"I am just for home produced power as much as possible" Why spend so much generating local power??? Sure, it helps YOU, but the cost is so high for the rest of us, that it will dramatically hamper our existing free energy plans, more than trippling our already 40 trillion dollar expected outlay (best case scenario).
"100% credit as long as it is an active system that works and the cost stays stable to what it was three months before the law got signed, so there's no price bumping or gouging." OK, several issues here. 1, subsidizing of solar and other energy have been dropping, not increasing, because the total money being subsidized is rising faster than finds are available. You can't just say "make it fee!" Somewhere, someone is paying for it (taxpayers) and with the efficiency of government, every dollar subsidized costs $1.70. 2, government can not legally price fix an item except under a condition of war. Further, price fixing at current rates will mean massive profits, as costs continue to reduce dramatically for PV each year. Price fixing on costs will stifle innovation as money spent engineering can't be recuperated in profits due to price fixing. This is bad on so many levels of economic theory I really need to just stop now... [quote]I make US poverty level, close enough anyway, if I can afford it, so can a lot more folks.[/quote]You don't understand what the poverty level is do you... It's currently $10,210 for an individual, $20,650 for a family with 2 kids. That's both parents working for less than $5 an hour worked 40 hours a week, and that's BEFORE tax deductions. For a family of 4, that's less than $400 a week total. Assuming you can find rent in a rat hole trailer for $500 a month, and your food costs stay under $100 a week, and your total bills (phone, power, water, trash, etc) are under $400 a month, you have $300 left, total, BEFORE taxes are deducted to cover your car, gas, insurance, and household expenses. Assuming you installed solar, this meand you OWN your home, and thus also pay property taxes, which I'm guessing for you approach $2,000 a year, or just over $150 a month, and since uncle sam already took 30% of what you make out, you're in debt before I even start talking about other costs, like birthdays and Christmas, I didn't even include cable TV service, let alone solar PV. Knock out power bills, and you might save 2-300 a month with solar, assuming you have $25K in home equity to back it with, and get a good 2nd mortgage interest rate, you're still looking at $300 a month for 10 years anyway. This also assumes your mortgage and escrow are $500 a month combined, as I noted above.
"As to the US exporting, I could care less" Again, a failure to have any sense at all about economics. Further, our lack of exporting is WHAT IS STARVING THESE PEOPLE. It's not about "learn to grow food" it;s about there IS NO LAND TO GROW IT ON!. China is shrinking in population. India is shrinking in population. The world total is shrinking in population. Problem is, we had a nice balance of worldwide food (excluding some tribal peoples and disaster areas where, well, as you said, evolution works). Problem is, we reduced that food output by about 3%, and dramatically raised the cost of foods, like flour to make bread, 3 fold in less than a year. Their economies can't afford it, they starved. Besides, exporting cancels some national debt, and it's a product we can export indefinitely. You argued we were not starving them, I proved we were, you say "i don;t care." that's part of the problem with this country and our attitude towards "what I want, fuck the rest" does not mesh with allowing the human race to survive and overcome global warming and other critical issues.
"If people want to live in high rise termite cities with no way to get food or water if something happens, not my call"
It's not about them living in cities, it;s about them living in countries without enough arable land. It's about their past mistakes and culture catching up with them,
Elecs are more common than gas today, especially in any home built in the last 20 years. I generally prefer gas, since I can make hotter water faster, and never seem to run out, but electric is cheaper to buy, cheaper to install, are better insulated, and with gas costs rising, cheaper to run, plus since most people are ditching their gas stoves and gas dryers, blowing $20 a month just for the hookup (before you're billed for the gas) starts to get expensive fast
on-demand (tankless) seems to all run electric only (120 friggin AMP circuit!) They don't get water quite as hot, but don't waste energy storing hot water, so are typically deemed the cheapest to operate. Unfortunately, this is a bad direction to move in, since 100 million people on the east coast each using 120 APMS concurrently taking showers at 6AM would KILL our electric grid!
Ah, give it some time. The guys here at slashdot will soon enough change their code so it renders just a poorly in IE 8 as in 7, to ensure that those not up to speed with the rest of us have at least one more barrier to overcome before being considdered passible company.
Also, "sophisticated" used to mean "corrupted" so a nice, sophisticated man vying for a political office should be a real eye opener! No wonder we're in the shit we're in.
The original Macintosh, as they refer to, I'm assuming was the 128K, released in January 1984, but I (my family) owned a Lisa, which was the same thing, just sideways, in 1983, so I've actually been using macs 25 years already...
What really makes me feel old is I used to operate an original Apple II, equipped with both processors for compiling, back in 1979. I was but a grade school kid at the time, but we had 11 of them in a manually switched network (litterally, you could turn the dial to select what machine accessed the drive, it clicked automatically a few times a second if it didn't detect a token) connected to a single drive, which I think was an 800K hard disk if I remember...
We've owned a IIc, IIGS, lisa, 128K, 512ke, Classic, SE/30, SE/40, Quadra 610 and 630, LCII (added the 2nd processor to that one for virtualizing i386), MacII SE, Mac II CX, Quadra 9500, a power computing clone, G3 toewr, G4 tower, original 233 iMac and a 333 model, a cube, an iMac G4, G5, Intel iMac, a white iBook, a G4 powerbook, a MacBook Pro 15", a mini, and an appleTV. Just waiting for the new line to come out and I'll grab a new notebook and desktop. That will put our family over 30 Apple machines in less than 30 years.. Wow!
In the same time, I've had an IBM PS/2 (8088?), a Tandy1000, a DX4/100 clone (overclocked to 133 beating the pentiums at the time for less money), a PIII333, AMD700, AMD64/2800, and now a CoreII Duo 6500, or and an older Thinkpad, early pentium, was mized in there somewhere...
Sad, since I lived within 20 miuntes of IBM's HQ in Armonk, NY for most of that last 30 years... PCs are necessary for my line of work, but I've allways loved and allways will have an Apple.
Here's a start on the starvation data: we're at the lowerst worldwide wheat production in 34 years, and flour has risen 3 fold in cost in the last year alone. WEe're producing a lot of food, but the cost is being placed at a point where poor nations simply can't buy any. The USA is the worlds largest exporter of food. Record amounts of that going to ethanol mean less is going out through our borders. http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=5518
Home battery storage is viable for PV solar, but 1: many homes don;t have an OSHA approved location to put a battery (not all of us have basements or garrages), 2: it increases the cost of the system dramatically, and the batteries require replacement about every 8-10 years. 3: fire insurance costs increase dramatically with home batteries, and several insurance companies refuse to provide fire insurance due to the potential of cascade cell failure. In the future, better batteries will hapopen, safer and cheaper, but today there is no economy of scale for it, besides that most homes won't be able to produce enough in the first place.
I do not disagree with the fact that many people needlessly spend money on gadgets and entertainment, but you're not going to get them to saccrifice that unless the ROI makes sense. Today, solar PV in may areas of this country, without government subsidy, doesn't work. In other areas, the ROI looks good enough, and 7 year terms, especially in NJ, are common turnarounds, and it's selling well. What people don;t realize is that if we simply took how much money is going into the subsidy, and insead invested that money in wind power, the effect would not only be much more 100% clean energy, but it would lower everyone's electric bills, not just the ones who both own a home and have finances available to install such a system.
Hybrid cars are a $2,000 or so extra investment, and financers understand the fuel savings alone nearly compenssates for the extra cost. Solar PV is a 20K investment with fluctuating rates of return, and non-permanant installation. Solar PV does not add equity to your5 home near its cost of install.
small hobby gardens, common? 1/2 acre plots for gardening, rare. Maybe 10% of america has enough yard to do that, likely less, and many that do are elderly and can't perform the labor alone. In other countries, less than 25% may even have a yard at all. Your aslo still ignoring the cost diference for ALL of us. Great, you can save a hundred bucks a year, but the rest of us still REQUIRE that system. If it is not a universal solution, please disregard it from this conversation.
MIT estimates a 12-15 year term before solar PV competes in even some markets as a more economical solution than wind. Call me in 12-15 years and we'll talk.
insulation requirements, I completely agree, are a joke. Since however, few existing houses can be properly upgraded, and imposing too strict of a building code on new homes will destabalize the market, we have to taker baby steps. I built my house 3 years ago, and had great windows, appliances, and insulation put in, within reason. I tipped the contractor $100 cash to add a bunch of extra blowfill insulation in the attic, and mu new house, which is larger than my old, has about 30% less electric bills. Going further was possible, but at diminishing rates of return (and would have raised the cost of the structure beyond appraised values, and thus would have prevented bank financing without a larger downpayment, making this even more impossible for most of America).
Conservation, I'm right with ya. outlaw Incandescent bulbs, increase the SEER requirements on AC systems, slowly over time tighten building requirements, make appliances meet ever higher energy standards, start making PCs and other appliances use less and less trickle powewr and more efficiently sleep when appropriate. We CAN do a lot there, and we are continually improving. That's not part of this argume
Yes, this may be the best storage method, but it's still 3X the cost of using wind to make the energy in the first place, and salt storage, though the most efficient, roughly doubles the cost of the power system totqal, and since wind is globally constant (to within about 20%) and since we can make more power from wind by nearly an order of magnitude across the same acreage of land, we're better to use wind for this.
Further, unless we interconnect northern and southern hemespheres into a massive solar grid, we're going to need a LOT of salt to store enough energy for the entire USA to make it through the winter.... Can you trust the central american nations to not screw with out power lines (let alone give us access to bury them?)
Salt storage in intended to be a less-than-24-hour solution, or to provide an extra trickly of energy over a few overcast days. Longer termk storage, like uphil water is a better and cheaper solution in most areas, but still requires massive excavation projects. It;s better we simply put up more wqindmills then we'll ever conceivably need.
For discussions of alternative energy systems, and a REAL option for the replacement of oil fules, check out www.dotyenergy.com
We don;t need storage, and environment thrashing construction projects. Ultracapacitors can be used locally to handle sudden neighborhood spikes, but the best solution is simply more wind generators.
Wind does not subside nationally, only locally. Looking at wind speed reports from category 7 wind zones, the toal energy available from wind in thos eareas virtually never drops more than 20%. Keep in mind, in most of these areas, we can't even run the turbines as fast as they can spin, or they'd fly apart. We use breaking systems to stifle the speeds, so when wind drops minor amounts, we just use less braking, and get the same power.
When wind does drop locally, superconducting cables like those in use on Long Island and several other countries, and HDVC on shorter runs, can rpovide wind energy from other locations.
Most wind farm only let 80% of their generators spin at any time. Spinning up more handles peak needs, or lighter winds. Overproduction could also be used to make WindFuels (see www.dotyenergy.com) and we can use liquid fuels to power supplemental power plants for steam electric generation. Excess fules produced? no problem, they're cheaper than gasoline to make and will readily and easily be sold into the market for a proffit.
...but germany COULD have invested in wind power just the same way, and could currently be generating 3+GW of excess power instead of 1, and doing it centrally in a fashion that's easier to account for in the grid and cheaper to compensate for in off-peak (sun set) hours. This would have offest the average power bill by about 4 euros per month, which would have led to MORE wind power at a faster rate...
Also, current solar technology on single family homes can account for typically 70% or less than their energy use. Some homes are lickier than others, but most homes can not self produce 100% power. Further, most people live in multi-family homes, not singles, and shared roof space is insufficient. Covering every roof in the entire country would not produce enough power to offset the use, and the cost of doing so woul dbe close to 5X the cost of a similar producing wind farm.
All well and good, but even using advanced solar cells just coming out onto the market for the commercial sector, net yet available to average people or smaller companies, it;s still 3 times the cost of wind power.
Lets look at $ / MWH generated, and invest heaviest in the one that wins. Currently, that's wind energy by a BIG margin. Solar won't compete on cost, according to MIT and other research firms working heavily in solar, for 12-15 years at the earliest. By then, maybe we'll start shifting and diversifying.
Also, investing in a single path improves the economy of scale.
We HAVE enough land, we HAVE the grid technology (and it's included in the cost of wind), we have the manufacturing here in the USA, we have the ability.
If you want to know more, check out www.dotyenergy.com. After looking through their WindFuels information (how to make hydrocarbon fules of all kinds using wind energy in unlimited supply with less than half the CO2 output short term and less than 25% long term (after we replace coal with WindFuel power plants), then take a look at their expansive alternative energy section. They debunk every other option that's viable.
Solar PV payoffs, unsubsidezed (let's be real, if we're all doing it, the government can't afford to subsidize it) can be paid off for the average home, in a level 5 or higher solar area (aka, not the northeast, where most people live), in about 20 years. This does NOT include upkeep, storm damage replacement, or the degredation of cells over time. This also assumes your local grid will ALLOW you to connect to it for overflow/underflow, which in SC they do not, and assumes that when connected, you get market rate equivolent for the power you submit vs the power you use later.
I had BP analyze my home in Myrtle Beach, SC. 1st note that 50% of my roof DOES face south, and I am considdered a prime candidate for solar power. The size of the system to provide me 100% power (overproduce during day, but back at night, net yearly gain neutral), would have been 40% larger than my roof could accomodate for my 1700sqft single floor home. I would need to add panels to a secondary grid in the back yard. Next, since SC neither subsidized, nor does the power company buy overused poewer (they let you run the meter backwards when producing, but at the end of 30 days, if the meter reads less than the previos month's reading, you are NOT compensated the difference, and the new LOWER number is used to measure next month's bill, not your previos number, so you're actually giving them free energy as a result and further getting burned higher bills in the winter months. NOW however, the new digital meters they required us to upgrade to DON'T EVEN RUN BACKWARDS!)
Based on a 2% annual degredation in solar performance, the cost of the system, increased insurance costs, increased mortgage balance and interest charges, overproduction losses, and more, my estimated return on investment was 36 years. If I put in a smaller system that would never overproduce more than I used idly during daytime hours, my return would have been 24 years. Either way, FAR oonger than the estimated 15 year life of the panels... Even expecting a 5% increase in electricity costs anually, this system would not have paid itself off in less than 15 years anyway I looked at it.
Instead, I looked at hot water generation, which could have paid itself off in 6 years, but with that, I would have had to settle with cooler showers in the morning, or using grid power to suplement hot water anyway, so I just gave up...
As for wind and the grid, all estimates for wind power implemetation on a national scale already include an overhaul to our grid (which incidently, we're GOING to do one way or the other for a NUMBER of reasons!). Since wind across the nation as a whole does not fail the way it does locally, and using superconducting HVDC with near 0 loss, it's no issue to have power criss-crossing the continent, and we have so much wind potential, we can overproduce enough to make both electricity ANY WindFuels (see www.dotyenergy.com).
Home grown produce? Sure, about 8% of americans have land to do that on, not to mention the costs involved, and energy wasted with you doing it at home is actually MORE than doing it in large fields (once you considder that you're only getting food from your personal farm a few months of they year, plus everyone else still needs a supermarket anyway). Further, the fertilizers you use are much worse than commercial ones, and the damage you cause to the groundwater in your community is actually pretty impressive if everyone was doing it.
Also, Organic foods are MORE dangerous than non-organic acording to hundreds of leading nutricianists. Home gardening is a nice pasttime, but the time investment alone is more than most of us can commit to, and as far as pay? the typical home garden produces less than $200 of produce anually, for about 50 hours labor, so that's REALLY BAD pay in my book... I;'d rather work a seperate job (I actually HAVE a home garden, but it;s for pride and hobby reasons, NOT food production or savings).
We're already making windmills on a large scale. They're not getting much
Here's how we store power: method 1, as with the hoover dam and other sites, we overproduce electricity to pump water up hill, and use potential energy storage for hydropower later.
Method 2, use excess electricity produced to fuel electrolysis, and then run the H2 produces through RTFS processing (see www.dotyenergy.com) with sequestered CO2 from coal plants to make liquid fuel. We use that liquid fuel to power natural gas or oil burning plants (or modified coal plants). As a bonus, overproduces liquid fuels can be sold to airlines or gas stations. (actually, EindFuels are expected to be a FULL replacement for fuel, not just a suplement power wource, but short term this is a fantastic option).
Method 3, supercapacitors. Expensive, but for instant requirements, faster than generators can spin up, it;s a better option than flywheeled thraditional generators.
However, we CAN use wind to make all our energy. Instead of storing it, we simply put up more windmills than are needed by about 20%. Wind may fail locally, say in central Kansas, for a few hours, but wind does NOT fail nationwide like that.... In fact, summing the toal wind energy available at just the class 7 sites in the USA, we have enough energy to power all of the USA and Canada, and the energy output of those sites, collective total, has not fallen by more than 20% for more than a few minutes in recorded history. You see, most of these sites are where the trade winds come close to the ground. It simply doesn't stop blowing, and the speed of the wind is actually faster than we can safely spin generators, so even when that wind lessens, we can still get 100% poewr. There's no such thing as a WINDLESS DAY, stop spreading this FUD. A local plant might not be getting enough wind, but with superconducting cables (in use today in 6 countries, includiong here on long island, so don't give me that "they're too expensive", or "we can't do that yet" crap) that doesn't matter, we'll just import energy from somewhere that is making it.
Solar, yea, solar is bad for anything outside of hot water, or plans to use it to charge electric cars (since 80% of all driving is during daylight hours it's a good match). Problem is, for what soloar will cost to invest, we can build enough windmills to make 3X the power... Solar will compete on cost in about 12-15 years, if MIT's research is accurate (longer if it's not). The proposed costs of solar include grid anhancements like wind, but do not include storage costs, which we expect to actually be equal to or higher than solar power itself, meaning for the same dollar, we can make about 6X the electricity with wind.
WE HAVE NO SHORTAGE OF LEVEL 7 WIND AREAS, AND NO SHORTAGE OF LAND TO MAKE WIND. THIS IS A MYTH PUSHED BY COMPETITIVE ENRGY TECHNOLOGIES. Adding wind to farmlands only reduces crop yield by about 1-2%. Wind can be placed over water, at the tops of mountain ranges, in chasms and gaps between mountains, they're even experimenting with it between buildings in cities like Chicago. There is enough usable level 7 land in the USA that with current technology alone we can power all of north america. Other continents fare BETTER, not worse...
Hot water switching is not automatic, they just schedule your heater to only use elctricity when you're most likely to use hot water. Well insulated heaters keep water to within 10 degrees for more than 8 hours, so making hot water at 3AM means you get a hot shower at 7AM, but without the timer, it would make hot water again at 7:15 in every house on your block, causing a strain. Since we expect you won't need more hot water until 5PM, we hold of a few hours (and provide an override switch for when you need it). It;s called off-peak hot water management.
This is very different from HV/AC regulation, as California is proposing, and which I fully support, since I actually understand it and do not listen to the FUD being spread about it. The idea there is: if you study your AC unit, it typically turns on about once every 20 minutes, running for 5-15 then turning off again. If you adjust it to wider tolerances (3 degress variance instead of the default 2) you can stretch this about another 10 minutes. So, every 20-30 minutes everyone's AC will turn over once on a hot day. Some will run longer than others, but generally, they run 50% of the time at peak heat of the day. When it turns on is another issue, for 6-10 seconds, as it spinns up, it's using as much as 4 times the energy it normally would when running. That's the real kicker. The less often it turns over, the less energy it uses total, and the fewer running at a time, the better for the grid.
California's plan, to delay your AC startup by 1-15 minutes, and not longer than 30 minutes total in a 24 hour period, is all about local neighborhood grid balancing. If there are 400 homes, we have 16,000amps availible (typically). We can't let all the ACs run at once or there will be local brownouts, and the main grid compensates by pumping swithing power to that neighborhood, which stresses transformers and risks blow outs or brown outs. However, if we can ensure that less than 70% of the AC units are running at once, and that less than 25 per 400 are spinning up at once, we can balance that load more evenly, and not have to vary power loads on such small scales, making a cheaper grid, and balancing short-spin power needs (quick access overgeneration costs as much as 10 times as much as constant power)
15 miutes without AC will mean 1-2 degrees difference in a common home on a very hot day. If your AC wants to start up, here's what happens: It requests to the grid for permission to spin up. If it gets no response, it spins up (failsafe mode). If it's told to wait, it asks again every 1 minute. After a short break, power is available, and your AC kicks in and cools you down to your normal temp, however long that takes. If it's waiting more than 15 minutes, it kicks in anyway, same if it's been delayed more than 30 minutes in the last 24 hours total. California is only talking about delaying the spin-up. When you go off again, someone else comes on. The system is designed so you should never be more than a few degrees of norm, and you should not really notice that much at all.
They "request" as does the EPA, that you set your heat/cool range from 68-82 degrees. This is unreasonable in most people's eyes. However, this is a personal choice. I'm quite copmfortable at 68 if I wear a thicker shirt, or have a blanket on the couch. At 82, I melt... 78 is more reasonable to me, and I can't sleep unless it's 74 or cooler. I would however accept that the AC thermostat could "request" power within that range, to hold me to a tighter tolerance, but at a higher meter rate if I choose to do so. Kicking in only at 80 and above I'd pay standard rates, at 79 or below, i'd be willing to pay an extra small charge, at least until we're generating electricity from 100% renewable sources.
Actually, since wind power only ever degrades locally, and even then typically does not degrade across the whole wind farm, wind mills across the rest of the USA can pick up the slack easy enough.
Any talk of building a nationwide wind system simply includes the costs of superconducting HVDC lines, like the ones we've already broaght online in Long Island, and the ones being strung up across europe as well.
Also, turbines do NOT run at 100% at all times, even in good wind. The computers control each windmill individually, and adjust farm wide to make sure no windmills run too fast, and that others, even with wind blowing, don;t spin at all. When winds slow, brakes are released on other turbines, and even though wind is slowing, power can continue evenly. It's only when long term weaknesses in blowing occur that subsequent power is needed.
Part of the issue with wind power is that people don't understand 2 things. 1 is how the individual windmills are tied together, as I described above. 2 is that typically only 80% of the mills are spinning at any time (by choice) so we have 20% more power we can generate at will. A nationwide grid will follow that norm, and even if some farm in kansas is only producing 40% of it's norm, the another 30 farms would each only need to spin up an extra 2% of their reserve. Winds do not fail across an entire nation at once, and in level 7+ wind zones, rarely fail at all.
Unfortunately, there are a limited number of places this is possible. However, if you don't just like the idea of WindFuels (www.dotyenergy.com) as a complete alternative, we could easily pump excess energy into the RTFS process and make fuels which can be used in the power plants that provide energy during luls, keeping the process 100% green, and without scarring the countryside with massive lakes and resivoirs.
1: more wind does not mean more wind power. The generators are each computer comtrolled, and some wind turbines are spun up and down depending on the current damnd the grid can handle, in cooperation with other local power stations. We can DIRECTLY control how much wind energy we make and don't make.
2: equally, When wind falls back, most of the turbines are actually spinning with brakes having slowed the blades to slightly less than full spinning potential. The systems calibrate for light wind by releasing those restrictions, and the blades still spin at speed for multiple seconds, and even then, due the the weight of the blades, don't slow down very quickly... Local power companies have pleanty of time to spin up additional power.
Now, we do still need both wind and local power in a wind power environment. Some of the windo power can be used to push water uphill for on-demand hydro power later, but that's both expensive and limited in scope.
Also, wind power in the west, and across texas can't power all of america unless we add to the grid. They are correct, our current grid can't handle it, but anytime we're talking about adding power generation, we're also including in that the idea that we'll be expanding the grid as well. A superconducting line has been running on Long Island since April. The technology is proven, we somply need to deploy a few east-west and north-south lines, and some junction points, and we can distribute wind power across the whole nation.
Now, all that said, the braking systems, preventing over and under power, long distance transmission costs, and more, mean that we loose at least 15% efficiency on wind power generation. Why not let the turbines run full tilt all the time, producing direct current for electrolysis and make H2, which does NOT have to be grid balanced power. Instead of storing the H2, and trying to spend trillions building a new infrastructure for cars million dolar fule cells to run on it (read, you and I will NEVER drive one of these), we instead takle the H2 and run it to a local mixing plant and through an RFTS process using reclamated CO2, and we can make liquid fuels, on-site, and pipeline those fuels easily and safely using our existing infrastructure and keep driving our existing cars.
Doty Energy (www.dotyenergy.com) can do this TODAY. Costs for gasoline will be about $60/bbl, half what we're paying now. The CO2 we sequester from coal burning in current power plants will go to fuel the process in combination with H2 and some water. The byproducts are limted (and less than we get from making existing fuels). Eventually, new coal plants will also be capable of using liquid fuels in place of coal, so we'll be able to use WSindFuels to make power, then sequester it, recycle the CO2, and using free energy, make more fuel, in a process that will release 75% less CO2 total (since the car's won't be sequestering it's not completely CO2 free), release fewer byproducts, and allow us to continue using technology we already have, and to be free of foreign oil.
To run the whole country on WindFuels, including grid overhauls, pipeline upgrades, windfarms, and more, will cost about 40 trillion over 30-40 years. Fortunately, building this infrastructure is PROFITABLE, and since it can be deployed gradually, with much of the profit going back to system expansion, we should be able to get a great start on it with about 100 billion invested total.
It's also nice that ANYONE can built an RTFS plant, for about $50 million, and can make and sell fuels, lubricants, and just about any other hydrocarbon, directly to the open market. This means big oil won;t be able to control and corner the market, and fuel prices will remain in proportion to costs, not in proportion to demand.
If you want to know more, check out dotyenergy.com. The site is quire detailed already, but they're actually willing to share their reseaarch and numbers, and hope you'll find fault with the solution. A co
Simple, all ports, all connections, provided you have the apporpriate client application to use said port.
This is NO different than your PC. Out of the box, you can access web, e-mail, maybe a few other systems. Even with Windows, you can't connect to port 22 (SSH) unless you ADD a program. You still have access, you can still go there, but you get an error.
"The Internet" should NOT be confused with "the frame cloud" "The Internet" is not an all encompaing umbrella, it refers to user accessible systems using open source industry supported protocols. 3rd party add-ins that have protected patents like Java, Silverlight, Flash, WMA, etc, are not part of the internet content, but are external 3rd party content. If I let you download a word doc from my site and you don;t have Office, you have still connected to my portion of the internet successfully. It;s not my fault you can't access all of the content i've hosted, and it's not Apple's fault their device does not YET include these 3rd party programs that Apple is prevented by patent holders from internally developing.
The iPhone can go to every site Opera or Firefox can, and displays it exactly as those browsers would. Those browsers will also display a flash error or java prompt if you have not also installed the correct plug-in.
When discussing "Internet in your Pocket" Apple allways refered to the safari browser itself, and was never discussing other applications. Mail, SMS, and other IP services were allways discussed seperately in the adds. It is a common association that "Internet" refers to the WWW, and that e-mail refers to messaging, and Chat refers to IM, and Telnet and other protocols are also seperate. Their advertising made no attempt to convey that you could use the iPhone to connect to every service everywhere on every port, nor that 3rd party anything was supported. in fact, they made it quite clear in their marketing that in fact there was NO 3rd party support, so in fact, their advertising was properly confined to defined and reasonable limits as well as to a target audience. This order is bulshyte.
Anything proprietary is not "The Internet" The internet is open source, defined as a small set of protocols for displaying online content. Protocols shifted over the IP network are not part of the internet. The internet is a subset of protocols, not an umbrella of all of them.
"The Internet" is accessed with a browser. "Internet Mail" is a web page that access e-mail through a browser, but is considdered diferent from e-mail, which uses IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc, and which requires other custom applications. Every e-mail server is on the net, but not all of them are on the "Internet."
Ansl, anything embeded inside of a web page is called content. Some of that content requires a 3rd party propprietary interpreter, API, or application. The Internet hands over content but displaying it or accessing it may require additional tools. These tools are not on the internet, but on your device, and hence are not part of the internet.
A file server gives me access to data files. There is no guarantee I can open the file it sends me, but I can acces sit nonetheless. HTML has built in rules for embedding 3rd party content in a site that is not capable of being displayed on the internet. If a plug-in or 3rd party external application is required, it displays such a notice. Seeing this notice (not a loading error, but an indication specifically showing the site loaded proerly, but some content will not be streamed), means the site was displayed properly, and thus, the iPhone accessed it correctly.
NO browser on the market supports Flash or JAva on its own. ALL of them require a plug in. The default configuration does NOT include flash or java for any browser. The iPhone is exactly that. It's up to the user to acquire these 3rd party plug-ins. It just happens that they are not available.
This is in complete contracts to other moble devices, which can not display the complete codeset of HTML itself, as all other browsers can, but require special "mobile" versions of websites to be created by site administrators. The ide here is that site admins need to do NOTHING extra to accomodate iPhoner users, thus we can access all of the internet the same as we do at home, provided we add support for 3rd party add-ins if site operators choose not to provide (as they used to) flash free versions of their sites (which they ALL should!!!)
Right, IE can't browse a lot of sites, including Mobile.me at Apple. Safari, Mozilla, and Opera all can't go to Microsoft.com anymore since they don;t support silverlight. Only IE and Firefox (with a plug in and some hacks) can access Activex controlls on many sites. Most porn sites use proprietary video codecs that can't be displayed without a 3rd party installer, and then still only incertain browsers.
"THE WHOLE INTERNET" means this: you are not restricted to websites specifically designed for your mobile device. You can see a site the exact same way you'd see it at home. If at home, you have not installed flash, you'll see the same error you do on the iPhone, linking you to an installer page, but since you can't install it on your iPhone, you can't go there. No different from trying to surf TechNet on FireFox in Linux.
This order is yet another example of how undereducated government comitties get things wrong, and why buyer beware should be the golden rule once again.
uh, we're not notifying CONSUMERS here, we're notifying employers in factories who deal with these things.
It;s FUD like this that makes people shy away from CF bulbs, due to mercury poisoning potential. Sure, there's anough mercury in a single CF bulb to increase the PPM concentration in a room by a few, but this is actually still far below what the EPA defines as concentrations in breathable air for periods of long exposure. There's more mercury in the air outside that you'll breath than in a bulb, and 90% or so of what's in the bulb is in a solid and stable state, and even if released, is not a hazard...
Inside an LED, which is damn near impossible to break, and hermetically sealed, is enough of this carcinigin that you need tens of thoussands of them to reach dangerous levels, and even then its a MILD carcinigin, and you'd have to be exposed at dangerous levels for a long time.
They pass rulings like this so that companies are forced to make effortys to protect employees from exposure, nothing more. This will have ZERO effect on the LED market, period.
I don't know where you live in lower NY, but when my parents bought their house in Upper Westchester 32 years ago, it was a LOT more than 30K... closer to 85 actually. And when they sold it in the mid 90s it was barely worth 300K, and recently sold again last year for just over 450. They did a lot more than upkeep it.
Housing generally increases faster than wage income since it's not only wages, but material costs that increase over time. The value of a house is not set by "what tyhe market will bear" but by "what it costs to build a similar house in labor and materials in a similar location."
I have a house for sale in SC now, for about 200K. I bought it 3 years ago for about 170. To build that exact house today will cost 220K. The land value has only increased 5K in that time, the rest in in materials and labor. This is down from 250K after the mortgage buble burst since forclosed homes in this area were numerous, but that stock of homes will be gone soon enough and prices will inflate somewhat (cost to build is closer to 250K actually, but builders are taking heavy discounting due to short term forclosure pressure).
Please don;t speak about housing market forces unless you both understand tham and can link to collaborating information supporting your conclusions.
Granted, this is/., but you're only perpetuating FUD.
In some areas, price increases more dramatically, due to the lack of land to build on and demand for proximity to other things, but generally, across the nation, you don;t see prices rise like NY, and very few places like you describe.
[Quote]Yeah, you can sell power to other states at market rates... neato.[/quote]
In SC, you can not. You can (if you still have an analog meter, which they're quickly and involumntarily replacing) run the meter backwards, and offset the meter reading, but if you over produce, the electric companies of SC do NOT credit you. You give them free energy part of the year and still buy it back at other times.
[Quote]HVDC transmission lines remain economical, in terms of electrical losses, to a distance of about 4,000-6,000 miles. The longest currently operating singe transmission lines in the world are around 1,200 miles. Losses are not zero, but for the most part are relatively negligible.[/Quote]
Mostly true, that HVDC has little distance power loss, however, the loss in converting generated power (AC) to HVDC, then back again to use at home levels is actually significant. Still less so than conventioal high power lines asing AC, but not to be completely ignored. The real solution however is in buried superconducting nitrogen cooled cables. These can be run thousands of KM, have virtually 0 loss, and can run AC or DC. The liqid nitrogen takes some significant energy to make, but the trunks are so well shielded, that once filled, little energy is required to keep the cable at -200+ degrees. The first lines are already in use in Long Island, NY, and have been operating without much fanfaire since April of this year.
We have a solution for the radiactive "wastes", which actually can be held in your hand for some time wihtout giving you much more radiation than an x-ray does. It's call Yucca mountain, at least until we build a few re-breeding facilities in the US, after which, we can reconstitute most of the Uranium already unearthed and have a few thousand years of clean safe power.
Nuclear is cheap, it;s all the lawsuits that are expensive. You can't build a reactor anywhere without blowing a few hundred million just in fees, permits, and pay-offs. The waste is not our issue, people are. We're MUCH more worried about who has ACCESS to the waste than we are who's exposed to it...
[Quote]Simply put, roofing houses with high efficiency solar cells would solve most of our issues. Areas of low sunlight coverage (which are ironically, mostly coastal) can rely on a lot of other things, such as hydro, geothermal or tidal resources.[/Quote]
Roofing all the houses in america, is not only about an order of magnitude more expensive than creating the same energy (total system cost) from Wind and water, but there's actually not enough roof in all of America to do it with. Less than half of us actually live in single family homes. Even in mine, there's not enough roof to meet my own power demands. Plus, unsubsidized (as I am here in AC) it would take more than 17 years to recoup the costs, NOT including annual maintenance, extended warranty, and storm damage deductibles. Given the estimated life of solar panels, most of us would never break even, and our gevernment does not have enough money to subsidize more than 2-3% of us if we all jumped on the bandwagon. Efficiency needs to more than double, and cost needs to drop 75% before it even begins to compete with wind. Oh, and where do you plan to store all the overgeneration so we can use it at night? My cost analysis did not include home battery systems, nor the bilklions it would take (read: higher than the cost of nationwide wind farms, total) to build kenetic storage systems just for that purpose.
Much of what tou said is dead on right, but is either not looking at the total picture, or included some facts that propogandists got into your head (not your fault!)
Check out www.dotyenergy.com for a workable, afordable solution.
When I built my home 3 years ago, i looked into full environmental efficiency. Fully insulated walls, more than 2 feet of attic blown foam, insulation under the tile floors, properly sealed house, etc. The construction costs for doing that added up to basically 10 years of time to pay off, and that was on a NEW construction, from the ground up. In the long run it might have been worth it, but when I found out those upgrades count NOTHING towards home equity, I abandoned it in favor of sliding the insulation guy a $100 spot to blow a little extra in the attic (instead of an extra $1500 for the same)
I have good (modern standard) plus a little bit of extra insulation. I have a 14 seer AC unit. I have a good fridge and chest freezer and all new energy star appliances. My power bill at the house is about half of what I had at my old house, which was brick, and 200 sqft smaller. The biggest difference? good windows and solar reflecting film on them. To take that further might have saved me $20-40 a month, and would have cost thousands.
Geothermal is a nice idea, but doesn't help much when your ambient temp is 90+ in the summer. I have a friend here who uses it, and he had to add an AC to back it up. Sure, his AC only runs a few hours a day instead of mine like 12, but the cost of the geothermal system FAR outweighed the simple utility bill excess (since geothermal still actually requires energy in the form of a water pump, and the central air system to blow over the heat exchangers) He's got about a 20 year pay-off on that. In the winter, goeothermal does not work the other way for him, and he has the same heating bill as me to within about 10% / sq foot.
Biofuels are VERY bad. Experts estimate we starved 300,000 people last year to make the ethanol that is only 10% of our current gasoline mix. We can NOT sustain 100% liquid fules on that. Oceanic biofuel can be done, at about $9 per barel in mass quantity, if they can figure out how to make it work, but it heats the ocean FASTER than global warming to do it, so try again.
Wind is the way to go. Actually, thanks to www.dotyenergy.com, we can not only use wind for electricity, but also for ALL of our fuel needs, and at about $60/bbl, half the current cost of Gas.
It does not need to be expensive in the short term. Investment in wind is a self repaying system, taking typically less that 2 years to offset the cost of the windmill. With WindFuels, not only can we sell the fuel at a better price than the electricity, but you also get to sell O2 as a resource as well, it re-uses 60% of the water it needs (which IS sustainable as it doesn't need that much), and we'd be finding a use for all that sequestered CO2 from coal (which would eventually be replaced with liquid fuels in the long run).
Solar is GREAT for hot water, really bad for electricity. Most people forget, only a68% of americans own a home, and many of those are simply space in a larger apartment building, condo, or other multi-family complex.
I have a 1400 sq foot house (1790 under room including garrage). I live in SC where it's nice and sunny most of the year. I got a quote from BP for a solar install.
Even though I'm lucky, and more roof faces south than any other direction, covering the entire roof in their best panels would not give me 100% of my energy use. I'd need a second array of panels in the back yard. This accounts for paying overuse into the grid and drawing back power from it later. Unfortunately, in SC, power I ADD to the grid is NOT removed from my bill, so in the summer, they get net free energy from me and in the winter I'd not get that back, but still get a bill.
With total costs, it would take 17+ years to pay off the solution. (assuming no major damage happened to the sysystem, which is only warantied for 10 years, and will slowly get worse generating power with age).
Since I have a LOT of roof, in the south, but many have no roof to use of their own, or smaller ones, or live in less sun full climates, we can NOT generate enough electrical power to cover the US's current residential power needs EVEN IF EVERY SINGLE RESIDENCE INSTALLS THE MAXIMUM SUPPORTABLE SOLAR SYSTEM for thier roof size. It's also about 5 times more expensive than building a superconducting grid and using the wind power, which in the texas corridor alone could generate 40% of our power, and we have enough wind nationwide to cover everyone, at subsideized, shared rates, so even the poor can get renewable energy (which woucl not happen with home solar).
Give up on solar for about 20 more years. We're getting closer, but we're no where near close enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"I am just for home produced power as much as possible"
Why spend so much generating local power??? Sure, it helps YOU, but the cost is so high for the rest of us, that it will dramatically hamper our existing free energy plans, more than trippling our already 40 trillion dollar expected outlay (best case scenario).
"100% credit as long as it is an active system that works and the cost stays stable to what it was three months before the law got signed, so there's no price bumping or gouging."
OK, several issues here. 1, subsidizing of solar and other energy have been dropping, not increasing, because the total money being subsidized is rising faster than finds are available. You can't just say "make it fee!" Somewhere, someone is paying for it (taxpayers) and with the efficiency of government, every dollar subsidized costs $1.70. 2, government can not legally price fix an item except under a condition of war. Further, price fixing at current rates will mean massive profits, as costs continue to reduce dramatically for PV each year. Price fixing on costs will stifle innovation as money spent engineering can't be recuperated in profits due to price fixing. This is bad on so many levels of economic theory I really need to just stop now...
[quote]I make US poverty level, close enough anyway, if I can afford it, so can a lot more folks.[/quote]You don't understand what the poverty level is do you... It's currently $10,210 for an individual, $20,650 for a family with 2 kids. That's both parents working for less than $5 an hour worked 40 hours a week, and that's BEFORE tax deductions. For a family of 4, that's less than $400 a week total. Assuming you can find rent in a rat hole trailer for $500 a month, and your food costs stay under $100 a week, and your total bills (phone, power, water, trash, etc) are under $400 a month, you have $300 left, total, BEFORE taxes are deducted to cover your car, gas, insurance, and household expenses. Assuming you installed solar, this meand you OWN your home, and thus also pay property taxes, which I'm guessing for you approach $2,000 a year, or just over $150 a month, and since uncle sam already took 30% of what you make out, you're in debt before I even start talking about other costs, like birthdays and Christmas, I didn't even include cable TV service, let alone solar PV. Knock out power bills, and you might save 2-300 a month with solar, assuming you have $25K in home equity to back it with, and get a good 2nd mortgage interest rate, you're still looking at $300 a month for 10 years anyway. This also assumes your mortgage and escrow are $500 a month combined, as I noted above.
"As to the US exporting, I could care less" Again, a failure to have any sense at all about economics. Further, our lack of exporting is WHAT IS STARVING THESE PEOPLE. It's not about "learn to grow food" it;s about there IS NO LAND TO GROW IT ON!. China is shrinking in population. India is shrinking in population. The world total is shrinking in population. Problem is, we had a nice balance of worldwide food (excluding some tribal peoples and disaster areas where, well, as you said, evolution works). Problem is, we reduced that food output by about 3%, and dramatically raised the cost of foods, like flour to make bread, 3 fold in less than a year. Their economies can't afford it, they starved. Besides, exporting cancels some national debt, and it's a product we can export indefinitely. You argued we were not starving them, I proved we were, you say "i don;t care." that's part of the problem with this country and our attitude towards "what I want, fuck the rest" does not mesh with allowing the human race to survive and overcome global warming and other critical issues.
"If people want to live in high rise termite cities with no way to get food or water if something happens, not my call"
It's not about them living in cities, it;s about them living in countries without enough arable land. It's about their past mistakes and culture catching up with them,
Elecs are more common than gas today, especially in any home built in the last 20 years. I generally prefer gas, since I can make hotter water faster, and never seem to run out, but electric is cheaper to buy, cheaper to install, are better insulated, and with gas costs rising, cheaper to run, plus since most people are ditching their gas stoves and gas dryers, blowing $20 a month just for the hookup (before you're billed for the gas) starts to get expensive fast
on-demand (tankless) seems to all run electric only (120 friggin AMP circuit!) They don't get water quite as hot, but don't waste energy storing hot water, so are typically deemed the cheapest to operate. Unfortunately, this is a bad direction to move in, since 100 million people on the east coast each using 120 APMS concurrently taking showers at 6AM would KILL our electric grid!
Ah, give it some time. The guys here at slashdot will soon enough change their code so it renders just a poorly in IE 8 as in 7, to ensure that those not up to speed with the rest of us have at least one more barrier to overcome before being considdered passible company.
Also, "sophisticated" used to mean "corrupted" so a nice, sophisticated man vying for a political office should be a real eye opener! No wonder we're in the shit we're in.
The original Macintosh, as they refer to, I'm assuming was the 128K, released in January 1984, but I (my family) owned a Lisa, which was the same thing, just sideways, in 1983, so I've actually been using macs 25 years already...
What really makes me feel old is I used to operate an original Apple II, equipped with both processors for compiling, back in 1979. I was but a grade school kid at the time, but we had 11 of them in a manually switched network (litterally, you could turn the dial to select what machine accessed the drive, it clicked automatically a few times a second if it didn't detect a token) connected to a single drive, which I think was an 800K hard disk if I remember...
We've owned a IIc, IIGS, lisa, 128K, 512ke, Classic, SE/30, SE/40, Quadra 610 and 630, LCII (added the 2nd processor to that one for virtualizing i386), MacII SE, Mac II CX, Quadra 9500, a power computing clone, G3 toewr, G4 tower, original 233 iMac and a 333 model, a cube, an iMac G4, G5, Intel iMac, a white iBook, a G4 powerbook, a MacBook Pro 15", a mini, and an appleTV. Just waiting for the new line to come out and I'll grab a new notebook and desktop. That will put our family over 30 Apple machines in less than 30 years.. Wow!
In the same time, I've had an IBM PS/2 (8088?), a Tandy1000, a DX4/100 clone (overclocked to 133 beating the pentiums at the time for less money), a PIII333, AMD700, AMD64/2800, and now a CoreII Duo 6500, or and an older Thinkpad, early pentium, was mized in there somewhere...
Sad, since I lived within 20 miuntes of IBM's HQ in Armonk, NY for most of that last 30 years... PCs are necessary for my line of work, but I've allways loved and allways will have an Apple.
Here's a start on the starvation data: we're at the lowerst worldwide wheat production in 34 years, and flour has risen 3 fold in cost in the last year alone. WEe're producing a lot of food, but the cost is being placed at a point where poor nations simply can't buy any. The USA is the worlds largest exporter of food. Record amounts of that going to ethanol mean less is going out through our borders. http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=5518
Home battery storage is viable for PV solar, but 1: many homes don;t have an OSHA approved location to put a battery (not all of us have basements or garrages), 2: it increases the cost of the system dramatically, and the batteries require replacement about every 8-10 years. 3: fire insurance costs increase dramatically with home batteries, and several insurance companies refuse to provide fire insurance due to the potential of cascade cell failure. In the future, better batteries will hapopen, safer and cheaper, but today there is no economy of scale for it, besides that most homes won't be able to produce enough in the first place.
I do not disagree with the fact that many people needlessly spend money on gadgets and entertainment, but you're not going to get them to saccrifice that unless the ROI makes sense. Today, solar PV in may areas of this country, without government subsidy, doesn't work. In other areas, the ROI looks good enough, and 7 year terms, especially in NJ, are common turnarounds, and it's selling well. What people don;t realize is that if we simply took how much money is going into the subsidy, and insead invested that money in wind power, the effect would not only be much more 100% clean energy, but it would lower everyone's electric bills, not just the ones who both own a home and have finances available to install such a system.
Hybrid cars are a $2,000 or so extra investment, and financers understand the fuel savings alone nearly compenssates for the extra cost. Solar PV is a 20K investment with fluctuating rates of return, and non-permanant installation. Solar PV does not add equity to your5 home near its cost of install.
small hobby gardens, common? 1/2 acre plots for gardening, rare. Maybe 10% of america has enough yard to do that, likely less, and many that do are elderly and can't perform the labor alone. In other countries, less than 25% may even have a yard at all. Your aslo still ignoring the cost diference for ALL of us. Great, you can save a hundred bucks a year, but the rest of us still REQUIRE that system. If it is not a universal solution, please disregard it from this conversation.
MIT estimates a 12-15 year term before solar PV competes in even some markets as a more economical solution than wind. Call me in 12-15 years and we'll talk.
insulation requirements, I completely agree, are a joke. Since however, few existing houses can be properly upgraded, and imposing too strict of a building code on new homes will destabalize the market, we have to taker baby steps. I built my house 3 years ago, and had great windows, appliances, and insulation put in, within reason. I tipped the contractor $100 cash to add a bunch of extra blowfill insulation in the attic, and mu new house, which is larger than my old, has about 30% less electric bills. Going further was possible, but at diminishing rates of return (and would have raised the cost of the structure beyond appraised values, and thus would have prevented bank financing without a larger downpayment, making this even more impossible for most of America).
Conservation, I'm right with ya. outlaw Incandescent bulbs, increase the SEER requirements on AC systems, slowly over time tighten building requirements, make appliances meet ever higher energy standards, start making PCs and other appliances use less and less trickle powewr and more efficiently sleep when appropriate. We CAN do a lot there, and we are continually improving. That's not part of this argume
Yes, this may be the best storage method, but it's still 3X the cost of using wind to make the energy in the first place, and salt storage, though the most efficient, roughly doubles the cost of the power system totqal, and since wind is globally constant (to within about 20%) and since we can make more power from wind by nearly an order of magnitude across the same acreage of land, we're better to use wind for this.
Further, unless we interconnect northern and southern hemespheres into a massive solar grid, we're going to need a LOT of salt to store enough energy for the entire USA to make it through the winter.... Can you trust the central american nations to not screw with out power lines (let alone give us access to bury them?)
Salt storage in intended to be a less-than-24-hour solution, or to provide an extra trickly of energy over a few overcast days. Longer termk storage, like uphil water is a better and cheaper solution in most areas, but still requires massive excavation projects. It;s better we simply put up more wqindmills then we'll ever conceivably need.
For discussions of alternative energy systems, and a REAL option for the replacement of oil fules, check out www.dotyenergy.com
We don;t need storage, and environment thrashing construction projects. Ultracapacitors can be used locally to handle sudden neighborhood spikes, but the best solution is simply more wind generators.
Wind does not subside nationally, only locally. Looking at wind speed reports from category 7 wind zones, the toal energy available from wind in thos eareas virtually never drops more than 20%. Keep in mind, in most of these areas, we can't even run the turbines as fast as they can spin, or they'd fly apart. We use breaking systems to stifle the speeds, so when wind drops minor amounts, we just use less braking, and get the same power.
When wind does drop locally, superconducting cables like those in use on Long Island and several other countries, and HDVC on shorter runs, can rpovide wind energy from other locations.
Most wind farm only let 80% of their generators spin at any time. Spinning up more handles peak needs, or lighter winds. Overproduction could also be used to make WindFuels (see www.dotyenergy.com) and we can use liquid fuels to power supplemental power plants for steam electric generation. Excess fules produced? no problem, they're cheaper than gasoline to make and will readily and easily be sold into the market for a proffit.
...but germany COULD have invested in wind power just the same way, and could currently be generating 3+GW of excess power instead of 1, and doing it centrally in a fashion that's easier to account for in the grid and cheaper to compensate for in off-peak (sun set) hours. This would have offest the average power bill by about 4 euros per month, which would have led to MORE wind power at a faster rate...
Also, current solar technology on single family homes can account for typically 70% or less than their energy use. Some homes are lickier than others, but most homes can not self produce 100% power. Further, most people live in multi-family homes, not singles, and shared roof space is insufficient. Covering every roof in the entire country would not produce enough power to offset the use, and the cost of doing so woul dbe close to 5X the cost of a similar producing wind farm.
All well and good, but even using advanced solar cells just coming out onto the market for the commercial sector, net yet available to average people or smaller companies, it;s still 3 times the cost of wind power.
Lets look at $ / MWH generated, and invest heaviest in the one that wins. Currently, that's wind energy by a BIG margin. Solar won't compete on cost, according to MIT and other research firms working heavily in solar, for 12-15 years at the earliest. By then, maybe we'll start shifting and diversifying.
Also, investing in a single path improves the economy of scale.
We HAVE enough land, we HAVE the grid technology (and it's included in the cost of wind), we have the manufacturing here in the USA, we have the ability.
If you want to know more, check out www.dotyenergy.com. After looking through their WindFuels information (how to make hydrocarbon fules of all kinds using wind energy in unlimited supply with less than half the CO2 output short term and less than 25% long term (after we replace coal with WindFuel power plants), then take a look at their expansive alternative energy section. They debunk every other option that's viable.
Solar PV payoffs, unsubsidezed (let's be real, if we're all doing it, the government can't afford to subsidize it) can be paid off for the average home, in a level 5 or higher solar area (aka, not the northeast, where most people live), in about 20 years. This does NOT include upkeep, storm damage replacement, or the degredation of cells over time. This also assumes your local grid will ALLOW you to connect to it for overflow/underflow, which in SC they do not, and assumes that when connected, you get market rate equivolent for the power you submit vs the power you use later.
I had BP analyze my home in Myrtle Beach, SC. 1st note that 50% of my roof DOES face south, and I am considdered a prime candidate for solar power. The size of the system to provide me 100% power (overproduce during day, but back at night, net yearly gain neutral), would have been 40% larger than my roof could accomodate for my 1700sqft single floor home. I would need to add panels to a secondary grid in the back yard. Next, since SC neither subsidized, nor does the power company buy overused poewer (they let you run the meter backwards when producing, but at the end of 30 days, if the meter reads less than the previos month's reading, you are NOT compensated the difference, and the new LOWER number is used to measure next month's bill, not your previos number, so you're actually giving them free energy as a result and further getting burned higher bills in the winter months. NOW however, the new digital meters they required us to upgrade to DON'T EVEN RUN BACKWARDS!)
Based on a 2% annual degredation in solar performance, the cost of the system, increased insurance costs, increased mortgage balance and interest charges, overproduction losses, and more, my estimated return on investment was 36 years. If I put in a smaller system that would never overproduce more than I used idly during daytime hours, my return would have been 24 years. Either way, FAR oonger than the estimated 15 year life of the panels... Even expecting a 5% increase in electricity costs anually, this system would not have paid itself off in less than 15 years anyway I looked at it.
Instead, I looked at hot water generation, which could have paid itself off in 6 years, but with that, I would have had to settle with cooler showers in the morning, or using grid power to suplement hot water anyway, so I just gave up...
As for wind and the grid, all estimates for wind power implemetation on a national scale already include an overhaul to our grid (which incidently, we're GOING to do one way or the other for a NUMBER of reasons!). Since wind across the nation as a whole does not fail the way it does locally, and using superconducting HVDC with near 0 loss, it's no issue to have power criss-crossing the continent, and we have so much wind potential, we can overproduce enough to make both electricity ANY WindFuels (see www.dotyenergy.com).
Home grown produce? Sure, about 8% of americans have land to do that on, not to mention the costs involved, and energy wasted with you doing it at home is actually MORE than doing it in large fields (once you considder that you're only getting food from your personal farm a few months of they year, plus everyone else still needs a supermarket anyway). Further, the fertilizers you use are much worse than commercial ones, and the damage you cause to the groundwater in your community is actually pretty impressive if everyone was doing it.
Also, Organic foods are MORE dangerous than non-organic acording to hundreds of leading nutricianists. Home gardening is a nice pasttime, but the time investment alone is more than most of us can commit to, and as far as pay? the typical home garden produces less than $200 of produce anually, for about 50 hours labor, so that's REALLY BAD pay in my book... I;'d rather work a seperate job (I actually HAVE a home garden, but it;s for pride and hobby reasons, NOT food production or savings).
We're already making windmills on a large scale. They're not getting much
Here's how we store power:
method 1, as with the hoover dam and other sites, we overproduce electricity to pump water up hill, and use potential energy storage for hydropower later.
Method 2, use excess electricity produced to fuel electrolysis, and then run the H2 produces through RTFS processing (see www.dotyenergy.com) with sequestered CO2 from coal plants to make liquid fuel. We use that liquid fuel to power natural gas or oil burning plants (or modified coal plants). As a bonus, overproduces liquid fuels can be sold to airlines or gas stations. (actually, EindFuels are expected to be a FULL replacement for fuel, not just a suplement power wource, but short term this is a fantastic option).
Method 3, supercapacitors. Expensive, but for instant requirements, faster than generators can spin up, it;s a better option than flywheeled thraditional generators.
However, we CAN use wind to make all our energy. Instead of storing it, we simply put up more windmills than are needed by about 20%. Wind may fail locally, say in central Kansas, for a few hours, but wind does NOT fail nationwide like that.... In fact, summing the toal wind energy available at just the class 7 sites in the USA, we have enough energy to power all of the USA and Canada, and the energy output of those sites, collective total, has not fallen by more than 20% for more than a few minutes in recorded history. You see, most of these sites are where the trade winds come close to the ground. It simply doesn't stop blowing, and the speed of the wind is actually faster than we can safely spin generators, so even when that wind lessens, we can still get 100% poewr. There's no such thing as a WINDLESS DAY, stop spreading this FUD. A local plant might not be getting enough wind, but with superconducting cables (in use today in 6 countries, includiong here on long island, so don't give me that "they're too expensive", or "we can't do that yet" crap) that doesn't matter, we'll just import energy from somewhere that is making it.
Solar, yea, solar is bad for anything outside of hot water, or plans to use it to charge electric cars (since 80% of all driving is during daylight hours it's a good match). Problem is, for what soloar will cost to invest, we can build enough windmills to make 3X the power... Solar will compete on cost in about 12-15 years, if MIT's research is accurate (longer if it's not). The proposed costs of solar include grid anhancements like wind, but do not include storage costs, which we expect to actually be equal to or higher than solar power itself, meaning for the same dollar, we can make about 6X the electricity with wind.
WE HAVE NO SHORTAGE OF LEVEL 7 WIND AREAS, AND NO SHORTAGE OF LAND TO MAKE WIND. THIS IS A MYTH PUSHED BY COMPETITIVE ENRGY TECHNOLOGIES. Adding wind to farmlands only reduces crop yield by about 1-2%. Wind can be placed over water, at the tops of mountain ranges, in chasms and gaps between mountains, they're even experimenting with it between buildings in cities like Chicago. There is enough usable level 7 land in the USA that with current technology alone we can power all of north america. Other continents fare BETTER, not worse...
Hot water switching is not automatic, they just schedule your heater to only use elctricity when you're most likely to use hot water. Well insulated heaters keep water to within 10 degrees for more than 8 hours, so making hot water at 3AM means you get a hot shower at 7AM, but without the timer, it would make hot water again at 7:15 in every house on your block, causing a strain. Since we expect you won't need more hot water until 5PM, we hold of a few hours (and provide an override switch for when you need it). It;s called off-peak hot water management.
This is very different from HV/AC regulation, as California is proposing, and which I fully support, since I actually understand it and do not listen to the FUD being spread about it. The idea there is: if you study your AC unit, it typically turns on about once every 20 minutes, running for 5-15 then turning off again. If you adjust it to wider tolerances (3 degress variance instead of the default 2) you can stretch this about another 10 minutes. So, every 20-30 minutes everyone's AC will turn over once on a hot day. Some will run longer than others, but generally, they run 50% of the time at peak heat of the day. When it turns on is another issue, for 6-10 seconds, as it spinns up, it's using as much as 4 times the energy it normally would when running. That's the real kicker. The less often it turns over, the less energy it uses total, and the fewer running at a time, the better for the grid.
California's plan, to delay your AC startup by 1-15 minutes, and not longer than 30 minutes total in a 24 hour period, is all about local neighborhood grid balancing. If there are 400 homes, we have 16,000amps availible (typically). We can't let all the ACs run at once or there will be local brownouts, and the main grid compensates by pumping swithing power to that neighborhood, which stresses transformers and risks blow outs or brown outs. However, if we can ensure that less than 70% of the AC units are running at once, and that less than 25 per 400 are spinning up at once, we can balance that load more evenly, and not have to vary power loads on such small scales, making a cheaper grid, and balancing short-spin power needs (quick access overgeneration costs as much as 10 times as much as constant power)
15 miutes without AC will mean 1-2 degrees difference in a common home on a very hot day. If your AC wants to start up, here's what happens: It requests to the grid for permission to spin up. If it gets no response, it spins up (failsafe mode). If it's told to wait, it asks again every 1 minute. After a short break, power is available, and your AC kicks in and cools you down to your normal temp, however long that takes. If it's waiting more than 15 minutes, it kicks in anyway, same if it's been delayed more than 30 minutes in the last 24 hours total. California is only talking about delaying the spin-up. When you go off again, someone else comes on. The system is designed so you should never be more than a few degrees of norm, and you should not really notice that much at all.
They "request" as does the EPA, that you set your heat/cool range from 68-82 degrees. This is unreasonable in most people's eyes. However, this is a personal choice. I'm quite copmfortable at 68 if I wear a thicker shirt, or have a blanket on the couch. At 82, I melt... 78 is more reasonable to me, and I can't sleep unless it's 74 or cooler. I would however accept that the AC thermostat could "request" power within that range, to hold me to a tighter tolerance, but at a higher meter rate if I choose to do so. Kicking in only at 80 and above I'd pay standard rates, at 79 or below, i'd be willing to pay an extra small charge, at least until we're generating electricity from 100% renewable sources.
Actually, since wind power only ever degrades locally, and even then typically does not degrade across the whole wind farm, wind mills across the rest of the USA can pick up the slack easy enough.
Any talk of building a nationwide wind system simply includes the costs of superconducting HVDC lines, like the ones we've already broaght online in Long Island, and the ones being strung up across europe as well.
Also, turbines do NOT run at 100% at all times, even in good wind. The computers control each windmill individually, and adjust farm wide to make sure no windmills run too fast, and that others, even with wind blowing, don;t spin at all. When winds slow, brakes are released on other turbines, and even though wind is slowing, power can continue evenly. It's only when long term weaknesses in blowing occur that subsequent power is needed.
Part of the issue with wind power is that people don't understand 2 things. 1 is how the individual windmills are tied together, as I described above. 2 is that typically only 80% of the mills are spinning at any time (by choice) so we have 20% more power we can generate at will. A nationwide grid will follow that norm, and even if some farm in kansas is only producing 40% of it's norm, the another 30 farms would each only need to spin up an extra 2% of their reserve. Winds do not fail across an entire nation at once, and in level 7+ wind zones, rarely fail at all.
Unfortunately, there are a limited number of places this is possible. However, if you don't just like the idea of WindFuels (www.dotyenergy.com) as a complete alternative, we could easily pump excess energy into the RTFS process and make fuels which can be used in the power plants that provide energy during luls, keeping the process 100% green, and without scarring the countryside with massive lakes and resivoirs.
OK, here's some important things to note:
1: more wind does not mean more wind power. The generators are each computer comtrolled, and some wind turbines are spun up and down depending on the current damnd the grid can handle, in cooperation with other local power stations. We can DIRECTLY control how much wind energy we make and don't make.
2: equally, When wind falls back, most of the turbines are actually spinning with brakes having slowed the blades to slightly less than full spinning potential. The systems calibrate for light wind by releasing those restrictions, and the blades still spin at speed for multiple seconds, and even then, due the the weight of the blades, don't slow down very quickly... Local power companies have pleanty of time to spin up additional power.
Now, we do still need both wind and local power in a wind power environment. Some of the windo power can be used to push water uphill for on-demand hydro power later, but that's both expensive and limited in scope.
Also, wind power in the west, and across texas can't power all of america unless we add to the grid. They are correct, our current grid can't handle it, but anytime we're talking about adding power generation, we're also including in that the idea that we'll be expanding the grid as well. A superconducting line has been running on Long Island since April. The technology is proven, we somply need to deploy a few east-west and north-south lines, and some junction points, and we can distribute wind power across the whole nation.
Now, all that said, the braking systems, preventing over and under power, long distance transmission costs, and more, mean that we loose at least 15% efficiency on wind power generation. Why not let the turbines run full tilt all the time, producing direct current for electrolysis and make H2, which does NOT have to be grid balanced power. Instead of storing the H2, and trying to spend trillions building a new infrastructure for cars million dolar fule cells to run on it (read, you and I will NEVER drive one of these), we instead takle the H2 and run it to a local mixing plant and through an RFTS process using reclamated CO2, and we can make liquid fuels, on-site, and pipeline those fuels easily and safely using our existing infrastructure and keep driving our existing cars.
Doty Energy (www.dotyenergy.com) can do this TODAY. Costs for gasoline will be about $60/bbl, half what we're paying now. The CO2 we sequester from coal burning in current power plants will go to fuel the process in combination with H2 and some water. The byproducts are limted (and less than we get from making existing fuels). Eventually, new coal plants will also be capable of using liquid fuels in place of coal, so we'll be able to use WSindFuels to make power, then sequester it, recycle the CO2, and using free energy, make more fuel, in a process that will release 75% less CO2 total (since the car's won't be sequestering it's not completely CO2 free), release fewer byproducts, and allow us to continue using technology we already have, and to be free of foreign oil.
To run the whole country on WindFuels, including grid overhauls, pipeline upgrades, windfarms, and more, will cost about 40 trillion over 30-40 years. Fortunately, building this infrastructure is PROFITABLE, and since it can be deployed gradually, with much of the profit going back to system expansion, we should be able to get a great start on it with about 100 billion invested total.
It's also nice that ANYONE can built an RTFS plant, for about $50 million, and can make and sell fuels, lubricants, and just about any other hydrocarbon, directly to the open market. This means big oil won;t be able to control and corner the market, and fuel prices will remain in proportion to costs, not in proportion to demand.
If you want to know more, check out dotyenergy.com. The site is quire detailed already, but they're actually willing to share their reseaarch and numbers, and hope you'll find fault with the solution. A co
Simple, all ports, all connections, provided you have the apporpriate client application to use said port.
This is NO different than your PC. Out of the box, you can access web, e-mail, maybe a few other systems. Even with Windows, you can't connect to port 22 (SSH) unless you ADD a program. You still have access, you can still go there, but you get an error.
"The Internet" should NOT be confused with "the frame cloud" "The Internet" is not an all encompaing umbrella, it refers to user accessible systems using open source industry supported protocols. 3rd party add-ins that have protected patents like Java, Silverlight, Flash, WMA, etc, are not part of the internet content, but are external 3rd party content. If I let you download a word doc from my site and you don;t have Office, you have still connected to my portion of the internet successfully. It;s not my fault you can't access all of the content i've hosted, and it's not Apple's fault their device does not YET include these 3rd party programs that Apple is prevented by patent holders from internally developing.
The iPhone can go to every site Opera or Firefox can, and displays it exactly as those browsers would. Those browsers will also display a flash error or java prompt if you have not also installed the correct plug-in.
When discussing "Internet in your Pocket" Apple allways refered to the safari browser itself, and was never discussing other applications. Mail, SMS, and other IP services were allways discussed seperately in the adds. It is a common association that "Internet" refers to the WWW, and that e-mail refers to messaging, and Chat refers to IM, and Telnet and other protocols are also seperate. Their advertising made no attempt to convey that you could use the iPhone to connect to every service everywhere on every port, nor that 3rd party anything was supported. in fact, they made it quite clear in their marketing that in fact there was NO 3rd party support, so in fact, their advertising was properly confined to defined and reasonable limits as well as to a target audience. This order is bulshyte.
Anything proprietary is not "The Internet" The internet is open source, defined as a small set of protocols for displaying online content. Protocols shifted over the IP network are not part of the internet. The internet is a subset of protocols, not an umbrella of all of them.
"The Internet" is accessed with a browser. "Internet Mail" is a web page that access e-mail through a browser, but is considdered diferent from e-mail, which uses IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc, and which requires other custom applications. Every e-mail server is on the net, but not all of them are on the "Internet."
Ansl, anything embeded inside of a web page is called content. Some of that content requires a 3rd party propprietary interpreter, API, or application. The Internet hands over content but displaying it or accessing it may require additional tools. These tools are not on the internet, but on your device, and hence are not part of the internet.
A file server gives me access to data files. There is no guarantee I can open the file it sends me, but I can acces sit nonetheless. HTML has built in rules for embedding 3rd party content in a site that is not capable of being displayed on the internet. If a plug-in or 3rd party external application is required, it displays such a notice. Seeing this notice (not a loading error, but an indication specifically showing the site loaded proerly, but some content will not be streamed), means the site was displayed properly, and thus, the iPhone accessed it correctly.
NO browser on the market supports Flash or JAva on its own. ALL of them require a plug in. The default configuration does NOT include flash or java for any browser. The iPhone is exactly that. It's up to the user to acquire these 3rd party plug-ins. It just happens that they are not available.
This is in complete contracts to other moble devices, which can not display the complete codeset of HTML itself, as all other browsers can, but require special "mobile" versions of websites to be created by site administrators. The ide here is that site admins need to do NOTHING extra to accomodate iPhoner users, thus we can access all of the internet the same as we do at home, provided we add support for 3rd party add-ins if site operators choose not to provide (as they used to) flash free versions of their sites (which they ALL should!!!)
Right, IE can't browse a lot of sites, including Mobile.me at Apple. Safari, Mozilla, and Opera all can't go to Microsoft.com anymore since they don;t support silverlight. Only IE and Firefox (with a plug in and some hacks) can access Activex controlls on many sites. Most porn sites use proprietary video codecs that can't be displayed without a 3rd party installer, and then still only incertain browsers.
"THE WHOLE INTERNET" means this: you are not restricted to websites specifically designed for your mobile device. You can see a site the exact same way you'd see it at home. If at home, you have not installed flash, you'll see the same error you do on the iPhone, linking you to an installer page, but since you can't install it on your iPhone, you can't go there. No different from trying to surf TechNet on FireFox in Linux.
This order is yet another example of how undereducated government comitties get things wrong, and why buyer beware should be the golden rule once again.
I'd post a smart comment, but I'm laughing so hard my brain won't work! Mod parent up!
uh, we're not notifying CONSUMERS here, we're notifying employers in factories who deal with these things.
It;s FUD like this that makes people shy away from CF bulbs, due to mercury poisoning potential. Sure, there's anough mercury in a single CF bulb to increase the PPM concentration in a room by a few, but this is actually still far below what the EPA defines as concentrations in breathable air for periods of long exposure. There's more mercury in the air outside that you'll breath than in a bulb, and 90% or so of what's in the bulb is in a solid and stable state, and even if released, is not a hazard...
Inside an LED, which is damn near impossible to break, and hermetically sealed, is enough of this carcinigin that you need tens of thoussands of them to reach dangerous levels, and even then its a MILD carcinigin, and you'd have to be exposed at dangerous levels for a long time.
They pass rulings like this so that companies are forced to make effortys to protect employees from exposure, nothing more. This will have ZERO effect on the LED market, period.
I don't know where you live in lower NY, but when my parents bought their house in Upper Westchester 32 years ago, it was a LOT more than 30K... closer to 85 actually. And when they sold it in the mid 90s it was barely worth 300K, and recently sold again last year for just over 450. They did a lot more than upkeep it.
Housing generally increases faster than wage income since it's not only wages, but material costs that increase over time. The value of a house is not set by "what tyhe market will bear" but by "what it costs to build a similar house in labor and materials in a similar location."
I have a house for sale in SC now, for about 200K. I bought it 3 years ago for about 170. To build that exact house today will cost 220K. The land value has only increased 5K in that time, the rest in in materials and labor. This is down from 250K after the mortgage buble burst since forclosed homes in this area were numerous, but that stock of homes will be gone soon enough and prices will inflate somewhat (cost to build is closer to 250K actually, but builders are taking heavy discounting due to short term forclosure pressure).
Please don;t speak about housing market forces unless you both understand tham and can link to collaborating information supporting your conclusions.
Granted, this is /., but you're only perpetuating FUD.
In some areas, price increases more dramatically, due to the lack of land to build on and demand for proximity to other things, but generally, across the nation, you don;t see prices rise like NY, and very few places like you describe.
[Quote]Yeah, you can sell power to other states at market rates... neato.[/quote]
In SC, you can not. You can (if you still have an analog meter, which they're quickly and involumntarily replacing) run the meter backwards, and offset the meter reading, but if you over produce, the electric companies of SC do NOT credit you. You give them free energy part of the year and still buy it back at other times.
[Quote]HVDC transmission lines remain economical, in terms of electrical losses, to a distance of about 4,000-6,000 miles. The longest currently operating singe transmission lines in the world are around 1,200 miles. Losses are not zero, but for the most part are relatively negligible.[/Quote]
Mostly true, that HVDC has little distance power loss, however, the loss in converting generated power (AC) to HVDC, then back again to use at home levels is actually significant. Still less so than conventioal high power lines asing AC, but not to be completely ignored. The real solution however is in buried superconducting nitrogen cooled cables. These can be run thousands of KM, have virtually 0 loss, and can run AC or DC. The liqid nitrogen takes some significant energy to make, but the trunks are so well shielded, that once filled, little energy is required to keep the cable at -200+ degrees. The first lines are already in use in Long Island, NY, and have been operating without much fanfaire since April of this year.
We have a solution for the radiactive "wastes", which actually can be held in your hand for some time wihtout giving you much more radiation than an x-ray does. It's call Yucca mountain, at least until we build a few re-breeding facilities in the US, after which, we can reconstitute most of the Uranium already unearthed and have a few thousand years of clean safe power.
Nuclear is cheap, it;s all the lawsuits that are expensive. You can't build a reactor anywhere without blowing a few hundred million just in fees, permits, and pay-offs. The waste is not our issue, people are. We're MUCH more worried about who has ACCESS to the waste than we are who's exposed to it...
[Quote]Simply put, roofing houses with high efficiency solar cells would solve most of our issues. Areas of low sunlight coverage (which are ironically, mostly coastal) can rely on a lot of other things, such as hydro, geothermal or tidal resources.[/Quote]
Roofing all the houses in america, is not only about an order of magnitude more expensive than creating the same energy (total system cost) from Wind and water, but there's actually not enough roof in all of America to do it with. Less than half of us actually live in single family homes. Even in mine, there's not enough roof to meet my own power demands. Plus, unsubsidized (as I am here in AC) it would take more than 17 years to recoup the costs, NOT including annual maintenance, extended warranty, and storm damage deductibles. Given the estimated life of solar panels, most of us would never break even, and our gevernment does not have enough money to subsidize more than 2-3% of us if we all jumped on the bandwagon. Efficiency needs to more than double, and cost needs to drop 75% before it even begins to compete with wind. Oh, and where do you plan to store all the overgeneration so we can use it at night? My cost analysis did not include home battery systems, nor the bilklions it would take (read: higher than the cost of nationwide wind farms, total) to build kenetic storage systems just for that purpose.
Much of what tou said is dead on right, but is either not looking at the total picture, or included some facts that propogandists got into your head (not your fault!)
Check out www.dotyenergy.com for a workable, afordable solution.
When I built my home 3 years ago, i looked into full environmental efficiency. Fully insulated walls, more than 2 feet of attic blown foam, insulation under the tile floors, properly sealed house, etc. The construction costs for doing that added up to basically 10 years of time to pay off, and that was on a NEW construction, from the ground up. In the long run it might have been worth it, but when I found out those upgrades count NOTHING towards home equity, I abandoned it in favor of sliding the insulation guy a $100 spot to blow a little extra in the attic (instead of an extra $1500 for the same)
I have good (modern standard) plus a little bit of extra insulation. I have a 14 seer AC unit. I have a good fridge and chest freezer and all new energy star appliances. My power bill at the house is about half of what I had at my old house, which was brick, and 200 sqft smaller. The biggest difference? good windows and solar reflecting film on them. To take that further might have saved me $20-40 a month, and would have cost thousands.
Geothermal is a nice idea, but doesn't help much when your ambient temp is 90+ in the summer. I have a friend here who uses it, and he had to add an AC to back it up. Sure, his AC only runs a few hours a day instead of mine like 12, but the cost of the geothermal system FAR outweighed the simple utility bill excess (since geothermal still actually requires energy in the form of a water pump, and the central air system to blow over the heat exchangers) He's got about a 20 year pay-off on that. In the winter, goeothermal does not work the other way for him, and he has the same heating bill as me to within about 10% / sq foot.
Biofuels are VERY bad. Experts estimate we starved 300,000 people last year to make the ethanol that is only 10% of our current gasoline mix. We can NOT sustain 100% liquid fules on that. Oceanic biofuel can be done, at about $9 per barel in mass quantity, if they can figure out how to make it work, but it heats the ocean FASTER than global warming to do it, so try again.
Wind is the way to go. Actually, thanks to www.dotyenergy.com, we can not only use wind for electricity, but also for ALL of our fuel needs, and at about $60/bbl, half the current cost of Gas.
It does not need to be expensive in the short term. Investment in wind is a self repaying system, taking typically less that 2 years to offset the cost of the windmill. With WindFuels, not only can we sell the fuel at a better price than the electricity, but you also get to sell O2 as a resource as well, it re-uses 60% of the water it needs (which IS sustainable as it doesn't need that much), and we'd be finding a use for all that sequestered CO2 from coal (which would eventually be replaced with liquid fuels in the long run).
Solar is GREAT for hot water, really bad for electricity. Most people forget, only a68% of americans own a home, and many of those are simply space in a larger apartment building, condo, or other multi-family complex.
I have a 1400 sq foot house (1790 under room including garrage). I live in SC where it's nice and sunny most of the year. I got a quote from BP for a solar install.
Even though I'm lucky, and more roof faces south than any other direction, covering the entire roof in their best panels would not give me 100% of my energy use. I'd need a second array of panels in the back yard. This accounts for paying overuse into the grid and drawing back power from it later. Unfortunately, in SC, power I ADD to the grid is NOT removed from my bill, so in the summer, they get net free energy from me and in the winter I'd not get that back, but still get a bill.
With total costs, it would take 17+ years to pay off the solution. (assuming no major damage happened to the sysystem, which is only warantied for 10 years, and will slowly get worse generating power with age).
Since I have a LOT of roof, in the south, but many have no roof to use of their own, or smaller ones, or live in less sun full climates, we can NOT generate enough electrical power to cover the US's current residential power needs EVEN IF EVERY SINGLE RESIDENCE INSTALLS THE MAXIMUM SUPPORTABLE SOLAR SYSTEM for thier roof size. It's also about 5 times more expensive than building a superconducting grid and using the wind power, which in the texas corridor alone could generate 40% of our power, and we have enough wind nationwide to cover everyone, at subsideized, shared rates, so even the poor can get renewable energy (which woucl not happen with home solar).
Give up on solar for about 20 more years. We're getting closer, but we're no where near close enough.