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228 comments on DrumBeat: September 30, 2008
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228 comments on DrumBeat: September 30, 2008
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GAIA Host Collective
Black_Dog -
Some people want everything. How are we going to help pay for the Big Bailout if we extend the renewable energy credits?
Of course, not extending the credits will immediately kill many proposed wind farm projects, such as the one to be built off the Delaware coast, a project that only got the go-ahead after an incredibly drawn out and convoluted political fight.
Credits? We don't got no stinkin credits!!
Sounds like great news to me. As long as wind energy is just a means to greenwash natural gas and coal it deserves no credits.
Instead of pissing that money away on subsidizing production of intermittent electrical energy(much of which is eaten away by the inefficiency of single cycle gas turbines, the cost of keeping coal plants spinning and the production of power when no one needs it) it should go towards grid energy storage research. Cheap, large scale storage is absolutely essential if wind energy is ever to become useful.
I don't understand this kind of logic. It gives me a feeling the priorities are set wrong.
We have a long emergency to address. It will take decades to build adequate infrastructures. The greatest problem is to unlock the resources to do it. If someone can unlock money to build a power generation facility that won't kill us with global warming, please don't argue the technology limitations. Just let him build it. There won't be time to do it later if we wait for all the issues to be fixed.
Once the oil dries out, there will be such a thirst for energy that the electricity will not be let go to waste. Someone will find out how to use it regardless of the time of day it is generated. Besides if you put wind mills and solar panels in the field, you create the market for small residential power storage devices. It is harder to cost effectively solve the storage issue without having a market.
As it stands wind power is at most a way to save a small quantity of natural gas and coal.
The price you pay for this is greenwashing the use of fossil fuels, deepening the dependence on fossil fuels, it makes it seem like something is being done and allows people to shut off their brains and think the problem has been solved. Unless you've got vast quantities of hydro peaking capacity(e.g. Scandinavia) it won't solve anything, it's a trap.
Without a miraculous power storage medium that's cheap, easy to scale up and uses abundant materials this can't change.
That's suicide; you don't have time to invent a seat belt seconds before a head on collision.
The scope of this problem is enormous and can't be glossed over. There's always been an enormous profit incentive for producing a cheap, reliable storage medium for electrical power and countless people have tried, but the best we've managed to come up with is the lead-acid battery(dating from 1859) and pumped hydro(circa 1890's).