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Humans are extremely bad at being efficient, especially with energy, as it requires effort and change, two things that as a species we do really really badly. A much better idea would be to focus efforts on producing excesses of cheap, available energy like the thorium cycle and say "Ok, now you don't need to be as efficient because we have lots of carbon neutral energy." I'm not saying that efficiency is BAD and is something that shouldn't be strived for, I'm just saying its incredibly difficult to implement on a level that would be meaningful. Efficiency is usually tied to a base cost of upgrading before any savings are made, the majority of people would rather have their teeth pulled than be forced to buy into something they can't see any benefits from for 3+ years.
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Sep 14, 2012 12:55
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:17 |
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Install Gentoo posted:Not to mention all the other ways of efficiency. Replace your crappy old standard def CRT set with a flashy new LCD HDTV? You're almost certainly using much less power to watch TV now. Old fridge breaks down? Any new fridge will be more power efficient. Heating system breaks or air conditioner breaks? The new system is probably more efficient. Hell, have an old Pentium 4/Athlon desktop? Any new computer is going to use less power. Practically any home appliance there is, if it's more than like 6 years old? The average kind of that appliance on the market now is more efficient. Even your cell phone's charger is going to be more efficient now than the charger and cell phone you had 4 years ago. But when do you see these changes? When you get the electricity bill, that fridge/tv/whatever will take years to pay for itself in efficiency savings.
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Sep 14, 2012 18:02
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I'm pretty sure I mentioned that efficiency is awesome, but not saving grace that will somehow make the world better. Despite all these advancements in efficient electronics, the US energy production increases each year to fit demand because they're simply using more of it, even with all their super energy saving kitchen appliances.  No doubt that chart would be much higher if we still had horribly inefficient appliances, but it would still be the same shape. If you want to actually do something constructive, you've got to figure out how to take that big red chunk sitting in the middle and get rid of it, being efficient takes a small bit away and that's good, but you can only be so efficient, after that you have to look at how to replace it, because we can't live without it, we're just too reliant on an energy rich society. edit: also, all that saved energy is probably taken away from renewable, since renewable energy is so drat expensive and has to be bought at a subsidized rate. Yeti Fiasco fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Sep 14, 2012 |
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Sep 14, 2012 19:43
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Install Gentoo posted:If you don't think getting that savings from everyone in the country would help in a huge fuckin' way I don't know what to say to you. Why do I have to keep reiterating that I think EFFICIENCY IS A GREAT THING THAT SHOULD BE SRIVED FOR, I just think that getting everyone to do it is phenomenally more difficult than building carbon neutral nuclear energy sources.
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Sep 14, 2012 22:43
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I really wasn't thinking of just lightbulbs when I said that, that's literally the easiest and cheapest form of energy saving you can do, using that as a base mark for ease of efficiency as a whole is stupid. Also, this thread is getting wildly off topic. What are people views on the pros and cons of Solar thermal?
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Sep 17, 2012 10:53
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No one ever seems to mention the sheer quantity of water you need to keep the vast array of mirrors clean, along with the difficulty of getting it where solar power is situated (In arid, sunny regions at high altitude). The biggest solar thermal complex in the world (Solar Energy Generating Systems, Mojave) has an installed capacity of 354mW but only has a capacity factor of 21% (thanks wikipedia!), considering the enormous footprint it takes up (483,960m2), this doesn't seem like much, though I guess the land has no other use.
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Sep 17, 2012 14:34
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spankmeister posted:Sure it does, you could build a nuclear reactor there! Why would you want to though? Surely a better location is near a metropolitan area so there's less transmission lines.
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Sep 17, 2012 15:38
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spankmeister posted:Joking aside, the middle of a hot, arid desert is a bad location for a nuclear plant because of the lack of cooling water. But what if you had some kind of mystical reactor that didn't require water as coolant and couldn't melt down? Wy don't we make one of those? 
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Sep 17, 2012 18:19
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