End of Oil interview on local Seattle NPR station

I think one of the huge advantages of wind/solar is that they don't need to be highly concentrated. Single family homes can easily install and maintain their own solar panels right now. If you take "the size of Arizona" and divide it into several million pieces distributed over several million homes, it becomes much more reasonable. You can't have a "single family coal/oil-burning power plant" in your backyard, but you clearly can have a solar system on your roof. Its a clear advantage of the system, and should be exploited to its fullest.

As for needing sunlight, that's what batteries are for. Kinetic energy batteries would cut down on the pollution/waste of lead-acid batteries. And all of this technology is readily available today.

 

This topic is more relevent in the Environmental forum.


I'll second the solar issue. Residences aside. I wonder how much commercial rooftop space there is nationwide? My own wild guess would be that there is more area nationwide in commercial rooftop space than the state of Arizona. By this, I mean all of the flat roofs on malls, high rises, strip malls, factories, etc.

Solar panels limitations are not really limitations. They make power when it's needed most - the daytime. Factories are all online producing goods, and they are one of the larger consumers of daytime power. The panels do well to provide the additional capacity during these times. When it gets dark, and they are no longer able to produce power, well, the demand is dropping to nighttime levels anyway.

 

But that 100 SqMi isn't dedicated to the wind mills. Farming and other uses can easily coexist in the spaces between the mills.

This poses the same problem he cites for Hydrogen. Producing electricity, transmission, charging, and dis-charging the battery loses efficiency at each step. What both do well is to concentrate the available energy relatively safely and make it mobile where energy infrastructures are unavailable.

 

It is real, just pick it up

A grand daughter and grandfather are walking along the street. The granddaughter says, "Oh look grandfather, a $20 bill!" The grandfather, looks then replies, "Don't be rediculous, if the $20 bill were real someone would have picked it up by now!"

The $20 bill is real. PV panels on the roof of every residence, business, school and church - tied to the grid, provides "distributed generation" - more cost effective than highly concentrated megagenerating plants. A conservative (least cost, end use) person thinks and acts long term. A liberal (least cost, first use) person thinks and acts short term.

PV panels on every roof is long-term thinking and integrates everyone vs. an isolated megaplant. Short-term thinkers can watch their electric meters run backwards. Long-term thinks know that it is always cheaper to hold onto what you already have (sunlight) rather than constantly "going to get more someplace else."

 

Re: It is real, just pick it up

Then why are conservatives the fiercest opponents of alternative energy?

The "End of Oil" guy seems to think that we are better off producing all our energy centrally and then distributing it over an expensive (and vulnerable) grid. I agree with all the posters above who point out the tremendous advantage of distributed energy production and the potential for integrating it with current uses (rooftop solar panels, wind farms, etc.)

As an example, one of those big five-megawatt wind turbines at each section corner would be a very small obstruction to agriculture, for which the farmers could be easily compensated, and would take very little land out of production.

 

Re: It is real, just pick it up

The reality is, they are not conservative, or liberal. The current government parties are in it for themselves, and NOT for the public in which they are supposed to be serving.

Bush is a big corportaion president. He seeks to support them, so thay'll scratch his back. They get richer, he gets richer. The rest of us get the trickle down effects. Kerry is a liberal elitest who thinks he has all the answers, yet sees himself "above the masses." He has his constintuents that he will play the exact same game with that Bush is now, despite his "promises" to eliminate special interests. The only difference is, he will reach into whomever's wallet he sees fit to fund his desired results. The only special interests he's interested in elimiating, are those that aren't greasing his own palms.

The way to make a difference is to somehow get the othe 75% of the voting capable pulbic back into the polls, and get the republicrats booted OUT of office at EVERY level.

 

Re: It is real, just pick it up

Agreed.

But the difficulty is that we don't elect people by majority. We elect by plurality. So we don't get rid of the "Republicrats" unless we can get a plurality of the voters to back a single candidate; and not only for president, but in a majority of states and congressional districts.

If those 75% voted, each for his or her preferred candidate, the big two parties would still control the gummint. And the people who oppose the two big parties are spread across the political spectrum, not likely to unite behind a single candidate.

 

Possibly. Hoever, many people who don't vote, don't because they don't like either party. Getting these people back in, and voting outside of party lines, would shake things up. Even if the election was as razor thin as the 2000 election was with an out of party lines candidate, the incumbents would get a wake up call.

 

Good point.

I've been voting for "protest" candidates ever since I was old enough to vote. (Occasionally I vote for a mainstream candidate for a local election.)

Now we just have to get the rest of those non-voters to follow our example.

 

Yeah, and that 2000 election sure taught Bush a lesson!

 

I hate to get this old tired argument going again, but it was not Bush who started trying to rewrite Florida law regarding recounts, and what was supposed to be considered a properly marked ballot. Laws exist for a reaon, and one of them is not to rewrite them as one sees fit when trying to circumvent the electorial process.

 

I, too, hate to get an old tired argument going, especially one that has nothing to do with the conversation already in progress. No one was talking about the controversy over the Florida recount, so there was certainly no reason for you to introduce that into the conversation.

My point was that there is no evidence whatever that Bush (or anyone else, other than Ralph Nader himself) got any kind of "wake-up call" from the third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader in the 2000 election.

 

The issue in Florida was not the counting of the ballots. It was that 5,000 black voters were illegally turned away from the polls after the Secretary of State of Florida, who was at the same time Bush's campaign manager in the state (a serious conflict of interest!), and was appointed by Bush's brother, hired a private firm to compile a bogus list of black alleged ex-felons.

The issue is also the electoral college system itself, which was designed specifically to put some distance between the democratic process and the selection of the president.

And the issue is that Gore himself, and the Democratic party, confined themselves to the non-issue of ballots and recounts, and refused to raise the issue of outright fraud, probably because they didn't want to set a precedent, because both parties have a long and ignoble history of electoral fraud, and raising the issue now would raise doubts about the system itself.

 

I am currently reading "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" by ex CIA Robert Baer.

This book is quite a wake up on how the revolving door works for the beltway and how the house of Sa'ud affects the politics here in the US.

What I find disturbing is that the Saudi's are holding over 1 trillion dollars in US treasury plus 1 trillion in the US stock market. Combined with their control of the crude oil market: they have the USA right by the balls