Romney wrong to sell solar short

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http://aboutmittromney.com/energy.htm

As I expected, Romney's ideas and record on energy are not irreparably hideous, and I see some strong notions here. However, he is making a mistake in trying to sell solar and wind short just because Obama's policy has been very pro-solar and pro-wind. He would benefit from a more "all of the above" strategy, which includes solar, wind and other energy solutions he has proposed.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/romneys- ... 3w8U_BYvQA

However, I am skeptical as to how much Romney's campaign rhetoric during the GOP race actually corresponds with his plans for the presidency. If he starts sounding like his old self during his 2012 campaign for the presidency, we could find ourselves confronted with a more green-friendly Romney.

Solar energy is not efficient as its existence is dependent on whether it is subsidized or not.

The Canadian fossil fuel industry receives nearly $1.5 billion a year in subsidies. That is after more than 150 years of intensive fossil fuel use. Why is everyone so harsh on renewable for requiring subsidies? To be perfectly honest, all forms of alternative energy will require subsidies. It is unfortunate, but necessary if we are to cut CO2 emissions.

Romney's proposals are horrible. He is talking about gutting environmental review processes and expanding fossil fuel use. Exactly the opposite should be done. Also, I would hardly call Obama pro-solar and wind. There hasn't been a major increase in their usage under him (that is, they still provide only a few percent of the USAs electricity). In fact, CO2 emissions continue to increase under his administration.

The complaint is that the emissions just aren't increasing fast enough.

Nuclear is the only practical solution to our future energy needs.

there is very little subsidy in denmark and germany and we are leading in wind power,

the us makes solar inefficient for themselves, in germany there are whole towns where the average energy consumption is negative, actually supplying the industry around them.
using wind at the planned level and solar at the personal level.

This^

Yet, I am not sure how wind energy could be efficient on a larger scale, since it needs to be stored and transported because of its inconsistent source. Transporting stored wind power would likely take more energy than wind could produce. Therefore wind energy would be most efficacious for smaller bioregions.

I think algae fuel (if it is ever tried in practice on a variety of mechanisms) would be the best replacement for unsustainable oil extraction and precarious coal mines until better technology could make possible the operation of machinery and production of electricity with clean energy.

I hope that our countries could acheive this industrial autonomy from unstable regions of the world and the current untrustworthy companies before hydraulic fracturing becomes the center of convoluted industries and therefore impossible to replace with either alternative or nuclear energy until all fossil fuels are depleted.

Views about subsidies aside, I am prone to disagree with the conservative discouragement of innovation which would make justice and environmental or industrial hygiene easier just because a few innovations failed. The motivation behind this denigration appears to be this view that the earth was merely created for people to suffer as punishment.

Last edited by petitesouris on 04 Apr 2012, 10:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

What I think might be a good idea would be for the government to pay part of the cost for people to put solar panels on their roofs. Then the home-owner would sign a contract to sell the electricity to the government (well, the power company, all of which in Canada are publicly owned) at a reduced price (say, $.09/kWh, about $0.01 less than what residential customers pay for power) to pay off the cost of installation. Once the loan is paid off (interest free, preferably) the solar panels can be plugged into the house itself and used to supplement the power it draws from the grid. The problem would be whether or not the solar panels could pay for themselves in their lifetime. But some back-of-the envelope calculations I did seem to suggest that the home-owner could still get some good use out of them.

Also physically photovoltaic is less that ten percent efficient. At this stage of our technology solar looses because:

1. low physical efficiency
2. baseline power output is available only in daytime and that subjected to the fickleness of cloud cover
3. cost per kilo-watt is way to high at present
4. amount of energy that can been generated is to low for industrial use.

Solar photovoltaic electric generation has its uses in very restricted niches. Places where connection to the grid is not feasible and places where one cannot bring enough hydrocarbon fuel to run a generator.

ruveyn

You can buy solar panels for your house now that are around 15% efficient.

As for the rest of your post: there are things more important than what is cheapest. I'm not ruling out wind, micro-hydro, or even nuclear, but even if all of them are more expensive than fossil fuels they are still worth investing in.

Well, I was hoping for some insights on Romney's record on energy policy, actually. The thing is, it is my hope that the Romney campaign will adopt a more liberal policy on solar/wind power in the future. I have gathered that his record is really not unlike that of a lot of Democrats, and I would rather examine all of his ideas on this issue rather than get his party confused with his actual political leanings. I don't see him as a conservative Republican, and I think that the conservative rhetoric he has spouted over the course of the GOP campaign has been mostly a sham. I honestly think that there is a fair chance that Romney could have a fairly broad diversity of ideas, and I think that everything ought to be considered. We need to think about how his platform differs from that of Obama, on this issue, and try to figure out their actual behavior is likely to be in practice.

Well, what I think would be a big boon for photovoltaic would be if real estate developers were to start building solar energy into large subdivisions, and maybe we could pass more laws to allow them to serve a double-use as energy producers. Let's take a string of single-level townhouses equipped with the most efficient solar energy production on the market. A large subdivision owned by one company would have a much stronger chance of pulling in a long-term profit off of solar energy than an individual home-owner, who would suffer from severe naivete on where to find the best deals and so on. The breaking point, I think, will be when we start seeing more large subdivisions run extensively on solar. If someone wants to build a large subdivision that has higher energy output than usage, the advantage would be that it would be instantly profitable rather than only being profitable after they have found buyers. They could still make money with the homes just languishing there.

Solar is still a young technology, but Romney is making a mistake in glossing it over as a practical solution.

Do you still want an industrial based economy? Then your alternative energy sources must produce power on an industrial scale. There is only one alternative: nuclear power.

ruveyn

storage is neccesary only if wind is the only source of power, not to mention that even then with a large enough energy net much of the inconsistency dissapears in the average (all of scandinavia and some of northern europe already do this)

the true power from alternatives will never be scale as in a singular nuclear or fossil fueled plant, not that that doesnt have its merrits, but from the very fact that they are distributed and as such share some of the possitive effects also seen in cloud computing and storage, the internet itself even.

to truly tab this potential however we would need a rapid response smart grid capable of regulating itself across vast areas and with som predictive ability in place, models of behavior and the like.
another reason they are popular today is that they deal with realtively small ammounts of electricity compared to an entire turbine so they allow the grid managers to fine tune the grid in a much faster and easier manner than with conventional powerplants.

Steady and predictable is more important than cheapest. Solar Power is at the mercy of night time and the clouds. Winds are notoriously fickle. That is why solar and wind generated electricity cannot be more than a niche supplement to steadier modes of power generation. The only power source that has the energy density and steadiness required (at this juncture) is nuclear power.

If we knew how to dig a 40 kilometer hole down through the the mantle then would could have the energy of the planet itself. Unfortunately there are perhaps a half dozen places on earth where the magma of the mantle is exposed. For example Ice Land. Ice Land sits on the crack between two tectonic plates. That is why they can use Earth Heat to generate their electricity. We in the United States are not so fortunate. Hydroelectric power generated from gravitational potential is very clean and nice but there are very few high-head water flows offering that kind of potential energy. We should use the ones there are, but they are not enough to power our industry. One thing we can do that will by us 10 or 15 years of breathing room is conservation of the energy we do have. By using more efficient machinery and lighting and power transmission we would acquire the equivalent of a gigantic Arab oil field without burning an extra drop of oil. Conservation is not a long term solution but it would be very useful for the decade or two in which it will make a difference.

ruveyn

Solar alone would not do the job, no. Although there are some interesting proposals that would help such as solar panels capable of generating some electricity from infrared, and materials that use the piezoelectric effect to generate electricity from the impact of raindrops. And technologies such as compressed air storage, fuel cells, and storage ponds by hydro damns could be useful to store energy for use when the sun isn't shining (although only the last one is at the stage where we could use it at the moment). But mostly what I see solar as useful for in the short term is helping to supplement the grid, reducing how much fuel we burn in other places. Coupled with improving efficiency, that can cut down a lot on how much fossil fuels we burn.

I am open to nuclear power, but am unconvinced that it is the best option. The power plants tend to go way over budget when they're being built. There is a nuclear power plant being refurbished in Canada that must be costing nearly twice as much as it should have. Also, we don't yet have a firm plan for long term storage of the waste (essentially Canada's policy is, keep building the temporary storage sites and put off figuring long term storage for another few decades). As such, we really don't know what the full life-cycle cost of nuclear power is. Additionally, it takes forever and a day to propose, approve, license, and build a nuclear power plant. That doesn't rule it out, but if the motivation is wanting to reduce CO2 emissions as recommended by the IPCC then we need new sources of energy in the next 5 years or so.

I agree, geothermal is a great power source for those places where it works. Iceland uses it extensively already, and there are places in the US where it could probably be expanded. There are certain areas where wind energy would be quite reliable (turbines all over the North Sea, for instance, off the coasts of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). Tidal energy shows some promise as you get tides twice a day, like clockwork. There are some areas where the geography is such that you get huge tides. Ocean currents are essentially constant, so there are proposals for what look like underwater wind farms. All of these sorts of things (and more) working together with solar have huge potential. It would be a big initial investment, but in many cases it would result in very low upkeep costs (the exception being things in the ocean). And we have a pretty good idea what these sorts of things would cost for the entire life-cycle. I think that there have been studies showing that we could power the world off of renewable energy. It would just require batteries (well, preferably newer, cheaper, cleaner technology) as backups.