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333 comments on Vinod Khosla - Give Him Your Ideas

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AlanfromBigEasy on July 31, 2006 - 1:55pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The wind turbines being installed this year owe VERY VERY little to gov't subsidies.

I have watched the development of wind turbines for a couple of decades and the major forces in development were:

  1. A carbon tax in Denmark

  2. Favorable pricing of wind generated electricity in Denmark

  3. An "in service experience" database on WTs collected and published by the Danish gov't (Better quality WTs got more orders; poorer quality models disappeared).  Market driven evolution.

  4. Danish law and society that allowed for groups of people (a half dozen farmers, some city residents and one farmer) to own one or more WTs as a co-op.

Just a few years ago, Danish companies produced 80% of the world's WTs.  Please note "Massive R&D spending by Denmark" was NOT listed.  (Enron bought last surviving US & German WT makers, merged them, and then GE bought the division from bankruptcy court.  GE put in some major marketing & research $ and is now #1).

Many billions have been spent by gov'ts around the world and only nuclear power can be said to be the "in service" result.  R&D spending by gov't is *NOT* the answer !  They have had a long series of "not in market" results for over 30 years. Geothermal was also developed with minimal gov't R&D.

Thus my preference for mature technolgies that we know can work; especially Urban Rail.

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slaphappy on August 2, 2006 - 1:10am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm actually willing to grant your point, but notice that you didn't have to make it using phony numbers and a deceptive chart.

Also, it should be added that the R&D for nuclear is now spent, so there is no reason to not use it just because it was pretty expensive to develop.

Realistically, taking only R&D related to civilian nuclear power (no nuclear navy stuff, no nuclear weapons, none of that), how big was the subsidy compared to today's generating capacity, in $/KWh. Probably pretty small. Even if 40 billion was spent in 1960, that's less than a billion a year for something like 100GW of capacity. A penny per watt of capacity, a tiny fraction of a cent per KWh, hardly seems like the criminal waste that was claimed.

Jack it up to 100 billion or more, it doesn't matter. The electrical infrastructure in this country costs trillions of dollars, a few hundred billion for R&D doesn't fundamentally alter the equation.

I just don't see why the fact that this tech cost a lot to develop (yeah, less than 1% of the cost of installing our current electrical generation, that's apparently a lot...) somehow means that it's bad to use it now. Want subsidies for wind development (which you don't, I see...) fine, but it's no reason why nuclear can't be used.

That's all I'm saying.

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333 comments on Vinod Khosla - Give Him Your Ideas

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