The American news media is bombarding us almost daily with news reports about global warming. Scientists are paraded around on every news station, trying to prove - with facts - their side of the issue. Who politically are we supposed to side with, the Democrats or the Republicans? Whether you believe we are killing our environment or not, it seems that the American people aren't willing to go "green" unless it benefits them financially. Saving the environment could possibly be only a small benefit of utilizing green technology.
I would be willing to bet that most people buy hybrid automobiles or energy efficient home appliances, for the simple reason it keeps their wallets a little fatter. People like Al Gore look at this purely from a financial aspect. He has made millions of dollars by scaring people with false statements and producing movies with flat out lies. One example that comes to mind is when Mr. Gore inconveniently... errrr... incorrectly stated the warmest year on record. The actual warmest year on record was back in 1934. And he is leading this global warming political frenzy. So lets break it down to the bare essentials and take the politics out of it. What are we left with? The simple answer is...technology.
Our civilization has evolved technologically faster in the last 100 years than all previous human history. So why can't we find other ways to produce energy than burning oil? We can, we just won't. There is an impression out there, that leads you to believe that wanting "Green" energy means you are a liberal. Again lets take politics out of it. There are numerous ways to harness energy whether it be from nuclear, hydro-electric, solar or wind sources. These sources are probably less costly in the long run than how we are producing energy now. All that's required to capture "free" energy is to build and maintain equipment to acquire it and store it.
Oil for example is highly regulated from a global entity that can drive prices to heat our homes or fill our car's gas tank through the roof. Wouldn't it be nice to know that to heat or cool your home is going to be roughly the same price year to year? It could be. With huge fields of solar panels built in areas where the sun shines almost every day of the year, the energy could be stored in large capacitors for future use and there would always be a reserve. In areas of high wind, put up large windmills. Hydro-electric power would be constant year round. Nuclear energy even with it's high potential for disaster is a great way to produce power.
Nuclear facilities built today would undoubtedly be safer than the ones built 30 years ago. We've learned a lot the few times where reactors have failed. This might sound a little crazy, but the waste produced from nuclear facilities could be shot out into space with large rockets. We would never need to store it besides the time it sits waiting to be exported out of this world.
Our nation could be completely self sufficient and devoid of energy dependance from foreign nations if we wanted to be. I have no doubt about that. The technology is there. What frustrates me is that we aren't pursuing it. I believe the reason being, is because this has been a political issue instead of a technology issue. People get annoyed listening to Congressman and Senators whine about issues such as this. Our two major political parties are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and years worth of time bickering back and forth instead of just doing it.
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It's not technology, it's money. just like recycled products you see on the shelf at the store. they cost more money. the oil we get for free is then refined to make gasolene and other types of oil. think of it this way: if oil was something we had to pay to make, then keep paying to refine it, it would cost more than something else, and people would buy the something else instead. Hybrid cars cost $10k more than regular ones. 30% recycled paper cost about 30% more than regular paper. there is no demand for the items that cost more than something else, and so there is no demand to pursue it.
there's a way of burning coal that has almost no polution. again, it costs more than simply lighting it on fire.
Right now, we aren't pursuing the technology because of money yes, but there is so much more we can do to cut the costs. Once the technology advances, the cost will come down. Look at computers and try to buy the best video card out there for less than $600. It won't happen. Now take that same video card, and purchase it 2 years from now. You won't pay more than $200 for it. The same principle applies here. Of course when something new comes along, the price is high. Compared to the gasoline combustable engine, hybrid technology is fairly new.
I'm also not talking about recycled anything, I'm talking about ways to harness energy besides burning oil. The price of purchasing something as simple as solar panels for your house would take less than 5 years to recoup the money. After that, it's all profit for you. If enough energy is produced by the panels, you could technically not have an electric bill.
well here's the technology (PDF from the Dept of Energy):
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/2b2.pdf
Here's a powerplant that will utilize zero-emissions coal burning, built upon completed designs that exploit the mathematics of coal's energy potential:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/
and here's the reason it's not actively being pursued:
"[...] The $1.5 billion project [...]"
I'm not denying that cost and technology reflect each other, I'm just saying that things like energy production can't catch on like smaller technology (like computers) because it takes a few power plants already in execution before you can really learn where to tweak it. the more expensive something is, the harder it will be to find investers, and when the project is this massive, no one wants to front the bill, so the process usually doesn't leave the papers.
If you are worried about statistics, currently only 40% of what we produce comes from petroleum sources. We already make 23% of our energy from coal. Another 23% comes from Natural Gas. So that leave 14% left for nuclear/green sources. The technology has to be somewhat cheap if we are using it to power 14% of our energy. That is a lot of facilities and maintenance fees someone already footed the bill for. The next bunch of "Superrich" people are the people that will invest in this alternate energy technology.
Like I mentioned in my original post, I'm not looking at this from an environmental point of view. I am trying to look at this from a technology point of view and our dependance on foreign oil point of view. In Pennsylvania, on top of a small ridge line, there are roughly a dozen or so windmills. I'm sure that produces enough energy to power a small town. Green sources of power have been around longer than petroleum sources of power. How many times have you seen big wheels attached to the side of a flour mill utilizing the stream to produce power? And that was in the 1800's if not earlier.
i think we should have to pedal bikes in order to power the tv.
With huge fields of solar panels built in areas where the sun shines almost every day of the year, the energy could be stored in large capacitors for future use and there would always be a reserve.
Electrical storage isn't very practical. At least, capacitor technology has a long way to go before it can do what you suggest. Power generation facilities already employ huge banks of capacitors, but they're just for coping with moment-to-moment fluctuations in power draw. To store even a day's energy for a single city would take facilities larger than I can imagine.
The best power storage system we have doesn't actually store electricity - it stores potential electricity. Pumped-storage hydroelectric basically takes surplus power production and uses it to pump water to a higher elevation. In times of greater demand, the water is then released into a turbine to generate power. This method is apparently about 70%+ efficient.
The technology has to be somewhat cheap if we are using it to power 14% of our energy.
Hoover Dam supplies 2 gigawatts of power, and Niagara Falls another 4.4 GW. We only have one of each, and I doubt that equally prolific sites exist in this country. The smaller plants are more expensive per MW simply because they produce much less.
Solar and wind are both problematic in that you need sun or wind to make them work; they can both make contributions to the grid, but aren't very useful for base power generation. Geothermal and biomass are both more reliable, but I don't think they produce anywhere near as much power as, say, coal.
Some interesting 2006 stats on power generation.
In the near term, I think our best path to energy independence is going to include shale oil extraction (a cost-effective extraction method for which was devised a few years ago - at least on small scale) and nuclear plant construction. Like the bumper sticker says - more people were killed in Ted Kennedy's car than at Three Mile Island.
I'm also intrigued by a contraption that I saw on TV a few years ago - a miniature nuclear reactor, about the size of a van. You bury it in a concrete bunker and plug into it, and I think it's good for about 10 years. It was developed as a way to power things that are far from power generation facilities, although I have no idea if it's actually in use outside the prototype test units. If memory serves (and it may not), it was supposed to be very cheap, too - about $10k. I think a lot of businesses that already pay more than that per year could save money by installing one or more of those, and by selling any excess production back into the grid they could help alleviate the need for dirtier sources. Some day there may be one cheap enough to stick in your back yard.
There's a much larger unit that's been developed by Toshiba, but is basically the same idea. That one costs $25 million and lasts for about 30 years. More expensive, but a lot more power - it powers a town.
When it comes to the large capacitors and ways to store energy, The best way to do it is to produce the energy and distribute it out quickly. A backup is mainly what I'm talking about for this.
The technology is there right now, but we need to refine it for sure. There most definitely will be better ways to get energy if we actually put some time and effort into it. If oil is only way to get energy, I feel sorry for the human race. We won't exist too long. To say that producing energy from other places than oil isn't feasible, that's just not the case. Since we already do get some of our energy from these places, it has to be somewhat economically worth it. I can't believe that given enough money and research, we couldn't come up with a more efficient way to produce energy. This will be the only way to truly be energy self-sufficient. We don't have nearly enough oil to sustain our lifestyle here. And even if we did, we would never be allowed to drill for it.
Producing energy from other places than oil is feasable; replacing oil with them, right now, isn't. Oil is a legacy technology, we've had a long tome to get used to it, and made huge investments in it; those can't be replaced overnight, or even in a decade. That's why I think oil shale is an important part of a transition. It gets us off foreign oil while we work on cutting down consumption through the introduction of other technologies. We have vast reserves of it, much of it in drillable areas, but you can't get it by just drilling. Until just recently, it's been prohibitively expensive to extract.
A few years ago an Israeli company came up with a way to make hydrogen fuel cells that actually didn't take more energy to create than they provided - substantially less, in fact. I'm kind of surprised we haven't heard more about that, too.
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