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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index
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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (162885)11/8/2008 2:49:50 PM
From: Elroy JetsonRead Replies (2) of 306849
 
As Boone Pickens so self-interestedly points out, we can't drill our way out of buying foreign oil, and buying foreign oil certainly doesn't give us cheaper gas.

Burning the oil or natural gas at a centralized power plant and using plug-in hybrids is increasingly more fuel-efficient and more cost-efficient as batteries or other storage devices become cheaper and more efficient. Clearly the move to central power stations and plug-in hybrids makes sense - and it doesn't need to be subsidized. Each consumer will clearly see that their cost per mile is substantially less when they fill-up at the plug instead of the gas station.

But how to produce the electricity is more problematic. The Chevron-Google thermal solar project was estimated to produce power at parity with burning oil or gas at a power station, but oil prices are lower now. So you have to decide how much, if at all to subsidize alternate energy sources which are not competitive with oil or gas.

I think it would be far better to subsidize research in alternate energy technologies than subsidizing the building of alternate energy plants which use current inefficient technology which will never be cost competitive with the combination of oil and later alternate energy technologies. From a historical viewpoint it would be as if President Harry Truman has made a major government investment in vacuum tube manufacturing plants.

Oil prices are not going to rise back that soon, so there's sufficient time for a major R&D effort to develop the electrical generating equivalent of the development of the transistor.
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