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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (386897)	5/28/2008 11:56:33 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576322

After all, electricity is generated by plants that burn oil or natural gas. First, natural gas is not oil, so I don't know why you guys (you & JF) lump them together. Just over 1% of electricity in the US is generated by oil, so we could totally eliminate it without materially affecting our dependence on foreign oil. Okay. I thought it was closer to 10% but its only 3%........so electric cars are a real boon assuming we can keep use of oil in electricity generation to 3%. "49.7 percent of our nation's electricity was generated from coal. Nuclear energy produced 19.3 percent. Natural gas supplied 18.7 percent. Hydropower provided 6.5 percent of the supply. Fuel oil provided 3.0 percent of the generation mix. Biomass produced 1.6 percent, while other renewable resources, such as geothermal, solar, and wind, provided the remainder of the supply. eei.org While we do import a lot of gas, it does not pose the kind of energy independence issue that oil does -- Most nat. gas is produced locally, not imported. a) We are more diverse in our electricity generation than we are in our reliance on Oil; b) Supplies of natural gas are available from countries which pose no threat to us; Again, we have considerable nat. gas production in the US. Up until recently, nat. gas has been more expensive than oil so we have used only a little of our reserves. In fact, its mostly used is in the summer when EPA standards are being exceeded.....nat. gas burns much cleaner than oil. c) The development of wind as a clean, renewable electricity source is beginning to take off. To put it in perspective, a wind farm consisting of 500 of the new 5Mw wind turbines, available soon, could duplicate the output of Hoover dam. Agreed. d) There is always nuclear, which is a very clean resource, and can be done cost effectively if you get the federal government to take charge and streamline the process. Agreed but its not likely to be approved. e) Most importantly, electric vehicles will largely be charged at night during off-peak hours, when excess capacity is available. Agreed. Obviously, the focus should be on trying to develop a cost-effective way of manufacturing Hydrogen (and one that doesn't involve Natural gas); once this is done, fuel cells pretty much solve the problem altogether. But electric cars pose no real problems in terms of energy independence or utilization. Agreed.