Best article for yonks Don :)

SOLUTIONS?

Nuclear?

- Lets quickly eliminate the nuclear option in Australia. Its too expensive for commissioning and decommissioning power reactors

- however unlikely just 1 accident (Fukushima) wrote off the Japanese and German nuclear industries for a decade

- here its election-losing politically unpopular, and

- is no direct help for air, car, truck and interstate train travel.

PURE HYDROGEN FUEL as a REPLACEMENT for HYDROCARBON ENERGY

- For transport a replacedment high energy fuel is reguired. I'd say the need PURE HYDROGEN FUEL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel

"Hydrogen fuel is a zero carbon fuel burned with oxygen. It can be used in fuel cells or internal combustion engines. It has begun to be used in commercial fuel cell vehicles, such as passenger cars, and has been used in fuel cell buses for many years.

...Hydrogen fuel can be used to power stationary power generation plants, or provide an alternative to natural gas for heating applications.

- some costs and drawbacks, for future comment.
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Some much lower level of hydrocarbon use is still required for ammonia, cement and plastics as well as (coking coal for) for steel as noted in Don's article.

Australian politicians can't manage the present, let alone the future.

Evidently Smil doesn't think hydrogen will save us. A feasible rate of decarbonisation is hard to predict because on the one hand fossil fuels are currently affordable and have the supporting infrastructure. On the other hand they will one day run out (think east Australian gas) and rightly or wrongly get the blame for weather woes.

I think fossil fuels are like farmland next to housing subdivisions; numerous justifications can always be made to exploit them. Thus we will either make it to 2050 still using fossil fuels or the global economy will fall apart. My hunch is that things will get dire this decade with only certain technologies allowed which simply don't have the grunt and applications of fossil fuels. I hope public opinion turns on those who won't allow capable replacements like nuclear.

Windmills are too unreliable to do the job of replacing fossil fuels, but even if they wern't, there is no way we can afford them.

One point that is ignored by all greens, & often even those who see the stupidity of renewables, is that windmills have a useful life of a maximum of 20 years. Considering this the suggested number required to replace fossil fuel generation is much greater than realised.

Every windmill existing today, & virtually any built in the next ten years would be dead by 2050.

Any generating useful power in 2050 would have to be built after 2030. The number required to be built annually after 2030 thus becomes much more massive & 5% of that massive fleet would have to be replaced annually, just to tread water with capacity.

This is totally unaffordable on going, but kids & politicians with no math will only see this when the lights go out.

There is no hope of achieving the target dates for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Not now, not tomorrow, not 2050, not even 2150.

The problem is now so big that it just cannot be fixed.

But politicians and bureaucrats need to set optimistic targets even if they know they cannot achieve them. It's part of the game: Set a target, can't meet it; set another target, can't meet it; I know! let's set another target.

Instead of working out unachievable targets we would be better off teaching ourselves how to die in the Anthropocene, because it looks like being the age of human extinction.

Actually, I think I'll spend my remaining days in Canberra playing Spot The LNP Sex Deviant.

PS. Don

1. I agree "that the whole 2050 target has nothing to do with science and technology and a great deal to do with politics."

I also am unlikey to be kicking in 2050 - if living I'd be 89 years old. But both sides of the family tend to burn themselves out by 86.
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Technological advances would have to forge far ahead of rapidly rising world population. Also each new person (especially in China and India wants a higher energy per person quality of life) - instead of one car per 10 people, 1 car per 2 people.
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So, yes, reliance on new-better technologies R&D:

- HYDROGEN FUEL

- with Hydrogen fuel being manufactured by renewables, eg: Mass collector isolated site SOLAR and WINDPOWER (more propellers on land and in shallow sea areas (already in UK waters). See the Pilbara Hydrogen proposal http://reneweconomy.com.au/huge-50bn-pilbara-green-hydrogen-hub-granted-major-project-status-17416/ but make it for Australian Domestic Use not just envisaged export use.

- Giant and Home Lithium-ion Batteries (and then more advanced chemistry)

to collect off-peak ROOFTOP and MASS SOLAR, WINDPOWER and PUMPED HYDRO.

No matter what, they will still be taking our money for hydrogen as they have with wind and solar.

Hydrogen is expensive and dangerous. Ian Plimer has said that he would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a hydrogen power plant any day.

Unless we get a few more pandemics before then there will not be many people left around by 2050.
We are breeding ourselves out of existence.

Clarification:
If we get a few more pandemics before then, coupled with our rampant over breeding, there will not be many people around by 2050.

plantagenet,

Come off it mate! You're a hell of a lot older than 60.

No one as addled brained as you could be only 60.

I suspect the greenies are well aware that 2050 is just plain silly.
That is why they are promoting the Great Reset !
I notice one of their new clauses in the whole scheme is no private cars.
No doubt no private air conditioners. Has anybody seen their detailed
plan for the new order ? I am sure they are working on it.
Probably mud brick houses as well.
Hydrogen, I have read a number of times, has such a poor energy cycle
that it is simply a no goer.
Used with fuel cells in buses the system is inefficient and the work
life of the fuel cells is uneconomic.

From memory Eastern Australia's maximum demand is 50 Gigawatts.
The number of operational wind turbines, each 50 Megawatt means
50,000/50x3 = 3000 turbines allowing for 33% availability
average over a year. Some later turbines I believe are 100 megawatt.
Then because it might be winter and a very widespread still night
the next morning you need another 3000 turbines to recharge
the big battery you installed to run that load all night.
You cannot recharge using the first 3000 turbines because they
are flat out busy running the country, provided the morning does
not have a lack of wind.

Can you see anything wrong with that reasoning ? I know some people
object to it but where have I got it wrong ?
Sure you can use larger turbines but they will cost more anyway.
A more computer driven grid will be able to shuffle power around but
it cannot make more power, it can only smooth out variations in wind.
However some argue that the number of turbines has to be multiplied by
a factor somewhere between three and twelve.
How can all that be built on a declining co2 emission.
Fusion is still 60 years away.

As someone who probably will still be around in 2050, I consider both this and the Vaclav Smil paper it's based on, to be lazy articles displaying a lack of thought. They're basically saying the task is big so we need more time, but disregarding the environmental effects of failing to act rapidly. It* compares the pace to that of historical energy transitions, yet it fails to even mention the one that was even remotely comparable (the urgent need to reduce the need for human power when slavery ended) and ignores the biggest societal difference between now and the times of the historical transitions: we now have an education system producing millions of scientists and engineers!

The downplaying of the innovations shows ignorance of their significance. Even with the technology that's already in commercial use, decarbonising the production of steel and ammonia becomes easy once the hydrogen is available - and we know how to make hydrogen! In Whyalla they're about to build a direct reduction plant (to make sponge iron, from which steel can be made more cheaply) and a solar farm to power it.

* Aitkin quotes Smil's article so much, and so much of Smil's article, that there's really no point in treating them as separate works. The only significant difference I noticed was that Aitkin didn't mention nuclear power, while Smil mentioned it in passing but seemingly failed to comprehend that it could be part of the solution.

Bazz,
A very obvious flaw in your reasoning is that electricity demand in Eastern Australia rarely exceeds half the maximum.
And why are you assuming it would all have to come from wind when solar is also available and getting cheaper?

I don't doubt, of course, that there are silly greenies; after all, there seem to be silly people of every philosophy. But WTF is the scheme with the "no private cars" clause?

I suspect that nuclear will end up being the only practical method of
producing electricity on a large scale.
The first one we build will probably be very expensive and take too
long to build. Hopefully the contract will be given to a French or
US company and give experience to local engineers.
In the meantime we will have to build more coal fired stations.
Slavery ended when steam power became cheaper than slave power.
This enabled the slave owners to become good fellas.
Energy transitions are up there with all the other major changes such
as the telegraph, radio, the internal combustion engine, aircraft etc.

Bazz,
Nuclear certainly won't be the only practical method of producing electricity on a large scale in Australia, and we certainly don't need more coal fired power stations - they're now almost as bad from an economic viewpoint as they are environmentally!

>Slavery ended when steam power became cheaper than slave power.
Maybe in some parts of the world, but slavery was ended far sooner in Europe.

The production of 'Green Power' will cause that much pollution that'll make these targets utterly irrelevant !