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Green Energy Almost Cost-Competitive with Fossil Fuels
js7a writes "As reported in the Houston Chronicle, the sharply rising cost of natural gas and other fossil fuels has caused the cost of renewable energy to finally reach the price of nonrenewables. However, wind still has some catching up to do: 'a 10 percent wind- and 90 percent water-generated mix is about $9 per month less expensive than the 100 percent wind plan.' As more wind generation and grid transmission capacity is built, wind will eventually become more competitive than hydroelectric, but hydro and other sources will be required to balance grid demand in calm areas. Slashdot has been following this trend."
I've been using green mountain for two years. It's great and makes me feel good (it's about 10-15% more expensive).
Also, it sounds pretty cool to say that my web server is being powered by windmills.
Robert Nagle
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Hopefully fusion research makes another break through.
hardly, as your arguement assumes that rampantly burning gasoline and oil has no negative side effects in the meantime, that the economic tipping point will be reached before those side effects are felt, and that the tipping point will be reached slowly enough that an infrastructure change can occur relatively painlessly.
More realistically, pollution is a problem, and a shift away from oil will be a massive shock to a world economy dependant on the stuff, and we're doing precious little to prepare for it.
I'd imagine that cleanup costs are included to the extent that the vendors of the related energy sources are required to pay for such cleanup.
.sig, regardless of what the "current administration" is at the time.
Then again, I imagine a lot of things.
Also, I think "Not that I expect the current administration to do anything about it" would make a great
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
If we're talking about long term viable solutions nothing competes with nuclear energy. The only candidate would be thermal energy but that's situational/regional and much harder to deal with. When will people get over their petty fears of nuclear ENERGY (not warheads!) and stop talking about wind power and all that other nonsense.
You're bitching about wind being not green enough when the other one they had was hydro? Hydro-electric power is really bad for the environment due to the way dams fuck up the eco-systems around rivers. By contrast, wind turbines cause no more damage to migratory birds than any other large building (which is really to say that they do a decent amount of damage).
Of course, if people want a really green source they should look to either nuclear or solar that isn't provided by solar panels (last I checked, the creation of solar panels was not-so-good).
Wind and hydro have their own environmental problems. Hydro, in particular, can have severe environmental consequences for regional ecosystems and human populations. Some of these effects may only become apparent after billions of dollars have been spent and many years have elapsed. The Aswan dam in Egypt is a good example of all the things that can go wrong when you try to control a river.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It is my opinion that more research needs to be done on solar and that communities receiving a lot of sunlight on a yearly basis (like mine) should implement a policy to get solar panels on the roofs of as many homes and businesses as possible. let them be managed and maintanied by the local power authorities. We could really see a lot of energy created here in the Las Vegas valley. hell, the entire American Southwest for that matter.. This would certainly reduce the load on fossil fuels fo our little neck of the woods. It would also free us from the interstate negotiations that occur every so often for the rights to power from Hoover Dam. I say fill my roof up with solar arrays. Hell.. look at all of the roof space provided by every casino in the city.. every highrise.. every other small business.. There is a lot of power being wasted simply to heat my damn terracota roof tiles!
But are politicians and power companies ambitious enough to tackle something like that? Certainly not.
What is your penile percentile?
Here in Oklahoma they are putting up ALOT of new windfarms Cheap land, it can be dual use (cows and horses can still graze on a windfarm). Alot of empty land and a calm day here is a 10mph wind, drove back from lunch with a nice 20-25mph breeze blowing over the highway. the plains from the Dakotas down to oklahoma get alot of wind and large expanses of either unused land or land where livestock are grazing and thus could graze in and around the windfarms.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I have a open-loop geothermal system at my home. It's used for heating and cooling of the air. It takes water out of my well, which is a moderated temp year round and uses it to transfer the heat into it during the summer, and takes the heat out of the water in the winter.
You can do the same thing with a closed-loop system (you just pump the water in a big circuit of underground pipes). In a closed-loop system you can even use antifreeze (that stuff that transfers the heat out of your engine block and through the heaters in your car) and the system works simiarly to that.
I'm slowly working on converting some of my more sustained power requirements to a solar/battery powered system. I have a simple parts page online that will allow you to start building a small system to operate lighting or other must-need devices (basically, build your own UPS and charge off of solar/wind/whatever DC voltage source you want).
I just got a 700W inverter on sale recently, and have some older car/boat batteries that the previous owner left here. I just ordered a solar charge controller kit, and am going to borrow some 12-24V solar cells from a friend to do some testing.. If it works well, i'm going to expand my cells and get some good batteries to operate some of my necessary devices.
and exactly how are you proposing to get all the strontium-90 we'd need to run those little fellows without massive risk?
You Crazy Dams are some of the greatest enviromental disasters EVER. Look what the the large Nile dam (can't remember the name) did to the fishing industry of the Nile delta. I can go on for days. Hydroelectric power is definately not GREEN an any sense of the word. Look at some of D.N.A's evnivromental books and paper for more info. Yes, the inpact can be significantly reduced, but you might as well strip mine for a similiar effect. Just because it doesn't cause "greenhouse" gases doesn't make it eviromentally safe.
Wind, Hydro, Nuclear... great for electricity but does nothing about Gas and Oil.
Until electric cars become efficient enough to run all day on a single charge with half a day of stored energy still available, petrol is the energy source we need to replace.
I'm betting on Biodiesel. It's still more expensive to refine than crude oil but that gap is closing fast. With current subsidies you can actually buy biodiesel for cheaper than Gasoline...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
i'm not quite sure what CxO's would sign up for a project that's showing a 20 year ROI.
you say this person "made" their equipment. i don't quite know what someone can make their equipment for, but i've looked seriously into having solar installed on my house. it's currently 40,000$ to have solar panels installed. our house averages about 1800$ per year in electricity costs.
the payback on that is, well quite a long time. i probably won't own the house after that long of a time. so i have to consider, will someone purchasing my house be willing to pay extra because there'll be low/no electricity costs? basically would they invest in their energy savings? how much? personally, it's too much and too far off to be seriously considered right now.
now, if it were 10k, it would be feasable. i could have it paid in 5 years. that's a project i'd take on.
http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm
I visited a largish wind farm back in the 80s. it wasn't noisy, it wasn't particularly unslightly and i thought that tales of the blades cutting through birds was a myth that had been debunked as only happening _very_ occationally i.e. a handful of times ever. it struck me then that this was the future of energy generation and it strikes me now that wind is potentially one of the best options available, maybe the turbines are being attacked becuase they are a threat to current production methods?
strontium-90 isn't the only heat producing isotope- any isotope will do as long as it is fissible. Nasa just uses strontium-90 for it's extremely predictable lifespan and even decay curve. No need to be that picky for household power. Heck- take it from the current nuclear waste from the big reactors- most of that stuff will stay at 80C for decades with no further refinement at all. Or the naturally occuring uranium outcropings that produce radon gas in some older homes. What it is won't matter to the humans around it once it is sealed behind 4" of lead on all sides.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Dinosaurs: Millions of years ago, nature destroyed them. Help them get even... use fossil fuels.
Ok, on a more serious note, I had seen an interesting news article years ago about someone who setup some windmills, except they were a little different than most. They consisted of long three sided objects... like the turning signs car dealerships put on the top of cars except they were long and skinny rather than short and squat. These were built into the concrete dividers on the highway. The traffic driving in opposite directions on opposite sides created MORE than enough wind to turn the rows of hundred mini-windmills.
No eyesore (no worse than a concrete divider) No dead birds (if they fly into these they deserve to die) No changing wind patterns (any more than they already are that is)
It's amazing that all these people complain about each and every power producing system. The problem I see is more these people complaining, not the power production methods. All these complaints are partly the reason(along with decaying infrastructure) California, and many other states have sever power problems, and they are not going to get any better if all people do is complain that this system is bad cause of birds, or this system produces a waste that we still haven't found a place for.
I like the idea of renewable energy systems. Wind/Solar/Geothermal seem like nice ways to generate power, without damaging the eco-system to the point of a coal burning power plant. Shoot, even a Nuclear power plant is a better option, in my opinion, than plants powered by fossil fuels.
After these systems are in place, then come up with solutions to the problems that are produced.
So, where are all the dams going to go
There.
It's amazing people still call hydroelectric power "green", but then hypocrisy in defense of liberal ideas is no vice...
You fucking troll. It's renewable, not magical. Every action causes a reaction, our energy needs aren't going away, but there are ways to minimise the impact of our actions. Hydroelectric damns cause dammage, but the impact of a local flood is not in the same ballpark as the impact that the floods from melting the artic and antartic with greenhouse gases would have.
You can't take the sky from me...
Hmmm... so what you are saying is that we need to balance the use of burning fossil fuels, thus creating CO2, thus warming the planet, with the use of windmills to cool the planet. ;-)
I would be interested to see that article. A 2 degree global temperature change is pretty big. I don't understand how that would really happen. The laws of conservation of energy should show that the energy is not being "taken away". The turbines create heat (moving parts), many of the devices that use the power create heat, and I am sure there are lots of other places that the energy is turned into heat. Yes, that energy would be turned into other forms of energy (light etc.), but then again, it wasn't in the form of heat to begin with. I am not saying that there wouldn't be environmental impacts... I just don't know that I agree it would cause a drop in temp. Then again, I am no physicist and I don't know what I am talking about.
Why does "total extinction (at worst)" get modded +5 insightful? What sort of an insight is it that suggests a species like ours that has managed to survive and thrive from Ethiopia to Siberia to the Amazon to New Jersey would be WIPED out by burning fossil fuels?
There are already huge economies of scale in the basic technology of PV. The silicon wafers for solar cells and computer chips are basically the same. And we know how many billions are spent on process improvements for chip fabs. Satellites also demand the most efficient high grade solar cells at whatever the cost. So there's a huge incentive to fund basic R&D just for the satellite market. Mass production on a wide scale would demand cheaper (and cleaner) technology, so I agree there are improvements to be had there, especially with cleaner. Growing silicon wafers is nasty business, probably not as nasty as fossil fuel energy, but nasty all the same. If you want to harvest the sun at the cost of less efficiency per area, the greenest way I can think of now is with biodiesel made from algae or vegetable oil like soybeans. Something like 60-70% of U.S. farmland is used to grow livestock feed. Cut back on the beef consumption a bit and that's a lot of spare capacity to feed a hungry world or feed the fuel pump.
If the Ottoman empire didn't want to be carved up maybe they shouldn't have joined Germany in WW1.
The Ottomans were Turks, not Arabs. The Arabs fought against the Ottomans during WWI, in collusion with the British (Laurence of Arabia). After using the Arabs to help defeat the Ottomans, Britain betrayed them by splitting Arab lands with France. This is how right wingers distort history, by confusing one group with another. But I bet they're all just brown people to you.
The "democracy" we overthrew to put the Shah in charge consisted of replacing the old Shah with his son.
BULLSHIT! The CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh and replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi).
What you're doing there is knows as "revisionist history."
I didn't say the west "deserves" it. My point was that the west was asking for it. Don't poke a hornet's nest and then blame the hornets for stinging you.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!