Renewable Energy

[JennPKRpro]

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I’m not saying that we should build a huge 10,000 mile mirror in the dessert in Nevada. All though the government does own an absurd amount of land in Nevada, upwards of over 90%. And I am not saying that we need to turn the Dakotas in to wind farms either.

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Actually, I like both these ideas. Just leave some space for Vegas in the middle of the huge mirror.

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Do you have any idea the number of birds that could be blinded by this gigantic mirror?

And while I'm not being serious, someone, somewhere, would be.

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Why not control the human population, then we wouldnt need such a mirror.

[fsista]

In Sweden, the gas costs 8$ per gallon.

[TwoOuter]

The new wave in solar technology: Nanosolar. Some pretty heavy hitters are backing this:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bo...n/item_59.html

[ConstantineX]

Energy policy in America is much more than a simple question of quantity and sources. All energy providers have to plan for periods of peak energy usage, as all businesses with large fixed costs. For example a retail store is built to handle busy weekends, not just slow nights. So that means there are big problems with energy sources whose timetables can't be predicted. Some firms have excess power generation than demanded at a given time, some have too little. To some extent the market is already helping solve this by letting power providers buy and sell power from one another. But there's still lots of innovation left in capacitor and storage technology where excess energy can be stored for peak energy times. This is the single largest problem with solar and wind power, NOT the absolute quantity of power maximally provided. Fresh ideas like plug-in hybrids are emerging, where you can return the energy you don't use back to the grid. Imagine, for example, how much more incentivized to turn off idle appliances you would be if you could sell excess power you didn't use (by reducing your power bill) back to the power company. The solution to our complicated power problems will never be conservation or giant fields, it's going to come from a combination of different renewable sources. And the poster who mentioned how impossible it is to live without oil products (plastics anyone?!) is right - we are going to be "dependent" on fossil fuels for a long, long time.

[microbet]

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The new wave in solar technology: Nanosolar. Some pretty heavy hitters are backing this:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bo...n/item_59.html

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One way or another solar will become much cheaper in the near future. Even without new technology this will happen because there is a lot of investment going into increasing silicon production and prices are currently somewhat high because of a spike in demand largely from Germany.

There is also plenty of room for some new technology or manufacturing method like the link above to drop prices to a small fraction of what they currently are.

As coolio and others mentioned there are issues about storing energy and a mix of solutions is required, but in some areas with good solar resources and nearby mountains/hills solar in combination with pumped-storage hydroelectric power could supply a very large portion of power.

I think conservation pretty much goes without saying here a well. I just want to mention that if you think compact fluorescents suck you might try again or try not getting the cheapest bulbs available. As far as light quality and the time it takes to get to full brightness there is a HUGE difference between older or cheaper bulbs and newer better bulbs (not that expensive, like $4 or $5).

In the not too distant future LED lights might be providing a lot more of the light and use a lot less power.

[ConstantineX]

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The new wave in solar technology: Nanosolar. Some pretty heavy hitters are backing this:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bo...n/item_59.html

[/ QUOTE ]

One way or another solar will become much cheaper in the near future. Even without new technology this will happen because there is a lot of investment going into increasing silicon production and prices are currently somewhat high because of a spike in demand largely from Germany.

There is also plenty of room for some new technology or manufacturing method like the link above to drop prices to a small fraction of what they currently are.

As coolio and others mentioned there are issues about storing energy and a mix of solutions is required, but in some areas with good solar resources and nearby mountains/hills solar in combination with pumped-storage hydroelectric power could supply a very large portion of power.

I think conservation pretty much goes without saying here a well. I just want to mention that if you think compact fluorescents suck you might try again or try not getting the cheapest bulbs available. As far as light quality and the time it takes to get to full brightness there is a HUGE difference between older or cheaper bulbs and newer better bulbs (not that expensive, like $4 or $5).

In the not too distant future LED lights might be providing a lot more of the light and use a lot less power.

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I'm not really that well read into this, but I think I have read that hydroelectric power is just a plain bad idea. There are so many unintended consequences from manipulating water sources to the environment, like killing fish and depleting the land, and combined with the negligible amount of energy actually produced makes it pretty much moot for any vast plans. And the basic solar technology seems to be falling really fast, making investments on that side much better. See the horrors of the Chinese Three Gorges dam.

[NozeCandy]

How much energy could a human produce through physical labor/activity? Seems like if an efficient way to do this was created, we could employ a bunch of homeless people to basically work out.

[bobman0330]

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How much energy could a human produce through physical labor/activity? Seems like if an efficient way to do this was created, we could employ a bunch of homeless people to basically work out.

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Good plan, but it might be necessary to hook them up to a huge virtual reality sim to keep them docile. We'll need an autonomous AI program to police any rabble-rousers too. But otherwise it should work, as long as the laws of thermodynamics don't apply...

[kerowo]

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How much energy could a human produce through physical labor/activity? Seems like if an efficient way to do this was created, we could employ a bunch of homeless people to basically work out.

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I think Lance Armstrong could only manage around 4-600 Watts of sustained output when we was in racing condition, so call it 3KW over the 4 or 5 hours of racing. At a cost of about 8-9000 calories.

It'd take a lot of homeless and lot of cheeseburgers.

[microbet]

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The new wave in solar technology: Nanosolar. Some pretty heavy hitters are backing this:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bo...n/item_59.html

[/ QUOTE ]

One way or another solar will become much cheaper in the near future. Even without new technology this will happen because there is a lot of investment going into increasing silicon production and prices are currently somewhat high because of a spike in demand largely from Germany.

There is also plenty of room for some new technology or manufacturing method like the link above to drop prices to a small fraction of what they currently are.

As coolio and others mentioned there are issues about storing energy and a mix of solutions is required, but in some areas with good solar resources and nearby mountains/hills solar in combination with pumped-storage hydroelectric power could supply a very large portion of power.

I think conservation pretty much goes without saying here a well. I just want to mention that if you think compact fluorescents suck you might try again or try not getting the cheapest bulbs available. As far as light quality and the time it takes to get to full brightness there is a HUGE difference between older or cheaper bulbs and newer better bulbs (not that expensive, like $4 or $5).

In the not too distant future LED lights might be providing a lot more of the light and use a lot less power.

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I'm not really that well read into this, but I think I have read that hydroelectric power is just a plain bad idea. There are so many unintended consequences from manipulating water sources to the environment, like killing fish and depleting the land, and combined with the negligible amount of energy actually produced makes it pretty much moot for any vast plans. And the basic solar technology seems to be falling really fast, making investments on that side much better. See the horrors of the Chinese Three Gorges dam.

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Hydroelectric produces 19% of world electricity. Costs and damage to the environment vary a lot. What I'm talking about is a little different in pumped storage which is pumping water up hill (behind a dam or a higher lake), getting the energy back and pumping it back. The total process is 70-85% efficient and is a way to store energy from intermittent power supplies like solar or wind. It's something that will work much better in some locations than others, but will always have some environment effects that have to be weighed against the alternatives.

At any rate, I didn't mean to get that into the global picture. The whole problem of energy and pollution/global warming/peak oil is going to take a long time to turn around no matter how hard people try. For my part I think that installing as much solar power as possible (in my area) and doing what I can for conservation is what needs to be done the most and problems like what to do when we have so much solar power that we need to balance the supply at night with something else is still a ways off.