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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (5427)	2/27/2009 9:15:38 AM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Hardly.. but that was just an article regarding proposals and theoretical policy initiatives. Did you think it was very scientific when they stated that no pollution would occur on those lands? It sure wasn't very realistic, given our history of construction projects of such scale. Furthermore, no where did they incorporate the actual energy cost that would be expended to cover 49,000 square miles of "suitable land" for their solar farms. They incorporated all of the costs in the project and the beauty of it is it basically pays for itself over about 50 years and then there are very low ongoing expenses. The energy source is Free! After all.... saving $300 billion a year plus on foreign oil more than pays for the entire system and as they said in their study they factored in no further improvements in technology over those years to prove that it could be done today. They presented their study to Congress last March and have gotten a lot of attention. Of course we know solar technology will be much better in 50 years and we should easily have much more energy harvested by then per unit area. My hunch is that we will have PV's that are over 70% efficient then for an increase of energy harvest approximately 300% better than today's panels. When I look at the total impacts that coal fired generation has had on our world and the many thousands of people that have died just as a result of mining coal not to mention the health effects on all of us this proposal has a lot of merit.