Asymmetrical Information

Of course, nukular power is not polluting at all.

You might not need to draw power from the grid at all, but from a local source. Solar obviously won't work for an overnight recharge, but perhaps could be used while you're at work. Or wind power, if you don't mind chopped-up birds all over the place.

1. Power plants are a more efficient use of energy as more of the fuel is converted into electricity. This means that recharging off the grid is more carbon efficient than running off of gasoline.

2. Even if coal in it's current form is more polluting, adding scrubbers to a coal plant is going to reduce the carbon emitted. Here's a hint is easier to add pollution scrubbers to 5000 electical plants than it is to add emissions to 45 million cars.

3. Nuclear plants are carbon neutral in generation. Adding nuclear plants to the mix would reduce the overall carbon emitted. There's a reason China and India are building all those pebble bed reactors.

All and all recharging off the grid is a great idea. If the grid is relatively clean. That's why the green movement needs to change it's stance on nuclear power.

While power plants are more efficient than an internal combustion car engine, it's not clear that charging off the grid is more energy efficient over-all. The energy used in the power plant is converted to electricity, it is then converted to stored energy in the battery which is then drawn down by the electric motor to move the car. Each of these steps loose energy to inefficiency. In the end, there could still be some net energy savings, but there might also be a net energy loss -- depending on the technology and how the car is used. This is just a long way of saying that the relative efficiency of the power plant and the internal combustion engine are not the only variables that need be taken into account.

You'll also notice that the guy in the article is in California, where the supply of electricity is so famously cheap, abundant, and reliable. (Until you've run the numbers it's hard to appreciate what a huge amount of electricity, by residential standards, it takes to replace a tank of gas.)

This + nuke power = good idea. Now, to get the idiot anti-nukers out of the picture some how.

Actually coal gasification has real promise. Gasified coal can have most of the really bad stuff taken out before combustion. (Really bad being mercury and sulfur.) This is much more efficient than scrubbers.

CO2 is still a problem, but that is true of any combustion mechanism.

And gasified coal can burn in turbines giving extra efficency over just boilers. A couple of full scale plants have been built, so this is not experimental

One argument that seems to re-occur each time nuclear energy is proposed as a solution is the fear of radiation affecting humans, whether by accident inside the reactor or during its half-life after the used material has been disposed. Yet it seems that the actual danger posed by radiation is grossly overstated, and there are infinitely more deaths associated with fossil-fuel based energy than with nuclear. I don’t remember that many deaths reported at Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island appeared to be a non-event. Are there some good sources out there that can point me to actual body counts from nuclear accidents and long-term radiation from disposed radioactive material?

www.architectureandmorality.blogspot.com

Steven DenBeste has written much of interest on this topic - try

http://denbeste.nu/cgi-bin/perlfect/search/search.pl?p=1&lang=en&mode=all&q=nuclear+coal

to see some of his articles.

Mr. Zrimsek:  Most electric-supply problems are during afternoon peak hours; vehicles charging overnight would present few difficulties by comparison.

Mr. Walser:  I happen to have done a brief analysis touching on the comparative efficiency of vehicles vs. electric powerplants and the delivery system, both burning petroleum (and ignoring refinery losses for the former).  It's posted at The Ergosphere:  Petroleum independence as a growth engine.

There's ALWAYS an energy loss whenever you change from one form of energy to another. But obviously that's countered by the convenience of having the energy in a different form.

And don't forget that there are limits on how far you can send electrical energy, which is why generating plants have to be relatively near the end users. Personally, I'd LIKE a nuclear reactor in my back yard, if only so I could tease people about how we glow in the dark!

Batteries are not only inefficient, they're expensive, they are themselves polluting (production and disposal), and they don't suit many people's transport needs - people who need to go more than a few hundred miles without having to stop for hours to charge up.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a general adoption of electric cars over fossil fueled ones, though they may be very well suited to a commuter niche.

Sigivald:  Batteries (even the crappy lead-acid ones) are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, and large batteries are among the most-recycled consumer goods in the USA.

You talk about many people, but what about the many, many more whose daily commute is the median 22 miles/day or less?  Those people could drive a plug-in hybrid (aka GO-HEV and never have to burn gasoline except on the weekends.  Further, once you've gone to grid power for the vehicle, anything that can feed the grid is a further substitute for that local fuel.

Someone who drives gets 50 MPG during the 20% of their driving that needs gasoline, and uses a combination of coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind for the rest is getting an nonest 250 MPG of petroleum.  They could even put solar panels on their roof if they wanted to offset the other fossil fuels.  Is it legitimate to claim the 250 MPG figure?  As a fuzzy rather than a hard number, even I would say yes... but only if not misrepresented.

Of course, once the hydrogen fuel cell problem gets all the bugs out, people will need to come up with a different way of indicating fuel efficiency.

However, that will still be quite a number of years off, particularly those closed-loop fuel cells.

When doing analysis on this type of issue there are a few things that must be borne in mind. In no particular order:

1. Conversions of energy sources to a common unit like gigajoules or mmbtus is appealing to engineers, but is economically meaningless. This, I think, is proven by the fact that fossil fuels do not all sell at btu parity. You might as well compare them by weight or volume.
2. On a related point, individual consumers are not interested in buying cheap mmbtus. They are interested in getting from point A to point B, keeping their houses cool or warm and being able to see at night. Electric cars might make sense, if you don’t mind going slowly or not going very far between lengthy refueling sessions. Apparently, consumers do mind, however, because when they have been offered electric vehicles, they have chosen gasoline engines instead.
3. When you look at the cost of generating electricity from different sources, you must take capital expenses into account. Most often the comparisons are made under the assumption that you already have the plants. Existing nuclear plants can generate power for less than $0.01/kwh, but when you include the capital expense for building one and reasonable return on that capital, they are a much more costly source of power.
4. And power plants are not the only capital costs that must be considered. In addition to generating the power, you have to get it to where it is needed. That involves building transmission, which is already in short supply in many parts of the country. FERC commissioners have expressed concern regarding the meager amount of capital going into transmission today. Increasing the capacity of the transmission grid to support the shift of a significant portion of the nation’s transportation assets to electricity would create a NIMBY problem of galactic proportion. Alternatives that would increase the capacity of the existing grid (i.e. thyristors) are very expensive.

A common mistake is to perform a cursory analysis and then conclude that society should make some huge transformation (which, given the market value of all of the internal combustion engines in the US, shifting to electric vehicles would clearly be). If you are enamored of electric cars, it is more productive to analyze why, in this free market economy, they have not caught on. And try to avoid explanations that involve conspiracies, cabals, secret societies, the devil or consumer stupidity.

Finally, an anecdote. In the midst of the power crisis in California, I visited Palo Alto and parked in the basement of their city hall. There they were providing electricity for electric cars – at no charge! That ranks as one the stupidest things I’ve witnessed, outside the old Soviet Union.

"On this headline's logic, I am inviting investment my new idea for a car that uses NO GASOLINE AT ALL!!! I am planning to call it a "diesel"."

Wow! An infinite-MPG car!!

And after hydrogen fuel cells are perfected, we'll still need a way to store hydrogen efficiently at low pressures, as well as an efficent way to reform more complex hydrocarbons into hydrogen.

Research is underway (and has been for awhile now), but it is unclear how close researchers are getting to the solutions.

"Until you've run the numbers it's hard to appreciate what a huge amount of electricity, by residential standards, it takes to replace a tank of gas."

I know I'll regret trying this off the top of my head. A typical household in the US has a peak electrical demand of about 12 KWH, and an average of about 30 KWH/day. Call it 900 KWH per month. Now assume a suburban household with an average of 90 minutes of driving per day (probably low), using an average of 40 HP (probably high). One HP is 1.34 KW, so ignoring efficiency considerations, 40 HP times 1.34 KW times 1.5 hours/day times 30 days/month gives us... carry the one... 2412 KWH/month. About 2.7 times the current household usage. At 9.25 cents per KWH (from my most recent bill, including fees and taxes), $223/month.

Too high? Too low?

"When you look at the cost of generating electricity from different sources, you must take capital expenses into account. Most often the comparisons are made under the assumption that you already have the plants. Existing nuclear plants can generate power for less than $0.01/kwh, but when you include the capital expense for building one and reasonable return on that capital, they are a much more costly source of power."

Which leads us to a couple of follow-on questions:

1. Is there any big source of capital cost that can be reduced?

2. Is there any way to spread that capital cost over more kilowatts?

For (1), it might be worth revisiting some of the power plant regs that have been written over the years, not to mention rewritten during plant construction and requiring redesign (which tends to be expensive)

As for (2), any additional kilowatt-hours that come out of an existing nuclear plant are nearly free. This can include kilowatt-hours going into car batteries (or anywhere else) in the middle of the night, when the plant is normally running below capacity. Applying peak pricing to all customers can get them looking at other ways they can get some of their kilowatt-hours at off-peak times, and encourage a market for gadgets that help consumers do that.

(How about an A/C unit that freezes a lot of water at night, and uses that ice to cool the house when the sun's up? Peak pricing might encourage some people to buy it.)

Another idea would be to build a nuke-plant that runs at peak output 24/7 whose power is used to make hydrogen, or better yet synthetic liquid fuel. Then you can power cars with it and we won't run out of it for quite a while.

Good thoughts,Ken. On the first, you are certainly correct. Particularly with respect to changing regulations - especially in licensing - for nuclear facilities. And we must include not only direct capital outlays, but indirect risk capital, which must be highly significant for any new nuclear plant, given the risk that it will be killed by regulatory fiat after a large sum of direct capital has already been spent.

On the second point, it is my understanding that, once fired up, nuclear plants run at pretty much full capacity. The reason is that the marginal cost of production is so low and the cost of stopping and starting so high, there are very few scenarios in which it makes economic sense to shut one down. The situation is similar with coal plants. For this reason wholesale prices of power can even drop to zero for short period at night in some areas. Peak power requirements are typically met by natural gas fired plants.

Alas, storage of power has been analyzed extensively and has had very few economic applications. The most common form is pumped storage, which involves pumping water uphill when prices are low, and allowing it to spin turbines during the day as it flows back down. It is widely used in Japan, but chiefly as a result of a rather odd market structure there. If the wholesale markets in Japan were effectively deregulated, it is questionable that much of it would be economic even there. If the cost of peak power continues to rise (with the price of natgas), however, at some point it will become economically viable, at which point I suspect we'll discover reasons why it damages the environment and we won't do that either...

"generating plants have to be relatively near the end users" - Rex

Actually that's not the case for HVDC transmission systems. Sure distance still matters (unless we've got superconducting transmission wires in which case distance really wouldn't matter), but nowhere near as much as for traditional AC systems.

Batteries will remain the 800-pound gorilla lurking in the closet of all electric car and fuel-electric hybrid units, until either much more efficient battery technologies go mainstream or the hydrogen problem is solved (meaning, widespread use of fuel cells). IIRC, the battery pack in the current-generation Toyota Prius is estimated to last 100,000 miles (it is hoped) after which it has to be recycled. Note that:

1. Recycling a battery pack, especially a gigantic lithium-ion pack, is not a 'free' process, economically or environmentally.

2. The same is obviously true for producing it in the first place.

3. The replacement cost is estimated to be a few thousand dollars -- or roughly 1-2x the cost of rebuilding a traditional gasoline engine of comparable spec to the Prius drivetrain. Except a reasonably well-maintained gasoline engine may easily last 200,000 miles without needing that kind of work. Will this lead to old Prius cars (and other hybrids and electrics) being scrapped prematurely, thus increasing the net environmental costs to producing them?

GM, we might recall, sent most of its EV1s to the crusher once the associated leases expired. Mind you, I've got nothing against electric cars or hybrids on a conceptual level, but in the real world there is no magic bullet -- just some solutions which may be better than others. A modern, well-maintained four-stroke internal combustion engine is actuallly a marvel of efficiency and cleanliness given what it is expected to do. The problem has less to do with the technology itself, but the sheer volume of them in operation. Concomitantly, the problem of volumes is not necessarily solved by switching to alternative technologies; we may just be fooling ourselves for a generation or two, after which previously-overlooked real costs will become more visible.

anony-mouse says:

The replacement cost is estimated to be a few thousand dollars

GM, we might recall, sent most of its EV1s to the crusher once the associated leases expired.

Michael Cain:  Try 15 kW at highway cruise or between 250 and 350 watt-hours per mile for a passenger car.  The figure that sticks in my mind for average vehicle use is 13,000 miles/year, so call it 1100 miles/month; at 350 Wh/mile that's 385 kWh which costs $38.50 at 10¢/kWh.  (Off-peak power for charging overnight is likely to cost considerably less in most places.)

And John writes:

Conversions of energy sources to a common unit like gigajoules or mmbtus is ... economically meaningless.

You do have a point about non-fungibles; the cheapness of electricity makes no difference to people whose vehicles run only on gasoline.  On the other hand, it is a strong incentive to change.

... individual consumers are not interested in buying cheap mmbtus. They are interested in getting from point A to point B, keeping their houses cool or warm and being able to see at night.

Electric cars might make sense, if you don’t mind going slowly or not going very far between lengthy refueling sessions.

When you look at the cost of generating electricity from different sources, you must take capital expenses into account.

1. They'd make some use of the grid capacity going idle.
2. They'd boost consumption during the lowest demand periods of the day, allowing some powerplants to run continuously.
3. The transfer of some demand from e.g. gas-burning peaking plants to coal-burning base-load plants would cut variable costs and take pressure off gas supplies.

My buddy, who both read many motoring magazines, and believed some of the advert claims which were printed, especially about oil and petrol saving devices; signed up for a few items.
He saved 15% fuel by fastening this little doo-hickey to his carburettor, then saved another 12.5% by adding this gunge to his oil reservoir, and added a further 17.75% saving by replacing all the grease in his bearings with this super new lubricant! He also invested in about four other fuel-saving devices!
Only trouble was he had to stop every fifty miles to drain excess fuel out of the tank!

Jane Galt, actually natural gas is more abundant than oil (but not as abundant as coal) which is why the US still obtains most of its natural gas domestically. You may recall there has been controversy about building the additional natural gas terminals the US will need to handle future imports. Worldwide there is still plently of natural gas although the oil is running out.

Engineer-Poet: Try 15 kW at highway cruise or between 250 and 350 watt-hours per mile for a passenger car. The figure that sticks in my mind for average vehicle use is 13,000 miles/year, so call it 1100 miles/month; at 350 Wh/mile that's 385 kWh which costs $38.50 at 10¢/kWh. (Off-peak power for charging overnight is likely to cost considerably less in most places.)

A more reasonable starting point. I was guessing for a suburban household, so some small adjustments. Much of the driving will not be highway cruise, but will be stop and go. Even with regenerative braking and a power curve that doesn't care much about speed, assume some loss of efficiency, perhaps 10%. Let's say 275 watt-hours per mile. Typical household has more than one vehicle, so piles up more total miles than that. Let's say a factor of 1.5, so 20,500 miles/year or 1700 miles/month. Charging efficiencies are not perfect, so assume a 10% loss for that. 9.25 cents is what I pay, and the local utility does not offer off-peak pricing to residential customers. So call it 520 KWH per month, at a cost of $48.10. Versus $163.46 for gasoline at 26 MPG and $2.50/gal (what I paid yesterday).

Sign me up, if I can get the car at close to the same cost. Even without fast recharge, I can afford to rent a gas-burner when I have to make the occassional 500-mile run to my Mom's.

Engineer-poet: that's a fine point, but how does taxi service compare to general usage profiles in the broader population?

Michael Cain:  If your car was a gas-optional hybrid (aka plug-in hybrid, charges from the grid for short trips) your extra effort would amount to filling it up for those long runs.  Battery capacities and prices being what they are, we're likely to see those at reasonable prices before the pure EV.

anony-mouse:  It's hard to tell, because the first cars are only a few years old and those in more typical use haven't reached that kind of mileage yet.  IIRC Toyota has revised their estimate of the typical battery lifespan to 150,000 miles based on experience, and nothing prevents them from increasing that estimate as more data come in.

Engineer-Poet wrote:

Tell that to the folks who switched their plants from natural gas to fuel oil when the price of the former hit $8.80/mmbtu.

Here I’m confused. You seem to making my point, although it may be because I did not make it well enough. To use a simple illustration, to say that an oil plant with a 12,000 heat rate is better than a natgas plant with a 14,000 heat rate is true on an energy conversion basis, but of no economic significance. You dispatch the plant with the best economics, not the plant with the best energy conversion rate.

A million BTU of electricity costs $29.28 at 10¢/kWH, compared to $20.62 for gasoline at $2.599 and 126,000 BTU/gallon. On the other hand, you can get a lot more of the electricity's energy to your wheels than the gasoline's.

It seems, then, that you’re beginning to sneak up on a more compelling exposition of the analysis. That is, how far can you go for a dollar’s worth of electricity and how far can you go on a dollar’s worth of gasoline? From there you can begin to add in the cost of manufacturing and maintaining electric or hybrids, reasonable expected life of the different vehicles, etc.

That's a piece of the past. First, the plug-in hybrid goes as far as you want at any legal speed, but manages most of the first few tens of miles largely on juice…

I don’t think it’s a piece of the past. I was speaking of electric vehicles, and you referred to hybrids. Or perhaps there is no longer an active lobby for electric cars?

The power companies' fixed costs in e.g. transmission yield more if they transmit more energy. Electric vehicles or GO-HEVs charging overnight would be boons for the utilities and generators:

1. They'd make some use of the grid capacity going idle.

This is certainly true, but doesn’t represent a boon to the transmission utilities. Since they are allowed a fixed rate of return, increasing throughput wouldn’t involve any long-term gain to the utility shareholders. It would, I believe, lower the cost to those using transmission, as tariff rates should fall. That’s a benefit to consumers, but a pretty small one compared to the cost of energy. Still, every little bit helps.

2. They'd boost consumption during the lowest demand periods of the day, allowing some powerplants to run continuously.

With the typical generation stack, plants that are not baseload are natural gas fired. This would be good for generators, but you would no longer be getting $0.10/kwh power. But of course, in time, generators would have to build more coal or nuclear plants.

3. The transfer of some demand from e.g. gas-burning peaking plants to coal-burning base-load plants would cut variable costs and take pressure off gas supplies.

Generators would have to build more baseload plants (coal and nuclear) but the absolute need for peakers wouldn’t diminish, just their percent of total generation. No help for gas demand, I’m afraid.

Did you actually read the full article? It actually does discuss the issue of whether CO2 and fossil fuel savings are still being achieved or not with plug-in battery/regenerative motor & battery hybrids.

James Shearer, proven reserves of natural gas may be ample, but distribution is currently not.

SG, you will note that this is called "Department of Awful Headlines", not "Department of Awful Articles"

Engineer-Poet stated the case for the plug-in hybrids very well.

I believe there are two additional advantages to the plug-ins:

1) electricity production in this country is nearly 100% supplied with domestic sources. Quite the opposite is true for oil. utilizing more domestic electricity in exchange for imported oil is good.

2) future plans for more environmentally-friendly sources of power (wind, nuclear, solar, geo-thermal) are all for generating electricity, not producing gasoline. one should expect the amount of clean electricity to grow with time.

Allow me to correct myself. Flattening out load would diminish the need for peaking capacity. Must have been operating on too little sleep!

btw, it is one of the most misleading headlines one could imagine.... as if the energy issue wasn't complicated enough for non-technical folks to handle.

Wind, solar, and geothermal power sources will never produce a significant amount of power. The quantity of energy used by the United States is so big that maxing out wind, solar, and geothermal will produce only a fraction of the total. Nuclear is much more promising if people can just get over their fear of radiation.

Hydrogen is not a power source, it is a power distribution method. Hydrogen replaces power lines, not gasoline. We can't "mine" hydrogen. We have to put energy into it to make it. Coal, oil, uranium, etc... are all power sources.

I would love to see an electric vehicle with a small gasoline engine (probably a rotary or turbine) generating electricity instead of power to the wheels. With regenerative braking and smart wheels, this car could be safe, fast, and efficient. Compact electric motors can be quite powerful. With the gasoline engine optimised for a single running speed and batteries to help with peak loads, you could make a car that goes very fast and for long durations.

1 gallon of gasoline = 36 kW-hrs. Filling a 13 gallon tank in 5 minutes yields a power transfer of over 5 MW. Even if car batteries can be charged in 10 or 15 minutes, I wouldn't want to try to draw 5 MW at my house. I wouldn't even want the ability to draw that kind of power into my house.

Charging at home is going to take time for safety reasons, if nothing else. You can get about 24 kW out of a 100 Amp, 240 Volt circuit. That will charge that car battery in 1.5 hours, which isn't bad, but that's still a pretty hefty circuit. The next biggest load you'll have in your house is your electric range (12.5 kW) and then your electric clothes dryer (5 kW).

In reality, you'll probably charge your car up every day more slowly and not all at once when it runs out of juice. If you do this, you'll use less power. If this electric car is comparable to a 13 gallon tank gas powered car, it probably needs a 1/10th charge each day, so you'll need 10 minutes a day at the full power or an hour if you use a power level closer to your existing electric dryer.

So two cars charging for an hour a day, each day providing about 1.3 gallon equivalent of gas is like having two electric dryers or an electric range running for an hour each day.

If this load is going to run off-peak, then you can't come home and plug in right away. Your charging station will have to have a timer to start charging after people go to bed. No big deal.

I'm not sure what I've proven, but I'm out of gas...

Earnest: I think what you've proven is that cars are extraordinary freedom at a rather high cost. I think you've also proven that any attempt at reducing that cost also reduces that freedom.

Earnest I.:  You ignore the little fact that the conversion from gasoline to work is very lossy; figures I've seen claim that the average for US vehicles is a measly 17%.

Typical energy consumption for electric vehicles is rather low; the Tango claims 170 watt-hours/mile (output from the batteries, I expect), the tzero claims 205 Wh/mi (ditto) and the Prius+ pioneers are measuring values like 262 Wh/mile (at the input to the battery charger).  If you drove 50 miles/day at even 350 Wh/mi, you'd use 17.5 kWh; charging at 220 V 15 A, you'd fill the batteries in 5.3 hours.  A Prius+ charging a 30-mile battery pack at 262 Wh/mile would take 7.9 kWh, or overnight from a 16-gauge extension cord at 110 V.

If you work the numbers you can prove to yourself that you can start small and still accomplish amazing fuel savings with this technology.

1) electricity production in this country is nearly 100% supplied with domestic sources. Quite the opposite is true for oil. utilizing more domestic electricity in exchange for imported oil is good.

Barring widespread adoption of nuclear, do we have evidence that this would continue to hold true if a significant fraction of transportation energy were shifted over to the power grid?

Earnest: I think what you've proven is that cars are extraordinary freedom at a rather high cost. I think you've also proven that any attempt at reducing that cost also reduces that freedom.

Yup. Assuming a widespread adoption of electric vehicles with a standardized charging interface, one can see a market for power companies to install a special high-power charging outlet brick wired direct to the service transformer, and a service transformer wound with a suitable secondary tap available. That does present a chicken-and-egg scenario, though, and meanwhile, I think most people won't readily adapt to a vehicle that isn't always ready to go.

Financially speaking, cars are among the worst investments a person can make; many people make the investment anyway not just for the transportation, but for the sake of possessing convenient, readily-accessible transportation. Proffer a vehicle that notably reduces or deletes those latter two, and the incentive to buy is similarly adjusted.

anony-mouse, consider that 17% efficiency figure again.  Combined-cycle gas turbine powerplants are upwards of 50% efficient; even allowing for 7% transmission losses, 10% each in charger and batteries and 20% in the motor, you've still got 30.1% net efficiency.  Compared to burning fuel in 17% efficient cars, you could burn oil in those powerplants and still get 77% more miles per gallon.

Wind electricity is as cheap as 4.5¢/kWh today.  $0.045/kWh * .350 kWh/mi = 1.58¢/mile.  Allegedly, concentrating solar with Stirling-cycle engines is coming at $2.00/watt in 25 kW packages.  All you need is a connection from grid to wheels and gasoline's epitaph is written.

anony-mouse, we (U.S.) export a lot of coal beyond what we burn in power plants. so we could build a lot more coal-fired power plants and still be self-sufficient on electricity, not even counting wind&nukes.

personally, i'd like to see more wind and nuclear. contrary to Earnest I.'s assumption, if we harnessed all the potential wind power in s. dakota and texas alone, we would have more power than the country consumes (we'd still have issues with the inconsistency of the power source requiring substantial 'battery' back-up or peaker plants) we have just about the richest wind resources in the world in the great plains. furthermore, wind is just about cost competitive with nuclear, coal and gas-fired power plants (see the economist of about a month ago for a nice article with a more detailed breakdown of capital, fuel, and maintainence costs at varying fuel cost ranges)

I'm actually pro-hybrid or electric vehicles, so my post wasn't really intended to be an argument either way, just some thoughts.

If we were to harness all of the wind power in South Dakota and Texas, we would have to build a tremendous number of windmills along with attending roads, service facilities, etc... This may still be cleaner, but would carpet huge areas with windmills. If we reduce pollution but replace the environment with wind farms, have we improved things? Same goes for putting down solar farms all over the place.

Both wind farms and solar farms still require alternate power sources to take up the slack. The more such sources you have, though, the less backup power you need (as long as the wind farms are spread apart).

Also, what would the environmental effects of drawing that much energy out of the atmosphere be? Has anyone studied the effects of massive wind farms on the climate?

yeah, that'd be quite a lot of windmills. fortunately, more cows than people live in these areas. I think putting them on all the mountaintops (which are also great, high-wind value spots) is a worse idea. i guess there's no free lunch in energy generation. I mentioned it to point out the potential.
the environmental issues are, as I understand them:
1) killing birds; current siting of windmills generally requires avoiding migratory bird flight paths. i think in the long run, birds have eyes and brains and will adapt, sorta like squirells have adapted to avoiding cars.
2) slight reduction in total wind currents leads to somewhat colder poles and warmer equatorial. on balance, since melting polar glaciers are a negative for global warming, this is probably a small plus. but the whole effect is probably so small that practically speaking, it can be ignored.

There is no energy problem.

There is only a portable energy problem.

With fission, e can have all the energy we want for a billion years, even if we don't learn how to control fusion. Fission is one of the safest, cleanest, and cheapest energy sources we know of. Most developed countries except for the US seem to be aware of this.

However, we cannot fit fission reactors into cars. That's the main reason we still need fossil fuels.

This man hasn't solved the problem at all -- he can only go twenty miles before his batteries run out. Flamable materials still have vastly more energy per volume than anything else.

And that, not solar power or wind power or huge stacks of traditional batteries, is what we need to be working on.

What do you mean, he hasn't solved his problem?

Suppose his daily commute is less than 20 miles.  He goes all week without having to burn a drop of gasoline.  If he can obtain power at work, he can run errands on his way home and still not burn gasoline unless he goes over 20 miles (which takes quite a bit of time in most urban settings).

Even 20 miles turns gasoline from a necessity to an option for a great many people.  How is that not a solution?

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