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Gates and renewable energy

WFU71

WFU71

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The article is behind a paywall, but I agree with the quote. Subsidies aren't the answer. Though I swing libertarian, if we're choosing between government investment in subsidies or R&D, we need R&D so that renewable energy can be developed to the point that it makes sense economically without subsidies. That's the tipping point that will result in mass adoption.
 
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Agreed.
 
Here's the missing operative info (not a complete copy):
Mr Gates said he had invested directly in about 15 companies and indirectly in another 30, via venture capital funds, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. “Over the next five years, there’s a good chance that will double,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

He argued that current technologies could only reduce global CO2 emissions at a “beyond astronomical” economic cost. “The only way you can get to the very positive scenario is by great innovation,” he said. “Innovation really does bend the curve.”

Rejecting calls from environmental campaign groups for shareholders to dump holdings in oil and gas companies, on the grounds this will have little impact, he instead urged “high-risk” investment in new technologies.

He said renewables were far from capable in their current form of capturing projected growth in energy use by 2030. He cited solar power as an example: “Solar is only during the day, solar only works best in places where it's warm. We don’t have perfect grids. We don’t have storage.
“There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind.
“Power is about reliability. We need to get something that works reliably.”

Among the technology Mr Gates said was the most promising was “nuclear recycling”, where he has invested several hundred million dollars. His biggest single commitment was in a US-based company called TerraPower.

“Nuclear technology today is failing on cost, safety, proliferation, waste and fuel shortage, and so any technology that comes in has to have some answer to all of those things.” TerraPower’s reactors would be powered not by enriched uranium, used by traditional reactors, but by depleted uranium, the waste from today’s plants.
Depleted uranium is widely available as a raw material to be turned into energy. The plants using this spent fuel, so-called Travelling Wave Reactors, could be one solution to how to dispose of nuclear waste. A small amount of enriched uranium is needed to get them started, but they would run on waste, making and consuming their own supply.
In theory, they could run for decades without refuelling, making them a cheaper and safer alternative to existing reactors.
 
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Agree with the summation in the OP. However, the Chinese are likely to beat everybody to the punch. As the world's largest polluters, they at least had the foresight to invest in some serious R&D, knowing it is in their short and long term interests to do so.
 
WFU71 said:
Rejecting calls from environmental campaign groups for shareholders to dump holdings in oil and gas companies, on the grounds this will have little impact, he instead urged “high-risk” investment in new technologies.
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Exactly. If anything, one should continue investing in oil/gas and take the profits earned there to reinvest into renewable technology research.

WFU71 said:
He said renewables were far from capable in their current form of capturing projected growth in energy use by 2030. He cited solar power as an example: “Solar is only during the day, solar only works best in places where it's warm. We don’t have perfect grids. We don’t have storage.
“There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind.
“Power is about reliability. We need to get something that works reliably.”

Among the technology Mr Gates said was the most promising was “nuclear recycling”, where he has invested several hundred million dollars. His biggest single commitment was in a US-based company called TerraPower.
Click to expand...

We've got to get over this "fear" of nuclear. It's still the most promising go-forward technology for replacing oil/gas in any sort of timely manner.

Besides the blown out of proportion safety concerns, the biggest issue with current nuclear is the waste. A mixture of traditional nuclear plants and plants developed to run on the waste of traditional plants would be great. The politics will likely be a far bigger hurdle than the technology development.
 
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http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2014/02/will-thorium-save-us-from-climate-change/

"Even eminent climate scientists like James Hansen claim we can't avoid nuclear if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hansen, a former NASA scientist, with Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tom Wigley of Australia's University of Adelaide, wrote an open letter last year stating, "the time has come for those who take the threat of global warming seriously to embrace the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems."

From the open letter:
"Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power"

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/
 
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RacerDeac said:
Exactly. If anything, one should continue investing in oil/gas and take the profits earned there to reinvest into renewable technology research.



We've got to get over this "fear" of nuclear. It's still the most promising go-forward technology for replacing oil/gas in any sort of timely manner.

Besides the blown out of proportion safety concerns, the biggest issue with current nuclear is the waste. A mixture of traditional nuclear plants and plants developed to run on the waste of traditional plants would be great. The politics will likely be a far bigger hurdle than the technology development.
Click to expand...


Why don't we just put this waste on a rocket and fire it into space?
 
The idea of a rocket full of radioactive material exploding in the upper atmosphere doesn't sound appealing to me. Noted, I haven't done the research to see what the risk would be.
 
ONW said:
Why don't we just put this waste on a rocket and fire it into space?
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It is incredibly expensive to launch anything into space at the moment. Also, there is a very real threat of mass contamination.

I'm a huge proponent of RTGs in space probes but they have two distinct drawbacks.

First, the plutonium used to power them is a by-product of nuclear arms creation.

Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator_plutonium_pellet-640x503.jpg


Second, there is a very real concern of contamination in the event of a catastrophic failure during launch. Instead of having a localized radioactive disaster, you would have radioactive material raining down over a whole country/region.
 
To give you an idea of the issue. Scientists expected Skylab to burn up in the atmosphere but if it didn't they predicted the debris field would be somewhere in the Indian Ocean. They were wrong on both points. It didn't burn up completely, and lots of debris rained down in Australia. Nuclear waste would dissipate much more quickly and over a wider area. Until we build a space elevator, we have no chance of economically shooting nuclear waste into space.

2000px-Skylab_reentry_map.svg.png
 
Those are all good reasons not to do that. Appreciate the responses.
 
WFU71 said:
Wouldn't this be some really big shit?

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline
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"The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”"

"The previous third-party analysis of the E-Cat device, published in March 2013, was attacked and debunked very rapidly. It seems this new report has been intentionally designed so that there are fewer plot holes and logical leaps."


It would be a really big deal if it eventually works.
 
ONW said:
"The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”"

"The previous third-party analysis of the E-Cat device, published in March 2013, was attacked and debunked very rapidly. It seems this new report has been intentionally designed so that there are fewer plot holes and logical leaps."


It would be a really big deal if it eventually works.
Click to expand...

That would explain why this article is from a seemingly random tech website instead of a legit news source.
 
RacerDeac said:
The idea of a rocket full of radioactive material exploding in the upper atmosphere doesn't sound appealing to me. Noted, I haven't done the research to see what the risk would be.
Click to expand...

From some work I did, the best rockets we have currently calculate to about a 3% failure rate. The space shuttles had an overall mission failure rate of just under 2%, that is two shuttles (Columbia and Challenger) did not complete mission out of slightly over 100 launches.

Right now, Atlas V is the only thing US has flying that has not experienced a failure. (knock on wood.) It is one of the potential future options for ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station.
 
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