Jimmy Carter 2nd Term; renewable energy

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If Jimmy Carter was reelected for a second term, would it have made may difference toward US energy policy and renewable developments?
 
We might have burned more money away on renewables if such a miracle should occur. The problem with renewables is a problem of physics, you can't get more energy out of something than it has already. The problem with solar and wind is that there is not much energy there, not on a square meter basis. It takes lots and lots and lots of room to get any sort of meaningful amount of energy even with 100% efficiency. Various European countries have gotten them to limp along with massive subsidies, once the subsidies are cut the renewables go away. Sooner or later the world's economy has to be based on nuclear energy as that is the only viable alternative when fossil fuels run out, most likely molten salt as it can turn TH into U233.
 
We might have burned more money away on renewables if such a miracle should occur. The problem with renewables is a problem of physics, you can't get more energy out of something than it has already. The problem with solar and wind is that there is not much energy there, not on a square meter basis. It takes lots and lots and lots of room to get any sort of meaningful amount of energy even with 100% efficiency. Various European countries have gotten them to limp along with massive subsidies, once the subsidies are cut the renewables go away. Sooner or later the world's economy has to be based on nuclear energy as that is the only viable alternative when fossil fuels run out, most likely molten salt as it can turn TH into U233.

Stuff and nonsense. I ran the numbers on a purely solar-based economy (total nonsense of course, one would actually have hydro, wind, etc. in a well-designed system, but it was a proof of concept exercise) a while back:

Solar can produce all the energy you want in any vaguely practical or reasonable sense. Every day, the Earth's land area intercepts about 3.7*10^16 watts of solar energy at 250 W/m^2 (taking into account night-time, but not weather), or 2,000 times current total global energy consumption of about 1.5*10^13 watts. Clearly the land demands here are not particularly objectionable; assuming a 10% efficient system, behind even the present state-of-the-art, a total of 0.5% of the Earth's land area would have to be dedicated to power generation. Agriculture, for example, utilizes about 1/3rd of Earth's land area, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, so this is comparatively negligible, especially if you consider the amount of land consumed for coal mining, coal mine tailings, fly ash storage, and so on.

Of course, merely meeting existing energy demands is hardly enough. Assuming that the world's population equilibrates at about 10 billion people, with a per capita energy usage of 11.5 kilowatts (similar to present-day Americans, and high enough to allow "high-energy" processes in conjunction with efficiency measures like increased use of public transportation), then about 10^14 watts would be needed. Assuming a 30% efficient system (plausible given existing lab efficiency limits and solid-state switching systems), this would then require about 3% of Earth's land to be covered with solar panels. This is, obviously, larger, but is still small compared to many other land uses we have no problem accepting.

Alternatively, assume that each of those people need 3,000 cubic meters of water per person per year (higher than the United States average figure), and it all has to be provided by reverse osmosis purification of seawater (obviously unrealistic, as much of that water is used for agriculture or industrial uses and doesn't need to be so pure, and global warming will not destroy all fresh water sources). That means that 3*10^13 cubic meters of water need to be purified per year (ten times more than current total global usage of 3,000 cubic kilometers or 3*10^12 cubic meters per year). Then, 10^14 kilowatt-hours (at 3 kWh/cubic meter) will be needed per year to purify that water, which equates to about 12 terawatts of constant power generation capacity (12 * 10^9 kW * 8760 hours/year ~ 100*10^12 kWh = 10^14 kWh). Supposing a 30% system efficiency as before, this equates to around 150 billion square meters of panel, or about 0.1% of Earth's land area, again a rather trivial amount of land considering how much water we're talking about processing, and much less than would be needed to supply basic energy needs.

Similarly, assume that you want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the same rate that it was put in (about 4*10^10 tons per year at present), and that it takes about 100 kilowatt-hours per ton to remove carbon dioxide (the best figure I could quickly find). Then you need to produce 4*10^12 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year to sink carbon, or about one-twentieth as much as you are dedicating to producing clean water, and hence only about 0.005% of Earth's land area. This would remove the entire excess carbon budget of about 5 trillion tons (~0.1% of Earth's atmosphere) in 125 years. If you increased the amount of energy to the amount dedicated to producing water, then you would sink 8*10^11 tons per year, and would finish sinking the carbon budget in 7 years (obviously unrealistic).

Solar...has the power.

TL;DR: Dedicating 3% of global surface area to solar power generation using existing but lab-scale technology would produce enough electricity to supply ten billion people, more than the current world population, with the same per capita energy supply as Americans, discounting any and all other energy sources. Provided proper efficiency measures were used, this could simultaneously provide more fresh water to each of those ten billion people than is used by the average American including agriculture and industry annually and sink the entire excess carbon budget in about a century. This is less than 10% as much as we actually dedicate to agriculture, and actually about the same as the sum of all global city areas (so roughly speaking rooftop panels, using admittedly laboratory technologies, could actually supply all energy needs on Earth, in theory).

Of course this isn't a realistic setup, and it does ignore weather (but it doesn't ignore nighttime or global variation in insolation--that's the average global insolation figure I used there, which takes into account diurnal and geographical variations), but from a technical perspective solar is entirely capable of supplying global energy needs--actually more than global energy needs--without needing a disproportionate amount of land, no more than we dedicate to many other economic activities.
 
If Jimmy Carter was reelected for a second term, would it have made may difference toward US energy policy and renewable developments?

Solar energy aside, I do not see it impossible for Carter to counter Reagan's (planned of course, hinted at, announced on the campaign trail...) economic tractor of increased military spending by starting an 'environmental' Manhattan project to produce a viable 50 mpg car. Furthermore the focus would be on better using the energy we got for instance by promoting energy efficient homes (I say that because OTL that was what was happening in Germany and many other European countries.)

But overall, I think more energy independence would mean more stuff powered by electricity... Which we would get from more 'efficient' nuclear reactors.
 
Stuff and nonsense. I ran the numbers on a purely solar-based economy (total nonsense of course, one would actually have hydro, wind, etc. in a well-designed system, but it was a proof of concept exercise) a while back:



TL;DR: Dedicating 3% of global surface area to solar power generation using existing but lab-scale technology would produce enough electricity to supply ten billion people, more than the current world population, with the same per capita energy supply as Americans, discounting any and all other energy sources. Provided proper efficiency measures were used, this could simultaneously provide more fresh water to each of those ten billion people than is used by the average American including agriculture and industry annually and sink the entire excess carbon budget in about a century. This is less than 10% as much as we actually dedicate to agriculture, and actually about the same as the sum of all global city areas (so roughly speaking rooftop panels, using admittedly laboratory technologies, could actually supply all energy needs on Earth, in theory).

Of course this isn't a realistic setup, and it does ignore weather (but it doesn't ignore nighttime or global variation in insolation--that's the average global insolation figure I used there, which takes into account diurnal and geographical variations), but from a technical perspective solar is entirely capable of supplying global energy needs--actually more than global energy needs--without needing a disproportionate amount of land, no more than we dedicate to many other economic activities.

Solar energy has a power density of 1.35 w per square meter which is next to nothing. Coal has a power density of around 10 or more times that while oil and natural gas are even higher while nuclear would be higher yet . Land isn't free or limitless. You also can use fossil fuel and nuclear 24/7 in anything but catastrophic weather almost anywhere you want. Solar can only be used daytime and wind power only when the wind is blowing and even then it can't be blowing too hard. So you need multiple backups which costs money and you have the much more costly problem of infrastructure as all these backups have to be connected to the grid. Also these backups can only be used for back ups as if your "back up" goes down what then? So you have to overbuild by at least twice and more likely three or four times over. Solar isn't very efficient in cold weather nor can it be used at night. Wind energy can only be used where the wind blows a lot. It has to be windy MOST OF THE TIME to pay off, in fact the vast majority of the time. Any time the wind is not blowing or is blowing only lightly is time it isn't generating power.
 
Solar energy has a power density of 1.35 w per square meter which is next to nothing.
Er, no. 1.35 W/square meter is closer to the average geothermal heat flux (which is actually less than 1/10th of a Watt per square meter). Average terrestrial insolation, ignoring weather factors but taking into account night-time and geographical factors (that is, the fact that the poles have a lower insolation during the day than the equator) is 250 W/square meter, as I said, or nearly 200 times your figure. At the equator on a clear day, it's nearly 1,000 watts per square meter.

Coal has a power density of around 10 or more times that while oil and natural gas are even higher while nuclear would be higher yet .
I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, because the energy densities of coal and uranium are incommensurable with the energy densities of solar or wind power. Coal and uranium are usually expressed in terms of watts per kilogram or gram of material, whereas solar power density is expressed in watts per square meter. You can't directly compare these figures, although you can create a synthetic "watts per square meter" by taking into account the area needed for mining, processing, power plants, storing waste, and so on and so forth for the other two.

Regardless, your own examples show that energy density doesn't really matter. Uranium is vastly more energy-dense than coal, but nuclear power is less economically viable because extracting that energy requires large capital expenditures. Similarly, solar may be less energy-dense than coal, but it is becoming more economically viable due to regulations driving up the cost of coal and, in some places, particularly high insolations or high costs of transport for coal (e.g., in Hawaii both operate).

Land isn't free or limitless.
No, but as I clearly showed the amount of land needed is basically trivial in comparison with many activities that are less economically valuable (per square meter of land) than producing electricity. In fact, as I pointed out, decent panels could theoretically generate enough electricity to power the whole world off of city rooftops, so you wouldn't even need to use additional land. You're free to show your own assumptions and do your own math to disprove that.

You also can use fossil fuel and nuclear 24/7 in anything but catastrophic weather almost anywhere you want.
This is actually not true. It's not uncommon for fossil fuel and nuclear plants to suffer unscheduled maintenance and other issues, or for the grid itself to fail in one way or another, and every power plant needs to be taken offline from time to time for various reasons. Even the most reliable nuclear plants aren't going to be working more than four days in every five, on average (of course what you actually see is long periods of constant uptime punctuated by shutdowns, but that averages out to a less than 100% capacity factor).

Solar can only be used daytime and wind power only when the wind is blowing and even then it can't be blowing too hard.
Of course, which is part of why I pointed out several times that this calculation was unrealistic. However, as I emphasized several times, I did take into account the effects of night-time losses when calculating the average power supply (through the expedient of my average insolation figure including night-time areas as well as day-time zones), so that although my solar fields would be generating no power at night, every square meter would (on average) be generating much more power than the constant levels I assume during the day. Hence, there would be sufficient energy available to take advantage of a range of storage options, from batteries to simply synthesizing liquid fuels and burning those later.

So you need multiple backups which costs money and you have the much more costly problem of infrastructure as all these backups have to be connected to the grid. Also these backups can only be used for back ups as if your "back up" goes down what then? So you have to overbuild by at least twice and more likely three or four times over.
It's a matter of what reliability you will accept. You seem to be aiming for 100% uptime, which is unrealistic and not achieved by non-renewable forms of generation. What happens if your backups fail? Then you have a blackout. That's what happens when a big plant or a substation fails in the conventional grid, too.

Solar isn't very efficient in cold weather nor can it be used at night.
Like I said, I took this into account in the basic calculation. This is already also fantastically overbuilt by the assumption that it's supplying the entire world with American-level per capita energy quantities (not electricity, but energy). The United States has one of the highest per-capita energy consumption rates in the entire world, with many developed countries using half as much, so there is considerable overbuild included.

Wind energy can only be used where the wind blows a lot. It has to be windy MOST OF THE TIME to pay off, in fact the vast majority of the time. Any time the wind is not blowing or is blowing only lightly is time it isn't generating power.
I didn't actually include wind at all, another reason I said this was unrealistic. But it is providing almost 10% of the electricity I use (I live in Texas), so it's obviously capable of producing a large fraction of modern power demands.

The point is that you said that renewables are not capable of powering a modern economy because they have insufficient power density. This is just not true if you actually look at the numbers, which I showed. There's plenty of power available from renewables without using unreasonable or excessive amounts of land.
 
If Jimmy Carter was reelected for a second term, would it have made may difference toward US energy policy and renewable developments?

Anyways, to actually answer the OP...it might have made some marginal difference. The United States really scaled back renewable energy research during the 1980s, and if it hadn't, well, you can never really say with these things, but you might see a bit more work on the NASA wind turbine program, solar cells might be a bit more advanced or the like...I wouldn't expect things to be more than a few years ahead of OTL at most. I don't see much hope for a renewables-focused policy in the 1980s or 1990s, they were just too expensive and fossil fuels far too cheap at that time, but more work might make green policies more viable a little earlier than OTL later.
 
Solar energy has a power density of 1.35 w per square meter which is next to nothing. Coal has a power density of around 10 or more times that while oil and natural gas are even higher while nuclear would be higher yet . Land isn't free or limitless. You also can use fossil fuel and nuclear 24/7 in anything but catastrophic weather almost anywhere you want. Solar can only be used daytime and wind power only when the wind is blowing and even then it can't be blowing too hard. So you need multiple backups which costs money and you have the much more costly problem of infrastructure as all these backups have to be connected to the grid. Also these backups can only be used for back ups as if your "back up" goes down what then? So you have to overbuild by at least twice and more likely three or four times over. Solar isn't very efficient in cold weather nor can it be used at night. Wind energy can only be used where the wind blows a lot. It has to be windy MOST OF THE TIME to pay off, in fact the vast majority of the time. Any time the wind is not blowing or is blowing only lightly is time it isn't generating power.

If I remember right, covering some fragments of the Sahara desert would produce enough energy for Europe.
 
Er, no. 1.35 W/square meter is closer to the average geothermal heat flux (which is actually less than 1/10th of a Watt per square meter). Average terrestrial insolation, ignoring weather factors but taking into account night-time and geographical factors (that is, the fact that the poles have a lower insolation during the day than the equator) is 250 W/square meter, as I said, or nearly 200 times your figure. At the equator on a clear day, it's nearly 1,000 watts per square meter.


I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, because the energy densities of coal and uranium are incommensurable with the energy densities of solar or wind power. Coal and uranium are usually expressed in terms of watts per kilogram or gram of material, whereas solar power density is expressed in watts per square meter. You can't directly compare these figures, although you can create a synthetic "watts per square meter" by taking into account the area needed for mining, processing, power plants, storing waste, and so on and so forth for the other two.

Regardless, your own examples show that energy density doesn't really matter. Uranium is vastly more energy-dense than coal, but nuclear power is less economically viable because extracting that energy requires large capital expenditures. Similarly, solar may be less energy-dense than coal, but it is becoming more economically viable due to regulations driving up the cost of coal and, in some places, particularly high insolations or high costs of transport for coal (e.g., in Hawaii both operate).


No, but as I clearly showed the amount of land needed is basically trivial in comparison with many activities that are less economically valuable (per square meter of land) than producing electricity. In fact, as I pointed out, decent panels could theoretically generate enough electricity to power the whole world off of city rooftops, so you wouldn't even need to use additional land. You're free to show your own assumptions and do your own math to disprove that.


This is actually not true. It's not uncommon for fossil fuel and nuclear plants to suffer unscheduled maintenance and other issues, or for the grid itself to fail in one way or another, and every power plant needs to be taken offline from time to time for various reasons. Even the most reliable nuclear plants aren't going to be working more than four days in every five, on average (of course what you actually see is long periods of constant uptime punctuated by shutdowns, but that averages out to a less than 100% capacity factor).


Of course, which is part of why I pointed out several times that this calculation was unrealistic. However, as I emphasized several times, I did take into account the effects of night-time losses when calculating the average power supply (through the expedient of my average insolation figure including night-time areas as well as day-time zones), so that although my solar fields would be generating no power at night, every square meter would (on average) be generating much more power than the constant levels I assume during the day. Hence, there would be sufficient energy available to take advantage of a range of storage options, from batteries to simply synthesizing liquid fuels and burning those later.


It's a matter of what reliability you will accept. You seem to be aiming for 100% uptime, which is unrealistic and not achieved by non-renewable forms of generation. What happens if your backups fail? Then you have a blackout. That's what happens when a big plant or a substation fails in the conventional grid, too.


Like I said, I took this into account in the basic calculation. This is already also fantastically overbuilt by the assumption that it's supplying the entire world with American-level per capita energy quantities (not electricity, but energy). The United States has one of the highest per-capita energy consumption rates in the entire world, with many developed countries using half as much, so there is considerable overbuild included.


I didn't actually include wind at all, another reason I said this was unrealistic. But it is providing almost 10% of the electricity I use (I live in Texas), so it's obviously capable of producing a large fraction of modern power demands.

The point is that you said that renewables are not capable of powering a modern economy because they have insufficient power density. This is just not true if you actually look at the numbers, which I showed. There's plenty of power available from renewables without using unreasonable or excessive amounts of land.


You can't store electricity efficiently so the average during the day doesn't matter. Your rooftop solar panels won't help at 12AM. Batteries are extremely inefficient and using the energy to make liquid fuel is as well.

Solar farms and windmills ALSO need maintenance and other issues and since it takes at least ten times the area the maintenance is actually greater. Maintenance doesn't magically go away with solar panels. Any sort of power production requires it.

I am not aiming for 100% just around what we have now. My point is that you need the backup generators (most likely using coal, natural gas or nuclear) for the times the sun isn't shining. In winter the sun is shining less than half the day. There is a limit on how far you can transmit electricity. The sun will set in Buffalo, NY at about 5:30-6:00 at night in February. http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/buffalo?month=2&year=2015 How many people go to sleep that early?

There are REASONS why solar and wind don't provide much of the World's energy and it isn't because of the "evil oil companies" or the "evil coal companies" , it is because even with massive subsidies it is far too inefficient to work. It is too unreliable and takes far too much room.
 
We have 1.4 kW of solar panels on our 5th wheel and 8.6 kW-hrs of LFP (48 V nominal) and have not hooked into line power or generator except once in two years of boondocking/mootchdocking. Our daughter has 6 or 7 kW on her roof in Las Cruces, NM and averages $60/month back from El Paso Electric. It works.
 

Delta Force

Banned
I ran the figures for a nuclear economy a while ago.

The world consumes 19,320,360,620 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to Wikipedia. That's 2,205,520 megawatts of average capacity. Assuming an 85% capacity factor, that would mean 2,756,900 megawatts of nameplate capacity would be required if nuclear power were used. Using the Palo Verde numbers from earlier, a facility (including buffer and expansion land, transmission facilities, etc.) has a power density of 0.83 megawatts per acre, or 205.10 megawatts per square kilometer. Including the additional two units planned for the facility but never built, the density rises to 1.378 megawatts per acre, or 340.51 megawatts per square kilometer. That means 8096.38 square kilometers to 13441.74 square kilometers would be required to power the world using nuclear energy, including room for all the additional equipment required, buffer zones, and backup facilities. Probably more than that because some periods need more electricity than others (summer or winter, usually), but the number can easily go up without using too much land. That's an area the size of Puerto Rico on the low end, to an area the size of the Bahamas on the high end, sufficient to power the entire world.

Earth has a land area of 148,940,000 square kilometers and the nuclear power stations need to 8096.38 to 13441.74 square kilometers for everything, which would be 0.0054% to 0.0090% of total land area. Another way to put this is that 51 to 85 nuclear energy centers the size of Washington DC could provide enough energy to meet total world demand. Probably even less, since if they were consolidated some of the buffer areas could overlap.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Solar energy aside, I do not see it impossible for Carter to counter Reagan's (planned of course, hinted at, announced on the campaign trail...) economic tractor of increased military spending by starting an 'environmental' Manhattan project to produce a viable 50 mpg car. Furthermore the focus would be on better using the energy we got for instance by promoting energy efficient homes (I say that because OTL that was what was happening in Germany and many other European countries.)

But overall, I think more energy independence would mean more stuff powered by electricity... Which we would get from more 'efficient' nuclear reactors.

It's kind of ironic how people think that 50 mpg vehicles are something new or high tech. There were cars sold in the United States in the 1980s that had mileage around there using gasoline engines. The Chevy Sprint/Suzuki SA310 achieved 44 mpg city and 55 mpg highway using a carbureted 48 horsepower engine, with a 70 horsepower turbocharged fuel injected version achieving 60 miles per hour in 9.4 seconds, with 37 mpg city/43 mpg highway.

There was an initiative under President Clinton for the development of efficient cars, but I don't see the need to use advanced materials and such to build them. It's more cost-effective to make reasonably efficient vehicles using commercially available technology. Even hybrids have questionable payoff times for their enhanced mileage, and may actually come out to be an overall poor investment in times of low energy prices.
 
It's kind of ironic how people think that 50 mpg vehicles are something new or high tech. There were cars sold in the United States in the 1980s that had mileage around there using gasoline engines.

When gas prices started going up back a few years ago and there was talk about raising the current fuel standards, people were screaming it was impossible to get some the the very modest increases that were suggested without destroying the car industry. I was sitting there thinking "We had the technology for 40 and 50 mpg cars in the 80's. What have we forgotten?"

Torqumada
 
It's kind of ironic how people think that 50 mpg vehicles are something new or high tech. There were cars sold in the United States in the 1980s that had mileage around there using gasoline engines. The Chevy Sprint/Suzuki SA310 achieved 44 mpg city and 55 mpg highway using a carbureted 48 horsepower engine, with a 70 horsepower turbocharged fuel injected version achieving 60 miles per hour in 9.4 seconds, with 37 mpg city/43 mpg highway.

There was an initiative under President Clinton for the development of efficient cars, but I don't see the need to use advanced materials and such to build them. It's more cost-effective to make reasonably efficient vehicles using commercially available technology. Even hybrids have questionable payoff times for their enhanced mileage, and may actually come out to be an overall poor investment in times of low energy prices.

It's easy to make a car get 50 mpg. It's much harder to get Americans to drive it. We don't drive underpowered cars like in Japan or Europe.the technology is now there were we can have our cake and eat it too.
 
Try running even a grocery store with that and try that in Buffalo, Minneapolis or Cleveland instead of El Paso.

What about LA, Dallas, Mexico City, Cairo, São Paulo, Jakarta, etc. More people live in areas with better insolation than Buffalo then don't.

For every doubling of solar capacity Solar energy prices drop 20 percent. It's know as Swanson's law. So a mass investment in the 1980s could significantly reduce solar energy prices. Right now it's competitive in areas with high insolation. In 15 years Spain is hoping to have solar thermal plants that can provide base load without NG back up. Perhaps this development could be moved up.
 

Delta Force

Banned
A polymer body with an overhead cam engine might not be what performance oriented Americans were looking for in a vehicle, but it would be well within the technology of even the 1960s, and would be less expensive to build then conventional vehicles if implemented together (the engine would cost more). The engine could be made out of iron instead of aluminum to save money (the weight savings wouldn't be as high as for a larger engine) and to simplify adding a turbocharger for performance models.
 
I was sitting there thinking "We had the technology for 40 and 50 mpg cars in the 80's. What have we forgotten?"

Not everyone wanted to drive an oversized Golf Cart powered with a stinking, clattering, smoky diesel with an automatic slushbox, awesomely slow,0-60 in 21 seconds:p

There was a reason those Diesel Rabbits didn't catch on vs even crappy K-Cars
 
Not everyone wanted to drive an oversized Golf Cart powered with a stinking, clattering, smoky diesel with an automatic slushbox, awesomely slow,0-60 in 21 seconds:p

There was a reason those Diesel Rabbits didn't catch on vs even crappy K-Cars

1920px-1987_Honda_CRX_Si%2C_rear_right_%28Lime_Rock%29.jpg


Import Car of the Year.
Motor Trend Car of the Year
Rated one of the Top 10 cars of all time by Road and Track
Car and Driver Top 10

etc.....

Not a diesel vehicle and depending on the year got as much as 51mpg. I don't recall it clattering at all or being stinky. Zero to 60 in 8.6 seconds was it's best time. I don't recall it being slow at all.

Torqumada
 
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