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Google's Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B
Lucas123 writes "Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17,000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google's renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500,000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy."
$4,700 per house.
115M homes in USA - 115Mx4.7K
$0.54 Trillion dollars to have solar to every US household. We need baseline power, and some areas of the USA would be less effective for solar, but that $0.54T investment ought to cover around 50% of electricity needs in the US. It would also help to usher in the era of electric cars.
Dammit, the cost of Iraq/Afghanistan has been projected at ten times that amount ($6 Trillion). So much for "securing energy supplies".
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN
All your base load are belong to US
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say??
Make your time.
Every time some company like Google announces funding for some Tempest or Solaris farm somewhere I wince. It's not the money, it's the very idea of the thing. The Internet is 24/7, and they're supposed to be the smartest guys & gals in the room. How can they get behind and forge ahead on something that won't even solve their own problems?
How did this decades-long solar slash wind fixation even begin?? Why don't at least half the folks out there pause and say, "wait a minute... what are we trying to accomplish?" I'm developing an honest resentment to those so-called 'green' things, and believe me it's not comfortable or fun. Truth is, wind and solar smell bad.
They smell like grid-down Darwin In Action DEATH. If I can easily imagine some awful Event that would render all solar and wind technology useless overnight, for a week or longer... who else can? Take your pick: Dust from a volcanic event or asteroid impact, or a Winter storm with Arctic air meeting warm moist air from the South that sweeps diagonally across the continent with freezing rain, leaving inches of ice accumulation, road and rail impassible.
Or a Little Ice Age. We are more vulnerable to harsh Winter conditions than we were in 1650-1700. Electricity powers everything. Some scientists are baffledby the sun's behavior lately, but Professor Lockwood and the Washington Post aren't: Sun activity is in free fall, but you shouldn’t expect a new little ice age. I did a triple-facepalm when atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh said, "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.” Just like that. Human carbon emissions will offset a global weather phenomenon that lasted some 70-300 years. What makes her so sure?
Wind and Solar for grid energy are Rube Goldberg engineering disasters. So many precision cast moving parts out there in the elements, blades that rely on brakes and oil-filled transmission boxes. Everything subject to freeze and fail sooner than intended, and it's all in faraway places with branch feeders running to it at great expense, so it can solve your energy problems completely. Or maybe 20%. Some day. Some times. Not as much as expected. After the first calamity strikes, not at all.
Power plants are strong buildings with machinery inside built to withstand the worst of the elements. The best of these are completely self-contained, generate gigawatts of power and can stock months of fuel. Three guesses.
Solar and Wind grid energy farms are spacious gardens of delicate -- and ultimately useless -- garbage that never would have and will not ensure our survival, built at great expense in an atmosphere of dreamlike foolishness that has got to stop this minute.
My children deserve better. This is madness, people! Ape-shit madness! When discussing base load grid power, especially with aging infrastructure and an uncertain economic outlook... these sources should have been laughed out of the room. Google deserves better, as do we. This is an existential threat. Their money at this point would be better spent on T-shirts for natural gas producers and coal miners.
Or just perhaps... a commitment to fast-track thorium, a national effort on the same scale that put men on the moon. So we can crack this energy thing for the next thousand years, and go to the moon again.
And let's send women to the moon. It's their turn.
Some Google Talks. They should listen.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>