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Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter
I place my bets on solar energy and on wind energy. Both are cheap, effective, and produce NO harmful end products. In fact, they're the cleanest options we have, and if we began building up fleets of windmills and solar panels, we could have plenty of energy to live with in a clean, environmentally friendly world. Then we just need to worry about countries who don't want or are unable to raise the bar... like China or India... especially China...
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Germany is world market leader for technology regarding solar energy installations - but believe me, it only is becasue of heavy subsidies, and massive financial investements whose profits are enjoyed from investors outside Germany. In other words: it is ridiculously expensive for the tax-payer. If Germany would go solar energy all the way, running that would form the greatest expense post in germany's GNP. Up to almost the half of the GNP would be needed to spend on the energy system for installation and maintaining and keep the according industry running. Even the optimists with their more friendly calculations cannot show to press the costs below at least one quarter if the yearly GNP.
Windmills, another german strength, are not energy-efficient enough to ever take over electricty production completely.
In other words: a combination of solar energy and wind energy alone is both unaffordable and not sufficient enough in energy production to satisfy the energy hunger of modern industrialised hitech societies. So, adressing things by solar and wind energy alone is unrealistic to be acchieved in just some decades. A completely new, energy-passive kind of architecture is neeeded (it exists, but only people with a reasonable - and stable! - income can afford it), it would need to decosntruct all existing cities, including metropoles, and replace the buildings with such new ones, and it would need to completely decinstruct the industrial structures and replace current factories with new ones with an energy-efficiency that currently does not exist.
Germany's solar industry has full books for the next 14-15 years, the industry was almost exploding - but still business is not self-supporting and needs to be heavily subsidised. Hard to imagine that within the next couple of decades it every becomes if not a profitable then at least cost-neutral business. But good business perspectives are needed, if you try to chnage the world without allowing people to make a reasonable profit by that, you can forget it. Business leaders are no monks. On anothe rhand, a bsuiness that only lives by every third buck or so of the national taxes being pumped into it, is no healthy business-doing. even more so when these tax investements do not stay in Germany, but flow to investors in foreign countries.
We simply consume too much energy - trend pointing upwards. the IPCC has just been criticised for having assumed in it'S projection that the demand for energy would considerably fall over the next years. But it is rising in the West, and is exploding in Asia. - People may want to keep that in mind when buying their next computer combo with that mega-super-wonder power supply and that hyper-wonder grahics card that eats the Watts like a formula one car eats the meters. running your system over night or equip it with power-intensive items like mention, spares you of any argument in favour of energy-saving light bulbs, of course.
Deleting solar and wind energy completely, is not needed. but leaving it to these, is stupid, and unaffordable. Both should be considered as regional, small-scale solution, maybe with the exceptions of wind parks on the ocean, but if this idea survives in the face of growing storm activity remains to be seen. We need both a massive reduction of energy consummation in West and East alike, and we need very new technologies used in the industry, we need a new idea of traffic, and a new architecture. Plus new, passive energy production methods, whatever will work. Adding the global warming and the rise of sea levels, we also need to orient towards the idea of living not by the sea, but living on the sea, which is true for major areas in the flat parts of europe, the coastal areas anyway here and in the US, and SE Asia as well. Quite some Dutch architects currently are working in rhich Dubai, where they are busy in projects of artificial island, and floating cities. Floating houses is a trend - for the rhich - in dutch architecture, too. The Netherlands will get it from several sides: from the rising sea level, the spiking precipitation during more excessive storms, and the increase in water delivered by the rivers, carrying all the water masses from Europe into the Netherland. So it is understandable that the Dutch have become a global centre and trendsetter in adaptive architecture building. Saw some docu on it some days ago on TV, and saw some very impressive design studies. these will not be of any use for the poor, of course - it is a very exclusive party being raised. But the sea levels are rising, the ice is melting, the glaciers are disappearing, and the weather becomes more extreme, and we know from sediment analysis that in ages of Earth's history where the mean temperature was around 3°C warmer than today, sea levels sometimes were 25m +/-10m above the levels of today. In the long perspective, and considering that it is a lot of work and consumes both ressources and time to build cities like the ones we have now, it makes sense not to stay by the ocean, but to move onto the ocean. And this will see a very different way of energy production, we can assume.
That are longer time perspectives, I know. But short-sightedness is what has brought us to where we are, and I would say: it is a mess. If there will be a next time, we should not repeat that mistake.