be no incentive to get a fraction of the small fraction that is possible up and connected to the grid. Oil, Coal and Nuclear is the only way to get what we need in the abundance that we need.
The waste issue for nuclear is yet to be resolved, so relying only on that wouldn’t work even if the political consensus was there.
Only in the mind of above mentined enviro knuckle-heads. Safe and secure storage has been resolved, but nothing is good enough for said knuckle-heads.
The moon-battery on this issue is legion! No wonder we are still wondering in desert of this problem!
“Unless you don’t think that freeing 25-30 Million souls from the clutches of a murdering madman and his insane sons, smack in the middle of the ME oil fields is useless… I certainly don’t.”
One supposes not nearly as useless as the previous reasons, like 9/11, followed by WMDs, ad nauseum.
Of course “smack in the middle of the ME oil fields” IS the crux of the matter, since we wouldn’t be be there otherwise (e.g. see Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Tibet etc.).
“A safe and secure Iraq… as the card ad says… PRICELESS.”
I hope so too. Let us know when it happens.
The solution is obvious: find a platinum-rich asteroid, park it in geostationary orbit over the U.S., run a space elevator from it to the manufacturing facilities on the ground, et voila! Plenty o’ Platinum! It’s at least as plausibile as Gore’s plan and it should only take a few centuries.
I saw an interview with Gore on the news last night regarding his vision. He agreed that it was a lot of money, but it was a worthwhile sacrifice for other people to make. Okay I added in that last part about other people, but that’s what it boils down to.
Sure jpc, as soon as you get the rock in orbit the protesters will say you’re raping its ecosystem, and Congress would enact a mining moratorium — and they’ll all be funded by the Platinum mine-owners lobby.
WildBill said “The moon-battery on this issue is legion!”
My gosh, you’ve accidentally revealed the solution: turn the moon into a gigantic storage battery! Just haul the needed lead and acid to the moon, inject it into the core, and use radio waves to beam the resulting electrical energy back to Earth. (Use a secure frequency to prevent other nations from stealing electricity, unless it turns out to be “too cheap to meter.”)
For those who want to get real about alternative energy sources, Stephen Den Beste’s old posts are good, concise analyses. But even he couldn’t get the truly devout to put aside the religion:
http://chizumatic.mee.nu/ghosts_of_my_past
While Peak Oil is here, there is no need to try to completely eliminate the use of oil. There will always be some oil available albeit at a very high price.
The important concept is that we can no longer expand, let alone maintain, current consumption patterns as oil production gradually declines year after year in the face of rising world demand due to ever increasing population.
Some changes have to be made or they will be forced by the Peak Oil situation.
Ignoring Peak Oil or refusing to appreciate it’s implications are not options.
Kevin,
You’re just a realist! Your ideology is blinding you from seeing the truth. You realists should just go back to your caves. Nobody likes you so you must be wrong!
Hehe, seriously though, you nailed it.
97escort,
Let’s assume that we are at peak oil. What course do the peak oil folks then recommend? I say use the oil to make multipliers like solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Build the infrastructure while we still have oil. I don’t see Gore’s proposal getting us anywhere. Begging people to conform just doesn’t work, and he knows it.