Renewable Energy

[kyleb]

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And the thing that pisses me off the most is paying $3.50 a gallon for gas, while Exxon/Mobile post record profits each month.

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How dare they.

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Ok so when does it stop? It's ok for them to keep raising prices, making more and more money, and blaming it on something else? I know barrels are high, but this shouldn't be an excuse for oil companies to make more money. Thank Bush.

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Yes, it's okay, because people continue to buy their products. If you don't like it, limit your consumption of gas. Don't depend on the government to do [censored] you should stand up for.

[marchron]

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And the thing that pisses me off the most is paying $3.50 a gallon for gas, while Exxon/Mobile post record profits each month.

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How dare they.

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Ok so when does it stop? It's ok for them to keep raising prices, making more and more money, and blaming it on something else? I know barrels are high, but this shouldn't be an excuse for oil companies to make more money. Thank Bush.

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Yes, it's okay, because people continue to buy their products. If you don't like it, limit your consumption of gas. Don't depend on the government to do [censored] you should stand up for.

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What he said. Don't like it? Call your broker and tell him to buy XOM. If you can't beat 'em, buy a piece of 'em.

The fact that Bush is president really has nothing to do with it.

[coolio4433]

Okay as someone who works in this industry (Electric Power and Relaibility), I feel an unnatural need to chime in.
Wind, Solar, Nuclear all need to be a part of the future of energy production in this country and the world, but as was stated previously, the wind doesn't blow 24/7, even in North Dakota, and the sun doesn't shine brightly every day. The storage devices currently employed are okay, but not sufficient on a large scale to be implemented like some of you are suggesting.

The other issue with wind power is that, at least in the upper midwest, when electric demand is the highest (July and August) the wind is blowing the least.

And we don't even want to start a discussion about the transmission lines that would need to be constructed to go with a large scale wind farm or solar farm. Not to mention the stability concerns on the entire system caused by the minute to minute fluctuations that can happen with these generation methods.
Capacitor banks can help, but those aren't exactly the cheapest or best methods either.

This is where Nuclear and Coal come in. These are used for base load and are always running pretty much full bore 24/7 which helps the system stay on frequency when wind and other sorts of fluctuating generation sources come on line.

Pretty much, there is no easy solution, despite what some environmentalists would have you think, but by using everything available to us, we can certainly start taking steps in the right direction.

[bxb]

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Why doesn’t the government force us to make use of more renewable forms of energy?

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Change should be adopted because people have an economic incentive to do so. (i.e. they are paying more for oil than other energy sources), not because the government forces action.

Government action has tons of unintended consequences, some of which lead to creating a bigger problem than existed in the first place.

Corn based ethanol comes to my mind. The U.S. is handing out large subsidies to corn farmers to produce corn for ethanol, which in turn is driving up the global demand for corn, which in turn is driving up the price of corn on the free market, which in turn is making corn (many third world countries primary food source) much more expensive.

Corn is also the primary grain used in livestock feed, so as the price of corn goes up, so do items such as milk, beef, chicken, eggs, etc.

Other problems with corn ethanol, is that the amount of energy required to create 1 "unit" of ethanol energy, is greater than the energy required.

Sugar ethanol (primarily produced by Brazil) is much more energy efficient than corn ethanol, yet due mostly to tariffs and import regulations, the U.S. doesn't produce it, and instead hands out government subsidies to U.S. farmers who grow corn for ethanol.

Sorry if this belongs in politics, people's misconceptions about economics and energy is a pet peeve of mine.

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Global warming is an example of a negative externality. The unfettered market arrives at an inefficient equilibrium. Either massive cooperation or government intervention is required for the market to reach the ideal equilibrium.

[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

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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.

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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.

[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.

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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.