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A most excellent point! I would love have a battery car that I could charge on sunlight, and if the car is charged, I would use the excess to help my house function!!
Gee! What a simple solution! (And if the car could go 60 miles round trip it would be totally functional in my life!!)
Very cool.
If an electric cars and large solar arrays are out of your budget Giant and Schwinn both make bicycles with electric assist motors. I’ve never ridden one, but I hear they’re pretty cool.
I think I’m going to change my name on here to:
Bad Grammar-Getting Worse.
Why not? The lawn chair guy made it to Idaho today. We should put him in charge of the Iraq war! He’s done at least one thing right, which is one more than Bush.
How will the energy elite lord it over the rest of us if they can’t sell us energy? How will the government tax us to keep the cash-flow they have become accustomed to if they don’t have oil products to tax? Do politicians die in small airplane accidents if they become too adamant?
I’ve raised these questions before. And I think everyone knows the answers.
My point is: That’s why you won’t have these things very soon, unless, like the person in the clip, you do it yourself.
How come they never have to refuel the space station? Do you suppose the technology has been there all along?
I can hear “conspiracy theory” as if I were Pavlov’s dog.
We aren’t driving on sunlight because it doesn’t make WHATADICK Cheney or Monkeyface Bush any money. They’re oil men. They like the oil crisis. They’re getting paid. If anyone doesn’t get that they’re not paying attention.
WRT running on solar, a great idea but what would people do who live in high rise apartments and condos (another of Will’s causes celebres)? You’d have to have a solar farm next door, correct?
re 8: You’re absolutely correct. Highrises would be a technical problem, so let’s not do anything.
Gaddis @ 5
The space station gets over 12 hours of pure sunlight every day from its solar panels. And its energy needs are pretty predictable.
Solar energy would suck in this state. We need the most energy in the winter time, when the angle of the sun is the lowest and the cloud cover the heaviest.
On the other hand, with oil at $145 per barrel, solar power should be cost-effective somewhere. 10 years ago, they said solar would not be cost-effective unless oil hit $60 per barrel.
@10
Solar is working pretty well in Northern Germany, in the spring, summer & fall.
http://www.german-renewable-en.....power.html
If it will work there it will work here.
We don’t “drive on sunlight” because we live in Washington state.
And secondly, we drive them during the day and not at night, so charging could be a bit of a problem. Unless, of course, you only plan on working every other day. At which point your boss would likely fire you.
And Michael @ 11, the panels are only being made in northern Germany, you git.
“These systems are primarily suitable for areas with high levels of solar radiation (e.g. North Africa, Southern Europe, the southern states of the USA).”
There are three months available for solar use in WA, and at least one week of each of them would have people back on the gas for the duration.
Bob Barr on THIS WEEK just said George Bush is the greatest threat to liberty in the USA!
This from a person who helped attack President Clinton!
@12
Here’s a better article for ya:
Last year, about half of the world’s solar electricity was produced in the country. Of the 20 biggest photovoltaic plants, 15 are in Germany, even though it has only half as many sunny days as countries such as Portugal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....02466.html
And btw, you don’t plug your electric car into a solar panel, you plug in into a battery charged by solar panels. Problem solved.
Who’s the git now?
What happens if your driving requires you to go more than 40-miles? Not everyone works in a cubicle or otherwise stays in place all day, every day.
And would he get the same mileage on a vehicle larger than a VW Bug? What do you do for people who have to pick up kids or run errands or do the stuff that most people with lives do in the ordinary course of a day’s events?
With the paucity of sunlight in this part of the country, will this mean building more power generation stations (nukes, dams, coal-fired plants, etc.)?
While there is a need to develop new technologies, a one size fits all and jam everyone into a sardine can on wheels approach then demanding why “everyone” isn’t doing it is simplistic.
There’s a lot of silly about all this.
The Piper
Why do the wingnut twits posting in this thread assume that (a) Seattle won’t get warmer and sunnier and (b) solar technology won’t get better or cheaper?
Why do the wingnut twits posting in this thread assume that (a) Seattle won’t get warmer and sunnier and (b) solar technology won’t get better or cheaper?
Oil is a flawed energy source and will be replaced.
@18 Roger
Your faith in God to come to your rescue is worthy of George Bush.
There is an alternative .. we may need to accept an energy lean future. That raises a lot on intriguing possibilities:
a. according t classical capitalism, wealth =capital=productivity of capital. If energy costs more, does productivity fall? Doesn’t that mean that world wealth will decline?
b. to maintain productivity, we will need to find ways of optimizing use of energy. Mass transit, centralized cities, virtual meetings, ..all these seem likely.
c. The assumption that increased value will cause a never ending spiral of increased wealth in the OPEK nations is false. At some point, the world economy fails, dragging them with us all.
d. Many forms of energy production are very cheap, IF one discounts the capital costs of constructing the plants. THI IS ESP TRUE FOR SOLAR.
e. We need to be careful in assuming that solar, or other renewables, are w/o environmental costs. We already use one solar source .. the damns!
Letters to the Editor, Sunday Edition
Mike Land of Grove, Oklahoma, wrote to the fishwrapper:
“There have been a lot of harsh words thrown back and forth between Seattle and Oklahoma City, and I am confident that it played a small part in Starbucks’ recent woes [‘Starbucks to close 600 stores,’ Business, July 2].
“The whole mess drew a lot of people together in Oklahoma to boycott Starbucks stores. ,,,
“Howard Schultz must realize that there is something called corporate responsibility, and he forgot how many Starbucks units he had actually opened in Oklahoma in the past year. It really surprises me that he put them to a literal blood sacrifice when he took our city and state to court. Looks like he did not get it his way.”
(Quoted under fair use)
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Let’s skip this Okie cracker’s weird concept of “corporate responsibility” and total ignorance of business and just say, “Enjoy paying sales taxes for your basketball palace, sucker!”
I mean, seriously, what kind of yahoos would boycott $4 lattes to demand higher taxes?
Sheesh.
@19 Thanks for your energy and economic expertise, Stephen. I don’t know what we’d do without you. We’d have to perceive the obvious ourselves.
You missed one pertinent little point, though — namely, that continued human population growth (which leads, among other things, to higher energy consumption) is unsustainable.
Your observation about solar being cheap if we discount the capital costs is precious! You could readily turn that into a generalization that applies to just about everything. For example, space travel is cheap if you disregard the capital costs and look only at astronauts’ salaries, etc. And if investors didn’t have to put up capital to buy stocks, well, stocks would be free!
As for whether there’s a divine power or not, I can’t prove it to you one way or the other, so that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. Apparently, you already have. So have I.
Actually, sometimes stocks are free! For example, I got all of my Starbucks stock for free. Here’s how. I bought some shares. After it went up and split several times, I sold enough to get double my original investment back, but still owned three-fourths of the shares! Because I paid nothing for those shares, I got them free. I do this all the time. I’ve sold off 1/3rd of my NOV shares, and because that stock has more than tripled since I bought it, I got the shares I still own for nothing.
Unfortunately, things work this way only in the magical world of paper finance. In the real world, someone has to put up capital for plant, equipment, and supplies. The idea is to make the other guy do it, and grab your piece of the business without paying for it. In the long run, this doesn’t work on the macroeconomic scale.
But then, neither does taxing labor 3 times as much as capital, or giving $1.5 million of tax exemptions to people who inherit money and only $10,000 of tax exemptions to people who work for their money, because in the long run, in a macroeconomic frame, this destroys the incentive to work and eventually nobody will produce anything and the economy will become unbalanced with no labor and a surfeit of capital that produces nothing for want of labor.
Deserts would be good places to set up solar farms. Sunny days are not neccesary for solar cells they work with cloud cover. Washinton has a lot of geothermal resources. Either can produce electricity and hook into the present power grid to charge up your electric vehicle. Or produce hydrogen.
A major stumbling block as noted is the major industries. Their concern would appear to be to maintain or increase profit and political power. I’m all for a reasonable profit and the abilty to have input on our own goverance. I have some doubts that this a reciprical feeling in much of the industry elite population.
I’m getting back on my bicycle, motorcycle and public transportation for most of my travel needs. I can do this, the 911 has about 270,000 mi on it and can enter semi retirement with some relief. Wonder if it could be converted to hydrogen? I’d like to make a small(1.5 seats) sports car that would run on hydrogen.
Michael @ 14
An electric car requires quite a number of heavy lead-acid batteries for the 40 mile maximum range. You would be switching lots of batteries back and forth every day. Batteries store only a fraction of the energy per unti of weight that gasoline or other hydrocarbons store. You need several hundred pounds of batteries to store the energy that a six pound gallon of gasoline stores. A major portion of the weight of an electric car is in the batteries. So you are using a considerable amount of energy just to transport your batteries.
Solar power satellites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite
@21 Roger
You believers in the Great Carrot have a great advantage over us atheists!
The point about capital is that private investment is usually a short term affair. The Saudi’s for example, may in the long term be better off NOT selling oil today. In effect, their short term profits may be eating into their log term capital.
Similarly, once built a solar farm may have very low operating costs but the capital investment to get there may be too large for any current company to pursue.
So, if you have a chance to ask the grat carrot, could you please:
“Oh Great Orange Root of All,
Riddle me this:
How much money would we need to spend to build a solar plant the would compete with the damns on the Columbia?
As for space travel, BTW, your analogy sucks. Space travle has huge expendible costs and, at elast so far, capital investments have not shown that they lower those costs. In contrast, a solar farm may be as efficient as a Grand Coulee dam.
Then there is the issue of the population implosion. Her we agree .. though I suspect the rabbits will go too. The critical, do something about issue, is how do we the privileged optimize our children’s future in light of the inevitable? For example, I believe that NAFTA helps North America compete, at some cost to the USA. Do we have the leadership to tell a Boeing worker that his grandkids will benefit from NAFTA?
The best part of that video is when he drove that car away. Did you hear the sound that car made?
A bit of hum maybe but otherwise pretty silent.
A world of electric transportation is a quieter world. It’s the kind of world I’d like to hand to my kids.
The silly wingnuts like the pooper just don’t get it. There’s a bunch of renewable sources of electricity that can make up for the less than ideal sunlight here in Western Washington and they can come from long distances over the existing grid.
One source isn’t that renewable but is practically unlimited: hot rock geothermal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.....mal_System
YLB @ 27
Tidal power also technically is not renewable. Using it slows down the earth’s rotation slightly. Of course, the existing tidal friction is already slowing down the earth’s rotation by a second a century or so, and tidal power will increase the drain on rotational energy by a much, much smaller increment than the existing drain. Maybe using a lot of geothermal will end up freezing the earth’s core in a few trillion years.
25 – For an anti-statist, you certainly are enthralled with centralized solutions that can only be financed and championed by hard core statists much like nuclear power is today.
28 – I think the sun’s rising surface temperature is on course to drying up all of the earth’s water making life as we know it impossible – in about a billion years
24 – We need much better batteries for sure. A new generation of lithium ion batteries are being looked at for the Chevy Volt that are much better than the standard lead acid batteries in that VW bug. But even still they don’t come close to the energy density of gasoline.
A company called Firefly is doing innovative things with lead acid batteries that defeat many of the shortcomings of current lead-acid batteries while taking advantage of the enormous infrastructure already in place for their manufacture.
I’ve been hearing forever about the EEStor Supercapacitor which is touted as a real game changer. They’ve recently convinced Lockheed Martin that they’re for real. No product yet though.
The problem is funding and the influence of the battery industry. For the industry, too much innovation is a bad thing. They’ve got a lot of capital sunk into what they’re doing now and they don’t want to jump onto the next thing until it makes sense to them. And battery technology isn’t a career maker to a lot of engineers.
Yeah we badly need a technology that stores energy at the density of gasoline or better if possible. Or if not, then vehicles need to be built of lighter materials like carbon fiber that are much lighter without compromising safety and load bearing requirements.
@24 Richard, your post is riddled with errors.
There is, at this time, no electric car with a 40-mile range. General Motors is working on one (the Chevy Volt) but they don’t have the battery technology yet.
Lead-acid batteries are far too heavy and inefficient to be used in electric or even hybrid cars. These vehicles use lithium-ion batteries.
Some people have conceptualized plug-in vehicles as using switchable batteries. However, the Chevy Volt will use a rechargeable bank of batteries built into the car that hopefully will last the (short?) life of the car. Replacing the batteries in electric cars is a very major expense — maybe expensive enough to scrap the vehicle.
Well, early airplanes were crude and primitive, too. So were early radios, and TVs, and phones, etc. I wouldn’t bet against the long-term feasibility of electric cars. If electric motors can pull trains weighing thousands of tons, they can power cars, too.
Roger Rabbit Quiz
Diesel locomotives are powered by:
[ ] 1. A diesel engine connected to the drive wheels by a mechanical transmission.
[ ] 2. Electric motors that get electricity from a diesel-driven generator.
[ ] 3. A bunch of hamsters in running wheels connected to the drive wheels with large rubber bands.
[ ] 4. Electricity fed to electric motors through the rails; the diesel engines are only there to make noise and smoke so it sounds and looks like a real train.
32 – The Prius right now uses a Nickel Metal Hydride battery. Ditto for practically every other hybrid on the market right now except for some of the low volume boutique tinkerers out there. Using Lithium Ion is right around the corner. The Volt will definitely have it. Within 5 years everyone else will have it too. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Toyota beats everyone to the punch.
Changing the battery in a hybrid is of necessity a big deal. It shouldn’t be easy. If it was easy then the theft possibilities would be totally out of control.
33 – Bingo! It’s 2. The Chevy Volt is a “serial” hybrid just like the typical diesel locomotive.
@26 “The Saudi’s for example, may in the long term be better off NOT selling oil today.”
Probably not. They’ve figured this one out. If the world doesn’t have a reliable supply of affordable oil in sufficient quantities to meet its economic needs, it will abandon oil in favor of other energy sources and technologies, and the Saudis will be stuck with oil they can’t sell.
The Saudis surely know the oil economy is doomed. The game is to prolong it long enough to unload their resource. In the short term, investing in increased production will drive prices down and devalue their remaining resource. But that’s exactly what the Saudis are doing, investing tens of billions of dollars to boost their production capacity from 9.5 million bpd to 12.5 million bpd. Why? To protect their market.
If they don’t, and oil prices stay sky-high, lots of things can compete with oil, given enough time to build the plants and infrastructure. Tar sands, hydrogen from natural gas, shale oil, coal gasification, solar, biofuels, etc., are all cheaper than oil at today’s crude prices.
In the 1980s, OPEC knocked the pins out from under nascent alternative energies by boosting production and knocking oil prices well below the costs of these other energies, thereby keeping their market share and prolong the world’s dependence on oil for at least another quarter century.
This time may be different because the oil-producing countries don’t have spare capacity to bring oil prices down. There may well be another oil price bust, but if so, it will be short-lived. The vast reserves we’ve depended on are being drawn down, and new discoveries don’t even come close to replacing them.
World production has been flat since 2005. Big oil companies like Exxon are investing relatively little in E & P (exploration and production), using their massive profits to pay dividends and buy back stock instead. Why? Partly because E & P investments don’t produce as much oil (or profit) as they used to, and (I suspect) partly because they realize their industry isn’t the best place to make massive new infrastructure investments because it’s a dying industry.
In any case, even the Saudis acknowledge that global production will hit a ceiling but demand won’t, which inevitably means the world will move away from oil. They want to sell their oil before it does.
In a sealed biosphere like planet earth, where is all the water going to go to?
@34 “33 – Bingo! It’s 2. The Chevy Volt is a ‘serial’ hybrid just like the typical diesel locomotive.”
This technology has been around only since, oh, 1895 or 1917 or 1929, depending on which stage of development you use to define the first railway diesel locomotives.
@36 It doesn’t go anywhere. It becomes a different form of matter.
36 – Read all about it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci.....649913.stm
A pessimistic view to be sure.
36 – Somewhat more optimistic but pretty grim.
http://space.newscientist.com/.....news_rss20
Of course this is all academic. It’s too far ahead, beyond any rational concern.
We should be more worried about Greenland or Antarctica melting.
While I’m not normally into conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats, this is one subject where I’m going to have to break out my Reynolds Wrap.
We had functional electric cars ten years ago. California required that a certain (rather small) percentage of vehicles be “zero emissions vehicles”, and so was born the General Motors EV-1 and the Toyota RAV-4 Electric (among others). People loved them. GM and Toyota couldn’t (wouldn’t?) build them fast enough.
The GM EV-1 had a top speed of 85 mph, and a range of 160 miles on a single charge.
When the law changed, for reasons that we could debate, GM immediately cancelled the program. They had leased, rather than sold all of the EV-1 vehicles, so at the end of the lease, they recalled them all (to the loud protests of the folks leasing them) and, despite offers to purchase them, instead chose to have them all destroyed.
Toyota insisted on continuing to build and sell its RAV-4 electric, but the company holding the patent on the battery technology refused to allow it to be used on large capacity batteries. When Panasonic (the producer of the battery) and Toyota tried to make them anyway, the patent holder sued and won an injunction.
Who (I hear you asking) bought the company that held that patent, then sued Toyota and Panasonic? Who has that kind of clout that they could take on two of Japan’s biggest companies?
That would be Chevron.
Here’s a bit more “good news”. I recently saw an ExxonMobil commercial, where a chemical engineer was touting the fact that they (ExxonMobil) were leading the world in battery research, and had patented a number of innovations in battery technology.
Anyone else need some Reynolds Wrap?
References:
http://tinyurl.com/33fspd – Chevron’s patent on NiMH technology
http://www.electrifyingtimes.com/ev1crush.html
http://www.cleanup-gm.com/ev1.html
@41 GM spent about $500 million of its own money (plus another $500 million of government money) to produce 457 EV-1s. At a cost of about $2 million each, they were leased for the sticker equivalent of $34,000 to $44,000 each. Not exactly a going concern. This looks like something the green eyeshade boys would kill as fast as they could.
So why do we use lead-acid batteries in regular automobiles, if NiMH’s or LiON’s have a higher energy density? Those lead-acid car batteries weigh about 50 pounds. Maybe a NiMH or LiON could do the same at 20% or 25% of the weight? This would reduce the weight of the average car by over 1%, and allow gas mileage to increase by 0.2 or 0.3 miles per gallon.
Roger:
Well, yes, but…
When GM came up with the figures you’re quoting, they were telling the truth, but neglecting to point out a few things that are true of all new production vehicles.
Yes, if you enclude all of the research and production costs in starting a new vehicle line, setting up distribution, new contracts with parts suppliers, etc… into the costs of the EV-1, then they were, indeed very costly.
Normally, those costs are deferred and spread over hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
GM chose to severely limit production of the EV-1. They had thousands of people on waiting lists for the vehicles, even though GM refused to allow the vehicle to be taken out of the states of California and Arizona.
The research had been done, and the production line was in place. Buyers were begging for the vehicles. GM refused to sell, and once the ZEV requirement was repealed, immediately dismantled the production line and recalled the vehicles. Offers to purchase existing vehicles were denied.
Sorry, but the only green eyeshade folks involved here were over at Chevron.
Here’s another tidbit. What would you think of an electric car with a range of 48 miles and a top speed of 50 mph? If you could get a new one for around $17,500? You can, you know. Except…
That’s the price of a new one in Great Britain, including their rather steep VAT. If you bring one to the US, it must be equipped with a “speed limiter” that reduces top speed to 25 MPH.
http://www.goingreen.co.uk/store/content/gwiz
While a second car with a range of around 50 miles and a top speed of 50 MPH would be really useful, reducing the top speed to 25 also limits its utility dramatically.
You sure I can’t interest you in some Reynolds Wrap, Roger?
@29 YLB, in my opinion, a large scale industrialization, and energy generation effort in orbit, trump any political concerns. I don’t believe that an enterprise of that scale can be effectively managed by a rigid bureaucracy, hense I see nothing but benefits for the nation, and the world.
Okay, I have done some research on energy density of rechargeable batteries:
Lead-acid is 30-40 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg).
The best marketed technology right now is lithium ion, at 160 Wh/kg, and lithium ion polymer, at 130-200 Wh/kg.
This is still a fraction of the energy in gasoline. A kilogram of gasoline (a little over 1/3 gallon) has 44,000 BTU’s of energy. A watt-hour is about 3.5 BTU’s. So a LiON battery will only have 570 BTU’s per kilogram, and a LiON polymer up to 700 BTU’s per kilogram.
Electric motors do tend to be more efficient than combustion engines. Nearly all the electrical energy is converted into propulsion, while probably half or more of combustion energy becomes heat instead of propulsion. Also, you don’t need the various apparati for combustion on an electric powered car.
Still, gasoline has more than 50 times the energy per weight than the best currently available batteries. A typical gas or diesel auto holds 16 gallons (about 100 pounds) and can go over 300 miles on the highway, and over 250 miles in town. An electric car can have five times this weight in batteries, and less than one-fifth the range.
There is some hope with nanowire batteries, which may be able to have 10 times the number of lithium ions per kilogram. If that really develops, it may be possible to have electric cars with the same range (or greater) than gas or diesel cars, with only a couple hundred pounds of batteries.
And if we can ever get batteries with a greater energy density than gasoline, then portable laser rifles may become feasible.
John Barelli @ 44
Maybe you should try on the Reynolds wrap?
The UK electric cart in question (I say “cart”, instead of “car” for obvious reasons), weighs 400 kg without batteries, and requires 265 kg of batteries to get a 48 mile range. That is 583 pounds of batteries stuffed in a cart that weighs 880 pounds without batteries. It also takes 8 hours to charge your cart batteries. Although you can charge them 80% in just 2.5 hours.
Richard:
My point about the “cart” as you call it, is that for a modest price, it would easily suffice as a second vehicle for many, if not most families.
If only the government would allow it to be sold without the speed limiter.
Folks over in Great Britain can buy these today, and they’re rather popular.
I’ve looked at my own family’s driving, and even though I live several miles outside the city limits of Gig Harbor, it would suffice for most of our driving needs.
Yes, I’d still need a regular gasoline-powered car for long distances, but I currently need to have two cars anyway.
Instead, however, there is an artificial limitation put on the vehicle that makes it almost useless.
Go back, if you would, to the original idea of this thread. Why don’t we have functional electric vehicles? Old guys tinkering in their garages can put one together out of an old VW, that would suffice for many people’s commuting and everyday driving needs.
Everyone? No, of course not. No more than my 91 Capri would meet the everyday driving needs of someone driving a soccer team across the state.
The point is that given the price and capabilities of the UK version of this “cart”, there would likely be a demand.
I would also point out the “SmartCar”, currently sold in the US. The gasoline version is highway legal. The electric version requires a speed limiter (25 MPH), and may not be driven on streets with a speed limit of over 35 MPH.
If you can manage to tell me how a vehicle carrying volatile, explosive fuel is safe at highway speeds when a battery powered version is not, I’d be interested in your reasoning.
And considering how many families have two (or more) cars, it seems likely that there would be a market for these, except for the artificial speed limitation.
This is a currently available product that there is a demand for, but the supply is being artificially limited. Some of the companies involved in keeping the supply limited are the same folks reaping record profits on gasoline, and who were (until recently) reaping record profits on gasoline powered vehicles.
If buggy whip manufacturers had had the same clout as the oil companies, what would we be driving today?
Humbling and daunting numbers.
2007 U.S. Primary Energy Sources:
Coal: 22.8%
Nat Gas: 23.6%
Petroleum: 39.8%
Nuke: 8.4%
Hydroelectric: 2.5%
Geothermal: 0.35%
Solar: 0.08%
Wind: 0.32%
Biomass (ethanol, wood and the like): 3.6%
Total Fossil Fuel: 86.2%
Total Renewable: 6.8%
The rest is nuke + imported electricity.
The only practical way to beat down that fossil fuel mountain is to make more efficient use of that fossil energy while steadily swapping out the dirty sources for cleaner and yep that will have to include nukes to both increase the inventory and replace the old ones that are breaking down. But I don’t see any practical way to get to 250 or 300 operating nukes by 2050 much less 1000.
It’s a tough problem.
Rabbit
How do you know what the Saudis think?
Look, SA has no other resources. Once the oil is gone, given there hypergeometric growth in population, how do you propose they will pay for their existence?
Your assumption that they are afraid to raise prices because the invisible hand will somehow cause an alternative, cheap technology seems to me be religious in nature. Noone I have read suggests that there is another equally efficient fule source visible today.
SS @ 50
The Saudis can develop and export solar power. They get a LOT of sunshine!
At least the Iranians are being pretty sensible these days on population growth. Iranian fertility is only 1.71 children per woman. Saudi fertility is 3.89 children per woman, while even the United States is at 2.1 children per woman — slightly above the replacement rate.
Noone I have read suggests that there is another equally efficient fule source visible today.
Yes, it’s called energy efficiency. The energy cost of a dollar of GDP has plunged radically from the early seventies. A revolution in communications and computing among other factors has resulted in more getting done with much less expenditure in energy. From about 18,0000 BTU per dollar of GDP in 1970 to just under 9000 today.
And there’s still a long way to go. The U.S. is not as efficient as Europe and Europe is not even as efficient as Japan.
YLB @ 49
I think we could build 250 nukes or even 1,000 in the next 40 years if we really wanted to. We probably won’t need to, of course. I have read that we could supply all of the world’s energy needs for the next 8,000 years through fission, if we use breeder technology to convert U-238 to plutonium and thorium to a different isotope of fissionable uranium (I think U-233 or U-234).
We could also do a hell of a lot with solar power. The German solar plants do work pretty well, but a solar plant in Arizona could actually be profitable with little or no subsidy.
YLB @ 49
Your numbers add up to 101.45%
45 – Complete pie in the sky. An energy system that vulnerable to disruption will never come to pass.
I know of no better solution to energy supply than the distributed solution – energy generated as close as possible to where it’s used. It conquers the transmission loss problem and the security problems – it’s also much more market friendly throwing off much needed jobs. It uses a variety of sources: solar, wind, biomass, tidal, geothermal – and technologies: PV, CSP, Turbine, Pyrolysis, fuel cells, etc.
53 – Breeder technology is very complex and unforgiving as well as expensive. Canada is right now building just 2 nukes that are way over budget. Multiply that many times with breeders.
54 – I was rounding. See my source. They go over 100 percent too.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0103.html
Perhaps the faith in the invisible hand is well placed. Or???
While I am an atheist, even when it comes to the invisible hand, I do believe in doing what can be done.
That is why I feel we need to try Jimmy Carter’s approach once again. Americans need to learn to live a different life style.
The most striking issue is that efficiency and conservation are good answers. However, I would be very interested in reading the proportion of US petrol consumption that goes to the daily commute? How expensive is that new village in Carnation? My guess is that this is huge part of the US consumption problem but how do you turn the urge to the burbs around without a massive loss in real estate value?
A similar issue is the American belief in the free standing home. Free standing house must be less efficient than high rises, but … what happens to our economy if that change happens fast?
BUT, even if we can fix this part of our behavior, the need for petrol is simply not going away because petrol and petrol served fuels are simply so efficient compared to anything else. Electric cars are a good idea BUT electricity ain’t gonna power planes, trains, boats, or 18 wheelers. (Well maybe trains)
Imagine trying to power a jet with batteries!
Another unpleasant issue may be the fuel costs of living in different areas of the nation. What is the real cost of life in Las Vegas? or for that matter Alaska?
@24
You’ve got it a bit backwards, the house has a big battery and the car has it’s batteries, no switching. Yes you loose a bunch of efficiency that way. The world’s not perfect and I was just pitching an idea, not trying to sell a ready made system.
Please read most what I write here as big picture idea pitching. I know about autism, gardening, commercial fishing and bicycles. Electrical engineering, not so much.
re 41: Regarding the sanity of believing in ‘conspiracies’, I would ask you two simple questions:
1- Are there laws against criminal conspiracies?
2- Were the lawmakers crazy conspiracy theorists?