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Electronic Armageddon, and No Electricity Either
Smart grid technology is a hot issue on Capitol Hill, but some are raising questions about the idea. In recent days we've discussed the smart grid's potential exposure to worm attacks, consumers' unreadiness for the idea, and whether the whole concept may need a rethink. A Congressional hearing on Thursday surfaced another reason for caution: the smart grid's vulnerability to EMP. "Electromagnetic Pulse" refers to the damage caused in electrical circuits and systems when a nuclear explosive goes off nearby. The electric grid as it's currently constituted is vulnerable to EMP; the further down the road we go towards a smart grid, the more vulnerable it will become. "It makes a great equalizer for small nations looking to stand up to military Goliaths, argues Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (Rep.-Md.), a former research scientist and engineer who has worked in the past on projects for NASA and the military. All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then fling the device high into the air and detonate its warhead. Such a system might not paralyze the entire United States, he concedes. 'But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it's as good as a bulls eye.'"
The utilities want the government to foot the bill for them to have modern telemetry as well as a bunch of routine maintenance type of stuff - old transformers rebuilt, etc - stuff that improves their old, core business. Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work, when in fact, nothing could be further than the truth. Grid-interactive systems actually RELIEVE load on the grid, and they do it especially at peak hours when AC loads kick in. And it works just great on the plain old dumb grid we have today. They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something! It's a crock of shit - propaganda and political games to try and fleece us of money that should otherwise be spent on deploying modern technologies. Not saying the grid doesn't have its place, on the contrary: grid-interactive is a very elegant solution. But the supposed smart-grid is being pushed in a very underhanded way and it's not at all what people think it is.
I think we've all known this since the "peace shield" days.
A sensible dome, combined with the walls we are now building, will take care of a lot of this nonsense.
I say cut the local dome-building industry in on the stimulus and get this tasked over to the EPA double quick.
In the documentary film Escape from LA, Snake Plisskin (who I thought was taller) shuts down the entire world with an EMP allowing Latin American countries to invade the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_bomb It's scary brilliant how they convert explosive energy to electromagnetic. It's also far easier to build than any nuclear device.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
At least that's what some say. I wouldn't rule out hack attacks (both foreign or domestic) either. EMP
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Carbon dust, preferably something that drifts easily, probably something on a nanoscale like carbon nanotubes. That will damage all kinds of electronics. Many Air Force military communications and computer facilities near flight lines have vents to cut off outside air. They're used mostly for when a plane crashes and burns though it can afford minimal protection against NBC's.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This is shocking.
I didn't see watt the problem was before.
But if we are attacked empusively, we will be exposed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yeah because a sea worthy steamer, scud missile launcher and crude nuclear weapon are so easy to come by. Not saying the smart grid doesn't have other problems but it is far from easy to do serious EMP damage.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
I read about this exact senerio on cryptome.org back in early 2000's. Word was that a Russian general mentioned this specific attack vector to some American politicians (or something similar). They then went over how once the power gird is down it would take 18+ month to order the new power plants from Europe as we no longer build these things locally.
"All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon."
All one needs to travel to another galaxy, he charges, is a space worthy steamer, $100,000,000,000 to develop an inertial damper, and a crude faster than light warpdrive.
Longhorn 6:8 -
"I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Bill, and Balmer was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by acquisition, lock-in and proprietary-standards, and by the wild clippies of the earth."
It always freaked me out that this might come to pass.
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
El Reg got this one about right. ( Do check the comments though.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-114/B_%22Soft-Bomb%22
It is quite obvious how dependent civilization is on electricity, and most gov'ts give out the advice to be prepared for a few days or even weeks without electricity and other resulting amenities such as water and fresh food in the supermarket - but how many people actually follow up on that? Especially a big city in the middle of such a blackout would have serious problems with everything being just-in-time delivered.
Raising awareness and preparedness of such a SHTF scenario has a better ROI than pumping 1000x that money into a military project to defeat yet another hypothetical terrorist scare. And if I were a terrorist I'd certainly have other plans with even a halfway decent nuke on a boat than fire it into the sky.
These EMP-weapons have presumably been around since the cold war (You don't need a missile. A small plane would do fine for a suicide bomber). The threat of attack agianst the US has been around since it began to push it's proverbial nose into other countries affairs, by military means.
If someone had all that, you think they'd just knock out the electricity??? If people want to take down the electric grid, they break into multiple large bottleneck electricity distribution points and mess stuff up, and get like 5 years in jail. If people want to kill almost everyone, poison everyone else, and destroy lots of stuff in one strike, they buy nukes. People don't target electric grids with nukes.
This why I, Senator John W. Dismal of the State of Confusion, am sponsoring the Amish Computing Initiative Bill which seeks to establish funding for non-electronic computing using bovine technology. I've been told we can achieve 100 Mega cow-flops per second with massive parallel-processing grain-fed logic mechanisms, called 'herds'. Those crazy wonderful inventive Amish in my district. In addition, the computers can provide some mighty fine ice cream. America does not have to be dependent on a grid that may go down. We are also anticipating funding MIT to research hamster-powered PDAs. Some of the faculty have expressed unusual interest in gerbils, too. I say let them, but don't come crying to me if you end up in the emergency room with duct tape, professors. That's all the time I have to spare, I have to go pick up a bribe. Oops. I mean see a lobbyist.
Rep. Bartlett read a book, and got a bug up his ass.
The book he read was: http://onesecondafter.com/
Literally, the book is about three nukes launched from ships at sea, on top of modified scuds. Same plot as this Representatives scary scenario.
Bruce Schneier calls this kind of thing the "Movie Plot Terrorist Threat."
BTW It's a decent book for a fun read. If you enjoy the end of the world aspect of a zombie film, you'll like "One Second After."
But it's fiction, and while the principle is interesting, it won't be the end of the world as we know it.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's not hugely surprising to me that there might be issues with a more complex grid, as with a more complex anything, even short of vulnerability to an EMP attack. If there are automated systems, that's automated systems that could fail, or could operate in unintended ways. There's just more stuff that has to go right; more control systems that must be robust under various conditions; more dynamical-system states that need to be understood and designed for.
What is surprising to me is that I can't actually find a decent, even-handed overview of smart grids. You can have your choice of breathless "smart grid is THE FUTURE" books and articles. One book goes so far as to title itself Perfect Power: How the Microgrid Revolution Will Unleash Cleaner, Greener, More Abundant Energy . Yes, that's right, the new grid will provide perfect power, which will solve all our problems. Does anyone seriously believe there aren't pros and cons that at least deserve some consideration and design?
Of course, there are some academics who've written detailed journal articles, usually on some sub-aspect. But our public discourse seems to, at the moment, consist of a bunch of "the smart grid is the messiah" people on the one hand, and now "omg what about terrorism" on the other hand.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Traditionally, we've only worried about the chaos that would be caused by blackouts -- failures on the electricity supply side; and about attacks on the grid via hacking or things like EMP.
However, we are distributing more and more intelligence to households. Countless billions of intelligent devices exist and they are increasingly networked.
The metaphor for reliability of electric supply is "keeping the lights on" so consider the vulnerability of billions and billions of intelligent light bulbs (Why you would want your bulb to be intelligent and networked? I have no idea; its just a metaphor).
Here's the point, as the intelligence and communications become more distributed, they become more attractive to wannabe hackers and attackers. It could become equally attractive to attack the light bulbs as attacking the power grid.
Now consider how onerous it would be to consider such innocuous devices such as light bulbs to be critical infrastructure. Homeland security might need to require the same cyber security standards from every light bulb owner as they do from the utility and grid operators. Clearly, that won't work. Therefore, we may need to restrict the spread of distributed intelligence and communications in consumer level items as a defense.
Restricting technology would be highly offensive, but what's the alternative?
Where have I heard this idea before? Oh yes, Battlestar Galactica. Galactica restricted use of technology and especially networking to reduce vulnerabilty to Zylon attacks. Might life imitate SF yet again?
Any "Smart" Grid system needs to bring local generation strategies into the picture, where, for lack of a better term the grid is "segmented" so that if the main power supply for a region goes away, for whatever reason, local "segments" of the grid can still keep running on locally generated power, with reduced capacity, so that at least some buildings will still have power for emergency shelter, with functioning lighting, heat & communications.
Local generation could include wind, solar, battery banks, gas generators, and fuel cells and/or tiny natural gas plants, maybe even as individual units installed in residential homes or municipal buildings -- these could all be managed both during normal grid operation and when there is a large-scale outage.
This sounds like a no-brainer to me, but maybe there's some reason it's not practical, aside from cost, since I'm tired of hearing: "No we can't do that, even though it's a good idea" just because it's "too expensive". We created the idea of money thousands of years ago, and if it's preventing us from doing things that make sense now, maybe we should fucking get rid of it, or at least change the way we use it.
And if you're concerned about EMP attacks, I don't think there's any way that EMP could affect big honking knife switches, so make sure it has some of those to handle the segmentation. That would probably have some advantages for backup switching even for things other than EMP attacks, which (as others are saying) doesn't seem like a very efficient way to mess things up. There are better ways to create havoc.
... my netbook inside my tinfoil hat. bah! this will show them
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Let's not do anything then 'cus somebody may decide to break it.
What a pathetic world view.
Who the hell cares if the grid is down, the EMP pulse will have fried all electronics in the area anyway.
The scenario suggested is stupid and unrealistic: if you're gonna hit a nation with an EMP nuke, exactly what are ya gonna do when the effect wears off, hmmmm? You'd better be equipped to INVADE on the heels of that EMP blast, otherwise you'll still be toast soon enough.
Are you listening, Lichtenstein?
He spent buzillions out of pocket to buy the windchargers, some non trivial amount. Yes, the water delivery right of way issue is also involved, but he also has the water that needs delivering some day.
My guess is eventually they will relent when they really *need* the water in those metro regions, and it will just be more expensive then. His was a damn good idea, replace the natgas used for electricity plants with the wind power. The natgas then can be diverted and goes to fuel fleet vehicles, to keep the conversion costs down (all the same model, etc). The natgas is cheaper to run the vehicles on. Oil cash doesn't have to be exported out of the US so it saves on balance of payment issues. win/win/win/win overall.
Ya, he stood to make some serious dollars on the deal, but so effin what?? Where's the beef there, you work for free or don't expect a return on a lot of investment? Bigass huge projects that succeed *tend to make some bigass dollars*. That's just reality, no different from anything else like that in our world.
He's an old guy, been in the energy biz for a long time, and I saw his plan as something he really thought about, came up with a two birds with one stone deal that would work, FOUR birds really, and he wanted it for a legacy contribution as well. The latter is a guess but bet I am right on that one.
Any random young guy can be scary smart, but it takes an older guy who started out scary smart to see all the angles, because you only get that with a ton of real world experience.
He really does not "need" the money at his level and age. Like Gates going off developing medicine action for africa, something to do while you are already rich, and it is in his level of proven expertise.
As to the water, the southwest is in for real long term drought according to the bulk of the climate guessers, while at the same time demands keep going up. We WILL be building more water transfer pipelines, either now while it is cheaper, or later on when it is way more expensive. No "ifs" about it at all, it is GOING to happen because it needs to happen.
Running the new water pipelines from the same areas roughly where the new electricity (which we will also be needing shortly) will be coming from on the same right of way *made sense*. Doing it in two different right of ways at two different times when they start and stop at the same places roughly is way stupid and short sighted.
Way stupid, and way shortsighted. Those boneheads jumped the shark by not doing it all now while materials are cheaper and there's a glut of non working unemployed construction labor out there. They got handed an incredible deal and blew it!
I give the dude props, he has a logical and well thought out long view, not that lame "this quarter" view or "this election cycle" view that most businesses and politicians have and that we all suffer from constantly.
So, the state is controlling your indoor temperature. It's too cold in your house, make a tray to hold some ice near/above your thermostat, problem fixed. It's too hot in your house, place a hot shot glass under/near your thermostat, problem fixed.
You can manipulate your thermostat to your advantage. Unless the State places a camera on your thermostat, but them you can always put a picture in front of the lens.
Measure, counter measure.
P.S. I have a login somewhere. Not really an AC, just a lazy login looker or LLL.
I can see that individual smart grid components may be more vulnerable to EMP, but overall shouldn't a smart grid be more resistant to having nodes removed from it? Our current grid doesn't deal with imbalances very well - often causing outages in areas which could technically get power, but where it can't be delivered because of archaic grid deisgn. Remember the Northeast blackout in 2003? I'm thinking that an EMP may physically damage our current grid technology less, but the effect across the system would be more widespread and long lasting because of lack of flexibility in the current grid.
Yeah, my computers and electricity ... that's what i'm gonna be worried about when see nuclear fireball going off five miles away. "But how will I toast bread now?" ... freaking sheople ...
Forget the E bomb... How about we get a couple of guys with a pickup and a couple of hundred bucks of steel pipe from Home Depot... they drive around flinging the pipes into transformer substations....
"Security" is a lie. There's always a way around whatever protections you can put in place, and the false protection is often extremely expensive while the workaround is usually cheap.
Security Theater at it's finest...
I think that is wonderful. The first time the grid fails, everyone will run out and start buying their own solar panels, wind generators, and other independent power sources.
Living in Chile
What worries me is a truck-mounted EMP generator deployed in the Wall Street area.
In today's financial markets, if Wall Street went down for a week, when it came back up, New York would no longer be the center of the financial universe.
(Of course, that's going to happen anyway; a debtor nation can't control the world financial system for long. China is shortening the maturity on its 2.1 trillion in Treasury paper and starting to buy real assets, mostly natural resources.)
I am sorry. How the hell did this even come up? If someone decides to explode and EMP over a smart grid, how is this any worse than they did it over a regular grid? Everything is fried anyway. We are chip based society, and very little of it is not vulnerable to EMP or solar flares.
By the way, I would be far more concerned with what a solar flare would do than a man made EMP. We have actually had these in our life time, and will have more.
What is the likly hood of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse
Living in Chile
Right, because if a nuclear weapon goes off, our first worry is: How will this affect the smart grid?
Further, if someone has a nuclear weapon, their first thought isn't.. Hey, Lets bring down their Smart Grid!
So, instead of the EMP only killing the electronics in the power plant, the electronics responsible for controlling the power distribution in switching stations and the electronics to be powered in your house... it ALSO kills your power meter?
That is one step too far!
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
You gotta have a crude nuclear weapon. A polite one simply won't do.
The grid is already vulnerable to this type of attack. SCADA has been in production for years and an EMP would cause all of the relays, transformers and control stations, not to mention EMS and OMS ops control centers to be wolloped....it would take everything down.
OMG! They are telling me that nuclear weapons can damage things??? I though they taught all those power grids how to duck and cover.
I actually worked with nascent smart grid technologies in the late 1990s. We wrote energy monitoring software for mid-size and larger enterprises. They have time of use rates and so understanding how to do peak shaving was very beneficial to them and they would wind up investing considerably to bring their demand down. These systems are usually pairs with SCADA systems that intimately wire up their processes and with all of that comes a certain amount of redundancy. The thing is though, if the control systems were to go offline, they could certainly still continue.
The question is put, do you need to have telemetry on residences? I would say the answer is no. Well in the late 1990s a load recorder by itself would set you back about a $1000 and then you needed either a network jack and a phone line to talk. I would be shocked if the same hardware could not be put together for a fraction of that, and I'd bet that a utility could get a smart meter at the residence for not that expensive in hardware cost. The real cost is the labor of the electrician to install it. This is a skilled job and its going to take some money to pay some guy to be out there for an afternoon wiring up a load recorder at your house. Then from there, the load recorder would have to attach to your communications infrastructure, and what might that be? Well, it could piggy back your internet by being its own wireless, it could plug into your POTS, it could have its own cell line (and boy that would drive costs up). The central software to manage all of that is there.
And so, after the utility spends millions of bucks installing all these meters on residences, what will they find? They already -KNOW- that the number 1 predictor of consumer electrical demand is the degree day. Seriously, go have a look at the temperature curve for the last 90 days, and compare that to the spot energy price for the last 90 days. They are going to be almost identically the same shape...
One has to wonder, if there is not a simpler way to get consumers to peak shave. Perhaps the easiest thing might be to have a collective energy bonus. Basically, if the utility does not have to fire up its oil units on it a hot day, and can avoid running spinning reserves, there's a certain amount of give back they can profitably put on the table to get people to not use so much power. So what they could do during summer months is basically calculate a collective credit, where, if a region meets a certain usage reduction goal, everyone gets some amount of credit back on their bill. From there consumers could, instead of spending energy dollars on metering, could spend things on actually valuable peak shaving products, which no doubt the utility and its local energy services partners would be more than happy to sell, to make this an economical deal for everyone. With a collective energy bonus, you get most of the benefits of a peak shaved grid, but without having to actually build one.
This is my sig.
Really? Who knew a NUCLEAR WEAPON DETONATION could have adverse effects on our infrastructure.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The military has all sorts of EMP-hardened stuff, and has had it deployed since Cold War days. Sure the transmission lines complicate things, but in that respect, and with proper hardening, a smart grid need be no more vulnerable than the current dumb grid. Harder, in fact, because the current dumb grid had no hardening in mind whatsoever. We don't need a smart grid to be dropped dead by EMP, our current grid will fill the bill just fine, thank you.
We just need to set the right standards.
As for hacking, that presumes that power companies are dumb enough to put this stuff live on the internet. I worked for a day once with a power guy - he knew his stuff, and knew how to keep things isolated that should be kept isolated. I'm not worried about infrastructure he manages. On the other hand, he told of auditing another place, and one recommendation was that they pass their networking through a firewall. Later, he was given the opportunity to inspect the "problem resolutions." He saw an ethernet cable going in a hole in a machine marked "firewall" and out the other side. No connectors, just the cable looping through the box.
We just need to set the right standards.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
EMP kills the grid we accept that. 28 years I have been in power plant controls without knowing of any EMP hardened electronics.
EMP kills your solar home power 'cause your charger is electronic & your inverter is electronic.
EMP kills your car with electronic injection, electronic ignition, electronic transmission controls.
EMP kills my diesel electric generator with electronic controller, electronic inverter. It has Kubota mechanical fuel system but 120 VAC 8 KW output is computer inverted from rectified AC.
EMP kills my Caterpillar main diesel with electronic fuel injection, my Allison transmission & ABS air brakes.
Even the diesel electric locomotives have electronics essential to operation.
1 EMP = no AC, no food, no music, no cars, no electricity. Must have old electric stuff to make electricity after EMP. Got cows, goats & garden?
Right of ways. That's the only way these sorts of things can be built. Long well established precedent there. *Of course* the government would need to get involved, and considering they thought casino gambling banking was worth a trillion bucks and still counting.....necessary infrastructure should be worth even more. In fact, if it was me, I'd take that casino bank money we taxpayers all have "invested" in and slap it around at a host of alternative energy and water projects instead.
Choices and priorities, hedged derivatives bets called "products" along with "legal" front running microsecond "trading" or necessary energy and water...man, that's a hard choice to make...not.
Our loot, and our children's and grandchildren's loot, is being spent anyway, by the dumptruck load, with apparently no way around that right now, so I would *much* rather see it going towards various projects like this (I'd take his idea even further, we need a national water "grid" pipeline system to move excess surplus water from some areas over to areas that need water and have chronic deficits), to help them get established, and to more science and medical R and D, etc. I see that as real investment into the future, not propping up the wall street gambling "industry" or such dinosaurs as GM, the king of slapping different sheet metal on the same everything else and calling that "innovation".
'But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it's as good as a bulls eye.'
Honestly, who gives a shit? Does New England even have electricity?
See, I'm a little more worried about the NUKES than the EMP associated with them. I mean, death fo a few million people, fallout, etc., just seems to be, I dunno, the major issue, with EMP only a component. Trying to claim that EMP is theworst part of the problem just seems... weird.
The truth is that a sufficiently high, large nuclear explosion would bring virtually everything to a standstill across the entirity of North America. We could not grow or distribute food. The population would be reduced by 90% within a year. Any s-hole country that were to try this has to know that our military will survive long enough to reduce said s-hole country to a border-to-border, glass paved, self-lighting parking lot. It is one thing for Kim-Jong-El to send millions of screaming soldiers across the border to die in S. Korea, and quite another to do something that will ensure that he personally does not survive the next 3 hours. Now, our primary star acting up - that's something quite different, that we should attempt to fix.
I'll ignore the smarmy insult...
Which part don't you understand? I'll clarify again.
He has water that is needed or will be needed, plus he invested in a large wind project for electricity, which is or will be needed as well. He doesn't own all the pieces for this project, but enough for a good start, and the plan itself makes several logical points. Right of ways are necessary to move these utility products, so of course the government would need to establish these routes, it's the basic way they are done in this nation with centralized delivery systems, which I termed the precedent. I then mentioned, just as a "for instance", that huge sums of money are being used to bailout some dubiously named banks, which I (and many other people) contend are more huge gambling casinos than anything else, and I said if these huge emergency sums were going to be spent anyway, I would much rather see these huge sums spent for national energy and water infrastructure projects, one example being the topic, the "Pickens' Plan", and also more scientific research and development, etc. What isn't clear?
Oh, right. EMP is the first thing I worry about when terrorists throw nukes around...
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
Isn't the point moot anyway at this time? Hasn't his project been canceled for the most part? Are those the facts, or not?
Well, that's your opinion and you are welcome to it, I just am of a differing opinion. He bought the windchargers, bunches of them, big ones, so it was both. Water was a huge part of it, and the first part of it, that I will grant readily, but the plan itself evolved.
And I've driven across Texas a few times..I think they have more than enough land for *both* a lot of windchargers and solar thermal farms! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
And either way, if you are talking electricity, you'd *still* need the right of ways to build new transmission towers and powerlines, wind or solar thermal or any other method, so that's a complete wash and a non issue. The windchargers are built or being built, they got contracted for and paid, they are going to go in someplace, either the Texans will get the juice or someone else will. Wind in large enough numbers and over a decent enough area can provide base load enough power, it's used all over now and is still, for the last buncha years running, the fastest method of new plants going in outside of the chinese coal burning plants (they are doing one new one per week average, that's why I think leaving them out of environmental treaties is lame and disingenuous and why even though I am pretty green I did not support Kyoto and I do not support the dems/obama "cap and trade" swindle stealth tax. the atmosphere has no boundaries).
And theoretically speaking, wind verus solar thermal,if a few or even few dozen of your 1-2 megawatt windchargers go down in your large farm of hundreds or thousands across many states, or the wind is not blowing there right now, no biggee, it's just not that much of a huge loss all things considered, but your 300 megawatt solar thermal plant, if that goes down..some huge city is sitting sweating in the dark, maybe for a long time.
Something to be said for *more points of production*.
All the various methods have benefits and tradeoffs and are part of the big energy mix we have. I want to get away from the "all or most of your eggs in one basket" approach we have been using. I like the "all of the above" method instead.
I have nothing against solar thermal. I like all forms of alternative energy and unlike 99% of all the slashdotters here who comment on energy topics I own both a solar PV rig and a windcharger. I just liked his plan because it was a credible quadruple play, one better than a hat trick. Yep, he stood to make a lot of money..all big energy (and water) projects when they are successful (built and running) make a lot of money. Because the world has an insatiable demand for more and more power and more and more water, to more and more places.
Personally I am in favor of a lot more smaller individual projects and a big decentralization effort (and re purpose a lot of closed rust belt factories to do this and put a lot of blue collar guys back to work), but I also recognize the need for centralized power delivery to provide juice for the cities primarily. The rural areas and suburbs could be well served with mass adoption of solar PV in a large number of areas for example, then no new big "plants" or new towers would be needed at all. And a *ton* of family farms could be doing some base model A large windcharger, provide all their own power most of the time plus sell any surplus. When and if I see a smallish home owner styled solar thermal rig (beyond a water heater into electricity production as part of the package, or just ground loop geothermal), I'd endorse that as well. I've seen several one-off prototypes, but nothing else. Might exist but I haven't seen it.
I like big power projects, mediums and small, all of the above. And I *really* endorse the idea of a huge national water pipeline grid, to move water around from where it is in excess to where it is in deficit. A lot of pipelines and hundreds of new deep reservoirs. *Really*, as in a big huge national "we need this yesterday" infrastructure project. Linking up already existing pipelines could help, then y