Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
The idea that we can draw endless supplies of clean energy from the wind and waves just doesn't add up
WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it's hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. Yet that is the provocative suggestion of one physicist who has done the sums.
He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels, he says, and we could seriously deplete the energy available in the atmosphere, with consequences as dire as severe climate change.
Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use.
Kleidon's brief:
The chemical composition of the earths atmosphere far from equilibrium is unique in the solar system and has been attributed to the presence of widespread life. Here I show that this perspective can be quantified using non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Generating disequilibrium in a thermodynamic variable requires the extraction of power from another thermodynamic gradient, and the second law of thermodynamics imposes fundamental limits on how much power can be extracted. When applied to complex earth system processes, where several irreversible processes compete to deplete the same gradients, it is easily shown that the maximum thermodynamic efficiency is much less than the classic Carnot limit, so that the ability of the earth system to generate power and disequilibrium is limited. This approach is used to quantify how much free energy is generated by various earth system processes to generate chemical disequilibrium. It is shown that surface life generates orders of magnitude more chemical free energy than any abiotic surface process, therefore being the primary driving force for shaping the geochemical environment at the planetary scale. To apply this perspective to the possible future of the planet, we first note that the free energy consumption by human activity is a considerable term in the free energy budget of the planet, and that global changes are closely related to this consumption of free energy. Since human activity and demands for free energy is going to increase in the future, the central question is how human free energy demands can increase sustainably without negatively impacting the ability of the earth system to generate free energy. I illustrate the implications of this thermodynamic perspective by discussing the forms of renewable energy and planetary engineering that would enhance overall free energy generation and thereby "empower" the future of the planet.
Comments
A Lovelock GAIA purveyor, I note in his 28 page pdf file on the link page he makes no mathematical or quantitative calculation of how human use of coal, nuclear energy, natural gas, or oil affects the 'free energy' balance on earth except for this p15:
The author doesn't discuss how the increase in CO2 will decrease heat/energy loss to space, and how this will increase his 'free energy' most evident in higher winds and bigger storms, heavy downpours of rain, and the resulting faster erosion due to mass movement of soil, rocks, and houses downstream.
James Hansen has for over 20 years discussed the climate forcing of greenhouse gases, and has calculated a energy imbalance of around +1/2-1 watt per square meter, see his 52 page pdf at link. Clearly, if humans are increasing energy retention in the GAIA we need not worry about a shortage of 'free energy' caused by our windmills or photovoltaic panels.
Kliedon and his free energy mumbo jumbo appears to have all the makings of a very kookie theory, like 'human energy fields' being disrupted by dental fillings.
by NCD on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 12:46pm
So, instead of wind turbines, we need hurricane-rated turbines, tornado-rated turbines and mudslide wave generators.
by Donal on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 1:52pm
...and don't forget get those dental fillings changed out.
by NCD on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 4:47pm
But then how will I get my directives from nutjob central? I had a tooth pulled and half my transmissions got garbled.
by jollyroger on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 7:51pm
by quinn esq on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 8:20pm
It's OK to get the tooth pulled than filled, or root canaled for heavens sake. Eat oatmeal. The directives will come back if you medicate yourself sufficiently. Don't forget to stoop under the free energy depleting windmills.
by NCD on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 11:16pm
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you take something out of the equation, it changes the answer. For instance, placing power generating turbines into the Gulf Stream would have a dramatic effect for the marine ecosystem and the weather over Europe. It won't happen in a day or two, but over time those turbines impede the flow of warmer waters that feed both marine life and the European weather which farmer rely on. Anyone have a clue how to increase the speed of a global current? Same goes for the wind. Disrupting the wind with windmill devices will effect those downwind.
Both wind power and tidal current power are okay so long as they are small scale. But to harness either or both to sustain power consumption which grows at an annual rate of about 7% a year before too long neither will be able to meet demand.
BTW ... while sunlight is free, it does take up land which makes then land beneath the panels useless for growing plant life which is necessary for both oxygen and food sources.
Too many log term trade-offs being ignored to satisfy short-term demands for diminishing non-renewable resources.
by Beetlejuice on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 1:11pm
The key is scale, which goes back to population, which frightens everyone. When we were putting in geothermal at the school, I was wondering at what point do we exchange so much energy that we begin to change the soil? The idea seems similar in spirit to what the Gaia folk have in mind. Obviously the earth is very massive, and termites probably have a larger effect on the soil than we do - now. But if we heat up or cool down the soil to make our buildings comfortable, what does that do, over long periods of time, to the critters in the soil?
by Donal on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 1:57pm
A well-placed monster venturi?
by kgb999 on Sat, 06/25/2011 - 12:30am
Felt like we went through this once already, with that Prof out in Calgary.
Anyhoo. Yup, you'll get localized changes in wind, temperature, etc., when you put in a wind-farm, or solar installation. And since the local is global, there'll be global effects.
Now. Try this. Human beings have constructed literally billions of... buildings. Big, solid things, constructed almost s though they wanted to wall the wind out! Hell, sometimes there's even lots of em gathered together in places, which seems to give the the confidence to go higher - even HIGHER than a windmill! Hard to imagine.
Plus... get this. These humans.... cut down trees. Across billions of acres. And plant trees, only of the kind they like, across billions of other acres.
All of this, disrupting the wind!
And then, they take the tops right off of mountains! And carve roads into mountains, and make bridges, and then they laid out TENS of billions of telephone poles, along with all sorts of other things that disrupt the wind.
Shorter... lots of what we do changes the winds. The more useful questions will be around what types of impact result, what scale, how permanent, etc. This guy's calculations are being chewed apart. I'll wait a couple of years and check back in.
by quinn esq on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 1:19pm
I think this guy's conclusions are off-base, he doesn't seem to have availed himself of all available research before undertaking his own. I lost my bookmarks so I need to track down the study again .... but I'm pretty certain that it has been clearly demonstrated that localized low-altitude turbulence is self-limiting in such a way that impact on the entirety of the atmospheric system can not possibly create the outcomes he imagines. The issue came up on one of ClearThinker's "stop having babies" threads. My memory is that the study produced extensive modelling of various surface coverages and impacts, etc. which directly contradict his imagined warming impacts from global-scale wind farming.
From memory, the basic essence of their findings in this regard were that a wind turbine creates localized turbulence which in turn reduces the efficiency of nearby turbines. The kinetic energy stored in the entire mass of the atmosphere will only be reduced by the maximum resistance of combined turbulence-limited turbines (which should only generate resistance within 500 feet of the planet surface) - which is a comparatively trivial quantity of energy. It seems like this guy implies if we were to reforest the planet with 150' trees, it would have catastrophically negative impacts on the planetary system.
I am having a bit of dissonance trying to reconcile a study relying on the second law of thermodynamics that also so easily tosses around the phrase "free energy". Even when referring to energy available in the earth's system for extraction - it is a terrible choice of verbiage. I'm also puzzled by his reference to chemical disequilibrium. My understanding is that wind is caused by kinetic disequilibrium - generally driven by the heating/cooling cycle of the sun vs. earth's rotation. And I always thought the tides were largely driven by extra-planetary magnetic forces acting on our planetary system.
There is obviously a finite quantity of energy that can be extracted from any system. Beyond that, I'm not that impressed with this study. I'm seeing sizzle, but very little steak. Personally, I am far more concerned with the failure of models to account for the increasing impacts of direct-heat forcing (my specific worry is nuclear dissipating massive amounts of heat waste directly to the OHC budget which is currently trivially dismissed as if it were entering the global heat budget in the same way as solar radiation - which must be absorbed or transferred to the water system in order to impact OHC).
by kgb999 on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 6:06pm
If I keep drinking Strongbows and falling down, I will use up all the gravity, and you will all fly away into the sun.
That's why I blog.
by Rootman on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 8:16pm