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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
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
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
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.
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.
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)
Not until either a solution is found for dealing with the radioactive waste that results from nuclear fission (i.e. never) or when we have perfected the use of controllable fusion (which is *always* 40 years away).
They do, mix it with molten silica and store it somewhere, or re-use it in another reactor. While it's dangerous to people the waste is still able to generate power, when it stops being usefull to generate power it is then as harmfull as any other heavy metal. The only reason why the US's nuclear waste isn't re-used is political, you don't want to make plutonium. If you did re-use the waste as canada does, you'd have very very little dangerously radiactive waste. Now coolant water is a different story but there are ways to decontaiminate that.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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...
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!