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Politics : Politics of Energy
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To: RetiredNow who wrote (5179)2/23/2009 12:03:46 PM
From: Hawkmoon  Read Replies (3) of 86355
 
Fixing aging infrastructure of old tech and old, dwindling energy sources or investing the same amount in new tech and new energy sources that won't dwindle?

What's more expensive.. fixing your old car or buying a new one?

There's no doubt that repairing infrastructure in the oil industry is an issue. But even if you replace fossil fuels with all solar/wind you have tremendous maintenance and overhaul issues. Within 10-20 years you're going to be faced with replacing the guts of all of those windmills. As for solar, there is an ongoing maintenance required to clean the solar panels to remove the persistence dust that will attempt to congregate upon them. Even Geothermal has maintenance issues to remove calcified buildup within the pipes. And the dissolved salts and oxygen accelerate corrosion:

bcsmain.com

And as I've mentioned MANY times, those Li-Ion batteries will need to be replaced every 6-7 years (if not sooner), so there you have even greater REPLACEMENT of battery infrastructure that could be a FAR GREATER burden upon the economy than existing infrastructure.

Nothing comes without cost (either current or future). And this is most readily observable in the wind turbine industry. They intrinsic design of these tower based wind turbines just cries "metal fatique" and will require constant surveillance and maintenance:

guardian.co.uk

windpower.org

And as they are discovering in Europe, if they have one failure of a wind mill due to catastrophic failure, if can cause regulators to order all turbines to "feather" their props and shut down pending maintenance inspection.

Hardly a sound manner in which to create future baseload power generation.

Hawk
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