Will Solar Power Outshine Oil in the Near Future?

[OmCheeto]

...
And exceeds the electicity market price. We pay more for solar power (6% of the electricity) than we pay for everything else (94%) combined.

That sounds horrible! But how much does that add up to?

From my naive calculations, it comes out to ¼% of the average German's income.
Losing ¼% of my income means I'd have to not drink my daily dose of beer, for 1 day out of the month.
Ehr mehr gerd. Lifestyle change! Solar sucks!

 

[russ_watters]

That sounds horrible! But how much does that add up to?

From my naive calculations, it comes out to ¼% of the average German's income.
Losing ¼% of my income means I'd have to not drink my daily dose of beer, for 1 day out of the month.
Ehr mehr gerd. Lifestyle change! Solar sucks!

I'm guessing you didn't include commercial energy use in there, but in either case your argument argument seems to be that since it is cheap, it doesn't matter if the value matches the cost. But:
1. It will become a lot less cheap if they are to achieve their emissions goals.
2. If Germans are that unconcerned about value, they should just send the money to me! I promise I won't generate any coal power with it!
3. You really should see a doctor about that drinking problem.

 

[mheslep]

comes out to ¼% of the average German's income.

And considerably more for the below average German income.

According to information from SPIEGEL ONLINE, 6.9 million households spend more than every tenth euro on energy - in 2008 it was only 5.5 million households.

http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/se...-deutschland-nimmt-drastisch-zu-a-954688.html

 

[OmCheeto]

I'm guessing you didn't include commercial energy use in there...

Nope! As I've said many times before, I'm not god, and cannot solve the planets problems, all at once.
Too many variables in this problem. Way too many.

 

[OmCheeto]

And considerably more for the below average German income.http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/se...-deutschland-nimmt-drastisch-zu-a-954688.html

hmmmm... from your link;

The goal for energetic renovation clearly missed

"The fossil energies will be a source of poverty...​

hmmm...

 

[mfb]

From many US media outlets and some German, I sometimes have the impression that those in Germany critical of Energiewende or in support of nuclear power are shunned as if they had Ebola. Unfortunate if true.

All large parties are against it. A large majority of the population is against it as well. I don't see how either of that would change.

From my naive calculations, it comes out to ¼% of the average German's income.
Losing ¼% of my income means I'd have to not drink my daily dose of beer, for 1 day out of the month.
Ehr mehr gerd. Lifestyle change! Solar sucks!

From 2013:
Renewables produced electricity worth €2 billion at the spot market. They got €19.4 billion subsidies from the "EEG-Umlage".
Yes, that is a factor 10.
As average, €19.4 billion per year is €20/month per person.

In 2017, the EEG-Umlage is 6.88 cent/kWh. At ~600 TWh demand that is €41 billion, or €40/month and person.
Not all that money goes to solar, although it is the largest part. Wind, hydro and biomass get some money as well.

Photovoltaics gets subsidies for 20 years - at a price per kWh that depends on the installation date only. It will take another ~10 years until a notable amount of installed capacity stops getting subsidies. The EEG-Umlage will continue to increase more for quite some time. Even if we would stop subsidies for new installations tomorrow (we don't), the total subsidies would end up at some large three-digit billion Euro value.

 

[OmCheeto]

...From 2013:
Renewables produced electricity worth €2 billion at the spot market. They got €19.4 billion subsidies from the "EEG-Umlage".
Yes, that is a factor 10.
As average, €19.4 billion per year is €20/month per person.

...

Sweet! I was only off by a factor of 2.
I got my numbers from some tree-hugger website: Clean Energy Wire, Berlin, and did some back of napkin maths:

22% renewable surcharge x €1050/(DE household year) x 1 yr/month = €19/(DE household month)
and with 2.1 DEers per household, it added up to €9/(DE mensch month)

I assumed my numbers were just crazy, as I couldn't imagine people complaining about 30(or 60) pfennig per day, when the future of ones nation was in question.

------
conversions:
DE = Germany
mensch = people
pfennig = penny
edit: € 0.88 = $ 1.00

€1 = $0.88

 

[OCR]

€1 = $0.88

€1 = $0.88 ? ... When...?

 

[OmCheeto]

€1 = $0.88 ? ... When...?

I will never stop screwing that up.

from my spreadsheet: exchange rate 0.88 $/euro

ps. Fixed! Thanks.

 

[OCR]

ps. Fixed! Thanks.

...
http://www.worldforexrates.com/usd/eur/
http://www.worldforexrates.com/usd/eur/

 

[mheslep]

Entrepreneur Elon Musk gave a lengthy talk to the US governors conference recently, covering several topics including solar and batteries. Musk tossed out the often used all-solar notion of a small corner of some sunny state covered with PV that would be sufficient to carry the US electric load (100 miles x 100 miles). The 'PV square' has been discussed for years, including on PF, going nowhere of course because of its inevitable intermittent nature.

This time however, Musk added that a square mile of batteries could be added to make the notional national PV array available "24/7". Some details on a battery array that can carry the US for 24 hours, assuming and average lUS load of 0.5 TW (12 TW-hrs):

-Cost: at ~$300/kWh and 100% depth of discharge, $3.6 trillion. The small Tesla battery installation planned for S. Australia is likely ~$500/kWh. All replaced every ~decade.
-Mass: 92 million tons (7.7 kg/kWh Tesla Powerpack). By comparison, US annual steel production is ~80 million tons/yr. Cobalt required (0.22kg/kWh), 2 million tons, with global cobalt production ~0.1 million ton/yr.
-Time to produce: 342 Gigafactory-years (35 GWh/yr).
-Number of Gigafactories to maintain the national battery w/ 10yr life: 34

And then there are seasonal lulls.

See 16m50s:

 

[mfb]

Cobalt required (0.22kg/kWh), 2 million tons, with global cobalt production ~0.1 million ton/yr.

And you have to replace it every ten years, so we need twice the world production constantly just to keep the US electricity grid running on solar. At the current demand - the demand will go up with more electric cars.

Yeah, I see some problems with that.

$360 billion per year means 8 cent/kWh just for the storage - at the current market prices of all the raw materials.

 

[Physics_Kid]

an interesting fact i just learned as of late. JP Morgan pulled all his funding from Tesla, and Tesla was pissed, and many at the time simply thought that Edison's DC was the better product. in reality, Tesla was right,... and so was JP Morgan, why invest in an end product that was free?

my humble opinion, hydrogen will proliferate onto the scene at the wrong time for solar and batteries, batts of which will basically bring bad stuff to the surface, and solar that will be max'd out due to footprint issues.

my bet is on hydrogen as being the staple source of energy for at least 10000x longer than anything Musk is making in deserts, and it will be here sooner than you think. how would you track such? just keep an on Musk and watch his move to hydrogen (investments, technology, etc).

and to boot, we don't really need solar to create the energy needed for electric cars, the energy is already there, you simply displaced a source and forced in a new converter. all the oil not used in cars is used to run the electric plants that make the juice for the batts. but i still wonder, in the efficiency balance of it all, does replacing carnot heat engine with electric save us anything? oil to electric into poor batts (even though we think lithium batts are great, surely better than alkaline, but how good are lithium batts in the math), is that any more efficient than a hi-tech diesel engine?

i am not a fan of moving stuff around and calling it great while collecting $$ along the way.

 

[mfb]

There is no hydrogen around. Hydrogen can be used as energy storage (with an efficiency significantly worse than batteries), but not as energy source.

Countries like the US have more than enough unused area for solar power.

all the oil not used in cars is used to run the electric plants that make the juice for the batts

Then we still get its pollution and the CO2. The efficiency of stationary power plants is a bit better, but after taking transportation and storage losses into account the difference is not that large.

=> move away from fossil fuel power plants.

 

[nikkkom]

The efficiency of stationary power plants is a _lot_ better that of car engines. It is well above 50%.

 

[mfb]

It is a bit above 50% for new power plants. Take the average, and include 10% transmission loss, and you are significantly below 50%. New ICE cars (the alternative to new electric cars!) have ~35% efficiency, some diesel engines even reach 45%.^[1] It gets worse if you take larger transmission losses into account, but overall the difference is not very large.

In addition, burning hydrocarbons produces a part of the energy from the formation of water, while burning coal only has the production of CO2 as energy source. At the same efficiency coal emits more CO2 (and much more other nasty stuff) per kWh. Here is a comparison

 

[Physics_Kid]

where does anyone propose they will be getting sun energy when its night time? big fields of toxic lithium batts? i can see it now, "new flash, Nevada desert of lithium batts suddenly daisy chain in sparks and fire like a bandoleer of firecrackers".
a solar roof on every home with bigger local farms for industry, and backed by a few nuke plants for night time, sounds more plausible

on the other hand, hydrogen could care less about where the sun is, and from what i can see, 1,386 million cubic kilometers (km3) of water is there ready to use for hydrogen. but like usual, we need energy to get that H, so maybe some solar farms for day time, a few nukes for night time production, and, you don't need a large footprint like solar does.

and since oils makes itself in the earth, at what point does that black gold becomes over abundant again and you get 55gal drums for $2. its a vicious cycle, and from what i can see, Musk and the like talk fancy words so they can shift $$ in their direction.

i myself am a hydrogen fan.

 

[Blank_Stare]

and since oils makes itself in the earth, at what point does that black gold becomes over abundant again and you get 55gal drums for $2.

(Tongue in cheek here...)

This is an interesting statement. Now, I'm not a geologist, or any kind of scientist, so perhaps you could explain to me just how many barrels of oil are being produced per day in the earth...or, on whatever scale of time you have available figures? Would that be Years?, Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Isn't our oil available to us as the result of a mass extinction event, millions of years ago? How many have we had since then, to supply the endless oil-production scenario you are suggesting?

Your statement makes me, a non-scientist, ask a lot of questions, but most specifically, how did I live over 5 decades, and never hear of such a wonderful thing before?

 

[Physics_Kid]

hi Blank_Stare
the question still remains, is there still organic matter being converted? or is it your belief that at some point in time all the organic material on the surface became buried and compressed and all of it is now one layer in the Earth and all of that material has been converted into the crude oil? or, is it possible that some organic material is still being squished and turning into oil?

There is no hydrogen around. Hydrogen can be used as energy storage (with an efficiency significantly worse than batteries), but not as energy source.

what are these hydrogen fuel cells i hear of?

cant we kick start H harvesting with nuke plant, and then via feedback process you use some H to get some H and the differential is supplied by the nuke plant (to get the additional H that the 1st subset of H used to get H).

like this, nuke at night, solar during the day. no batts needed , but can this scale at 53.6 Ampere-Hours per 2241 litres (2g of H), and 1kg of H = ~1gal of gasoline = ~30mi.

quik math
to go 300mi you need 10gal gas or ~10kg of H, or roughly 0.26x10^6 amp-hours.

 

[russ_watters]

cant we kick start H harvesting with nuke plant, and then via feedback process you use some H to get some H and the differential is supplied by the nuke plant (to get the additional H that the 1st subset of H used to get H).

like this, nuke at night, solar during the day. no batts needed , but can this scale at 53.6 Ampere-Hours per 2241 litres (2g of H)
View attachment 207932

"Feedback process" is just a term for fantasizing about perpetual motion. Feeding the hydrogen back into the hydrogen production process provides a net loss, not a net gain.

Otherwise, the idea of hydrogen as energy storage is ok, but I don't think it will become widespread for a good 50 years or so. It is too inefficient and doesn't solve the most important problems (getting rid of coal and oil).

 

[Physics_Kid]

"Feedback process" is just a term for fantasizing about perpetual motion. Feeding the hydrogen back into the hydrogen production process provides a net loss, not a net gain.

Otherwise, the idea of hydrogen as energy storage is ok, but I don't think it will become widespread for a good 50 years or so. It is too inefficient and doesn't solve the most important problems (getting rid of coal and oil).

if the process is more efficient at running on H than it is from nuke or solar (well, solar is free), you can get most efficiency by using some feedback of H. you did notice i did mention the solar & nuke would need to supply the diff, yes? i did not say H feedback alone runs the process after start-up. so the problem is less about the source and more about the efficiency of it all. even solar has problems, namely footprint, so in solar terms and for just about everything these days, power density is the key term. lithium batts have a larger power density than lead acid and lithium batts cycle better, but at what cost? the cost of improper disposal, the costs to harvest lithium, which is limited btw. can't we use solar to pump a ton of sea water into the great lakes during the day, and then at night catch the water in hrydro plants as it travels back to the sea, no harsh pollution in this process, a pseudo capacitor. just because Musk built a big chemical plant doesn't mean that's the solution, because its not. "Buy lithium batts" is like "Buy DC power" that Edison once sold. you can think of lithium batts like facebook

 

[Blank_Stare]

hi Blank_Stare
the question still remains, is there still organic matter being converted? or is it your belief that at some point in time all the organic material on the surface became buried and compressed and all of it is now one layer in the Earth and all of that material has been converted into the crude oil? or, is it possible that some organic material is still being squished and turning into oil?

I don't believe I said that the process was not possible, or non-existent. I asked, plainly, for a rate of conversion. However, at SOME point, each of those existing deposits is almost certain to be depleted. Are new deposits being created? Surely your idea is based on some evidence, or even some scientific journal or other writings? I'd just like to ponder how many millions of years it will take, at the current conversion rate, to sustain the needs of our current 7 billion humans, before I even start to consider how many of us will inhabit the planet once petroleum is again a practical energy resource.. Maybe we should start burying our garbage in such a way that it is likely to make petroleum, and leave maps for the people that will live millions of years from now? (Just Kidding...)

If the annual production rate is a thimble, then the process is negligible, at any scale that would matter to humans, in any foreseeable future. Even if that rate were 100 tanker cars per year, I suspect that it would still be so small, compared to the need, that it would not be worth pursuing. Of course, if you waited long enough, you might "bank" enough that there would be enough to do something with, but after a relatively short period of time, you would find yourself right back where we are today - that is to say, able to see the end of the resource as we know it. Maybe that's why petroleum is not considered a "renewable" resource, eh?

More to the point, as I understand it, the production of petroleum requires special circumstances. If I understand it correctly, it requires large amounts of organic matter, concentrated into small "containers", which are not exposed to oxygen or the normal weathering, and solar exposure that is the everyday circumstance on the surface of the planet. Otherwise, the material breaks down in the usual methods that we are used to seeing ourselves - namely, rot, and being washed away into the ecosystem.

I suspect the term "diminishing returns" may be applicable, because I don't believe that there is any petroleum production on the planet that could be keeping up with current needs, or even a substantial percentage of our needs. Again, I am not a scientist, and I may not fully understand the processes, but I also can not think of anywhere on the planet that the plants and animals die in large quantities all at once, and, upon dying get encased into an airtight system allowing for the creation of petroleum.

Do you?
.
.
.
I don't know what the ultimate solution to our energy needs is. I am not so arrogant as to believe that I could even understand all the variables. I am, however, pretty sure that it is not in the burning of fossil fuels, nor the production of poisonous lithium batteries.. I am also not so gullible as to believe that Solar (as handled today) is the ultimate answer... nor wind, nor wave, nor nuclear, nor anything else we have on the design boards today.

We've only been trying to solve this problem with any real resolve for a period of time measured in decades. By the time your grandchildren have grandchildren, everything that we have "figured out" up to today will be considered the "infancy" of energy science. In other words, we are really clueless children, throwing sand at each other in the sandbox, each convinced that our own answer is the RIGHT answer. Poppycock.

That doesn't mean we should quit talking about it, however. It just means that we are better served to smile at ideas that are not feasible (i.e, I am still laughing at my boss, who believes in perpetual motion machines as seen on youtube,), and move on to discussing ideas that have real potential.

On the surface of it, I like the idea of using Solar Energy to harvest hydrogen from water, for use when solar production can not keep up with demand. For the SHORT TERM. Someone wiser, and better-read than me would have to asses it for environmental impact, as well as economic feasibility. I just think it sounds good, at first glance. In the long term, I have to think that what we need has not yet been conceived of, but sits just on the horizon, awaiting that next brilliant mind to discover the connections that make it work.

Eventually, however, some better idea has to come along, and when it does, we'd be wise to be poised to make the transition...

...But that's a different discussion.

 

[mfb]

on the other hand, hydrogen could care less about where the sun is, and from what i can see, 1,386 million cubic kilometers (km3) of water is there ready to use for hydrogen. but like usual, we need energy to get that H, so maybe some solar farms for day time, a few nukes for night time production, and, you don't need a large footprint like solar does.

Hydrogen storage has a poor efficiency (~50%), and if you are worried about the safety of batteries you should be really worried about the safety hazards huge amounts of hydrogen pose.

Nuclear power and a bit of solar power together can do the job, you don't need huge hydrogen farms. Some wind in addition can work as well. Hydro for short-term fluctuations where applicable. You might get an overproduction once in a while, but most of the time the power plants run at reasonable levels.

and since oils makes itself in the earth, at what point does that black gold becomes over abundant again and you get 55gal drums for $2. its a vicious cycle, and from what i can see, Musk and the like talk fancy words so they can shift $$ in their direction.

What we burn in a single year is something like the oil produced in a million years. The rate of new oil formation is completely negligible.
It is not sufficient to just propose something - you have to check if the numbers work out. Otherwise proposals are pointless.

what are these hydrogen fuel cells i hear of?

They use hydrogen produced somewhere, either from natural gas (then you effectively burn that) or via electrolysis (then you have to put in more electricity than you get out).

A "feedback" system does not make sense. You can produce hydrogen from electricity, you can store it, you can burn it (in fuel cells, ideally) to recover a part of the invested energy, typically about 50%. Done.

"Buy lithium batts" is like "Buy DC power" that Edison once sold.

A side-remark: If we would build a new grid today, it would probably be DC. Power electronics made the transformation between voltages efficient enough, and you don't have to deal with all sorts of nasty issues of AC transmission. It is too late to switch now, but several long-distance transmission lines are built using DC.

 

[Blank_Stare]

cant we use solar to pump a ton of sea water into the great lakes during the day, and then at night catch the water in hrydro plants as it travels back to the sea, no harsh pollution in this process, a pseudo capacitor.

Ummm, The Great Lakes are fresh water (The largest fresh water reserve in the world, I might add,) - pumping in salt water from the sea would not only destroy the local wildlife habitat, and fisheries whose spawning beds rely on a consistent water chemistry and depth to the surface, but also plunge many millions of people into drought, as those dependent on the water for drinking would be forced to rely on the resources of those that are adjoining that "water economy", but not already participating in it, and do not have the infrastructure to support addition populations.

Did you know that Lake Michigan also drains into the Mississippi, something that was not true, until MAN reversed the course of the river? That means any salt in Lake Michigan would eventually contaminate every state bordering the Mississippi, and eventually dump into the Gulf of Mexico!

That's an extremely harsh pollution factor to that ecosystem, IMO. Parts of that ecosystem may be invisible to the naked eye, but they're there, and very delicately balanced, in the large scheme of things.

Also, as the Great Lakes has a minimal "tide", the resulting "wave" that your proposed pumping would make might interfere with nesting grounds for birds, lizards, amphibians, and small mammals, that live in and near the marshy areas, many of which are already underwater for short periods of time each spring, during snow-melt. Oh, and never mind the foolish humans who build their homes inches above the high water mark.

In other words, you have proposed Armageddon for a substantial portion of the United States and Canada. Amazing how easy it is to destroy millions of square miles of habitat, huh?

Otherwise, I think the concept is worth discussing. Seriously. It's very similar to how a hydro-electric dam regulates electricity production, so the science wouldn't be terribly hard to adapt. While it would be foolhardy to think we could introduce water to an existing ecosystem, we could create an ecosystem from (almost) scratch. Franklin Roosevelt did it when the TVA dammed up valleys in mountain passes. And while I am sure they destroyed ecosystems for land and river/stream based creatures (not to mention forcibly removing whole villages of people when the water started rising,) we could certainly weigh the loses against the benefits. For that matter, we could capture small amounts of water coming from those dams during the nights, and pump them back up during the day. But again, I wonder if the scale of such operations could be worthwhile, without again disturbing, or destroying the ecosystems, and the lifestyles of the inhabitants of the region?

Too bad water towers are such an eyesore, huh?

Keep thinking, dreaming, imagining - it's how every human advancement was ever born.

 

[Physics_Kid]

Maybe that's why petroleum is not considered a "renewable" resource, eh?

there is absolutely nothing that is renewable. all of the consumed energy is only increasing entropy of the universe, even the Earth is releasing its' energy to space, lost to never return again. second law of thermodynamics.

so for all the energy-folks who want to call sources "renewable", is hogwash.

we are only talking about efficient use of energy, and what that source is doesn't matter. surely energy from the sun is most efficient (it comes for free), but for obvious reasons the fact of rotation leaves the problem only half solved.

if we could leave batts out and use solar for day and nuke for night, could we get ~500-2000yrs until we need to rid nuke power because uranium is now all gone, all w/o oil use for electric?

 

[mfb]

if we could leave batts out and use solar for day and nuke for night, could we get ~500-2000yrs until we need to rid nuke power because uranium is now all gone, all w/o oil use for electric?

You can't rely on solar power, but if you keep a bit of backup capacity in the nuclear power plants and other things (like hydro), that would be possible for a long time. Who knows what comes afterwards - solving 30th century problems with 21st century ideas is probably not a good approach. Fusion should certainly be an option on such a long timescale, but maybe even fusion will look as outdated as the idea of horse-powered trains looks to us today.

 

[Physics_Kid]

fusion, we are close, tokamak is close.
so then why bother, use oil until tokamak comes online. why spend all the $$ on solar & batts, invest that in research for tokamak to accelerate the technology? but wait, Musk wouldn't like that now would he.

what, 100-200yrs left of oil, isn't that enough time for tokamak?

 

[Blank_Stare]

OK, I'm a sci-fi buff. When a problem gets discussed, I have to admit that I frequently allow my mind to go to ridiculous extremes, sometimes.

Above, I said water towers are eyesores. I really feel that way. But if we had enough water towers, it would be feasible to be able to overcome the irregular creation of power, using solar cells, and wind energy. Yeah, that's a lot of towers, and yeah, they would shade out whole communities...

...unless they were underground, right?

Bear with me, I know this is a dumb idea, but I think it might have a useful spark of an idea in it.

Hydro-electric counts on not only water, but more importantly, gravity. It does not care where the "waterfall" takes place, it only cares that it does take place. In other words, a ten foot drop from the top of my garden shed to the ground produces as much energy as a ten foot drop from my yard, to my basement floor - all other things equal.

Under the Great Lakes (Erie, I think) are some monstrous salt mines. They are mostly dry, and the salt has been there since the oceans receded, and the "puddles" dried up, in the far distant past. There's a tunnel under the channel between England and France. I believe that it was excavated as a mostly dry operation. There's also a tunnel underneath the Detroit River, between the US and Canada - again, the excavation was a mostly "dry" one.

Forget the money involved, for a minute - I know that's the first thing people attack, to kill an idea, but just for the sake of exploring the concept, let's imagine that it is not financially imprudent.

Let's dig caverns under major bodies of water, where we can install turbos (or whatever hydro uses) to turn the water dumping from the lake/sea/ocean above into the cavern below into electricity. We know such structures are possible, as they already exist, in the (mostly natural) form of salt mines.

Questions that come to mind, which I have not the mental ability to answer on my own:
What volume would a chamber have to be, to make it worthwhile - that is, able to provide a substantial enough amount of KWH to even be worth operating?
How many acres of Solar cells would be required to maintain it's operation?
What would we line the chamber with, to ensure that the water was not contaminated by the chemistry of the Earth at the excavations depth?
What precautions could we take to eliminate loss of life of human, fish, birds, and other wildlife, not only by the operation of the caverns, but by the disturbing of the surrounding environment?
What measures would be required to ensure that the intakes would not get plugged, or stuck open?
How would we add enough water to get the system started, without interrupting the ecosystem, and culture of the surrounding areas?
How many lakes, and how many areas of the oceans, fairly close to land would have a geology that would even allow this idea?
(I bet I think of more, as soon as I click "POST REPLY"...

If we could build something like this, it would be an almost closed-loop system, forever recirculating the water in the same lake, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of introducing foreign organisms, or differing water chemistry. I say "almost", because, obviously, the lake above is, as it has always been, subject to the weather and environment, and people.

So, daydream with me here, and tell me what your ideas are.

 

[OCR]

Isn't our oil available to us as the result of a mass extinction event, millions of years ago?

Maybe, but... maybe not... ?

Are new deposits being created?

That might depend on the definition of... new deposits ?Also, I don't have an opinion one way or the other, so no debate will be coming from me...
I basically just googled your question...

 

[Physics_Kid]

how would you sustain the differential needed to maintain water flow to a cavern under the sea? does the water evaporate and escape to the surface?

 

[Blank_Stare]

there is absolutely nothing that is renewable. all of the consumed energy is only increasing entropy of the universe, even the Earth is releasing its' energy to space, lost to never return again. second law of thermodynamics.

so for all the energy-folks who want to call sources "renewable", is hogwash.

we are only talking about efficient use of energy, and what that source is doesn't matter. surely energy from the sun is most efficient (it comes for free), but for obvious reasons the fact of rotation leaves the problem only half solved.

if we could leave batts out and use solar for day and nuke for night, could we get ~500-2000yrs until we need to rid nuke power because uranium is now all gone, all w/o oil use for electric?

From my entire post, all you want to do is quibble semantics? (...and I do not disagree with your statement, entirely...)

I guess I thought we were having a discussion with some substance.

Come on, address the issues you brought up (oil creation in the Earth would be a good start), and/or the ones I brought up (the issues, not the definitions of the words I used). Don't attack my (incorrect?) use of a single word, instead. You can't reasonably expect to make the statements you did, without providing any evidence, or even references regarding the topic, and then change the subject when asked to support your statements.

So, how 'bout it? Kick with some sources or evidence.

 

[Blank_Stare]

how would you sustain the differential needed to maintain water flow to a cavern under the sea? does the water evaporate and escape to the surface?

You proposed pumps - I assumed the same.

 

[Blank_Stare]

Maybe, but... maybe not... ?

That might depend on the definition of... new deposits ?Also, I don't have an opinion one way or the other, so no debate will be coming from me...
I basically just googled your question...

The first link provided says in the wiki page that it's BS, but is not so crude, when it states:
The two principal abiogenic petroleum hypotheses, the deep gas hypothesis of Thomas Gold and the deep abiotic petroleum hypothesis, have been scientifically reviewed without confirmation.[1] Scientific opinion on the origin of oil and gas is that all natural oil and gas deposits on Earth are fossil fuels and are, therefore, biogenic. Abiogenesis of small quantities of oil and gas remains an area of ongoing research.

The second link is beyond my capacity to absorb, comprehend, and restate, but while it does say that the required materials include "biomass", it also may be accomplished with coal or natural gas. It sounds like they are trying to do something similar to making petroleum, but I can't quite get a handle on the material. (I think I mentioned above that I am not a scientist...now I'm sure of it...)

The google link is interesting. Perhaps @Physics_Kid can use some of those links to support his case, which I will not be arguing on his behalf.

 

[Physics_Kid]

So, how 'bout it? Kick with some sources or evidence.

ask the question the other way, what makes anyone believe that all the kerogen is now gone? what's to say the process has stopped? you have proof that all of that bio matter from 100million years ago to now is all gone and no more bio is going in? maybe there's a nice fat layer of kerogen still being converted.

kerogen from ~100million years ago is what today's crude is? so what about the bio matter from ~65million years ago, 35million years gap there? could that bio in that gap still be under transformation??

a cavern under the sea, that solves the issue of flooding above ground. seems plausible, not sure its feasible in the scale required. still need solar for day and nuke night to power the diff used for pumping out the cavern. but then again, is moving that much water through the cavern going to impact sea life?

 

[Blank_Stare]

ask the question the other way, what makes anyone believe that all the kerogen is now gone? what's to say the process has stopped? you have proof that all of that bio matter from 100million years ago to now is all gone and no more bio is going in? maybe there's a nice fat layer of kerogen still being converted.

kerogen from ~100million years ago is what today's crude is? so what about the bio matter from ~65million years ago, 35million years gap there? could that bio in that gap still be under transformation??

a cavern under the sea, that solves the issue of flooding above ground. seems plausible, not sure its feasible in the scale required. still need solar for day and nuke night to power the diff used for pumping out the cavern. but then again, is moving that much water through the cavern going to impact sea life?

Turning the question around is a time-honored high school debate team method of avoiding the burden of proof. The better way, is not to make unsupportable claims in the first place. It's not my responsibility to prove that your unsubstantiated claims are false - it's your job to substantiate them, resist the urge to post them unsubstantiated, or come back with substantiation, when called to the task.

Clearly, you either can not, or will not defend your statements. So, I'll let you off the hook, in the interest in moving forward.

The caverns idea is probably far-fetched. However, I would not see the need for nuclear, if they were scaled properly. At night, the valves would be opened, and the power would be produced. The lake level would fall slowly, and hopefully, the scale of the operation would mean that the lake would not fall enough to interrupt the local ecology. During the day, solar would provide consumers with power, with enough excess to pump the water back to the lake, above.

My guess is that the scale of solar real estate would kill this idea. Nay-sayers are already griping about the amount of land it would take to provide enough power during daylight hours, if we were all-solar. I don't know the numbers, but my guess is that power during hours where we do not have sun would increase the land use by an unacceptable margin.

Of course, solar tech is advancing, and an increase in efficiency could change the formula some day.