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Lawman 0 posted:Launch prices should start going down as more competition starts to sprout up in both private (spacex vs ULA vs Virgin Galatic) and public (Russia vs Chinese vs ESA) agencies. They'll theoretically go down, but there's a pretty drat huge gap between just going down, and actually being cheap enough.
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Sep 4, 2012 15:42
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Especially since you could also make dirty bombs by robbing hospitals of radiation sources used for various treatments. Or hell, by breaking open a bunch of smoke detectors or old glow in the dark watches.
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Sep 5, 2012 17:23
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the posted:Cool, thanks for the info. I was just wondering if there was any possible way that families could possibly provide their own power, or if there were any simple initiatives that could be provided on a citywide level to reduce consumption. I know that painting roofs a certain color was famously suggested by our President (and mocked by Conservatives). Some great ways to reduce consumption are: 1) Ensuring every building and home is properly insulated. Subsidize retrofitting ones that aren't. This includes simple things like, if you have a large sliding glass door, putting a curtain in front of it to reduce heat coming in during summer days, or heat going out during winter nights. 2) Discounting/subsidizing or even giving away CFL bulbs and LED bulbs to replace incandescent lights. Some places have already done this on a number of occasions. And of course not only do they use less electricity, but a CFL bulb can last quite a long time, and LED bulbs can theoretically last 2 decades. 3) Subsidizing the cost of replacing old heating and air conditioning units with modern ones, which will generally be a lot more efficient. Especially important for buildings and homes that are poorly insulated or otherwise inefficient 4) Subsidizing the cost of replacing old appliances in general. Everything really. Replace an old CRT TV with an LCD one of a similar size or even larger and it'll use a lot less power. Same goes for fridges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, water heaters. Beyond that, you can get more complicated with things like solar panels, or solar thermal systems to heat your water for you (which is useful for both having hot water for normal uses, and supplemental home heating). But the preceding list is things that work in any climate, in any place in the world practically. Like with the TV example, I replaced an old 30 inch CRT set for a 32 inch LCD set back in 2010. I watch a lot of TV, and my power bill dropped like $10 a month once I did that. Because the CRT set simply used that much more electricity, and also put out more heat so during the summer the air conditioning was running a bit more. Also, all of these suggestions? They don't require anyone to give up the "luxuries" they have or live a different lifestyle in any way. They're nothing but good changes for everyone involved. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 18:42
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I thought there was some company who claimed they could use all that methane and such to partially replace petroleum for plastic production? Assuming that actually works, it'd be a better use than just burning it for fuel.
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Sep 11, 2012 22:07
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The Ender posted:
The LEDs do actually save you money though in the long run. Their price upfront is easily outweighed by the drastically lower electricity usage, and the far longer lifetime of the device before it "burns out" - even compared to CFL! The only problem with them ends up being is that they're usually in designs oriented to be used more like a spotlight or floodlight than a normal bulb pattern, but more normal lighting patterns have come out over time. Let's say you have an average 40 watt incandescent bulb you want to replace - it costs $1.25 for the bulb and runs for 1,000 hours. You can replace that with an 11 watt CFL bulb, that costs $7, and lasts 10,000 hours. Or you can replace that with a 6 watt LED bulb, that costs $23, but will last 50,000 hours. The current average electricity price in the US is 12.12 cents per kilowatt hour. Over the lifespan of the LED bulb, you'll use 300 kilowatt hours; so $59.36 for bulb plus electricity. To match that lifespan with CFL bulbs, you'd use 550 kilowatt hours and buy 5 bulbs; total comes to $101.66. With incandescent you'll use 2000 kilowatt hours and buy 50 bulbs; total comes to $304.90!
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Sep 12, 2012 15:38
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The Ender posted:Yeah, LEDs are the better option - I just talk about CFLs first because they are the most widely available alternative to incandescent bulbs for the moment. Are LEDs on any store shelves in America? In Canada they're strictly an 'order online' thing. I've seen 'em on the shelves in Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Target in America. Probably other stores too, as well as get 'em on Amazon. Boiled Water posted:I stand corrected. Your standard incandescent light bulb is rated for 1000 hours, which means it'll work for a year if you use it for 2.75 hours a day roughly.
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Sep 13, 2012 00:11
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:At 8 hours a day, 50,000 hours is 17 years. You completely forgot to discount the projected period, which brings the price of bulbs plus electricity for the CFL and LED to very similar levels. On top of that, there's the risk of your lighting needs changing over 17 years - it's a very long period to lock yourself into a certain type of light bulb in most situations for most people. Yes, LED bulbs last an EXTREMELY long time. I hardly see how that would make the overall price match CFLs though, as CFLs can't get much lower in power usage per light output at all. Also I don't see what you mean by "lighting needs changing in 17 years" - at worst you just move the bulb to another fixture if at year 9 you decide you want 60-watt-equivalent out of the lamp you had the 40-watt-equivalent LED bulb in. Electricity prices are also inevitably going to go up over the time span, making them better and better -they've gone from 8.31 cents per kwh nation average to 12.12 per kwh nation average since 2003. Let's go back to my example of bulbs: quote:You can replace that with an 11 watt CFL bulb, that costs $7, and lasts 10,000 hours. Let's compare for only 20,000 hours of use (6.8 years or so at 8 hours a day): CFL: 2 bulbs + 220 kilowatt hours = $40.66 LED: 1 bulb + 120 kilowatt hours = $37.50 Again, that's just with the nationwide average electricity price right now, and without the possibility of it rising being factored in. It can get a lot larger difference, like if you live in the Middle Atlantic states where electricity averages 15.65 cents per kwh: CFL: 2 bulbs + 220 kilowatt hours = $48.43 LED: 1 bulb + 120 kilowatt hours = $41.78 Or at the extreme, in Hawaii where the rate is 39.99 cents per kwh: CFL: 2 bulbs + 220 kilowatt hours = $101.98 LED: 1 bulb + 120 kilowatt hours = $70.99
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Sep 13, 2012 17:08
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:How many times have you moved in the past 17 years, and did you take all your light bulbs with you each time? 5 times and I always took my CFLs and then later LED bulbs with me. You don't take incandescents because they're dirt cheap and not worth it. Heck most of my lighting fixtures I can just leave the LED bulb in when I move because unlike incandescent or even some CFLs, they're not going to break in transit. At this point I've got only 2 CFL bulbs left and when they finally die I'm going to be all LED yo. Many of them only get used 2 hours a day max! Those bulbs will literally last me the rest of my life - over 68 years! quote:Can you be sure that the fixtures you have in your home (or the new one you move to) will require the same mix of bulbs of various wattages over such a long period? Have you ever broken a light bulb? Uh, yes? Never had a place where 40 and 60 watt equivalent bulbs didn't work. And even if there were some I couldn't use, I could just hold on to them until others broke. Or hell, let a friend or family member use one,I've done it before. I've never broken an LED bulb, they're tough as hell. I broke a CFL bulb once but so what? quote:For a commercial or industrial installation a lot of these factors are mitigated, but there's just too much variability in the lighting in an apartment or house to comfortably make projections that far out. If you want to use less electricity, all the more power to you, but a lot of the assumptions don't hold up if you're making a purely economic decision. So then why shouldn't we all just use incandescents? Using less electricity is the name of the goddamn game. LED bulbs use 85% less power than incandescents and 45% less than CFLs. Christ do you not realize how important a shift it would be if America was collectively using that much less power from shifting to LEDs? If I "discount the costs" then LEDs get even better. The power is an ongoing cost and guaranteed to rise over time. The power used, in fact, far eclipses the cost of the bulb. Friend Commuter posted:Totalling all that gives a net present value of $69.69 for the cost of five CFL bulbs and the electricity to run them for eight hours per day over the course of 17 years, and $46.96 for one LED bulb used for the same time. Advantage: LED. The advantage stays with LED until the annual inflation rate hits ~20%, at which point the NPV for CFL is $33.01 and that for LED is $33.14. Don't forget "not needing to change the bulb in a fixture nearly as often". Rent-A-Cop posted:I hope everyone involved in the above ridiculous discussion realizes exactly how dumb the idea of telling people to spend $20 now so they can save $5 over the next 15 years is. You start paying 45% less for power for lighting over CFL bulbs right away, or 85% less than incandescents. Hell, the $23 figure I use isn't even the lowest you can get an LED bulb for, you can sometimes find them on sale for like $10 but I used the higher figure to be fair. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Sep 13, 2012 |
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Sep 13, 2012 20:06
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Taerkar posted:Edit: Tangentially related but I've got these strip lights in my house that use these bulbs and they fail like mad. Is there an LED option for them that's reliable? These look like they'd be suitable replacements if they need to also be dimmable: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Eagle-L...+50w+equivalent I have a few Great Eagle branded LED bulbs, they work great.
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Sep 13, 2012 21:39
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-Troika- posted:CFLs arn't for everyone, as some people have health issues with being around fluorescent lights. Yes, another reason to use LEDs, on top of all the other reasons. Really no one should be actively seeking out CFLs as they are a transition technology.
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Sep 13, 2012 22:27
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Do you honestly not see a difference between a large savings with a small (if any) additional up-front cost as in the case of fuel efficient cars, and a small savings with a significant additional up-front cost? A $23 LED bulb lasts as long as $35 of fluorescent bulbs and $62.50 of incandescent bulbs. And that's before you add in the money saved on power. Ain't no car on the market that will last 50 times longer than one car, 5 times longer than a second car; and costs the same as 18.4 of the first car while using 15% of the gas; and 3.2 of the second car while using 55% of the gas.
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Sep 13, 2012 22:58
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Yeti Fiasco posted: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. But the thing is with LED bulbs, you can get all the benefits clearly up front, particularly when switching from incandescents. They run a lot cooler than incandescents and cfls, they don't need specialized fixtures just use your existing ones, and especially if you're switching from incandescents you get an 85% drop in your power bill for lighting. 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. You don't need to train people to turn off the light every time they leave the room, if leaving the light on now draws 15% of the power it used to. You don't need to tell people to conserve energy by watching less TV when their new TV uses 35% the power of their old one.
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Sep 14, 2012 17:07
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Yeti Fiasco posted: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. Dude, the point is you can't buy a fridge as inefficient as the average model from 10 years ago now. Nor can you buy a TV that inefficient or computer or heating system. poo poo is naturally more efficient now, no one has to go out of their way to do it. A 50 inch LCD TV uses less power than a 28 inch CRT, and it's even higher definition and thinner, lighter and so on. Next time an appliance breaks, or you're simply sick of it and want a change, I can pretty much guarantee you the replacement you buy will be more efficient than what you have now. No one has to change their habits, or hunt down special appliances. You don't need to change your lifestyle or give up "luxury" or "unnecessary" things. My utility bill at this apartment has gone down drastically over the past like 2.5 years I've lived here. First, they replaced the heating and air conditioning units with newer models, and my utility bill went down even though I now have it set to heat to 70 instead of 68 in winter, and cool to 72 instead of 74 in summer. Then I replaced my old 24 inch CRT which broke with a 32 inch LCD - it uses like 38% the power and looks better. I switched from a few incandescents and mostly CFLs to a few CFLs and mostly LED bulbs and that power usage dropped a lot. I got rid of my old Pentium 4 computer with a CRT for a Core i7 computer and LCD combo that's way faster but also uses way less power. The fridge that came with the unit broke and was from the mid-90s - the new fridge I got in uses way less power and is even bigger and has an icemaker now. Basically efficiency is great, and you don't have to compromise to get it.
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Sep 14, 2012 18:52
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Yeti Fiasco posted:I'm pretty sure I mentioned that efficiency is awesome, but not saving grace that will somehow make the world better. I'm personally using 61% the electricity and 79% the natural gas (for stove and heating) than I was 2.5 years ago. 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. Believe it or not, but most people haven't yet had the time or occasion to replace a lot of outdated appliances with much more efficient ones yet, so it hasn't dropped spectacularly. Strudel Man posted:This is due primarily to increasing population, though. Energy use per capita has been mostly static or decreasing since the 70s. For what it's worth, your chart includes all energy usage. Including transportation (gasoline, diesel, etc), and burning natural gas/oil directly for heat. His is just electricity. But yes in general Americans are using less energy.
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Sep 14, 2012 22:27
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Yeti Fiasco posted: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. What exactly is hard to do about "people will naturally end up with more efficient appliances as the old ones break"? You literally have to actively strive to avoid getting a more efficient appliance when an old one breaks down. Everyone is already doing this. There is no difficulty. The difficult part is to not use less power when replacing old stuff.
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Sep 15, 2012 02:01
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It seems to me that we should simply force the power companies to permanently shut down the fossil fuel plants first when efficiency lowers demand. Some form of incentives to keep the renewables up? Tax credit stuff if they shut down coal plants first? If we're doing 3000 TWh of electricity production from fossil fuels now (like that chart from a bit ago said), and we can cut that down to 2000 TWh worth - well that's a shitload less pollution and stuff. And it's effectively the same benefit as replacing that 1000 TWh production with renewables and nuclear.
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Sep 15, 2012 14:23
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I'd certainly prefer to err on the side of pollution controls rather than pure fuel efficiency, personally. Also is that "fuel economy in the lower thirties" for city, highway, or mix? And is that comparing both using the new EPA formula or comparing the 80s car with the old EPA formula for efficency to the new one with the new formula?
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Sep 16, 2012 17:18
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Hobo Erotica posted:... Right, that doesn't answer my question though. Where do they get the fuel, and what do they do with the waste? Mines. Put them in casks that can survive a terrorist bombing and an 80 mph head on train crash. The 1 percent that's left is not very radioactive. It's far more poisonous in the way that eating lead is, or taking deep lungfuls from a coal smokestack is. Highly radioactive equals decays fast as hell. Not very radioactive; what do you mean by exclusion zones? You can't go prancing into an operating nuclear power plant that's about it.
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Sep 18, 2012 02:27
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I've always found it hilarious how people were opposed to putting the stuff in Yucca Mountain. The Yucca Mountain area is highly irradiated by decades of atomic bomb tests so frankly most waste you'd put in there would be less deadly than just rolling around on the ground outside a bit.
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Sep 18, 2012 03:13
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QuarkJets posted:That can't be right though, oil barrel prices have been in that range for years. Today it's $86/barrel. American oil companies would be going nuts with oil shale development if oil shale were that profitable at this price range Well different oil shale areas have different profitability points! Estonia produces the most from oil shale globally, oddly enough.
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Oct 27, 2012 03:58
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Also most countries do not have 70%+ of their land area that's utterly deserted the way Australia does. Many countries have vast areas with few people, but there's usually farms and such in the lightly populated area that you can't just build solar facilities over. Look at all this empty empty land:  The lightest pink areas are equivalent densities to the white areas on this map of the US  The white range is 0 to 0.38 persons per square kilometer, the yellow is 0.38 to 1.54.
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Nov 15, 2012 04:33
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Which is why I'm talking about Australia and an Australian renewables plan. You're painting me as anti-nuclear, and I'm not. I fully agree that for a lot of countries, nuclear is at least going to be have to part of their mix of energy. I didn't paint you as anything? Uranium mining is much better than coal mining because you do a lot less of it to get the same energy. There I said it with a straight face which was incredibly easy because it's true.
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Nov 15, 2012 05:48
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Hobo Erotica posted:It's not really as simple as that.. from speaking to the communities affected, Uranium mining does things to the local environment that coal mining doesn't. Uranium has a higher energy content per tonne than coal of course, but you still have to mine substantial amounts of ore to get to the good stuff. And you still need all the infrastructure (roads, ports, mines etc). It probably is still Call me crazy, but I don't think the results of uranium mining have ever done this to a town and it's local environment:   2008: TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill 1966: Aberfan coal ash spillAnd there's been quite a few more.
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Nov 15, 2012 06:12
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Pander posted:Another question would concern how the terms "renewable" vs. "green" vs "CO-2 Neutral" vs. "zero GHG emissions" are utilized. I don't see why someone who claims to support 'green' causes or dislikes GHG emissions would promote any-generation bio-fuel, since it still requires the basic formula of FIRE + CARBON = CO2 Because depending on the biofuel being used it might be useful or viable. EG those cars that run on used cooking oil, that cooking oil is being produced anyway and often can't be reused for another purpose as easily as being used for fuel. Also the energy output of specifically grown biofuel can vary a lot - corn is TERRIBLE but switchgrass and sugarcane can be a lot better, sometimes even carbon neutral for the full cycle.
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Nov 19, 2012 23:16
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25 gigawatt is the demand in Australia for what? When? Please clarify.
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Nov 20, 2012 04:55
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ThePeteEffect posted:Of course, this dream also includes a much greater public transportation infrastructure. Trains are so efficient it's ridiculous (500 ton-miles/gallon of diesel). That's why 40% of freight by ton-mileage in the US gets carried by rail.
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Nov 20, 2012 19:43
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Hobo Erotica posted:Electric cars get way too much hype. They sound good at first glance, but when you think about it, they don’t actually accomplish very much by way of solving problems at all. Imagine if we somehow instantly changed every car in the world to an electric motor. You’ve still got traffic, you’ve still got parking shortages, you've still got people not getting fit, and unless you’re getting your electricity renewably, (which in most Australian cities isn’t the case), you’re still burning fossil fuels, with an emissions intensity which as bad or worse than petrol or diesel, let alone LPG. They're also less noisy, in low speed and stop-and-go traffic they use very little energy, and they do put out a shitload less pollution in total even if they were all powered solely by coal. Also you greatly drop the demand for petroleum, which we could really do with keeping around for other things like say planes and plastic production. I don't know about you Australians but in the US most car commutes are under 40 miles round trip a day. With electric primary hybrid engines it means most commutes could then be done almomst entirely on battery, especially in the most traffic-heavy areas. And then you get into how electric car batteries CAN help with load balancing electricity when they're plugged in with improved grids and all, which is very relevant to a heavy on the renewables system. hoboerotic posted:The worst case scenario for an electric car is slightly higher emissions than internal combustion. It's generally better. Not to mention it's much easier to filter emissions from power stations than from tailpipes.
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Nov 21, 2012 04:37
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Wait, wait, last I remember the UK was hyping up switching everything to natural gas that they could (because they had a lot of natural gas from the North Sea) - that seems like a bit of a reversal doesn't it?
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Nov 23, 2012 02:26
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:The fact that we are actually producing from tar sands and oil shale means we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. There really isn't much "too hard to get to right now" oil after that stuff is gone, and we aren't doing a whole lot to curb our consumption either. Yeah be we still have an awful lot of it, which will in general be produced at gradually decreasing amounts for years to come.
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Feb 27, 2013 23:45
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redshirt posted:For example, why not mandate any new house must have a solar panel system for power and hot water, in addition to a geothermal heating/cooling system. Because that's expensive, because there's a problem of way too much existing housing stock that needs to be used up, because there's a lot of places with very minimal usefulness for both solar and geothermal.
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Mar 26, 2013 02:18
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The thing is the heat available changes pretty drastically depending on location: Additionally if you have too many people attempting to use geothermal in the same area at once, you can end up with reduced energy availability. Using geothermal for long term electricity production is particularly vulnerable to this.
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Mar 26, 2013 17:48
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redshirt posted:Perhaps there's a better word for it, but home geothermal use could be used by just about everyone - you're not tapping magma for heat, but rather the generally stable ground temperatures 10-50 feet below the surface, which are usually around 55 degrees worldwide. Free heat, which is then boosted for heating purposes, or brought directly into the house for cooling purposes. If everyone in an area is tapping it, it can cause the ground temperature to change such that it becomes less effective for everyone. This map has nothing to do with going down to magma levels. German use of solar is highly variable, they have a whole lot of other sources up to cover. You can do it in one isolated place yes, but it would start having problems if you tried to convert a whole town over.
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Mar 26, 2013 20:01
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redshirt posted:I've never heard such a thing was possible - that a loop of coil ten feet below the ground will somehow reduce overall ground temperature if everyone was doing it. Seems highly unlikely to me - got anything I can read on the subject? If you and everyone else around you is dumping heat into the ground to cool your houses, you will start to heat up the ground and reduce the cooling efficiency. Similarly if you're attempting to get heat out of the ground in cold temperatures to warm houses. This is just basic physics. Keep in mind that an awful lot of people aren't living on huge lots. Burying a heat pump system suitable for use requires a not-insubstantial amount of space and if you have them too close together, you'll end up with them interfering and not being as efficient. Near surface temperatures change. It's not 55 F everywhere, it can range from below freezing (in permafrost zones) to as much as 65 or even more.
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Mar 26, 2013 21:07
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redshirt posted:I'll summarize again: I have a deep well (one form of this system), and in this well are two pipes - a pipe that goes down, and one that comes up. Depending on the heating/cooling needs, these pipes circulate water (or an antifreeze type solution) down to the bottom of the well, where it either heats up or cools down, and this water is then brought into the heat pump, which extracts the hot or cold air and then pushes that into a ducting system throughout your house. In the winter, this is heat. In the summer, it's cooling. If you do all deep well systems, then yeah you are at much lower risk of an "over use" effect. But it's the horizontal systems that tend to get used, due to their relative cheapness and ease of installation. And basically its easy on small lots to have them too close together in the soil:  That's one small scale one being installed. They are generally either just placed in a large trench as the cheapest way, or sometimes you dig a smaller one and drill outwards horizontally to fill them in.
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Mar 26, 2013 22:12
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Schizotek posted:Not to intrude on geothermal chat, but these systems don't seem terribly practical(possible) for urban areas with high pop. density. Or for major industrial centers. Which leaves rural/suburban homes for those part which is less than ten percent of energy consumption in the U.S. So this is pretty much a way for rural areas to lower their energy bill a moderate amount, and not any serious solution to energy generation, correct? Well there's that map I posted a few pages back that shows geothermal potential for straight up electricity generation, using full facilities that go below just the very top part of the soil like a typical residential system. There a lot of population centers where you could sink in a bunch of those and start getting a lot of electric power off of them, or use them to run a district steam system like Manhattan has. Would require heavy retrofitting but it can supply a lot of power in the right areas.
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Mar 26, 2013 23:26
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redshirt posted:I've heard some scare stories about geothermal electrical generation - for example, causing earthquakes in California. Anything to this? Places that are prone to earthquakes tend to also be places that have the most geothermal energy available - there isn't really any evidence that they cause them to happen where they wouldn't have already. Plus if you induce smaller quakes more frequently, that could tend to reduce the likelihood of really large quakes too. If it turns out that doing it does cause quakes, we may actually want to keep doing it for that reason.
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Mar 27, 2013 00:16
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ColoradoCleric posted:With electric cars already viable in their first generation, I really expect futures for oils to start dropping dramatically in the coming years. That's silly, there's still 250 million privately owned vehicles in use in the US alone, and we tend to only buy 6 million new ones a year. Takes a long time to work out the old ones.
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Mar 28, 2013 19:41
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ColoradoCleric posted:Right now the current electric vehicles are a "second car" and at that they are already doing a perfect job. For example lets just look at the Chevy Volt, it has a battery with a gasoline back up. Right now people that own these have hardly ever used any gasoline which has pretty much meant that they have driven entirely electric in their day to day lives the vast majority of the time. You do understand that the current average age of a car in the US is 11 years right? People don't get new cars that much. You need people to have gotten a whole bunch of new electric cars in order to start putting a serious drop into oil demand. It would take a massive uptick in new car purchases to cover replacing such a significant amount of vehicles with new electric ones.
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Mar 28, 2013 20:13
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Ardennes posted:Also, I doubt other coal heavy US states (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio etc) will ever give on coal since it is so important to their local economies. You can reduce demand in other states and cut down the number of approved coal plants but I doubt the US will ever really give up on coal although you could cut it down significantly (and it has been dropping somewhat). Funny thing about that, PA and OH are both currently ramping up natural gas instead of coal, especially PA, and on top of that PA already makes nearly as much electricity from nuclear as from coal. This site has very comprehensive information on power generation in each state: http://www.eia.gov/state/ The summary pages are nice, like http://www.eia.gov/state/print.cfm?sid=NJ
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Mar 29, 2013 22:11
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You can improve solar all you fuckin' want, it's not going to solve the problems in storing energy.
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Apr 1, 2013 02:54
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