Thank you for a poor analogy and really saying nothing at all. You might want to read my post on that on my blog and get back to me. I say this because people can, are, and have been building their own micro-energy systems.

Perhaps you've followed some of the links provided in the past?

Cheers

I think there is a strange piece of evidence to support this view; the Dakar car rally no longer goes to Dakar. This applies to the suggestion that Europe should get solar power from North Africa via long cables, partly undersea. Like the car rally that project would be repeatedly sabotaged.

Thanks for the clarification.. but I still contend that it's not too difficult to see the non-petroleum workarounds here. As I said initially, we have to use what's already in place, which is roads, cars, trucks, factories and supply-lines that are all heavily 'oiled'. But a desert CSP doesn't have to be extremely remote.

You could put them on the outskirts of Phoenix, El Paso or Tucson (I'll leave Vegas off the list at this point), giving them access to railheads for increasing worker and parts supply, while the railtrack would ideally also accompany the power-spur to the site as well, affording this grid component full maintenance access both for bringing the tools and working power. It's a few layers of considerable but not at all 'monumental' infrastructure that would be mutually supportive. It shouldn't have to be a unique spur-line, either, but could be established along the routes between cities, using grid and rail that then is already serving multiple purposes, while supplanting many old highway demands in the above categories.

The lifetime of PV, and of Rail are the best arguments for implementing them where possible, to buy the kind of timespan needed to adapt away from the old oil systems. For now, they don't happen without oil.. but I don't believe that they have to keep that constraint.

On the farm where I grew up (1950's Northern Canada) we didn't get grid electricity until I believe 1960. All draft horses until 1958 (except for threshing gang with their distilate-burning tractor). No telephone until 1962. BUT we always had wind-generated electricty (a 65 foot steel tower in the front yard, manually controlled, with a bank of lead-acid batteries in an outbuilding). Provided power for electric water pump for house, mom's vacuum cleaner, iron, lights, radio.

People who think the world ends if petroleum goes very expensive, have too little experience. If the continent were being fed by suburbanites gardening their front yards and the only thing holding up maintenance of some solar-thermal electricity generation and its transmission lines in central California were unavailability of some petroleum fuel, I would very soon get in the business of hiring a crew of (then abundantly available) cheap labour to anually extract enough petroleum from some tar sands somewhere to be able to provide sufficient fuel to them (at a sufficient price) to keep their transmission lines operating and their mirrors washed.

You underestimate how much housewives value electricity.

The little windmills that used to around years ago (to pump water for animals) don't require much in the way of fossil fuels. The huge monstrosities of wind turbines that we have today, that require multiple length trucks to carry their blades, do. Small water mills were developed long before fossil fuels, and could be used again.

I think that you are somewhat underestimating how far the use of renewable energy had advanced prior to the invention of the steam engine. In the seventeenth century 95,000 thousand mills (a combination of water and wind) were in use in France. Prior to the invention of the steam engine water wheels were being used to grind grain, polish metal, run lathes for metal working, grind ore and pump bellows for the processing of iron, manufacture textiles and paper, saw wood, etc. The industrial revolution was not really a technological discontinuity but an acceleration of an existing trend. Economic growth and increasing industrialization/urbanization were already occurring powered by wind and water when James Watt invented the steam engine. The idea that it is physically impossible to make use of renewable energy without fossil fuels is incorrect.

However, I would agree that it is highly questionable whether renewable energy sources can support the same levels of economic production to which we have grown accustomed, and the problems of managing energy descent are extremely thorny. It is a much easier task to build up your infrastructure based on the exploitation of fuels of increasing energy quality than it is to downsize your infrastructure to use energy sources of lower quality.

I also think that the concern about other resources than energy limiting economic production is well taken. It seems unlikely that we will out run of abundant elements such as iron, aluminum, titanium, and magnesium any time soon, but it takes a substantial amount of energy to extract these metals from their oxides, so that a combination of lower quality ores and more expensive energy source would significantly limit how much of these metals we can afford to produce. Other rarer substances may be even more problematical. I think that economic contraction is in the cards, but I am still not convinced that our long term energy future will be totally dominated by plant photosynthesis and passive solar/passive geothermal.