 Hawaii to be national renewable energy example?
On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Maren at google wrote:
> On Feb 7, 11:10 am, "Alvin E. Toda" <a...@lava.net> wrote:
>> I think tht a lot will also depend on how we switch
>> to electric cars and hybrid technology and other AC
>> systems. Also the need to distill fresh water from
>> the ocean might greatly increase usage of electrical
>> power. If all these things are so, then it may be
>> that the figure might be a lot closer to 95%.
>
> The need to distill water from the ocean may not need
> any electrical power as going directly through solar
> heat is a lot more efficient. Producing whatever we
> use to do this (unless it's large leaves, which I
> think is entirely possible but probably severely
> frowned upon by the DOH), take into consideration
> what the devices used take to produce.
What wrong with large leaves? We may use a
biotechnological process to recycle water. Point is
that cost will be the determining factor. Some
alternatives may require a lot of energy-- some not.
> Electric cars, unless solar powered, and the power
> panels produced by solar energy are an oil products
> sink. We already know that it takes more energy to
> produce ethanol than we get out of it. It's time to
> seriously think out of the box here if we want to get
> anywhere with this.
If the energy is free, then the cost is minimal. For
example, the solar energy to produce ethanol plants may
be an energy sink but the cost may still be less than
pumping the oil with it's infrastructure costs (which
the govt may pay for, but is still a cost nonetheless
to all of us) and shipping oil here and refining it.
Thinking out of the box wont help if there is no one to
finance the money for development. We have a lot of
good ideas but no money to develop them. That is the
reason why we start to consider these ideas when oil
gets up to $100 vs $25 a barrell. We are somewhat of a
self-indulgent people with little foresight, and do not
consider it bad that car manufacturers etc, would try
to block funding for this type of development. The
self-indulgent part comes from being happy in our
ignorance.
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