slimmouse » Thu Aug 08, 2013 7:46 pm wrote:So, apparently, harnessing the Powe of the Sun is more expensive than coal.
Hmm. If I really needed to discover why such a mindless situation truly exists,, I wonder if I could find out?
I might of course speculate that this is because the World is quite literally run by a tiny coterie of madmen, who need to be collectively confronted ASAP.
Its hard to imagine much else, when the most abundant source of "free energy" that we will ever know or need is there at our fingertips, (with all the advances in metallurgy, computer science, superconductors, et cetera ad infinitum), and yet its still more expensive than coal !
However, I digress. I guess Wintlers right. Free energy is too expensive. He's also spot on in this case as much as any with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the energy isn't really free. You still have to build up the infrastructure to capture, convert and distribute it, and in that regard coal is still cheaper.
That doesn't mean it will always be like that. As soon as solar gets cheap enough that it actually makes sense to use it instead of coal, people will start converting, but it needs to become cheaper and more flexible.
There are some intriguing uses of solar already, like this Ikea (yes, really) refuge housing:
Via nextbigfuture:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/07/ikea-s ... st-10.htmlI'm actually quite optimistic about alternative energy sources in the developing world. They don't have the infrastructure that the west has, so we might hopefully see something similar to the way mobile payments have taken off in Africa, only for energy. They never had ATM's, checkbooks or credit cards to begin with, so they all just went straight to the latest technology instead.
That, of course, won't happen in the west, because there's already generations of vested interests in the energy business. They're not going to change until there's a good profit to be had.
Same thing as mobile payments, which are pretty much non-existent in the US atm (If I remember correctly: 8 million mobile payments last year, 7.5 of those at Starbucks), simply because you already have the old infrastructure in place, and there's no compelling reason to change it.
The developing world doesn't have all those "constraints", which makes me an optimist.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave