So they build more than one, and don’t put them all in the same place.

Huh. They should try that with windmills.

People and Business demand energy 24/7/365.
Imagine 99% of the time having power – which 3.7 days a year would YOU happily stay in the dark?

Concentrated solar is much better than photovoltaics. Either use the hot oil or other substance to boil water and turn a turbine as your article states or simply hit the photo voltaics with more concentrated sun to get better efficiency. Both seem highly promising. I believe both methods are already in medium or possibly even large scale use as well.

Minor glitch is that we need the infrastructure to get the energy from the areas of high production, solar or wind, to the areas of high use, our cities. It’s a technical hurdle that shouldn’t be hard to overcome. We may need to go to higher voltage transmission lines, as they’ve done in Europe for years. There’s less loss but higher risk if a line breaks. We’ll probably need to take the slightly higher risk. Always trade-offs.

Interesting how the author of this site says concentrated solar is the way to go==low tech, distributed. Better than solar panels.

Obviously, the solution is a bit of everything.

Fun read:
http://www.naturalnews.com/021942.html

36,
You will find that WINDMILLs are designed NOT to work above 40mph.. They are set to Flutter and shut down.
i would love to capture those 100mph winds and STORE the energy from all the storms in the Atlantic, from Florida thru the GOLF coast..
think about it…3 months of storms could power the 1/2 the USA for the rest of the year..IF’ you could store it.

Storage? Who cares? Build them everywhere and for the most part they cover each other. You will indeed need oil and coal to cover down times, but if they aren’t running they don’t pollute and don’t chew through fuel. Existing plants would be serviced instead of building new ones.

Stop looking at this as an environmental issue. As fuel prices rise wind power becomes good business, and American farmers can finally start getting the money they deserve for their land and work.

Just a point you may be unaware of, every single minute 24 hours per day every single day of the year, enough energy hits earth from the sun to power the entire United States for a year.

I think that even with the relative inefficiency of today’s solar technologies and even without taking up the entire planet with solar panels, solar energy has the potential to be the only answer we need.

The fact that we also have wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, and wave power is a bonus.

So, yes, conserve energy. That’s a huge piece and certainly the most cost effective. Nothing is as cheap as simply improving the technologies by which we save energy instead of needing more. But, the energy is available.

Are you saying that it’s an insurmountable technical problem or merely that no one has put enough thought and research dollars into it? Would the answer have been different in an alternate universe where our president fought the war on terror by getting us off oil? Would the $2,000,000,000,000 we’ve spent on the Iraq war have made a difference in your answer?

Even now, would you imagine that it will take more than #30,000,000,000,000 a year to solve the problem?

Why thirty trillion dollars as my starting figure? Because in the late 1990s, someone added up all of the services provided to us by a functioning biosphere (clean water, clean air, topsoil, transpiration by trees bringing rain inland, etc., etc., etc.) and came up with the number thirty trillion dollars a year of services provided to humanity by the biosphere completely free of charge!

If we don’t take care of the biosphere, even for those who only care about economics, not the morality of mass extinction, that is the number we will have to cough up every year. Of course, that assumes we are even capable of doing so, a point I will not yet concede.

Using biomass as fuel is okay but you are pretty much burning what could be used as food or used to grow food and the last I read this has a staggering carbon foot print.

It is my understanding they are building the first test switch grass biofuel plant now. Unless you can use the stalk corn is not a great source of fuel. Removing the biomass from fields has negatives. You need compost to help soil hold water. Some modern farm practices make me wonder.

there is NO facility/faculty that can store the required Needs of this nation.
IF we could harness the winds in a Tornado/hurricane and STORE the power for our NEEDS…YOU could fill in a BLANK CHECK with any amount you wish.

I would EVAC every man woman and child from Florida to create such a Power plant, and storage facility…

But they are only part of the answer. You still need the base load nuke and coal plants to keep things running smoothly.

Looking out 500 years, what then. I know we won’t be there, but what about our descendents. It’s short sighted thinking that has the world in the pickle it is in now. Something must be developed to produce all of our electical and transportation needs or the world will descend into WAR, FAMINE, and PESTILENCE.

It’s too bad that the oil companies have so much control of Congress. We should be funding MASSIVE research into renewable energy. I still think the magic bullet will be hot fusion.

Don

Never heard of energy storage? Batteries? Hydrogen (not a fuel source, but can be a battery)? How about heating water and storing hot water in a large container, preferably underground? This last can be used to start with already hot water for the turbine and use a much smaller amount of fossil or nuclear fuel to heat the water the last few degrees to turn the turbine. Admittedly, this works better for solar water heat than wind, but it is yet another energy storage means.

One interesting suggestion has been fleets of electric cars plugged into the grid to be charged or discharged as an energy leveling mechanism. The batteries in everyone’s cars would become part of the energy storage means. Of course, the auto owners would pay for the energy for charging and be paid for the discharged energy back onto the grid. Whether the rate would be the same in both directions or a tad higher on the way back out to the grid to compensate for the loss in charging and discharging is not a topic I’ve heard anything about. But, the technology can work if we can get the kinks out of the economics of it.