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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7155)	2/26/2008 12:15:08 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24211

The Cogeneration Stopgap Posted by Engineer-Poet on February 26, 2008 - 10:00am The prospect of going through a cold winter with inadequate heat is a real one. More and more Americans are putting their winter heating fuel on credit, increasing their level of debt and the burden of servicing it. This cannot continue indefinitely. When the ARM resets or the credit cards max out, the whole house of cards (including paying the mortgage) falls down. Foreclosure is the problem in the mid-term, but freezing strikes as soon as there's no fuel for the furnace. This problem is made much worse by fuel shortages and the consequent price spikes. As fuel supplies go down, prices go up. The alternative is rationing, but this has costs too; if commerce is shut down, employees don't get paid and the problem of paying for heat is much the same. The problem comes down to affordability. Whether there is a limit to the gas available, or if incremental supplies command unaffordable prices, the alternatives are to do more with less, or do without. As N. American gas supplies are already shrinking, any good solution has to involve getting out in front of the problem and staying there. So what can we do? In the end, natural gas will be too expensive to burn just for space heat. The obvious long-term solution for most areas is a combination of superinsulation and passive solar design; if you need no fuel, you don't care how much it costs. Does anyone care about the cost of spermaceti anymore? But that's a 50-year goal; the immediate problems are going to center around keeping existing buildings warm and lit until they are finally renovated or replaced. If we have a relatively fixed building stock and a declining supply of gas for heat, the problem becomes one of getting the same amount of heat out of less fuel. The big question is if we can do that, and how? Can we do it? I believe the answer is "yes". Why should you believe me? Because I see a way for it to be done. The technologies have been with us for decades, though newer ones will improve the performance. It's attractive enough that some businesses have been moving this way for years; all we have to do is accelerate the existing trends. How do we do it? In the longer term, we replace natural gas with electricity. But this takes a relatively long time to plan and build generators, transmission lines, and so forth. In the short term, we do jiu-jitsu with entropy There's more… (1970 words) theoildrum.com