I Don’t Think Alternative Energy Means What You Think It Means: Fred Pearce to BP
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 11.20.08
photo: Julian
Last month British newspaper The Guardian started a greenwashing column to turn the spotlight on the dubious claims of environmental benefits that some companies put forth. In the latest of these columns, Fred Pearce takes on BP, showing how that company hasn’t really gotten ‘beyond petroleum’ at all.
Check it out, as similar claims can be made about pretty much every fossil fuel company: Despite any efforts they’ve made in investing in renewable energy or cleaning up their act, the bulk of what they do is as dirty as ever. Here’s part of what Pearce says about BP:
BP’s Definition of Alternative Energy Includes Plenty of Conventional Energy
Let's get real. BP likes to say that it is investing $1.5bn (£980,000) a year in "alternative energy". True, I am sure. But that word "alternative" is clever. Delve a little further and it turns out that BP's alternative energy division includes not just wind and solar and biofuels but also natural gas-fired power stations. Natural gas may be less polluting than coal and oil, but at the end of the day it's a fossil fuel filling the atmosphere with CO2. Alternative? Not by my definition.Also sheltering in the alternative energy division is BP's "emissions assets business", which makes money out of carbon trading, and a venture capital unit. But even if we lump all this "alternative" activity together, it still only makes up 7% of the company's planned $21bn (£13.85bn) investment this year. The remaining 93% is oil, spiced up with some coal.
More at: The Guardian
Greenwashing
How To Spot Greenwashing
The Semiotics of Greenwashing
Complaints Against Greenwashing Quadruple in the UK
Doesn't that gas station thing look like it's going to shoot itself?
Where do you think the swing load to support all those wind turbines is going to come from? Most of the cost of generating electricity is not even generation, it's the distribution.
Wind power is particularly nasty on the distribution system. Instead of dealing with the mess the typical solution is to just back it up with natural gas turbines. When I say back-up I don't mean that the majority of power is comming from wind power with a little bit of contribution from natural gas; for base-load power generation a full ~60-80% of power on average is going to come from natural gas(offshore wind being in the lower range and on-shore the higher).
If you decided you wanted wind-power without the natural gas you're pretty much SOL; the grid would have to become a fully connected graph, capable of shuffling electricity from anywhere in the continent to anywhere else in the continent with very little margin for error(unless you consider frequent black-outs acceptable). Unless you accept a few weeks out of the year of fossil fuel generation you're going to have to build an absurd amount of storage in addition to that massive HVDC grid criss-crossing the continent every which way.
@soylent:
You make a couple of valid points, but you bury them in some huge unsubstantiated assertions that read like coal-company-mouthpiece smokescreens.
How does the cost of distribution factor into your apparent argument against wind power? Baseload coal- or gas-fired powerplants require just as much transmission infrastructure as wind turbines, unless you plan to put little coal burners in everyone's back yard. You accuse wind power of being "particularly nasty" for distribution, which is blatant fearmongering. You imply from your statements about base-load generation that wind power is worthless because it cannot supply 100% of the power requirements of whatever nameless continent you illustrate. If you want to be taken seriously, why don't you provide some detail about what the real problems are, and some discussion of the research and engineering required to overcome those problems?
Every megawatt of wind- or solar-generated power is a megawatt less that has to be generated by burning some fossil fuel. Modern electrical distribution systems can already handle wildly variant point loads from the power consumer, and they can certainly be engineered to handle variant point supplies without the wholescale replacement of distribution mechanisms that your post implies. Get serious and put some thought into solving the issues rather than kvetching about them.
For a start: how about discussing options for moving more generation closer to the points of consumption? For example: use (preferably lower-cost/higher-efficiency) PV cells for taking up some of the peak power demands of summer air conditioning. The time when you really need the AC, because it's blazing hot with no respite from the sun, is precisely the time when those PV cells are going to have the greatest ability to generate the electricity to run that AC. Current silicon cells might be too expensive for the majority of consumer applications, but cells like the tubular collectors and printed PV cells from FirstSolar will probably change the economics of those applications significantly. That's a fairly trivial example; skillful engineers could certainly come up with more elegant and far-reaching ones.