[SustainableTompkins] New Solar Panel Technology

Thu Oct 11 10:45:42 PDT 2007

This is a very interesting discussion. I agree that life cycle energy costs of anything should always be taken into account and that reducing consumption must be top priority...in fact it's the only way we'll surive.
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There's a book called?The Last Hours?of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann that argues that we should be carefully using our remaining oil reserves even as they get ever more expensive and difficult to reach (and without more drilling in fragile areas) to transistion to a cleaner energy society.

The gorilla in that room, which I don't recall Hartmann adequately addressing, is coal. Unfortunately that's still comparatively plentiful and?as long as it's there they'll want to get at it no matter how many mountains they have to blow up, miners that get killed and "extra" deaths from respiratory dieseases--at least 60,000 in the U.S., 400,000 in China per year--,?all?quite in addition to?the?C02. And they want to liqueify it to give it that handy?dandy oil flexibility.?Without carbon capture and storage,?the C02 emissions from?liquified coal?are?more than double (119 % more) than from petroleum fuel according to an EPA estimate cited in The New York Times some months ago.??With ccs it's still 4 % more.

A moratorium on new construction iof current generation coal technology is necessary to our survival but the U.S. which is busily scapegoating China, has 150 new coal plants planned.

Can carbon sequestration at the source work?and can the technology be developed fast enough?

Another proposal is to buy climate security is?to pay?villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests.Excerpt from a recent?interview with Australian climate scientist Tim Flannery:

'Flannery said global economic expansion, particularly in China and India, was a major factor behind the unexpected acceleration in greenhouse gas levels.

"We're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels. You know, the metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course, clearly, with the metabolism of our planet," he said.

The report adds an urgency to international climate change talks on the Indonesian island of Bali in December, as reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, he said.

U.N. environment ministers meet in December in Bali to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

"We can reduce emissions as strongly as we like -- unless we can draw some of the standing stock of pollutant out of the air and into the tropical forests, we'll still face unacceptable levels of risk in 40 years time," he said.

Flannery suggested the developed world could buy "climate security" by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests.

"That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that's ?in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution, and we're the beneficiaries of that and most of the world missed out," he said.

"So I see that as a historic debt that we owe the world. And I can't imagine a better way of paying it back than trying to help the poorest people on the planet."

Link to whole article http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSSYD29548220071009?sp=true?

Jeanne

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-----Original Message-----
From: Joey Gates <earthdayithaca at yahoo.com>
To: Sustainable Tompkins County listserv <sustainabletompkins at lists.mutualaid.org>
Sent: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:38 pm
Subject: Re: [SustainableTompkins] New Solar Panel Technology

I would also add that it is good to look at the demand side of energy use also.  
Large arrays of skycraper sized wind towers can give the false illusion that it 
is ok to keep consuming large amounts of energy, instead of looking for ways to 
reduce.  

northsheep at juno.com wrote:  
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007 11:54:15 -0400 "George Adams" 
writes:
There is also a more long term kind of question I have never heard raised
but on a list like this it ought to be asked: what kinds of metals, and
inorganic materials go into these PV systems? In particular, when they
have
reached replacement or obsolescence age, will they be a disposal or
recycling burden such as our old computers and TV sets have become? Are
some PV technologies inherently more environmentally sound than others? 
I
would assume disposal costs should be part of total life cycle and a
requisite part of the thinking if we really are all about sustainability.

In my view George is right - few people attempt the full energy
accounting to find out if so-called renewables like solar, or any other
'green' technology is really sustainable without oil. A most important
question in addition to the ones George asked is: How much oil does it
take to build and maintain an alternative energy source? 

I think a true energy account will reveal that key processes of
constructing, delivering and maintaining alternative energy like wind or
solar on a scale that would replace much of current fossil fuel
consumption, require oil itself in large quantities. As an example, let's
take massive, centralized, grid-feeding wind electric, of which, on a
recent trip across Spain I saw many arrays across the landscape, each
bigger than the array we have in New York in Madison County. Unlike
electrical energy from wind, solar, or any other source, oil energy has
special properties (liquidity, high energy density) that are necessary to
do the heavy work of earth moving to prepare the sites, mine the raw
materials to make the big wind machines, forge the metal, make the
plastic parts, transport these monsters to the sites, and erect them, and
then do all that all over again to replace them when they wear out. 

We are so used to an oil-dependent industrial infrastructure that it
become invisible and left out of our accounting when we consider what
technologies might facilitate our inevitable conversion to a non-oil
society. 

Small, local energy alternatives for on-site energy use that use simple
technologies and materials and supply minimal needs, not the gross
overconsumption the industrial age is used to, might fare better by
comparison, in a total life cycle assessment of sustainability. 

Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying
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