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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (604)	7/8/2008 8:26:13 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 86355

I'm not so sure its too soon to start worrying about electric production. I read about coal plants being canceled. And strong opposition to nuke plants. If more people buy hybrids or electric cars in the future, we're gonna need more electric. Gotta generate that somehow. If we can't build new nuke and coal plants, that leaves natural gas. And though we're finding a lot, the amount of LNG we import is gonna have to go up - BTW a lot of imported LNG is gonna come from the bad old Persian Gulf. Qatar in particular is adding LNG capacity big time. No matter what you believe about GW, a lot of folks are acting as if it's real. Just heard an interview with T Boone Pickens and he's going to have a 2500 unit wind farm that produces enough power to supply 1 million homes. He said there was a study that said there is enough wind and land available in North Dakota to supply the electric needs of the whole US (I'm skeptical on that one). And nuke isn't dead, they are building 2 nuke plants here in Florida (I know because my electric bill is going up 20% in Jan to pay for them in advance). Also have been reading that with state of the art nuke "spent" fuel rods are no longer "spent" and can be recycled to the point where the radiation lasts only 200 years instead of 200,000 years as was the case. They do this in France. Still not sure that nuke plants are the cheapest alternative with the progress in wind and solar. For current hybrids you obviously don't need more electricity... plug in hybrids will add more consumption but those will start to trickle into the market in 2010. Pure electric will start making an impact in probably 4-5 years. I'm not complacent about the electric needs from this change but I think it will be managed... frankly I'm more concerned about speeding the replacement cycle to the more efficient vehicles... be it hybrid, plug in hybrids, pure electric or very efficient internal combustion vehicles (which are just fine with me).