Rethinking Renewable Energy with Professor Susan Krumdieck

What about that Michael Moore Movie?

How dare they cast doubt on the sanctity of Renewable Energy? Why am I feeling like this about that movie? I have been asked by a LOT of people what I thought of Planet of the Humans ? Of course the movie has its story to tell and its own perspective that makes it interesting - it is a movie. The facts about renewable energy weren't off the mark. I don't know about the implied corporate handshake of our esteemed environmental leaders. I have only worked with Richard Heinberg, and have found him to be straight up. What it is that is disturbing for people is that their perspective is being shifted. You find out about climate change and climate destruction and you get over your shock and horror and denial, and then you want to bargain. You want to save the world. We will be good. We will use only good energy. We need wind and solar. We are good pe ople. And so the narrative is formed and the story begins to become impervious to facts. You can find a talk that I...

What is Energy Transition Engineering and why it is imperative, with Sus...

I had a really interesting conversation with Jason Marmon of US Energy. He has worked in Oil and Gas and then decided to work on energy transition. We had a nice time brainstorming what energy transition means for oil and gas industry. Like everything these days, the go-to framework for debate is opposites positioning. In energy and climate change the position used to be "I'm not worried about climate change" vs "I'm freaked out about climate change". That framing didn't get a lot done, and it was masking the real issues, questions and potentials. The opposites positioning has moved on a bit and now the "it's not happening" people are off in their own bubble cooking up conspiracies. Now the opposites positioning is "Energy transition is switching to renewables" vs "energy transition is hydrogen and CCS". These two positions usually argue about the other not being able to replace fossil fuels at scale. That is correct ...

100% Renewable Energy

Can we have 100% Renewable Society in NZ? Of course humans can organise their activities using 100% renewable energy. That project has been highly successful and demonstrated through hundreds of thousands of manifestations over 20,000-30,000 years. The question of can "we" have 100% renewable generation in New Zealand now has two answers, yes and no. We are living in the fossil fuel age, we are fossil fuel man. Our activities and expectations and understanding of ourselves is based on "energy-on-demand" which can be provided by fossil fuel supply and fossil fuel designed infrastructure. The fact that we, as fossil fuel man, have these expectations does not change the fact that renewable energy is available in cycles and both regular and ra random patterns and with a good deal of uncertainty. Can we, as fossil fuel man, meet our expectations of how things are using only renewable energy? NO Can we adap...

Energy Transition Engineering

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