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

To: RetiredNow who wrote (5179)	2/23/2009 9:09:36 AM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

I guess that means if you were an oil exec, you'd do no maintenance on your pipelines, tank farms, etc and when they were no longer operable you'd just shut them down. Instead you'd invest in solar or wind or whatever Al Gore approves and beg for the government to make people buy your power at a high price. Why don't we let private investors invest the way they want. Oil execs can invest in oil infrastructure, "alternative" execs can invest in their own infrastructure. Investment decisions are best made by people investing their own money, not collective decisions made by government telling or coercing others how to invest theirs.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (5179)	2/23/2009 11:07:52 AM
From: Eric	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86355

The "Rusting" has gotten very, very bad in the industry. It looks like it will continue to get worse.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (5179)	2/23/2009 12:03:46 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to 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