Imagine Buenos Aires In 2030

[scotttswan]

The reality is that solar power is NOT an efficient way of generating energy and it might never become one. Producing the photovoltaic cells themselves consumers a RIDICULOUS amount of power and generates a lot of chemical waste. The fact that they only work well on on bright sunny days reduces their efficiency even further. And if you add the costs and energy to build the storage batteries that accompanies them, you end up with one of the most inefficient and environmentally unfriendly energy sources imaginable.

They may not be efficient but they are getting cheaper, easier and cleaner to make and overall help provide power to the grid. They can be placed easily on the roofs of buildings reducing the need for dirty fossil fuels that are killing the earth.

Batteries can be pumping tonnes of water up a mountain and then letting it flow back down at night.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Solar in combination with Nuclear, Wind, Tidal and if the scientists are right about Fusion we could maybe save the planet but hey, its inefficient so lets keep on burning coal.

2 interesting links.


http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

 

[camberiu]

its inefficient so lets keep on burning coal.

Nobody said that. But solar is not the answer. At least not for the foreseeable future. You can't power water treatment plants or mass transit with solar. You can't manufacture solar cells using solar power. Fossil fuels are very difficult to replace, unfortunately. Fusion is the holy grail and hopefully we will get there. But the most probable solution until we get to economically viable fusion (if we ever get it) are Thorium reactors. Thorium reactors are clean, safe, extremely powerful and highly efficient. They are the short term answer to fossil fuels.


http://youtu.be/uK367T7h6ZY

 

[ElQueso]

Until a transportable energy source that is efficient and relatively easy to produce as oil is, we aren't going to be changing too soon. Too many government officials, listening to too many pie-in-the-sky visionaries, have come up with the idea of things like solar panel arrays that just don't do good enough. For a home, sure. For a city - not.

And there is a lot of doubt nowadays that oil is a finite resource: http://www.viewzone....abioticoil.html, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/on-energy/2011/09/14/abiotic-oil-a-theory-worth-exploring

I had a startling conversation with a Chevron completions engineer when doing some work for them in the 2000s. This was around 2005, almost ten years ago. He told me that evidence is pointing to oil not being a fossil fuel, but rather is abiotic in nature, created from natural chemical and high-heat, high-pressure processes in the Earth's mantle. He told me the stories of a number of reservoirs world-wide that have refilled and no one can explain how the fields managed it by the old "fossil fuel" theory of oil creation (there are those who have said it was due to seepage from nearby reservoirs, but some replenishments didn't seem to have that possibility) It doesn't mean that all reservoirs will refill, but some will, and some new reservoirs will be created.

Since then, I've been seeing more and more come out on this.

In fact, there have been many articles about people using the new theory of how and where to find oil that they are going from around 20% exploration success using old methods to nearly 70% success using the new theories.

I've been hearing since the 70s that peak production is just around the corner and yet...it never quite arrives.

The only thing we need to do is use it cleaner, which we're doing little by little. I'm not a believer in anthropogenic global warming, but rather in natural heating and cooling cycles driven mostly by sun activity (the ocean releases vastly larger amounts of CO2 when warmed by the sun than humanity ever dreamed of!). If we can keep from polluting too much, oil is the best energy source we have until we build orbital power collectors and fusion power generation becomes a reality.

 

[ajoknoblauch]

The only thing we need to do is use it cleaner, which we're doing little by little. I'm not a believer in anthropogenic global warming, but rather in natural heating and cooling cycles driven mostly by sun activity (the ocean releases vastly larger amounts of CO2 when warmed by the sun than humanity ever dreamed of!). If we can keep from polluting too much, oil is the best energy source we have until we build orbital power collectors and fusion power generation becomes a reality.

There are natural cycles but, irrespective of that, anthropogenic warming is fact: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

 

[ElQueso]

When I read about anthropogenic warming, I see that a majority of scientists believe it is a cause, even perhaps THE cause. The article you link says "The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years." But I've seen others (granted, in the small minority) that claim human-based sources may contribute to the current warming trend, but that other, natural sources produce more CO2 than human sources.

As the abiotic origin of oil and other petroleum fuels show, scientists can be wrong en masse. NASA, although contributing to data and analysis, certainly, is following the lead of the majority of scientists. And I can understand that.

http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html

"From the early Triassic to the middle Cretaceous, the concentration of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide was similar to its current density. From the late cretaceous to the early Miocene, the concentration climbed above 210 ppmV. During the Holocene period, the concentration has oscillated from 210 ppmV to 385 ppmV.

It is possible that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will increase normally in the course of the next 50 million years to 1050 ppmV or 2500 ppmV."

NASA's chart only went back some 400,000 years, which does not include the bigger cycles over millions of years. I've seen many, many papers on climate change over longer periods and my feeling, granted as a complete layman, yet well-read, is that what's happening is mostly natural and there's not really anything we can do about it.

Also, as many of these papers state - flora grows much better, faster and bigger in CO2-rich environments. I've also seen other papers that claim that CO2 is not such an energy-trapper as has been stated. It's one of the reasons the dinosaurs could grow so big - plenty of food for herbivores, which also means plenty of food for omnivores and carnivores. Warming won't necessarily be a bad thing for the planet, although us puny humans with water-front property may not like some of the changes.

 

[scotttswan]

We've been through this circle many many times before.

Only 1 out of 9,136 recent peer-reviewed authors rejects global warming. It's happening and we're the cause.

We know where oil, coal and gas came from. Dead plants from the Carboniferous period. Then fungi came about and started to break down the dead plants so you don't get new oil, coal and gas.

There is no such thing as abiotic oil, it is a pseudoscience. No oil company has ever foundabiotic oil. Most likely because it doesn't exist.

You're right though, warming probably wont kill the planet completely but it will certainly make life very shitty for our descendants.

Thorium could be a solution, but like Fusion it's still very much a prototype. In the meantime Solar is getting cheaper, Modern panels have an energy payback of 1-1.5 years nowadays. You also have Concentrated solar power and Solar thermal energy.

We can store the energy with Pumped-storage hydroelectricity, Hydrogen Storage and many others....

Along with Wind and Nuclear we could pretty much operate without burning fossil fuels, all it requires is the political motivation.

 

[ghost]

Buenos Aires becomes a skate board park for 2017.................I like cool contemporary architecture but this plan doesn't even make sense. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/argentinas-tallest-skyscraper-to-be-the-entertainment-hub-of-the-country/articleshow/42702539.cms

 

[camberiu]

Thorium could be a solution, but like Fusion it's still very much a prototype.

Not quite. We have not figure out how to make fusion reactors that generate more power than it consumes. We have done so with Thorium reactors. India has started building a 300 MW thorium reactor that should be fully operational in less than 2 years. The plans are that by 2050, 30% of all India's electric energy will come from Thorium reactors. China wants to build a much larger thorium reactor by 2024.
Unlike fusion, the principles of commercially viable thorium reactors are well known.

 

[Dublin2BuenosAires]

Man made climate change denial madness is some of my favourite madness. I read that USNews article in the voice of Ron Burgundy and just sort of all came together for me.

 

[PhilipDT]

The reality is that solar power is NOT an efficient way of generating energy and it might never become one. Producing the photovoltaic cells themselves consumers a RIDICULOUS amount of power and generates a lot of chemical waste. The fact that they only work well on on bright sunny days reduces their efficiency even further. And if you add the costs and energy to build the storage batteries that accompanies them, you end up with one of the most inefficient and environmentally unfriendly energy sources imaginable.

Congratulation on finding an almost completely irrelevant graph to support your point.