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Originally Posted by IamBatman
Seriously, what do you have against renewable technology? is there any of them you like? you seem to focus only on short term costs and your cost comparisons between mass market developed tech and low volume leading edge technology makes me wonder about your motivation.  is the status quo your only answer? do we keep buying fuel from the Arabs and the crazy guy Hugo? what do you propose we do? |
Renewable is definately the way to go... The problem is that it keeps getting *sold* to the general public in the form of ideas that are generally not feasible...
Remember 10 years ago when hydrogen was going to be the future: we were all going to be driving fuel cell cars with hydrogen tanks... That is until people started looking at the availability of fuel cell catalysts like platinum and palladium and they realized that even with mass production those materials were going to be insanely expensive and moreover realized that there isnt enough of those precious metals in the ground to build all the cars that we would need. Also every car would have needed a high pressure tank to store the hydrogen and high pressure piping, all made out of stainless steel (because elemental hydogen is highly reactive) and that welding stainless is very difficult, time consuming and expensive. Back then the defense was the same moore law type argument that we would make advances and use mass production to bring down the cost in just a few years. Now ten years later we are right where we left off in terms of practicality.
Tesla promised the same thing, with vehicles that would be better and faster and also cheaper (eventually) and would have no emissions and no long tailpipe because you would charge your vehicle from your own solar array that would not only be cheap but also subsidized by the government. Of course what they didnt mention is that you really need about an acre of solar panels to regularly charge just the vehicle for the next day and that the most recent costs of such a setup is about $75000. Or that to build a vehicle like the model S with the performance they promise that the vehicle would need all carbon composite body work and that there is noone in the world that can mass produce carbon body work for even a run of a few thousand cars much less the 20000-50000 cars/year that would be needed from *each* manufacturer to meet consumer demands. Or that china can barely keep up with world demand for batteries as it is and is basically rendering large areas uninhabitable with pollution to keep those factories running. We done even know if enough metals can be mined practically to build as many batteries as would be needed to make a real go at electric vehicles.
So what so we do? I agree that staying the course and just buying oil is not a good idea but I also believe that there are other options that have not been given the consideration they deserve. One such option is to use methane. The idea is to leverage the technologies that are progressing in terms of practicality and cost-effectivenedd and use them with a method that keeps much of the existing infrastructure. SO the idea is to build solar and build it big, taking advantage of the fact that solar is now price competitive. Use the electricity generated from solar to generate methane: pull CO2 from the atmosphere and the crack the CO2 and H20 and make methane. Its a well known process and it sales well. existing IC engines can be converted to run methane and these engines run very efficiently with less wear and methane is much easier to store which means it can supplant batteries in the meantime.