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Is It True that Alternative Energy Is Too Expensive?
Many people assume that alternative energy is simply too expensive,
and not competitive with oil and other conventional means of energy.
While
some alternative writers allege that the big oil companies have
artificially increased alternative energy prices by buying up promising
alternative energy technologies - for example supposedly helping to kill
first-generation electric cars by buying
up promising battery patents so they couldn't be used in electric
models - we don't even need to go down that rabbit hole.
Specifically,
a 2008 report for Congress by the Congressional Research Service
entitled "Renewable Energy R&D Funding History: A Comparison with
Funding for Nuclear Energy, Fossil Energy, and Energy Efficiency
R&D" notes:
Over
the 30-year period from the Department of Energy's inception at the
beginning of fiscal Year (FY) 1978 through FY2007, federal spending for
renewable energy R&D amounted to about 16% of the energy R&D
total, compared with 15% for energy efficiency, 25% for fossil, and 41%
for nuclear. For the 60-year period from 1948 through 2007, nearly 11%
went to renewables, compared with 9% for efficiency, 25% for fossil, and
54% for nuclear.
In other words, renewable energy research
and development received a small fraction of the R&D funding for
nuclear and fossil fuels. This has skewed the market, making
conventional energy sources cheaper and alternative sources more
expensive.
In addition, when the externalities
of environmental, military and terrorism costs are taken into account,
conventional energy production is much more expensive than most people
realize.
For example, as I wrote
yesterday, the government has decided that deepwater oil drilling in
the Gulf and other fragile and hard-to-drill regions - and securing oil
in Iraq and other foreign regions - are in our national security and
national energy policy interests (remember that Alan
Greenspan, John
McCain, George
W. Bush, Sarah
Palin, a high-level
National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq
war was really about oil).
Nobel prize winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war alone will cost $3-5
trillion dollars.
And economist Anita Dancs writes:
Each year, our
military devotes substantial resources to securing access to and
safeguarding the transportation of oil and other energy sources. I
estimate that we will pay $90 billion this year to secure oil. If
spending on the Iraq War is included, the total rises to $166 billion.
In addition, experts say that the Iraq war has increased
the threat of terrorism. See this,
this,
this,
this,
this, this
and this.
The
bottom line is that if alternative energy R&D was funded at the
same level as conventional energy, and when the externalities of
environmental, military and terrorism costs are taken into account, it
is not clear that alternative energy is really substantially more
expensive than conventional energy. At the very least, if the playing
field were leveled, alternative energy could become cost competitive in
the relatively near-term future.
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You're getting pretty 'bold' with a lot of other people's money.
Why don't you send me $15,000 of your money and I'll install some panels, windmills and whatnot on my house.
Do you really think you own your money ?
Your money has been printed almost to infinity within the the castle walls of our banking institutions.
And what did it create - nothing but a suburban slump.
If Government does not print free money to create a industrial infrastructure your money will not have a outlet to convert it back into food and energy.
And as for the dream of energy self sufficiency - its a dream - industrial energy needs to be concentrated to be efficient.
Although if we somehow revert back to a preindustrial age solar panels will be nice .... until they break down.
Said 1000x that was what we should have done in the 90s.
Financed a gigantic wind and solar buildout with inflation dollars. We'd have so much juice we'd be cracking H2 for export right now. All the ingredients were there; instead we got a housing bubble and granite countertops!!! YIPPEEE
Er...no.
It's time to replace the roof by now, if you've never tried to repair/retrofit a 20 year old solar installation after roof replacement good for you.
Which raises an interesting point. No-one want to talk about maintenance and repair of solar. How much do you think it costs to clean the solar panels on a 20 acre installation?
We're going to find out. The city down the road 'got stimulated' and put in a crap-load. My best estimate for cleaning them: A lot.
Place looks like hell and all to provide about 25% of the juice for their little sewage plant.
Wash the pv panels about once a year. Well under one cent kWh.
Wash the concentrating solar mirrors about 4 times a year, just a little above one cent kWh.
There are actual problems with extensive use of solar generation, O&M ain't one of them.
"There are actual problems with extensive use of solar generation, O&M ain't one of them."
Oh, yes it is. PV panels have a half-life of less than 5 years. PV panels generate DC, and at such a low rate that it has to be stored in batteries, so that later on you can draw at a high enough rate to run, say, a washing machine. The batteries have a half-life of less than 5 years. The solid-state inverters necessary to convert battery DC to appliance-friendly AC rarely last more than 5 years if used heavily.
Jeeezus, I hate it when non-engineers start pontificating on stuff they know nothing about.
+ mucho Dork.
Nuclear fission.
Natural gas used in cars (Peru has lots of cars on natgas).
Apparently new "Green Building" technologies would save a lot of energy.
Re wind and solar, I don't know.
Wind and solar are a foolish boondoggle. Even if you got the cost reasonable, they would require VAST amounts of undeveloped land. Plus, there are not enough rare earth metals to build a fraction of solar panels you'd need. Even then, neither would provide stable base load power. In contrast, nuclear has a tiny footprint (several orders of magnitude smaller) and is perfect for base load. With fuel reprocessing, there is enough domestic uranium to supply all our electricity for thousands of years. Develop a thorium fuel cycle and it's 100,000 years.
With advanced nuclear power plant designs, you open up the possibility of using the excess heat for a cleaner Fischer-Tropsch process, allowing the US's vast coal reserves to make us self-sufficient in oil, even if electric cars go nowhere.
ps . not a fan of solar panels or wind for various reasons - although solar furnaces could be used in Desert areas for high energy industrial purposes such as smelting etc.
For base load applications fission in coal poor areas is best - this will free NG for transport / fertiliser uses.
transport - there need to be a rail renaissance in the states , High speed intercity , suburban rail in the more compact cities , trams in all cities , new lines for light cargo trains that would replace long distance trucking of consumer goods and transport these goods to nodal points.
Higher tax on petrol......!