It's not bad. It's just going to cost people and companies that are making money hand over fist a shit-ton of money to convert to it. And since these people/companies are beholden to shareholders and profits, this doesn't make them particularly excited. They will ride out the old way until they are forced to change, so that they can make every last penny they can.
Simple human greed. Those who benefit the most from fossil fuels are the ones with the money and a vested interest in keeping the status quo. We should all be using nuclear power by now, that or something else. But instead the nuke stigma is strong and "clean" power is decades behind the times because the 1% will do literally anything to ensure their impossible wealth remains where it is, and grows at the rate they're accustomed to.
these are people who possess and regularly make more money then it's possible to spend in a human lifetime but who will sooner see all who come after them dead then give up less then one percent of their wealth
Wrath baby and proud of it
Warning : Above post may contain snark and/or sarcasm. Try reparsing with the /s argument before replying.
What the world has learned is that America is never more than one election away from losing its goddamned mindMe on Elite : Dangerous | My WoW charactersOriginally Posted by Howard Tayler
It's not, it's just also not ready to be used as a baseload power supply. Pretty soon, give it ten or fifteen years to work out the kinks of graphene production and get graphene-based batteries worked out.
Because windmills and solar farms kill birds.
Because Donald reads too much infowars.
First of I reject your suggestion of what is fact in your question.
And then solar or wind energy are far from clean, first you have to build solar panels or towers and turbines which does not only take a lot of energy to do
but also a lot of water is used in the process.
Solar is as clean as electric cars - only on the outside.
Burning coal still is worse than solar or wind as the supply is limited and the air gets polluted.
I think a few other people went through and corrected you on most of this stuff. Most of your points are sort of valid if you were talking about solar in the 1970's. Solar efficiency has been sky rocketing and price has been dropping like a rock recently. Wind is on the same trajectory.
But I wanted to discuss your comment about water use. As far as I know solar panels need to be cleaned periodically and solar thermal needs some cooling. Is there something else that I'm missing here?
If you want to talk shit tons of water look no further than our current thermoelectric power production, which accounts for 90% of the electricity generated in the United States.
Withdrawals for thermoelectric power were 161 Bgal/d in 2010 and represented the lowest levels since before 1970. Surface-water withdrawals accounted for more than 99 percent of total thermoelectric-power withdrawals, and 73 percent of those surface-water withdrawals were from freshwater sources. Saline surface-water withdrawals for thermoelectric power accounted for 97 percent of total saline surface-water withdrawals for all uses. Thermoelectric-power withdrawals accounted for 45 percent of total withdrawals for all uses, and freshwater withdrawals for thermoelectric power accounted for 38 percent of the total freshwater withdrawals for all uses. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/
So that's 161,000,000,000 gallons per day. Billion with a B. For a little comparison here. Irrigation withdrawals were 115,000,000,000 per day in 2010. That's for farming. By the way we're only talking about the United States here.
So there's a lot of different systems and different types of power plants that use less and recycle it more but this gives a general idea of the kind of impact that thermoelectric power generation has.
Nuclear works for some areas. But it's expensive and there are cheaper alternatives in many areas. By the time we have fusion this debate will be over.
Here's a map of which power source is best for each area of the U.S. if you were to build your power plant today. You might notice the big green area in the middle of the U.S. that's wind. Blue is nuclear.
Last edited by Zmaniac17; 2017-06-03 at 08:04 AM.