Re: OT: betting against global warning


"ruylopez" <43087387@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1195489822$1073816@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


On Nov 19 2007 9:44 AM, Beldin the Sorcerer wrote:

I really doubt that's true.

Of course, we have more than enough land for solar.... what we lack is
wire
transmission capacity.

Go see last week's Newsweek.


I am pretty sure what we lack on solar, like every other non-fossil fuel
energy
source besides nuclear, is economic viability.

That would be wrong.

I am not sure what you mean by
"wire-transmitting capacity".

We need a very small amount of land, which we have, located in a brightly
lit desert-area, which we have.

If you read the article, you'll see we could power the entire country
easily.... but the problem is, electricity isn't all that portable... you
can't transmit it to the entire rest of the country (without massive power
loss) through the transmission process)



Yes you can get energy in a bunch of other
different ways, solar being one; but you cannot get it as cheaply as you
can by
burning fossil fuels.

Wrong again.

Oil : $100 a barrel.

Coal is cheaper. Hell, to heat your house, wood is cheaper. A lot more work,
but cheaper.

The world has built up, very rapidly, an industrial
economy that depends on this cheap, readily available energy. Solar just
isn't
there yet, AFAIK; I haven't looked in awhile but when I did it was nowhere
close. I am sure it is ever improving, but we need, IMO, something
revolutionary to solve the rapidly approaching problem. A problem of which
MMGW
is only a symptom.

Go read the article.

Here's a link :

http://www.newsweek.com/id/69535/page/2

And a relevent cite :

But physicist David Mills knows that the power of the sun is best captured
by gigantic fields of mirrors arrayed on the ground, which can generate
enough electricity to run an entire power plant. Mills, a physicist, spent
decades developing his technology-called a Compact Linear Fresnel
Reflector-at the University of New South Wales in Australia. After his
attempts to commercialize the process stalled, Mills, 61, thought about
retiring. But two well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalists got to him
first. Lane of Kleiner-Perkins and Vinod Khosla, the valley's leading
renewable energy evangelist, offered Mills a $40 million investment and a
top management team to get him to come to California and start over.
Last week, Ausra signed a 20-year contract with Pacific Gas and Electric to
provide electricity from a $500 million, 177-megawatt solar-thermal plant
under construction in California's Central Valley. The plant, which is set
to go online in 2010, will be the world's largest solar installation. The
blueprint is disarmingly simple. Rows of flat mirrors that follow the path
of the sun are arranged in a one-square-mile grid. The mirrors reflect the
sun's heat onto water-filled pipes above, creating steam that cranks a
turbine in a nearby power plant. The electricity produced doesn't emit a
molecule of greenhouse gas. "Big solar," as Ausra's concept is known, is
especially attractive in California, where public utilities are required to
get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2015



The bigger the plant, the cheaper each kilowatt-hour produced. "A field of
mirrors 91 miles square could power the entire United States," Mills says.
Though that field is unlikely to ever be built-strong-enough transmission
lines don't exist-the emerging solar-thermal industry has sparked a land
rush in the American desert



Go read, son.



Read the rest of the article, too... here's another highlight :



The choice for microbiologist Jack Newman came down to making strawberry
fragrance or changing the world. Sitting around a conference table last year
at Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, Calif., Newman and his colleagues
were trying to figure out what to do following the success of their project
to produce inexpensive anti-malarial drugs. (The project was a collaboration
between the Institute for OneWorld Health, Amyris Biotechnologies and U.C.
Berkeley, and was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.) The
genetically engineered microbes responsible for their breakthrough showed
tremendous promise in other areas. "We talked about flavors or fragrances or
vitamins that would make a couple of million bucks," says Newman. "Then we
said, 'Wait a second. A lot of people came [to the company] to change the
world, so why not tackle a really big problem?"

The scientists, who met as postdoctoral fellows at U.C. Berkeley, decided to
apply the knowledge they used to create their low-cost drug to develop a
line of "no-compromise" biofuels. Competitive in price and performance with
conventional fossil fuels, Newman says the Amyris products will cut
greenhouse-gas emissions by 85 to 95 percent, making them far cleaner than
ethanol. And unlike ethanol, the biofuels can be transported in existing
pipelines, and can be engineered to work in gasoline, diesel or jet engines.


.

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