DIY Home Made Energy

By Chantal W on Nov 18, 2007 | Reply

The impact would be astronomical. As it is I am trying to fill in the last couple pieces to start a renewable energy (electricity, heating, etc) plant in my state (a plant that would only create a vast number of jobs for people in my state). If the government dedicated that money to scientific research and development of renewable energy our lives and ability to be “green” should only improve. However, keep in mind that technically the government doesn’t have 700 B dollars, but are borrowing it from The Federal Reserve and further increasing our national debt. However, if the invested the money in researching and developing renewable energy resources, it would create a vast number of jobs and possibly help our economy as technology and methods we discover could also be sold to other countries looking to improve their environmental and economic impact. On a personal note, I feel that the government should hold the Bank Heads financially responsible for bailing out their own banks since it was their greed that got us into this situation in the first place. Anyway, I hope I answered your question!

By vicinic on Nov 19, 2007 | Reply

if the government doesn’t intervene, you couldn’t build anything because there would be no money to build anything. It goes like this. The failing institutions are worldwide. If we let the people in europe lose their money in the institution, then europe will not do business with use. Therefore we could not get the silicon to make a solar panel nor the steel to build wing farms.

People do business with the US because we are trustworthy and will pay our debts. wanna see proof, see how many companies do business in Russia or venezuela, why, because those countries are not trustworthy. The US, Japan and most of the EU stands behind business.

By Richard R on Nov 20, 2007 | Reply

Just think how many good paying jobs would be created if we open up the first 50 miles of shoreline for oil exploration and drilling

By bestonnet_00 on Nov 20, 2007 | Reply

If you spend it on nuclear power plant construction (at a few billion per GWe) you should be able to get about 200 reactors (give or take) which would replace most coal power plants as well as reduce the number of people working in the energy industry thereby making more people available for working in other jobs.

OTOH if it were invested in wind and ground based solar you’d get a lot of capacity but you wouldn’t have any reliability from the wind and solar generators so you’d need to provide back up for those power sources and right now that means natural gas so you’ll probably find about half your money used on inefficient simple cycle natural gas turbines (which are less efficient than combined cycle) and even if wind or solar could undercut nuclear on a per capacity basis the low capacity factors and need for backup power would mean that for the same amount of power generated the renewables will be more expensive which will reduce manufacturing jobs, probably by more than would be created by building all those wind farms and solar cells.

Factor in the need for reliable energy and you find that the renewables look even worse since they still need fossil fuels to be able to do it.

Then you’ve got the environmental effects of trying to steal energy from nature and the large structures needed to grab diffuse energy sources. Wind and solar are not all that nice when done on a large scale (wind also has safety issues with maintenance workers sometimes falling off along with blade shedding and the potential health effects of infrasonic noise). If you want clean power it’ll have to be pretty concentrated so that the generating equipment doesn’t take up much land and the waste is small enough to be contained (rather than just dumped into the atmosphere as is the case with fossil fuels). If anything requires cutting down a lot of trees then it’ll probably not be very good for the environment and renewable energy does in some places.

Now if we had better energy storage technologies we could use wind and solar and not need fossil fuel backup but even then you’ve got to include the cost and environmental effects of the energy storage and you’ve also got to have a massive overcapacity to charge the energy storage system (given that wind gets capacity factors as low as 20% when you run out of good sites, which you will very quickly if you decide to spend that much on it). There’s also the issue that the better energy storage technologies don’t exist, pumped hydro is the only thing that really works when you reach utility scales and that relies on there being a hydroelectric dam somewhere (hydro is pretty much exhausted and what hasn’t been dammed in the developed probably won’t ever due to environmental concerns, although putting generators on dams that don’t have them could get several extra GWe for no additional environmental impact).

If we want to solve global warming we have to start with what we have and we don’t have a way to use renewables (other than hydro) on a large scale without also using fossil fuels (rolling blackouts will not be accepted by the public for very long). Maybe we’ll end up getting the technology to be able to use non-hydro renewables to solve global warming but we should not count on it, especially if we’ve got something that can do the job right now.

Given all that if I were told that I had to spend that kind of money on energy that is called renewable (despite the term being pretty much meaningless) I’d spend most of it on the space programme so as to put solar power plants in orbit where it isn’t ever cloudy and is sunny >99% of the time (power would be beamed down as microwaves).