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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (36417)	8/21/2009 11:31:33 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Re: "Per unit of energy produced the subsidies for fossil fuels are dwarfed by the subsidies for wind and solar." Do not conflate two, (or three, or four...), different things. No one said ANYTHING about "solar" --- the discussion was wind. (And, even if you want to expand the discussion to "solar", it would be helpful to delineate what form of the technology youi are talking about: solar thermal or solar photoelectric for example, are both quite different in cost.) PS --- you link to the Texas estimates (nice though it is) appears to completely NOT ANSWER the question we were batting around. For one, it is nowhere near to current (going only up to 2006) and even THAT is "estimated". Two, it does not appear to compare subsidy expenses for the various technologies for generating electricity based on a COMMON FACTOR that would allow cross comparisons --- for example: "subsidy cost per Kilowatt produced" or "per BTU equivalent". No, it seems to just total up the subsidy costs which (with such widely varying proportions of the total US generation capacity that each represents) produces a figures that are useless for cross-comparison. (For example: wind representing such an infinitesimal portion of the generation capacity, while others are much larger). You need to compare subsidy costs using some sort or factor that they all have in common... for example "cost per Kilowatt" or some such before any kind of conclusion can be drawn. Anyway... nice link (but it certainly never says that "wind costs more" or anything at all like that.)