kdelong said:I agree that we need to kick the oil habit but what practical renewable energy sources do you suggest? Solar Power is great for someplace like Arizona, but what about places like Maine and Minnesota that don't see much sun? Nuclear Power is viable, but expensive and frightens too many people. The waste is a big problem. Biofuels require more energy to make than what they produce and hydrogen requires too much electrical power to make it economically feasible. Renewable or alternate fuels would be great but they have to be less expensive than oil to make sense, otherwise people won't use them and there would be no incentive to develop them. Except when there is no more oil of course.
That's a perfect argument for not doing anything: it has to be less expensive than oil. Using that logic, nothing will get done, and seeing how it's believed that there is less than 100 years of oil left--at current levels of consumption--why, there's no reason to do anything at all. Of course, people could push the country's leadership, but that would require effort. With people like Bush being elected, we certainly don't have to worry about weening ourselves off of oil.
For the record, photovoltaics are much farther along than you or most people even know. Rigid substrate cells are over 15% efficient and going up. A new PV structure was demonstrated to be 40%+ efficient. Elsewhere, work is going with solar collectors to overcome the efficiency limits of PV by concentrating more energy on the PV sites. Even with low efficiency, you lose nothing at all. There are no byproducts and no thermal effluent. As long as the Sun exists there is energy. PV costs are low enough to be incorporated into building costs and building upgrades. Arizona, alone, could provide, with current technology, over 10% of the countries energy. Solar cell farms are being built here.
Wind turbines are cheap, easy to install, and again have no harmful byproduct. There are many roof mounted turbines--with prop spans of a meter or so--on the market for homeowners. In both cases, PV and wind turbine, it doesn't matter if they sit idle for a period of time. When they're not idle, they pay for themselves and provide, in terms of Earth's thermodynamic system, free energy.
With hybrid technology now available, the manufacture of IC cars should come to an end. The technology for electric cars is already here. That is a fact. In fact, part of my work group at a defense contractor went to an auto manufacturers fuel cell research center. We were offered, for our project, free fuel cells. These cells were very advanced spec, yet they were several generations old for that auto manufacturer. Of course there's no need to start putting that technology on the road, when you can still suck more money out of the IC production lines. It's better to wait so the profit will go up for fuel cell technology.
Nuclear fusion is a viable option somewhere in the future, but fusion research in this country has been hamstrung by coal and oil interests and the president who lives off of them.
Nuclear fission is a real option. The vast majority of nuclear waste is low level waste in the form of tools, pipes, and etc. The French make great use of nuclear fission and their fuel reprocessing. Once again, we could learn a thing or two from the French.
Energy research? That's not even in the vocabulary of the current government. The DOE focuses a large portion of its work on military/defense/weapons research.
Next year, our house is getting a PV array, a wind turbine, and a water farming tank. We're of the mind that we should pay now, instead of passing the cost onto our children.
With that cost being increased conflict in the world as energy resources become more scarce as the world's population increases, global warming that may become irreversible, and the disease, food shortages, and other fun things that come of all that, it seems pretty [censored] petty, for people today, to complain about "the cost," when none of us will pay the real cost.
There are many other ways to ease our energy problems, but at least in this country and others, no one seems particularly interested in trying. Why should they when oil and gas are so cheap? Hell, we'll be dead when the oil runs out. It's not our problem, right?
