Discussion on:

Energy policy: Follow the money

Petroleum products and the internal combustion engine remain the best way to provide motivation for personal vehicles and mass transit. Until a better solution is found, I suggest you accept the fact.

Better solutions can be found if money is provided for research and development. So please provide the money.

I agree, everyone forgets about how much power is contained in properly atomized gasoline. Think about what happens to dummys that try to light barbacue grills or camp fires with gas....

Nuclear is the RISKIEST of all, Japan now has a Trillion Dollar Eco-Disaster to fund and all of Northern Japan is radioactively polluted!

The USA cannot afford a Fukushima, yet MSM never mentions the Nuclear Industry, I know they were President Obama's largest contributor...

The longer the US delays going Solar (of all flavors), the fewer required rare earth minerals and Copper will be left on the Planet for every Country to fight over... The Resource War has begun and China is "ahead" ...

With the price of Solar (of all flavors) dropping monthly and the cost of Nuclear Reactors (construction , repairs and decommissioning) spiraling ever upward by the time many of these NEW reactors get finished, their energy will have to be subsidized by the Government!

...until the storage and base-load issues are resolved. They provide two totally different forms of energy to the grid.

Think about much smaller - very local "grids". Groups of 50 homes providing their own power and linked into a small local system (which includes commercial usages). There are a lot of commercial and residential users who are completely independent of the grid. I am and have been for 30 years. I have pity for people at the mercy of the Grid and it going down for weeks. Why put up with it? It is failing you. Try something that is more dependable. Investigate the off the grid users - there are more and more of them, and it is cost effective.

...where will the power come from when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow?

Stored energy.... in the form of heat stored in molten salts, or in batteries, or weight differential, or submerged, compressed gasses, or hydrogen created by electrolysis, or many other ways. Created energy.... in the form of geothermal, or tidal flows, wave action, or the reclaimed energy that is extending the mpg of the hybrid cars, perhaps soon, fuel cells, or even the less green forms that dominate the current scene.

until power storage technology improves something else will need to carry grids through on the nights with no wind to provide power. As is very common in my neck of the woods.

Congrats to Lynn for living off the grid so long, but most people are unwilling to adapt their power usage trends or reduce their power usage enough to live on the limited battery storage systems available today.

Sadly most people are also bad with budgeting. They lack the discipline needed to budget to replace batteries every X years like lynn.

Unless they can have unlimited power on demand 24/7 and make easy monthly monthly payments, most people cannot deal with renewable energy.

People can click the negative vote all they want. I am just calling it as I see it.

The pro-renewable people like to ignore two facts.

Renewables (excluding hyrdro) will remain a niche player (as in less than 5 percent) until grid power storage improves significantly.

If grid power storage were to improve significantly, the biggest beneficiaries would not be renewables but rather coal and nuclear. Overnight, such a breakthrough would make these two baseload power suppliers into cheap peaker plants, thus encouraging more coal and nuclear development.

Pro-renewable have no answer to this. They ignore that there is no grid power storage solution on the horizon, and that such a solution would in fact greatly benefit the two power suppliers they tend to loathe the most.

Hence, irrelevant and ignored.

ZETA joules of power- submantle- below your feet. You don't need storage with continuous untapped power like that. Check out "the Rose" in Reyjavik

Reposted From RahSolar

According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.

There are 1.2 million square kilometers of farmland in China. This is 2 1/2 times the area of solar farm required to power the world in 2030.

The first link contains the science behind all the others.

http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021@N00/3895429285/

http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg

http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SolarVsShaleLR.pdf

http://www.landartgenerator.org/images/PosterCO2trees.pdf

http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SolarVsTarLR.pdf

http://landartgenerator.org/images/SOLARSTIMULUS.pdf

http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequiredWindOnly.jpg

A few points you chose to ignore:
The reason US is behind in renewables is because they are not economical. Why waste money on something that shows no possibility of being as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels, especially natural gas? In fact, I suspect if you look at lobbying money and subsidies per megawatt of power generated you will find that 'renewables' have both more subsidies and more lobbying money. Germany is going to have to choose among more fossil fuel power generation, more nuclear power, or turning the lights out, since they have found that renewables simply dont generate enough power.

Next, you completely ignore the money spent by groups such as the NRDC, Greenpeace, and the WWF to lobby congress. I have no doubt they spend as much or more than the fossil fuel industry.
Third, those claims of threats and harassment of climate scientists are only happening to what the AGW alarmists call skeptics. They are being threatened and harassed by Greenpeace and other groups, as well as the alarmists.

Megacorporation GE paid ZERO dollars in income taxes due to "green" subsidies. Say what you will about subsidies to the oil industry, but never in their history have they been totally liberated from paying any income tax whatsoever.

This comment is so oversimplified it is laughable. Zero taxes due to any one reason is silly. The US tax code is a complex mess, and every day our representatives contintue to try an add more tae exemptions or "loop-holes" as so many people referto them.

The small fortune GE spends in Washington pays off very well for them, so much so that GE's CEO is appointed to the "President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness" while at the same time he's shipping entire divisions to China.

With leadership & central planning like this, what could go wrong?

Not a lot laughable here.

I have lived off the grid for over 30 years and have all of the electrical toys, replace my batteries every 8 years or so, and HAVE NO MONTHLY BILLS. $1,250 for batteries divided by 8 years = $ 13.00 per month. Cheep enough for you.
Also, I have not suffered financial loss due to black outs and losing everything in my refrigerator or freezer.

Good Cite Lynn! Now if you could only replace all those inverters and AC motors with super efficient Direct Current motors. Are you taking advantage of the LED lighting too?

You are right, fixing a a off the grid goal is great, but we sure have to find ways to makes everyday power hungry devices more efficient and solar compatible. I look around my house and i definitely find 99% of all devices such as refrigerators, and motors that could work on lower voltage and be efficient with no loss.

What the heck, Solyndra and their ilk didn't even bother with congress - they went directly to the top. Quite profitable for them, a bite in the shorts for the taxpayers! Amazing religion the green and man-caused climate change is - absolution from any facts whatsoever (or at least the huge bulk of contradictory facts)!

If you want to find waste, you need look no farther than the waste that goes on to bring you your daily dose of 60 cycle 110vac.Fossil fuels must be discovered, extracted, transported, stored, and used to create electricity which must be transported, converted, and finally plugged into your local grid in hopes of you using it at almost the instant it was created lest it be wasted.
Solar power may have many problems which must be solved, but these are solvable problems. The sun is real easy to find almost everywhere, using it is generally pretty clean, it shines for free, and will probably do all these things for millions of years to come. New tech always costs more to start, and, if it's good, the cost drops drastically.

There are lobbies on both sides of the issue who spend money to influence energy policy because of the lack of market forces to serve the ends. I'm not advocating a fully open market, but this article is outstandingly one-sided. Until and unless the author and his supporters openly accept that the ends must be served REGARDLESS of cost, then these arguments come across as dishonest. Ignoring China, which is almost as far away from a Western economy as you can get before the outcomes are dire (e.g. North Korea or Venezuela, etc.), all efforts to force an unnatural transition to a dominant renewable supply have been costly at best and unsuccessful at worst. In both Germany and Spain, renewable supply has not yet met the targeted goals, although the proportions are high in certain regions. Yet the cost of electricity is still well over double or more of the average of the most expensive regions in the U.S.

So, unless writers like Mr. Nelder tell their readers upfront that they must accept high capital costs now (overall, in total) and higher costs to ratepayers now and in the future in order to meet the goals using whatever terms are necessary - e.g. carbon costs, externalities, climate change terms, etc. - then the arguments will remain unconvincing except to those who are on board already.

(Just a note, I work in the energy industry, including renewables. So my frustration is not that the government cannot/has not mandated the change but that articles and views like this have polluted the political discussion and actually have hampered the growth of renewable supply.)

The true cost of energy include:
mining and the environmental reparation costs
mining and the health costs to workers
mining and the cost fuel in shipping coal or LP gas to Power Plants
maintaining Power plants AND the failing Transmission Lines
The Cost to CONSUMERS during black outs and grid failures.
The subsidies to Mining and to Power Plants
The local tax money spent on Power Plants and maintaining the Grid
The local tax money spent on maintaining city transmission lines & transformer stations
The money spent by lobbyists for Oil, Gas, and Power companies (which really comes from the "consumer" or customer.)
the money spent for health problems from Power Plants contaminating the Air, Water, and surroundings which cause local communities continuing health problems.
The loss of financing alternatives which could relieve contamination and health costs.
The cost of building Power Plants and decommissioning them.
The 10,000 year monitoring of Uranium.
The cost of Uranium Power Plant breakdowns and related health concerns
After all those costs, Individual alternative energy systems are really 150 times cheaper to build, maintain, and reduce health and environmental problems. Environmental costs caused by the current power system are also a major problem to all - even those not using the Grid.
I have lived of the grid for over 30 years using PV and a small wind generator. I have to replace batteries every 8 years or so, and have some repairs on occasion - BUT I DO NOT HAVE A MONTHLY UTILITY BILL AND DO NOT HAVE BLACK OUTS.

So, counting all of the expenses of setting up your system - including tax credits (which the rest of us pay for) and any other subsidies, what was the cost of your system aside from the lead-acid batteries you must recycle every 8 years?