Energy Debate: Fusion, or Solar?

[homeforsummer]

That looked like quite an interesting article. Unfortunately when I was two or three paragraphs into it a popup appeared trying to sign me up for a newsletter or somethingorother. My response when something like that happens is to immediately leave the site. Please advise your editor that the magazine's misguided in-your-face promotional policy has driven at least one reader away.

They're a bit annoying I agree, but you can click on the large X to make it go away. It'll only do it once between each emptying of your history and cookies.

There's not a great deal you can add to my post above if you rage quit a site before you've read the article I was discussing - think yourself lucky I didn't link to one of the major car mags, whose ads are so intrusive I struggle to load some pages on my little laptop...

 

[MatskiMonk]

That looked like quite an interesting article. Unfortunately when I was two or three paragraphs into it a popup appeared trying to sign me up for a newsletter or somethingorother. My response when something like that happens is to immediately leave the site. Please advise your editor that the magazine's misguided in-your-face promotional policy has driven at least one reader away.

It only needed one click to close?

HFS's editor would have a field day with some people I know that base a cars efficiency on it's range, or even worse, how much £ is costs to fill the tank!

 

[homeforsummer]

HFS's editor would have a field day with some people I know that base a cars efficiency on it's range, or even worse, how much £ is costs to fill the tank!

Those are both psychological, and I admit I'm guilty of both! I don't mind having to fill up reasonably frequently provided I also can't squeeze much fuel in the tank when I do. But a car with decent mpg and a huge range still puts me off if the fill costs on the wrong side of £80 or so!

 

[MatskiMonk]

£20 per visit to the pump. If I have to go more than once a week then it's inefficient!

 

[BobK]

They're a bit annoying I agree

Bingo. I go to a site to be informed, perhaps to shop; not to be annoyed.

There's not a great deal you can add to my post above if you rage quit a site before you've read the article I was discussing - think yourself lucky I didn't link to one of the major car mags, whose ads are so intrusive I struggle to load some pages on my little laptop...

I didn't rage quit, it was a calm deliberate action that I always use when that happens. Please understand that I'm not against them offering me whatever it is they're offering, just the manner in which they went about it. I am just asking that you pass this along to the editor involved, that's why I mentioned it.

It only needed one click to close?

Yep, the X in the upper right corner.

Anyway, enough off-topicness. My thoughts are that solar power is a useful technology but (probably) will never be a major source of electrical power, not here on Earth anyway. Fusion power is "just around the corner" but that's what they've been saying for the past 50 years or so. Nonetheless that's a technology we should definitely be pursuing.

However I don't believe fusion power will be viable for vehicles less than the size of ships or similarly sized spacecraft. Not for a very very long time, anyway.

I'd heard it said a long time ago that solar power will immediately become practical when they figure out how to put a meter on it. For an interesting variant of that, check out Heinlein's "Let There Be Light" if you get a chance.

 

[Joel]

That looked like quite an interesting article. Unfortunately when I was two or three paragraphs into it a popup appeared trying to sign me up for a newsletter or somethingorother.

Download google chrome and adblock plus, you will never have to deal with this again.

TL;DR - New cars should last far longer than older ones have. We just need to treat them more like cars and less like last year's cellphone.

I have to concur, it's all about how they're maintained. My Corolla is a couple months shy of being 10 years old, with 160,000 kms on it, with the biggest issue being a wheel bearing replacement. I know plenty of my friends with Hondas and Toyotas (or American pickups) from the early 90's with 350,000+ kms on them and next to nothing major having to be replaced.

I think what happens is cars like my Corolla get traded in prematurely for a few reasons. In my family's case, it was simply that my parents are in a better financial spot than 10 years ago and they could afford to get a new car for my mom. There's nothing wrong with the Corolla, she didn't "need" a new car, but her new car is miles better in refinement, comfort, luxuries, and power, as well as being bigger and getting better fuel economy. I think it's mostly about the insane wealth we all have compared to the 60's, we can afford to lease a new car every 3-4 years. That, combined with how quickly car tech is advancing, leads to frequent trade ins.

 

[Beeblebrox237]

I think that solar panels would be great to put on top of buildings anywhere that it's possible for them to last a long time. That way, the building won't need as much power. However, solar power has lots of problems. First, they're very expensive, so very few people have the money to spend on them. Second, the manufacturing if solar panels often releases toxic chemicals into the environment.

 

[homeforsummer]

Second, the manufacturing if solar panels often releases toxic chemicals into the environment.

I had a little look into this, since I've seen it mentioned a couple of times now.

Oddly, there's not much on the internet about it post-2008, when presumably it was flavor of the month for a bit.

But of what I found, this article suggests that, even though solar panels use a lot of energy to produce, it's still vastly less than producing the equivalent amount of energy via fossil fuels (not just oil, but presumably coal and gas too).

Then I read up about Nitrogen trifluoride, a greenhouse gas vastly stronger than CO2, and now recognised as such through Kyoto. Nasty stuff, used in the production of thin-film solar cells. Well, it was, but most production has apparently switched to elemental fluorine (see second paragraph in this section) as a cleaner substitute.

I'm on the fence, as far as production pollution is concerned. I quite like this quote from the Watts Up With That? article I linked to:

So let’s just say – everything causes global warming, and leave it at that.

Generating energy is a dirty business, period. But there's a happy medium somewhere between making it less dirty, and making it commercially viable so as not to damage the economy.

Or, as has been alluded to, just get people to switch off their computers and lights at night and use less energy in the first place.

 

[niky]

The "dirty" produxtion comes of using old methods that were used with the also-nasty greenhouse gas nitrogen tetraflouride replaced with the new stuff. Use methods designed for use with nitrogen tetraflouride, and the problem goes away, mostly. What's left then is a drop in the bucket compared to the issues with coal power.

-

Cars nowadays last a hell of a long time. I've even seen those problematic direct injection diesel systems last up to 200,000 miles with no problems at all. But the teething stage has been very expensive for consumers, as many inferior direct injection systems (I'm looking at you, Japan!) are problematic, fiddly and expensive to fix. My hopes are that Mazda's new, lower combustion chamber pressure SkyActiv diesel systems will lower injector costs, though I haven't seen fuel system specs for the Ds yet.

Hopefully, the same such issues with dual clutch transmissions, variable geometry turbos and dual mass flywheels start to get better.

Remember, EFI was expensive, fiddly and unreliable at the start, too.

-

As for solar, it's still at the point where the cost-benefit ratio is marginal, but having been involved in purchase deliberation for the past few months for a variety of self-sufficient systems for third world social development projects, it seems like it is a viable alternative for situations where nothing else is available. Providing lights and basic telecommunications for out of the way communities is probably the first step.

At the very least, aside from the storage issue, solar can meet our most basic of needs. We won't be able to live high on the hog with it, but something is better than nothing.

 

[homeforsummer]

Cars nowadays last a hell of a long time.

I'd love to be in a position to own a car from new. I'm fairly sure that, if I chose right, I could happily own a car for 20+ years, maintaining and driving it to my standards, and not have too much trouble along the way. The trouble with always buying used cars is that you're at the mercy of whichever oaf owned it before you...

'Course, I'd always have projects on the side. My mistresses, if you like...

 

[Keef]

The main problems with modern cars are electronic. Mechanically, they're great, but all the gizmos will fail first.

 

[homeforsummer]

The main problems with modern cars are electronic. Mechanically, they're great, but all the gizmos will fail first.

True. Though that one is essentially a lottery. I know people with early 90s Lexus LS400s where every single electronic toy works and always have done, and there are no doubt people with one year old cars which never stop going wrong electrically.

 

[Johnnypenso]

And that's the main problem. Money not invested now may not develop new technologies quickly enough to cope when we get x number of years down the line and suddenly realise that we're out of oil/gas/coal, or that oil/gas/coal has become prohibitively expensive to extract and is commercially unviable.

To a certain extent that's already happening. You don't drill 10km down (à la Deepwater Horizon) because you want to, you do it because you have to, and easier methods of extracting have already been exhausted (or happen to be owned by countries you disagree with in the Middle East...). At the moment, extraction is expensive but plentiful (ditto other resources) so the price is fairly stable. At some point, it'll become expensive and scarce - that's when the price starts to rise.

I can appreciate what you're saying, and it's a conundrum.

At the moment, it isn't commercially viable on its own, but I think with energy it's necessary to think longer-term. And I'm not talking about global warming either (that's another subject for another thread), I'm talking simply about meeting energy needs in an increasingly energy-intensive society.

If there's no investment now (and in the absence of commercial viability, the money has to come from somewhere), then the technology will be decades behind when we actually need it.

That might be beyond our lifetimes, but - and feel free to label me as a treehugger if you want for this next bit - I'd like to think we're not going to leave future generations in deep crap because we're not doing what we can to invest in the sort of energy they'll be using out of necessity, rather than out of desire.

(I know the drill now. Usually when myself or anyone else raises such a point, someone comes in and says that their tax dollars shouldn't be spent on something they don't agree with, something they get no benefit from etc. Then I say that I agree on principal (I really do), but in practice I can't see a better way of doing it. Then they say that it doesn't matter what happens in the real world, because if I'm condoning using tax dollars for something they don't want then it's tantamount to giving up all your freedoms. Then someone else says that they're overreacting. Then everybody argues for a bit and regardless of outcome, both sides stick to their own views and nobody has really gained anything other than being smug believing that they're right really.)

What, water?

There's no conundrum, that's just what the tree-hugging liberals want you to believe. Almost all significant technological advancements in the history of mankind have come from individuals or private enterprise meeting market demands. Period. The technology for efficient solar energy will develop of it's own accord when market forces make it economically viable to do so. Same as windmills, geothermal etc. You don't need the government getting involved in it to spur any investment, there's plenty of money to be made in energy if it's economical to produce, sell and use any kind of energy.

 

[niky]

By and large, every energy source is subsidized. Now wait, I also use this argument when green-tech boosters complain about oil subsidies.... The thing is, the proportion of global money in energy subsidies is proportional to the amount of energy produced by each source. Your electrical transmission lines are government subsidized. Nuclear plants are government subsidized. As is transport. Roads. Rail. Even car manufacturers receive government support. Part of Japan's dominance in automobiles is due to government support. The Korean success story is mostly the same.

Of course, you still have to let the subsidized companies run like regular businesses. You force them to adopt unprofitable or inefficient practices and they'll sink faster than the British Auto Industry.

Solar will not produce the energy to pay for itself in the medium term, but over the long term, it does. At least when it's done right. In the absence of oil, coal and nuclear fuel, that's the most any alternative power source can do.

The only ones that pay for themselves in the medium term are hydroelectric and geothermal stations. But both are limited by geography. Suffice to say, replacing all our coal plants with those two is impossible.

While I agree that subsidy to an underperforming energy generation project is kind of stupid, this does not mean that the entire industry is unviable. There are situations and places where even traditional power generation schemes will not be cost-effective, but we build them, anyway.

 

[homeforsummer]

There's no conundrum, that's just what the tree-hugging liberals want you to believe.

Thank you for assuming I'm not capable of making my own decisions, but in future you can save yourself that effort and generally assume that what I type is very much my own thoughts, rather than a wild stab based on the thoughts and ideals of others. I promise I'll let you know if that ever changes.

Niky has already typed out part of my response better than I could have put it.

The other part of my response is a question: Do you really believe it's not worth investing in alternative energy generation in the now (on a far, far, far smaller scale, investment-wise, than we are doing in existing power generation and fuel sources)?

And do you think that the alternatives will essentially sort themselves out when existing methods cease to become "economical to produce"?

 

[Famine]

Didn't see this before.

The other interesting thing to note is that the biggest improvements come from the least-efficient cars.

15 mpg is pretty atrocious these days. So is 17 mpg. But if you can get a 15 mpg car(/truck) to do 17 mpg, then that's an improvement of more than 13 percent. To put that into perspective, a 50 mpg Toyota Prius would have to rise to almost 57 mpg to bring about the same improvement.

Actually, it's even more confusing, but even easier to see the benefit, when you stop using miles per gallon and start using other metrics. My editor wrote an excellent article on it. One which makes a lot of sense to people who aren't morons. And one which got him lots of negative comments from morons who didn't understand it.

I've just read that article... and... no.

Using the metric of distance per volume tells you how far you can go on the fuel you have. This is relatively useful - we have an approximate fuel gauge in front of us and we can (after guessing how accurate it is) roughly say how far we can go. 30mpg (10km/l) in a 10 gallon (45 litre) tank is 300 miles (450km). If it's half full, it's 150 miles (225km). You don't need anything more than primary school math for this - distance/volume (economy) multiplied by volume (remaining tank capacity) is distance - and that's quite fortunate as this is about the limit of Joe Public.

Using the metric of volume per arbitrary distance tells you how much fuel you'll need to go that arbitrary distance. This isn't as useful because we don't have a distance gauge in front of us (umm... a future distance gauge - what we WILL use the fuel for. The odo just tells us what distance we've already gone). 10l/100km in a 45 litre tank is... meaningless on first glance to most - you need to do another division (volume/(volume)) to work out how many 100kms you can go and then multiply it (and it'll still be 450km) and then divide it again according to your fuel gauge to know how far you can go on what fuel you have. That's fantastic if you can do math on the go - and trust me when I say that the one operator people can't do on the go is division - but needlessly complex considering what you want to know is how far you can go. For that we just need how much fuel we have (volume) and how far we can go on it (distance/volume).

Perhaps if we bought fuel in distance it'd be more useful, but, as things stand, distance/volume is the superior metric.


John's other argument - that the big numbers in the distance/volume metric obscure the percentage increase - is a bit smoke and mirrors. He argues that people don't understand that doubling the mpg is better than increasing it by half. But what happens when we convert it to l/100km? It goes from 10/20; 33/50 to 28/14; 8.5/5.5. Will the same people who can't understand that twice something is a better improvement than 50% more on big numbers understand that halving something is a better improvement than reducing it by a third on small numbers? Will they understand that using half as much fuel for every 100km driven is a better saving than using 33% less when they don't understand that going twice as far on each gallon is a better saving than going 50% further?

And then there's the matter of precision that one of the less abusive commentators mentioned. Those same people who don't understand doubling... they don't like precision - or rather they don't understand it. They get 32mpg, 35mpg, 38mpg and can see a clear difference. They don't get 8.8l/100km, 8.1l/100km, 7.4l/100km - or at least they can't see a clear difference. It gets worse the more economical you get (which is exactly John's argument about mpg) - 50mpg is 5.65l/100km, 55mpg is 5.14l/100km and that's a tougher sell in volume/distance than it is in distance/volume. 65mpg is 4.35, 70mpg is 4.04. When it gets to the "1 litre" (100/100) concept cars, the differences are almost imperceptible - numbers from 120 to 140mpg all round to 2l/100km (2.35 - 2.02). This is an intrinsic issue with the smaller, finer metric units (1609m in a mile, 4546ml in a gallon) that they increase precision at the expense of resolution - 2.35 small units per small unit might be more precise than 120 big units per big unit, but it's tougher to tell apart from 2.02 than 140 is from 120 for those people who can't do math (it'll be a nice problem when we get to it though ). This, of course, is exactly the reason the arbitrary distance of /100km was chosen - per km is just numbers after the decimal point.

The "mpg illusion" site linked is fun, but it highlights the only issue with mpg - that it hides how much fuel you actually use and it requires a division to get there. At 10mpg you use 1000 gallons a year to do 10,000 miles (distance/economy = volume), at 20 it's 500, at 40 it's 250 and so on. It's an exponential decay - double the economy and you half the volume used - and this is the math hole that I think John intends to highlight. Making it a function of the inverse just turns it into a geometric decay. You're left with the same issue - you need the distance driven to know how much fuel you use

A 10mpg car drives 100 miles. It uses 10 gallons (100/10 = 10).
A 28.3l/100km car drives 160km. It uses 45 litres (28.3 * [160/100] = 45).

Double the fuel economy and you half the use. For both.

A 20mpg car drives 100 miles. It uses 5 gallons.
A 14.1l/100km car drives 160km. It uses 22.6 litres.

We'll take the mpg illusion's extra example at this point...

A 50mpg car drives 100 miles. It uses 2 gallons.
A 5.7l/100km car drives 160km. It uses 9 litres.

Thus the "only driven 100 miles a week" initial pairing of 10 & 20 uses 15 gallons (68 litres). Changing to the 10 & 50 pairing gives an improvement to 12 gallons (54 litres) but the 20 & 20 pairing is best at 10 gallons (45 litres). The missing information is the distance each car is driven via either metric!


The argument that 100*1/(current metric) isn't stupid compared to (current metric) seems disingenuous at best.


And while we don't buy petrol in gallons any more, we certainly don't drive kilometres. Just remember that 9 litres is 2 gallons and you're sorted for the math on the go.

 

[Keef]

Whether or not technologies are worth investing in mostly depends on go is investing in it. Do you want to government to invest in it? That's an awful idea, not simply because guiding the market is not the job of government. Do you want business to invest in technology on their own in the hopes of engineering a profitable new product? Well, they already do that. These things take time. Chill out. When you rush it things get screwed up and that applies to pretty much anything in life.

I find the whole mpg thing for cars rather amusing. Nobody bothers to think about how much gas their engine burns at idle - for some reason I know that the first generation Dodge SRT4, a 2.4 liter 4-cylinder, burned 1.6 gallons per hour at idle. Kinda makes the whole stop/start thing seem like a world-saver. My point is that people say their new accord gets 35 mpg on the highway or 24 in the city but they let their car warm up on a cold morning for 15 minutes, complete wasting a sizable amount of fuel in the process.

In aviation we use time. We know how much fuel the engine burns per hour ad we calculate distances based on that...that's the basics. But the nature of flying and the operation of those engines is completely different than driving. We're always going the same speed at the same rpm, thus burning fuel at the same rate.

But cars don't work like that. There isn't any perfect way to calculate consumption so we're stuck with what we have.

 

[homeforsummer]

I've just read that article... and... no.

*Head explodes*

I think we can safely conclude a few things from this.

1) I was a bit harsh calling those who didn't understand it morons. Though many of them probably are.

2) I, myself, am a moron, at least when it comes to mathematics. Never been my strongest subject.

3) I feel like you've over-complicated it just a tad. I'll try and explain the way I see it:

But maybe you don't quite see the problem. OK, so here's a little test: Which saves more gasoline, going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?

If you're like most Americans, you picked the second one. But, in fact, that's exactly backwards. Over any given mileage, replacing a 10-mpg vehicle with one that gets 20 mpg saves five times the gasoline that replacing a 33-mpg vehicle with one that gets 50 does.

Don't believe it? Here’s the math. If you replace your old 1990s SUV (10 mpg) with a new 2009 Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid (20 mpg), over 100 miles you cut your gasoline consumption from 10 gallons to 5. That saves you five gallons.

If you swap your old Toyota Echo (33 mpg) for a new 2011 Toyota Prius (50 mpg), that only saves you one single gallon over the same distance--down from 3 to 2 gallons.

This bit I understand. Over a set distance (100 miles), an improvement of 10 mpg on the 10 mpg car is a larger saving (5 gallons) than an improvement of 17 mpg on a 33 mpg car (one gallon).

This, surely, is the basis of the article? It's fairly straightforward that the largest savings can be realised on the most inefficient vehicles. My earlier numbers on the part you quoted back this up - 2 mpg improvement on a 15 mpg truck is 13 percent. To match that percentage improvement on something already efficient (50 mpg) you'd need to find an extra 7 mpg somewhere. Making big trucks save 1 or 2 mpg is better than making a Prius save 5.

My the same metric, making a car like the Ford F-Series, which sells in the U.S. in vast numbers, a few mpg more efficient, is probably better than replacing every Corolla on the roads with a Prius.

Perhaps it falls apart a little after those initial paragraphs, but then those weren't the ones I was really referencing

TL;DR - Making big cars slightly better is preferable to making small cars lots better (sales aside - obviously making a Ferrari 1 mpg better doesn't amount to a hill of beans). How you choose to measure the consumption itself is largely up to you...

NB - I'm more or less resigned to the price of fuel. I can't not put fuel in my tank when I need it, so the price I pay is largely irrelevant anyway - beyond smaller numbers being better than big ones...

Keef - Individuals and companies are investing in it themselves. As are colleges, universities, and research institutes. They're just subject to subsidies - smaller ones than the supposedly self-supporting oil industry. I'm all for removing subsidies, but it has to be applied universally. If one company doesn't deserve grants or exemptions, then why should another?

Oh, and I'm a big fan of stop-start. Cars that don't have it seem horribly archaic these days. If I'm burning fuel I at least want to be having fun with it, rather than sat in traffic. Unfortunately, the EPA test isn't set up to take account of it (there's barely any idle time in EPA tests), as such it doesn't make a difference to the numbers, and nobody bothers fitting it.

 

[Famine]

This, surely, is the basis of the article?

It's written as if the way the US measures it - mpg - obfuscates this fact because increasing fuel economy by this metric reduces fuel used by exponential reduction, where l/100km makes it clear because reducing fuel economy by this metric reduces fuel used by geometric reduction. The argument seems to be that, because people in general aren't good at math, l/100km is a better metric - but it requires far more math to know how far you can still go according to your tank, deals with too precise numbers at the expense of clarity and requires exactly the same missing information (distance driven) to work out how much fuel you've used. I prefer mpg for exactly these reasons - and since I can divide by 4.55 in my head (I've had practice), it's not even that much of a bother that we sell the bloody stuff in litres

But yes, making inefficient cars slightly more economical makes more difference to the amount of fuel used (and thus the stuff we've got left and its price) than making efficient cars quite a great deal more economical.

 

[Johnnypenso]

.

The other part of my response is a question: Do you really believe it's not worth investing in alternative energy generation in the now (on a far, far, far smaller scale, investment-wise, than we are doing in existing power generation and fuel sources)?

And do you think that the alternatives will essentially sort themselves out when existing methods cease to become "economical to produce"?

No I don't believe it's necessary at all for my government to invest in alternate energy generation now or in the future. It's make work, corporate welfare. It's preening for the press and the tree hugging voters so the gov't of the day can say, "Hey look at us, aren't we cool, we're so green, just ignore those $20Billion deficits and the $QuarterTrillion in debt". It's political correctness gone wild and it's bankrupting us in the process.

And yes I do believe that the market will sort it out if and when the time comes. Carbon based fuels aren't going to run out overnight. There will be a slow and steady increase in the price over time and at some point large amounts of resources will be devoted from private industry to develop the necessary technology for alternative energy. If there is money to be made, it will get done just as almost everything else since the dawn of time has been done. If anything, government involvement will only slow the development of new technology.

They should stick to building roads and sewers and putting up hydro poles so the rest of us can go about our day and we'll solve the problem of energy generation for the future all on our own thank you very much.

 

[niky]

Of course, your government already spends on subsidizing non-green energy. If they were to stop subsidy completely, you'd be paying much more for electricity than you do now.

I live in a country where energy subsidies are almost non-existent. And the cost of paying market for coal and hydro-power really, really, really sucks.

Whether or not technologies are worth investing in mostly depends on go is investing in it. Do you want to government to invest in it? That's an awful idea, not simply because guiding the market is not the job of government. Do you want business to invest in technology on their own in the hopes of engineering a profitable new product? Well, they already do that. These things take time. Chill out. When you rush it things get screwed up and that applies to pretty much anything in life.

While I agree in principle, certain technologies, such as Nuclear Fusion, require billions up-front in investment long before any possible payoff. When your hypothetical ROI is measured in terms of multiple decades, most businesses will not want to take the chance.

In aviation we use time. We know how much fuel the engine burns per hour ad we calculate distances based on that...that's the basics. But the nature of flying and the operation of those engines is completely different than driving. We're always going the same speed at the same rpm, thus burning fuel at the same rate.

But cars don't work like that. There isn't any perfect way to calculate consumption so we're stuck with what we have.

Actually, there are a number of on-boards that calculate fuel usage in terms of gph or lph. It's a good metric to include on a door sticker. It's very hard to explain to consumers why they're getting 15-20 mpg in gridlock from small four-bangers.

 

[Johnnypenso]

Of course, your government already spends on subsidizing non-green energy. If they were to stop subsidy completely, you'd be paying much more for electricity than you do now.

I live in a country where energy subsidies are almost non-existent. And the cost of paying market for coal and hydro-power really, really, really sucks.

[/COLOR][/B]

Please explain to me how subisidies keep the cost of energy down for me, in detail if you please, so much so that I'd be paying much more for electricity than I do now. Keep in mind that when you say "government spends on susidizing energy", I am the government. Their money doesn't appear out of thin air it comes from my pocket.

 

[Keef]

Their money doesn't appear out of thin air it comes from my pocket.

Not only does some of it come from taxpayer pockets, but they can also print more money which devalues the money already in the system and that is effectively another tax - inflation. They don't like to tell us about that one.

 

[niky]

Government subsidies, in the form of direct low-interest loans, preferential tax rates and tax breaks, spending on transmission capacity (the erection and maintenace of power transmission capacity is extremely costly), spending on political favors to maintain relations with foreign countries that supply coal and bunker fuel, subsidies for coal mining, natural gas and oil drilling, military spending, and the like, lower the overhead of power companies.

Look hard enough, and you will find arguments as to which forms of power are more effective in terms of subsidies, but a lot of the statistics are very selective, ignoring other forms of subsidies, or mixing tax breaks with direct monetary investment. It would be interesting to calculate exactly how much your power would cost without any subsidy at all, but that's very difficult to do unless you look at the entire supply chain that leads up to you. Currently, coal is the king of kilowatts per dollar of subsidy. There's no denying that. But this is because most of the legwork is done... Besides, coal is expected to run out within the next thirty to fifty years. If the changeover happens in twenty years or so, when coal is more expensive, then it will cost more to adopt alternatives. Basically, governments are spending money now to avoid spending much more in the future. Why wait to plant crops to see us through the famine after it has started?

Hell, ask some analysts, and they'll say we're not spending enough on building an alternative infrastructure... But of course, spend too much on dead ends and we'll still end up in a bind when that day comes...

-----

Truthfully, in some cases, what comes out of your taxes would be better spent directly paying a power company to supply you with power (if you live right next door to one and there's a big customer base), or, if you're handy and can generate your own fuel (own a pig farm? The methane from a hundred heads is about enough to offset domestic electric consumption for several households. Of course, you have to feed them... ), to do it yourself. In other cases, you'd be spending more. The tax, theoretically, levels it out so you're paying for usage rather than how difficult it is to get that power to you. Theoretically, that is. No system is perfect, and yes, there is waste.

 

[Emptyone]

I thought I should interject with Thorium as an alternative fuel for the future, to deal with a possible energy crisis. The Chinese are making great efforts to switch to thorium reactors.

Clicky

Interesting to quote from the article

The Chinese aim to beat them to it. Technology for the molten salt process already exists. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee built such a reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to build nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.

Hence why we have Uranium water reactors, instead of Thorium ones.

Also, no risk of a meltdown

The beauty of thorium is that you cannot have a Fukushima disaster. Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University, who anchor's the UK's thorium research network ThorEA, said the metal must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the process. "There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam," he said.

And cleans up Uranium waste (possibly)

Yet it leaves far less toxic residue. Most of the mineral is used up in the fission process, while uranium reactors use up just 0.7pc. It can even burn up existing stockpiles of plutonium and hazardous waste.
Cambridge scientists published a tantalising study in the Annals of Nuclear Energy in February showing that it is possible to "achieve near complete transuranic waste incineration" by throwing the old residue into the reactor with thorium. In other words, it can help clean up the mess left by a half a century of nuclear weapons and uranium reactors, instead of transporting it at great cost to be encased in concrete and buried for milennia.

So this and Uranium are viable alternatives to Solar, in the meantime.

 

[DK]

Here's a video about thorium reactors which I found today:

The only real problem I have with this video is the narrator says thorium will "never run out". Of course, he might mean that the amount of thorium in the Earth's crust would supply global electricity needs for thousands of years.

 

[Emptyone]

Here's a video about thorium reactors which I found today:
*snip*
The only real problem I have with this video is the narrator says thorium will "never run out". Of course, he might mean that the amount of thorium in the Earth's crust would supply global electricity needs for thousands of years.

Good video 👍 Apart from never running out, but would do very much for the foreseeable future. Maybe this would stop people worrying about nuclear reactors exploding 💡

 

[Johnnypenso]

Government subsidies, in the form of direct low-interest loans, preferential tax rates and tax breaks, spending on transmission capacity (the erection and maintenace of power transmission capacity is extremely costly), spending on political favors to maintain relations with foreign countries that supply coal and bunker fuel, subsidies for coal mining, natural gas and oil drilling, military spending, and the like, lower the overhead of power companies.

Look hard enough, and you will find arguments as to which forms of power are more effective in terms of subsidies, but a lot of the statistics are very selective, ignoring other forms of subsidies, or mixing tax breaks with direct monetary investment. It would be interesting to calculate exactly how much your power would cost without any subsidy at all, but that's very difficult to do unless you look at the entire supply chain that leads up to you. Currently, coal is the king of kilowatts per dollar of subsidy. There's no denying that. But this is because most of the legwork is done... Besides, coal is expected to run out within the next thirty to fifty years. If the changeover happens in twenty years or so, when coal is more expensive, then it will cost more to adopt alternatives. Basically, governments are spending money now to avoid spending much more in the future. Why wait to plant crops to see us through the famine after it has started?

Hell, ask some analysts, and they'll say we're not spending enough on building an alternative infrastructure... But of course, spend too much on dead ends and we'll still end up in a bind when that day comes...

-----

Truthfully, in some cases, what comes out of your taxes would be better spent directly paying a power company to supply you with power (if you live right next door to one and there's a big customer base), or, if you're handy and can generate your own fuel (own a pig farm? The methane from a hundred heads is about enough to offset domestic electric consumption for several households. Of course, you have to feed them... ), to do it yourself. In other cases, you'd be spending more. The tax, theoretically, levels it out so you're paying for usage rather than how difficult it is to get that power to you. Theoretically, that is. No system is perfect, and yes, there is waste.

No offense, but that's not detail, those are generalities. I have no idea what energy production/comsumption is like in the Phillipines but I know about where I live. Most of the electricity in Ontario is from three sources, Hydroelectric, Nuclear and Natural Gas fired generators. We have very little dependency on coal and within 5-10 years our last coal fired generator will likely be gone. Hydroelectric produces no emissions of course, nuclear and natural gas very little. We have uranium here and lots of domestic natural gas.

To me it makes absolutely no economic sense for our province of 13 million people to invest $10Billion in flipping windmills, which is going to double the cost of domestic electricity over 5 years. Double!! For what? Less emissons? Hogwash, we're near zero emissions as it is. To save on infrastructure costs? No sir, windmills need wind to blow, it isn't always blowing, so you need all the same infrastructure with or without windmills.

I can imagine how happy the manufacturing base is in Ontario with electricity costs doubling in such a short period. Think that has anything to do with, for example, GM deciding to close one of their plants in Ontario and move it to Michigan in a couple of years? Of course it factors into the equation if they can do the same thing 300 miles down the road at half the cost. How much more manufacturing do we have to lose because of this stupidity?

I could almost live with it, almost, had the windmills been built in Ontario and run by an Ontario company, but they are not. The whole shebang was farmed out to a Korean company, without any tendering at all.

It's Green Insanity, there is no other way to describe it. It makes no economic or environmental sense. It may be different somewhere else, but I live here and it makes no sense to me nor to anyone else I know, except for my tree hugging liberal friends, who wouldn't understand a budget or statistic if it bit them in the 🤬

 

[niky]

Ah, Wind? Tricky, that one. Wind power is problematic because it's erratic and maintenance intensive. Definitely makes no sense to replace hydroelectric with wind, at all. We've reviewed purchasing wind power, and the numbers don't make any sense, whichever way you run them.

 

[Johnnypenso]

Ah, Wind? Tricky, that one. Wind power is problematic because it's erratic and maintenance intensive. Definitely makes no sense to replace hydroelectric with wind, at all. We've reviewed purchasing wind power, and the numbers don't make any sense, whichever way you run them.

Wind doesn't "replace" anything. When someone finds a way to store wind energy in some ecomonically viable way, it may be able to replace some other method of energy generation but not at this point.