On August 5, 2014, Amory Lovins published a commentary on Forbes.com titled Sowing Confusion About Renewable Energy. He was responding to an opinion piece published in the July 26, 2014 issue of The Economist that was based on a working paper titled The Net Benefits of Low and No-Carbon Electricity Technologies written by Charles R. […]
Unreliables
Atomic Show #217 – Michael Mariotte, President NIRS
At the suggestion of a long time Atomic Insights contributor and Atomic Show listener, I invited Michael Mariotte for a guest appearance on the Atomic Show. In the small world made up of active nuclear advocates and people adamantly opposed to nuclear energy, Mariotte and his organization are famous — or infamous, depending on one’s […]
James Hansen is worried about CO2 and realistic about solutions
Dr. James Hansen is perhaps the world’s most famous and stubbornly insistent climate change activists. He bases his concerns on several decades worth of intensive research. During part of his career, he served as the director of a large laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Center, so it was not just his own research that he […]
Where’s the Wind When You Need It?
The Bonneville Power Authority service area has more than 4,000 MW of wind energy capacity installed. They also provide a web-based information service that is updated every five minutes that reports on the service area load, thermal generation, hydro generation, and wind generation. Here is a picture reporting those numbers for the period from Jan […]
Cape Wind scrambling to meet deadline to qualify for $780 million taxpayer gift
Cape Wind is the leading offshore wind energy project in the United States. In 2001, more than 12 years ago, Jim Gordon, the project founder, started the process of promoting his vision of a building a 430 MWe (peak capacity) field of 130 massive (rotor diameter – 110 m, hub height – 80 m, nacelle […]
Energiewende – planned by industry and government without customer considerations
Jim Conca recently published a blog on Forbes titled European Economic Stability Threatened By Renewable Energy Subsidies. One of the earliest comments in the growing thread on that blog provided an interesting point of view about Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear energy in favor of unreliable power sources backed up by flexible lignite, coal and […]
Distressingly elitist view from two “sustainability consultants”
Joris van Dorp is an HVAC and energy systems mechanical engineer at a building installations consultancy. His primary work is associated with projects intended to improve energy efficiency/sustainability within the field. Clients include medical centers, airports, data centers, laboratories, office buildngs and some industrial clients. On October 18, 2013, Joris submitted the following comment. It […]
Talk of electric power grid demise is wrong
Someday, America is going to return to logic and reality. We may be making some progress as shown by the fact that there are an increasing number of people who no longer watch TV or trust the TV talking heads in the entertainment business called “television news.” However, we still have our issues. One irrational […]
Explaining my dismissal of fossil fuel alternatives that are NOT nuclear fission
I’ve been engaging in a discussion with several commenters who strongly disagree with my assertion that atomic fission is the ONLY technology that has the technical potential to beat hydrocarbon combustion in the market. It can provide cheaper, cleaner and more reliable heat that can be converted into useful power in almost exactly the same […]
German solar photovoltaic performance – informative graphic site
A friend just posted a link to a site that everyone who wants effective energy decision making should bookmark. It is titled Performance of Photovoltaics (PV) in Germany. The site includes animation features that illustrate the modeled output of solar installations over the course of each day. The model used should provide a reasonably good […]
Atomic Show #192 – Zero Carbon Options for South Australia
Ben Heard is one of the growing number of environmental professionals who have seriously evaluated all options for reducing mankind’s annual production rate of carbon dioxide and discovered that the best tool available is nuclear fission energy. As a part of his continuing journey of discovery, he worked with Brown and Pang to produce a […]
Power cheaper than coal – thorium AND uranium make it possible
Bob Hargraves, the author of Thorium: Energy Cheaper than Coal, recently traveled to Shanghai to present a 30 minute talk summarizing the main points of discussion that he covered in his book. The occasion of the trip was Thorium Energy Conference 2012. Bob is a professor with a good facility for numbers and a talent […]
