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

To: i-node who wrote (708339)	4/28/2013 10:53:24 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573866

Or for the amount of money wasted on "stimulus", but he chose not to use it that way. He chose not to waste it that way, instead he wasted it in other ways. A trillion or two won't result in anywhere close to half of the energy used in the US being "renewable" by any standard definition of that term.* The post you replied to only included electricity generation, but we use a lot of other energy, and even for electrical generation, its not just about buying X amount of capacity at current prices because - 1 - Rated capacity isn't actual electrical generation. Solar and wind produce noticeably less than 100% of the time. A fact which would increase if they where extended to less prime areas. 2 - Because solar and wind don't produce all of the time you would need fossil fuel backup. Neither solar nor wind have the characteristics to serve very well as either base power (running most of the time) or peak power (often not running, but with very high availability when you need it) 3 - While prices have gone down over time, and economies of scale can also reduce prices, any crash course in massively increasing solar and wind power on the scale of half of the US electrical generation over a ten year period (or somewhat less because the renewable figure apparently counts the existing hydro-power) would cause the prices for the resources used to go up. 4 - We only have as much solar and wind as we do now because of the subsidies. If we generate a lot more, the subsidies will have to be much larger which will be a large ongoing expense, not a one time payment. In fact the subsidies per unit of energy would likely have to go up, at least if the move was made over only a decade rather than say a half century. *You could call fossil fuels renewable because such fuels are still being created, just massively slower then we use them up, you could call solar non-renewable because in something like 6 billion years the sun will turn in to a white dwarf and not put out much energy and most likely in about a quadrillion years it will turn in to a black dwarf emitting almost nothing.