Will this country EVER bite the bullet and move to WIND and SOLAR power?

[VoteProgressive]

I cannot believe we cannot find a way to fund this? It would solve the damn Middle East war worry and also create a lot of jobs.

[DesertFlower]

1. the oil lobbysists have a lot of money

to spread around.

[tridim]

2. Smokey Hills Wind Farm in the reddest of the red states, Kansas..

This pic doesn't do it justice, the farm is huge.

[elocs]

6. .

[Shagbark Hickory]

10. Indiana. ANother fucking red state...

[mwooldri]

3. I guess with wind and solar it's an ownership issue.

We're on our own for this one. ;(

Gotta start saving those pennies for them thar solar panels and batteries and such.

[HughBeaumont]

4. Oligarchs can't own the sun or the air.

They can, however, own the oil, gas and water.

Plus, you think of everything that runs on cheap (currently) petroleum and have to concede that it's not going to be that simple a transition to these elements.

[FreakinDJ]

5. Don't fund it - Legislate it like Calif did with Tittle 25

[gateley]

7. I don't think we will until the Big Business honchos can figure out how to make

a huge profit.

Isn't that sad?

What I think will have to happen is that small companies take the initiative and grow from there.

[elocs]

8. No, not soon enough if ever. n/t

[muntrv]

9. Not as long as people keep chanting "DRILL BABY DRILL" like it's Disco Inferno.

[Cleita]

11. Not soon, any more than we will get single payer health

care. Why? For the same reason. As long as the mega-corporations who are making money from the status quo are still around to throw their weight around, we will have no needed change for the better.

Maybe we need to band together and form our own cooperatives that accomplish this. It would take a giant will and sacrifice on the part of the participants and they will be beaten down every chance those corporations get to do it either in the market place, legally or even criminally.

[Newest Reality]

20. Basically,

we are up against neo-Fascism, which many are calling corporatism now.

This version seems to be far more complex and you can tack-on a bunch of ideological terms that apply in various ways, but we are RIGHT up against it now. I think that is clear.

[Shagbark Hickory]

12. Looks like it is happening to some degree. But I doubt it will happen on a broad enough scale

to eliminate dirty energies.

^ NW Indiana ^

[The2ndWheel]

13. I'm pretty sure those will cause several long term, unintended problems

The same way oil, coal, etc, did after we started using those resources.

[VoteProgressive]

21. What would that be? nt

[The2ndWheel]

31. That's the beauty of it

We have no idea. We can't know. Far too many variables involved.

When we first started using oil, coal, etc, did we know that we would be living with what has resulted in being our reality as of March 29th, 2011? There have been cons to the use of oil and coal, and there have also been pros associated with their use.

There's no reason to believe any renewable energy won't have the same balance. There will be upsides to using solar, wind, etc. However, there will be downsides as well. As long as we exist within physical reality, it's a package deal. And the downsides won't just be that corporations won't be able to make vast amounts of profit, because that's way too easy. I mean actual downsides to the physical world that we live on.

[VoteProgressive]

32. Good point! nt

[Uncle Joe]

14. If we ever funded solar, wind and the development of a smart grid with anything remotely

approaching what's been spent and continues to be spent on nuclear, we would be home free.

Thanks for the thread, VoteProgressive.

[suffragette]

37. + 1,000

[ixion]

15. only after the tipping point

that is: only when it becomes beyond insane to run things off petrol products. Which is to say: Too late.

[The Second Stone]

16. Wars make some people rich and others powerful

wind and solar require enormous amounts of land so that the wealth cannot be concentrated.

[Sal Minella]

23. There's a remarkably small footprint underneath each of those wind

turbines, actually -- here in northwest Iowa we have a huge secondary crop of those big white daisies spinning away, scattered through the cornfields all over the place -- like wind-sown dandelions on a huge green lawn.

IMO, we aren't thinking small-scale enough yet -- For years, I've wanted a windmill on top of my garage that will charge my car overnight, and charge a master battery while I'm gone during the day. But the BigPowerBoys want centralized production so they can charge outrageous rates.

When you sell somebody a personal wind turbine, the revenue stream stops (except the power company paying the windmill owner for his/her excess electricity).

And don't try to tell me "the technology doesn't exist" -- the technology for the damn cell phone didn't exist a few years ago, either.

[polichick]

17. Not as long as politicians are owned by big oil and dirty coal.

[FBaggins]

18. Wind/Solar don't do much to offset oil shortages.

Very little electricity generation comes from oil. Wind/Solar can help us reduce the amount of coal and natural gas that we burn (and eventually nuclear), but they don't do much for oil unless we switch over motor fuels to an entirely new process (hydrogen, etc).

[jwirr]

19. Until things become so desperate everyone is effected the only

change toward alternatives will have to come from the bottom. Those of us who do not live in oil producing states should work on our governments for more incentives for the alternatives.

[Kelvin Mace]

22. Not while the Koch brothers have

money to spend and congressmen willing to be bought.

American will decide to move to solar the day after the economy implodes and can no longer sustain an industrial society.

[Yo_Mama]

24. If we passed a law today banning electricity production from oil

it would change the net electricity production in this country hardly at all. Less than 1% of electricity is produced from oil, and most of what is used to produce electricity is basically a waste product, often burned by refineries.

So wind and solar won't end the ME war worry. They may be good ideas for other reasons, but don't use any significant amount of oil for grid electricity production.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_in_the_united_states

72% of US oil is used for transportation. The rest is used for lubricants, oils, feedstock for manufacturing, and for production.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_use

Both wind and solar electricity production is quite expensive with today's technology, and would result in much higher electricity bills for households and companies. So if you want jobs, you do not want to go heavily into that right now.

With the cost of solar power dropping, there are some favorable places at which it is getting much cheaper. But one of the big variables is insolation, which varies mostly with geography.

Thus the answer to your question is that we are doing something, but the goal you seek is not achievable so we are not trying to do the impossible. It is not due to any conspiracy of big companies. If they could actually do it, they'd be doing it and making big money off that too. There is a reason why GE is so buddy-buddy with politicians in DC; they make a lot of money off wind subsidies from the federal government.

[sinkingfeeling]

25. Not in my lifetime.

[old mark]

26. K&R_ I worked in engineering in the early 1980's on a project for an

alternative energy company. This got popular after the gas crises in the late '70's, but interest lagged and died after petroleum produces got relatively cheap and readily available again...I think we are FINALLY starting to get interested in clean energy again, after most of the world is ahead of us. I hope we can get past the oil companies lies and propaganda this time.


mark

[BoWanZi]

27. Is it possible to generate one watt of electricty cheaper with wind/solar over conventional means?

I get the impression that solar and wind cost quite a bit more to generate 1 watt of electricity or 1 BTU of heat over conventional mesns such as oil/nuclear/coal/etc.

I have no idea if that is true, its jsut something I wonder about.

[VoteProgressive]

28. I think it is more expensive. But if we made t a goal the technology would improve....

over time as we learned more and more.

[BoWanZi]

30. How much more expensive? If its not that much more, say 10 percent, that would be more palatable

But if its like 2 or 3 times the cost of conventional, then its going to be a hard sell to the common US population.

I just wonder how much the cost of solar/wind would be on a grand scale, not a small study scale, but more along the lines of supplying power to a small city of 400k or so.

I figure that solar/wind is more expensive currently because of how limited it is. It just costs more to do something per BTU/Watt on a small scale than on a large scale.

[Gregorian]

29. It's bubbling up from the bottom.

There are all kinds of things happening below the radar. It's not like the way we turned down the shift over to the metric system as a country. That was a top down decision. But there are groups all over the country (and world) meeting in private, coming up with ways to start their ideas into motion. I'm involved in one. And big money is looking for the best ones to invest in. Petroleum is finally starting to cost. And now people are actually frightened of nuclear. So that's a beginning of a social consciousness.

Just wait until people realize that electric cars have 100% torque at 0 rpm. They're going to be so sorry they didn't switch sooner. But that's just the big fat American aspect.

[unblock]

33. eventually, of course, it's inevitable.

we will continue to suck down the non-renewable energy sources until what's left is so rare and so hard to extract that it becomes prohibitively expensive to much and eventually all of the population.

at that point, we will be left with a healthier mix, with wind and solar and geothermal and others playing a much larger role than they do today.

the question, of course, is when will these others become more prominent? in 20 years? in 50 years? or in 100 years?

but the oil won't last forever, so at some point, of course we will have to rely more on these "alternative" forms of energy production.

[CrossChris]

34. This country=oil companies & other dirty energy, the MIC, Wall St., big banks, we the parasites.

There's no "this country" to change to wind & solar. Who would initiate the change?

[WinkyDink]

35. Read more on wind power, and how people living nearby (UK) are made ill.

Cannot take the unending low-level "hum" (I'm one of those types), among other effects.

Ask the migrating birds.

Ask the companies themselves, who know they cannot provide uninterrupted full power.

[ohheckyeah]

36. Probably not until the environment

is so screwed that everyone raises hell.