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

To: RetiredNow who wrote (752143)	11/10/2013 10:03:13 PM
From: mel221	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576619

Naturally, I agree with you about all the subsidies. >> the best solution I saw was some MIT report years ago that said a 10 mile squared solar thermal farm in the Mojave desert could provide all of our electricity needs. I'm a big fan of all things MIT, but I suspect efficiency and implementation issues make that kind of farm impossible... Not to mention transmission loss to get that energy to Maine and Miami. I live in Arizona and routinely drive past several large Solar energy farms... The largest farm (Solana) just came online and is 3 square miles and produces 944,000 MW h/yr... which is great. But the US produces 3,886,400,000 MW h/yr of electricity (and that was in 2005). So, Solana produces 944/3,886,400 = 0.024% of US electricity needs. So we would need 4200 Solana scale plants (4200 * 3) = 12600 square miles. We certainly have the land for it, but that's a big space. So, we are not going 100% solar anytime soon. Converting to Natural gas has its appealing points, but one question does need to be answered. Why?, when coal is so plentiful and cheap. I know why the global warming alarmists hate coal... but I suspect coal may very well be an acceptable choice. The question that needs to be answered is why fear global warming? I understand the liberal agenda... I am interested in your concerns. There are many aspects of the current environment that are well within normal cycles. PS. There's a bit of basic math here... hope I didn't make a mistake ;-) en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org