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Retired engineer Steven Den Beste reprints a valuable checklist for plausible alternative energy sources:

…For too many people “alternate energy” is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations — and it’s not that easy.

In order for “alternate energy” to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can’t scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

Den Beste garnered a few good comments on that post (and quite a bit of attention elsewhere), but the best comments I’ve seen that answer some of the objections to this list are over here.

Of course, you should read Neo-Neocon’s article concerning T. Boone Pickens’ wind power project that SDB linked to, and SDB’s original detailed 2002 essay, which ought to be required reading for anyone discussing this topic.

And the 2002 essay links to SDB’s discussion of scale here:

My dad was an electrical engineer and he worked on power generation. (He spent most of his career on the hydro projects on the Columbia river.) He lived in an entirely different world than I did, a world where units like kilofarads and kilohenries were actually useful. That’s the kind of numbers you see when you’re describing long distance transmission lines. In my world, a microfarad is huge. In his world, a farad was tiny. (If you don’t know what that means, just let it pass.)

You’ve got to start thinking really, really big.

Anything which, when fully deployed, generates less than ten gigawatts average (10¹⁰ joules per second) is useless for our purposes in terms of actually making a meaningful contribution to the total amount of energy we consume.

SDB then goes on to discuss some of the more esoteric proposals for obtaining energy. It is a very depressing essay, because the scale is…bigger than most people can fit in their heads, the problems are hard, the cost is astronomical.

Steven’s preferred solution is coal, because it works and we’ve got plenty.

Still, burning carbon is stupid–it’s filthy, there is only a limited supply, it’s going to become increasingly expensive, and we need the chemical feed stock. (In my mind global warming is still very much, heh heh heh, up in the air, but I tend to discount it. We humans are simply not that significant on a planetary scale. See Copernicus and Darwin.) Simple conservation will not work for long — most of our energy systems are already extremely efficient, and “cutting back” to any significant degree would involve essentially rebuilding our society from the ground up.  Most likely, we wouldn’t like the results very much.

(Al Gore’s proposal to completely wean ourselves off carbon fuels in…am I remembering this right? Ten years? — yup, ten years, is simply stupid, particularly since I doubt nukes are even on the table in his plan.)

Everything we can do has at least a ten year lead time. First we need to open our domestic oil to drilling, including offshore and ANWR, so we can at least start to be somewhat self-sufficient. Start planning the nukes now.  There are several reasonable designs, but it will probably take at least five years to build pilot plants and choose two or three that can be standardized to reduce cost and increase competency. We also need to start pressing on fusion — not even uranium will last forever, and we don’t have good local sources, anyway. (Nearest is Canada, if I’m not mistaken.) However, fusion will involve new physics as well as fabulous engineering, and I note Steven’s response is, “Wake me when it works.”

Not that we should give up on trying make cheap solar cells and the like, but there’s a fundamental limit on how much energy comes down from the sun in a given day, and all of those solutions require an infrastructure with a huge surface area (see SDB #3).

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Oh, and speaking of St. Gore?

Irena Sendler passed away at 8AM (Warsaw time) on May 12th, in Warsaw, Poland at the age of 98…. Irena was one of 180 others to be nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace prize. In the height of irony, the award that year went to a man who has done nothing for peace, but instead threw the world into chaos and fear, while enriching his bank account – Al Gore.

Read the whole article, and honor someone who could have re-sanctified a prize that has never been washed clean of the blood from Yasser Arafat’s hands.

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The title for this post came from Tully at Stubborn Facts.

Originally, though, “The Cold Equations” comes from Tom Godwin’s notorious science fiction short story about orbital mechanics forcing a space craft pilot and a stowaway to make some hard choices. Wiki entry here, but beware, almost any discussion you find will necessarily involve spoilers. Let it be said that there’s some deep resonance with the current problem at hand: “Good physics, bad engineering.”

Ooh, here it is in full. It’s one of this collection of the stories that built the Golden Age of SF.