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Let's be honest. Renewables are pretty much feel-good solutions that are not adequate technologies to fill our power requirements. As we start putting millions of electric cars on our roads, power needs are only going to grow more quickly.
Groups have latched onto green energy because they know its easy to exploit. These companies suck in billions in subsidies and some have already dried up and blown away. Being green companies give them a shield to deflect criticism -- they're in it for the money as much as Exxon or BP, but they get a pass for being green, regardless that they really don't contribute any significant amount of power to the grid.
They will always be at best, supplemental energy sources. I'm not saying we shouldn't support them (I'd love to have solar on my house if it financially made sense), but they're hardly the eco-friendly good guys they market themselves as.
Rather than pouring money into these dead-end technologies, we should be funding research on exciting new ones like Thorium, which can theoretically yield as much power as a nuclear plant but without the risk of meltdown and the dangerous radioactive byproduct. Other countries have started building Thorium reactors to see if the tech is viable, but we're too busy funding windmills that kill thousands of birds and make bats' lungs explode if they get too close.
Cats kill millions of birds so boohoo.
Do you know how much money we are pouring into non solar and wind technology?
It took us a few years to complete our solar power system. We bought a piece of it each year. We were able to use the tax credit thing. Though we also wrote-off the expenses. Now our accountant has had to remind us to depreciate the system over the next 7 years.
To Quote Tommy Frank from 2005... It's easy to protest, it is hard to do.
I brought up the subject of subsidization in another thread and those many of the individuals who complain about crony capitalism, etc... were all for subsidizing wind and solar. When I brought up Bell, and it's monopoly for 50 years of the entire phone industry, the only response was 'nobody has land lines anymore'.
People, I fear, never learn that government deciding on an industry to build infrastructure always leads to monopoly that decades take to undo.
I've noted many times that those who advocate for governmental intervention are their own worse enemy when they will not condemn the abuse.
I am not against all government involvement. It makes it hard for me to argue for it when people wouldn't condemn corruption like Solyndra.
Unfortunately too many back the politics of the argument as opposed to the actual argument.
It has now reached the point where solar PV is in fact cheaper than the operating cost of gas. And the cost of solar PV is still dropping. In fact the real battle in NV and elsewhere is between the utility versus rooftop implementation. The utilities are trying to prevent roof top use while investing heavily in utility scale PV. You will end up with gas as the fill in source for the cheaper PV.
At some point it may well be that solar gets cheap enough in one form or the other to generate cost effective hydrogen and we have a storage and mobile fuel. There are indications that it may be possible to build cost effective thermal solar plants which also provide hydrogen.
I was always of the opinion that nuclear would be the transition fuel to renewable. But it appears the Japanese disaster took care of that. And there is absolutely no possibility of any new nuclear plants without government aid.
Instead of subsidization, I'd prefer an incentivization.
Instead of mandating things like CAFE, incentivize car makers with a pool of money for improving MPG.
I understand the point but I'm not sure that taxpayers should be forced to pay automakers for what they should be doing anyway. (but I'll continue this thought below)
Quote:
Same with renewable energies (all versions): put a pool of money together for KWH goals. Say at $.20 as a baseline...
But just picking and choosing via subsidies never seems to work.
Picking winners and losers often times aren't picking the best choices. It's the same argument I will make for things like solar development. Maybe we never get there with solar but we never know what developments will come out of the research.
When the government decides to subsidize this as opposed to that, it might have been that which ended up discovering the big break through.
The Wright brothers didn't need incentives.....on the other hand IMO we still haven't gone to the moon yet without a highly subsidized program. My belief is the actual moon landing wasn't the big pay out there but the many new developments that came from that.
Back to your first point......Could we do better by subsidizing results as opposed to ideas? Maybe.
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