An Imponderable Question

[Towntalk]

In the right here and now:

My web site today is leading with the crisis we are facing in the right here and now regarding oil, and it's frightening to the point where some Democrats are calling for the nationalizing of refineries right here in the United States - http://farrell-report.tripod.com

Allan: I couldn't agree with you more about plastic, and in point of fact there are companies doing that very thing with success

My argument is that things like solar and wind generation of power for industries is years away, and the problem is here with us right here and right now.

Look at the cost of gas ... natural gas ... food ... electricity ... they are all going through the roof right now.

How do we solve the problems we face today while we wait for the alternatives to catch up with needs. We can not compare our situation with third world countries that do not have the demands we have.

The one solution that would solve the electric issue is nuclear power, but even that would take years to complete before we could put them on line, but as you well know, there is resistance to using nuclear energy among the environmentalists.

Even the talk of clean coal meets with Resistance from the environmentalists.

Surely you know in your heart of hearts that solar and wind generation for cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major population areas is far into the future. And where would they get the land that would be needed just for the wind mills and solar panel farms.

Even as a backup for other types of power that would meet the criteria of the environmentalists, we have not yet developed the technology to the point where it would be practical.

Does that mean scrapping "Green Technology"? Certainly not, but it does mean that both sides of the issue are going to have to work together with the immediate problems that we have right now.

[irishbobcat]

Town Talk:

First, Government and business would have to address renewable energy funding.

Second, Solar power alone can not provide 24/7 at this time to Lordstown. However, wind, solar, and geotherminal
again can help begin to get Lordstown on a 24/7 track based on information from the Environmental Defense Fund:

Solar Energy: Power from the Sun

What's the first renewable energy technology that comes to mind?

You probably answered solar, the star of renewable energy options.

Yet, solar power produced less than 0.05 percent of America's electricity and only 0.66 percent of the world's electricity in 2007.

What's the promise of solar and what role will it play in our clean energy future?

The Promise
Every hour, the sun delivers as much energy to the Earth as all of humanity uses in a year. The total energy from just 20 days of sunshine is equal to all the energy available in the total reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas.

If we converted only 10 percent of this solar energy into electricity, a square of land 100 miles on a side (about 0.26 percent of America's total land area) could meet all of America's electricity needs.

Solar energy is clean, safe and inexhaustible. It can be harnessed many waysâ€"from passive solar heating, to rooftop solar cells that convert sunlight to electricity, to large scale solar power plants that use the sun's heat to generate steam. Depending on local regulations, some homeowners who use solar energy to generate their own power can sell surplus electricity to local utilities.

The Challenge
Despite its promise, solar power faces several technological hurdles.

First, the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day or every day of the yearâ€"far from it in some regions. This means solar must be paired with a backup energy source or, better yet, with a way to reserve energy for those times when the sun isn't shining.

The price of solar has been another major obstacle to its broad deployment. In 2007, a conventional rooftop photovoltaic solar system cost about $4 per watt for the cells, nearly twice that installed, or about $21,000 for a typical 3-kilowatt installation.

Most industry analysts agree the price must come down to about $1 per watt (and the storage problem must be resolved) before solar-generated electricity power can compete with coal-fired electricity virtually everywhere.

There are three ways to make solar cells more competitive:

Build a better solar cell â€" Continue streamlining existing technologies, which are primarily based on crystalline-silicon cells.
Mass produce cheaper, more flexible cells â€" Emerging next-generation "thin-film" technologies will make it possible to produce acres of lower-efficiency solar cells, which can be integrated right into roofing material or glass.
Concentrate solar energy â€" Invest in the most efficient, smallest possible cells, then wrap those cells in optics that concentrate the sunlight, multiplying its intensity 500 or even 1000 times.
Solar thermal powerâ€"using mirrors to harness and convert the sun's heat into electricityâ€"is another approach. Solar thermal is already competing with gas-fired power plants and has the potential to match coal in price and scale.

However, solar thermal plants are large and costly to build. And, since lenders currently view renewable energy investments as riskier than conventional energy, financing solar plant construction is a significant challenge.

The Future
A December 2007 report in Scientific American promotes "a massive switch to solar power" as the "logical choice" to free America from fossil fuels.

According to the report, "at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar thermal power plants… Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation's total energy consumption in 2006."

The U.S. Department of Energy predicts that within 10 years, "photovoltaic power will be competitive in price with traditional sources of electricity." This evolution can, of course, be sped up with a national cap on global warming pollution that would price the cost of emissions into the market, rewarding clean energy sources like solar.

The Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) predicts that with the right policies and investments, half of all new electricity generation in the U.S. could come from solar power by 2025.

While these reports offer promise, the U.S. has been falling behind. For years, the U.S. was the world's leading producer of solar cells. However, the Earth Policy Institute reports that the U.S. now ranks fifth in production behind Japan, China, Germany and Taiwan.

According to an MIT study, Japan's solar production increased twenty-twoâ€"fold from 1994 through 2003â€"while Japan was in a recession.

During this same period, while the U.S. economy surged, the U.S. solar industry remained flat.


From SEIA's US Solar Industry Year in Review 2007. [PDF]
The U.S. is also lagging on solar installation. Because of consistent government policies, Japan and Germany together command 70 percent of the world's solar market, despite the fact that neither country is particularly sunny.

Why hasn't the U.S. maintained its competitive edge in solar energy despite having some of the best solar resources on Earth?

The answer is simple: we haven't made clean renewable energy a priority. Both Germany and Japan have aggressive national policies promoting solar energy and both countries have ratified the Kyoto treaty, which mandates global warming pollution reductions.

By adopting a national cap on global warming pollution, Congress can unlock America's abundant solarâ€"and technologicalâ€" resources, creating huge opportunities to unleash the 21st century's clean energy economy.

Geothermal Energy: Power from the Earth

Geothermal energy is not glamorousâ€"its plants look more like coal-fired power plants than sleek, modern wind turbines or space-age solar mirrors in the desert.

But don't judge geothermal by its steam stacks.

Geothermal is used commercially in more than 20 countries (more than 70 if you count ground source heat pumps) and generates more than a quarter of the total electricity used in Iceland and the Philippines.

The U.S. is the world's leading geothermal energy producer, though geothermal generates less than one percent of America's total electricity output.

The Promise
Geothermal has one main advantage over today's leading renewables: it is not dependent on a sunny or a windy day. It is available virtually 100 percent of the time and therefore doesn't require a back-up fossil fuel power plant or energy storage capacity.

Geothermal is clean and safe. At facilities like the Geysers, where wastewater is reinjected back into the ground to replace the extracted steam, it is also sustainable. And it can be scaled up to generate power for major metropolitan areas.

Geothermal's potential is enormous. The amount of heat within 10,000 meters (about 33,000 feet) of Earth's surface contains 50,000 times more energy than all the oil and natural gas resources in the world.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that geothermal could provide between 4 and 20 percent of current U.S. electricity needs by 2025. It is already price competitive with coal-fired power plants in many places.

The Challenge
While geothermal heat occurs everywhere, the most easily accessible geothermal resources are naturally occurring hot springs at or near the Earth's surface. These geological features are found on less than 10 percent of Earth's land area.

Today, there are three ways to harness geothermal energy, all of which require access to a hot springs or hot wastewater.

If the hot water reaches the surface as steam, it can be harnessed to drive an electric turbine. This is called a "dry steam" system.
If the hot water remains a liquid at a high enough temperature, it can be "flashed" into steam and then used to drive the electric turbine. This is called a "flash steam" system.
If the hot water is not hot enough to be flashed directly into steam, it can be used to flash another liquid with a lower boiling pointâ€"such as ammoniaâ€"and the resulting steam is then captured in turbines. This is called a "binary" system.
Advancements in binary systems have opened new opportunities to access "moderate temperature" geothermal resources, which are far more common than high temperature resources.

The Chena Hot Springs power plant near Fairbanks, Alaska, is the lowest temperature geothermal resource to be used for commercial power production in the world.

Thanks to breakthroughs at Chena, the cost of power production from these moderate temperature resources has been reduced from 30¢ to less than 7¢ per kWh. That low price opens up the option of using waste heat resources, like the water that comes up at oil wells, as free fuel.

Researchers are also studying ways to capture heat in dry areas, know as "hot dry rock." This involves drilling deep into the earth's surface using technologies developed by the oil industry, then injecting water down to the hot rocks and bringing the hot water back to the surface to drive turbines and generate energy.

Several projects using this technologyâ€"called enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) or heat miningâ€"are under development in France, Australia, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S. The race is on to establish the world's first commercial hot dry rock power plant.

Many geologists are concerned about possible seismic consequences connected to drilling through the earth's surface to access hot dry rock resources. In 2007, a geothermal power plant in Switzerland triggered an earthquake that registered 3.4 on the Richter scale.

Another major barrier is the cost involved in finding viable geothermal resources. The only current way to test for geothermal properties is to drill deep holes. This is expensive and increases investment risk.

The Future
There are several areas of research that could soon make geothermal energy a more widely available and efficient resource.

Researchers are working to:

Make testing a potential geothermal location more economical, reducing the risk of investing money in "dry holes."
Make the current binary geothermal systems more efficient to tap cooler hot springs where direct and flash steam plants are not possible. Breakthroughs at the Chena Hot Springs location offer tremendous promise in this area.
Make the energy grid more efficient and develop transmission capacity to open up remote, and currently "stranded", geothermal resources.
Some analysts believe the big breakthrough in geothermal energy could come when enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) become economically competitive, allowing "heat mining" close to centers of demand, like big cities.

A 2006 study by MIT researchers found that "none of the known technical and economic barriers limiting widespread development of EGS as a domestic energy source are considered to be insurmountable."

The study concluded that EGS could generate 100 gigawatts or more in the U.S. by 2050. And it calculated the world's total EGS resources to be sufficient to provide all the world's energy needs for thousands of years.

As with all renewable energy resources, setting a cap on global warming pollution and pricing carbon emissions into the market is the key to creating economic incentives to finance and mainstream geothermal energy production.

Dennis Spisak-Independent Green Party Candidate for State Representative-60th District

campaign site: Http://votespisak.tripod.com

[AllanY2525]

The only item in Towntalk's list that I can see as "immediately addressable" is the cost
and source of plastics to manufacture cars at the Lordstown plant:

RECYCLE EXISTING PLASTIC TO MAKE THE CARS

It is far less expensive to reuse plastics than to make them from scratch,
not to mention that no additional petroleum is required to shred and melt
down plastic for re-use.

In any urbanized area of the United States that you could name, there is
more plastic laying around waiting to be reused at any given time than
we know what to do with.

Using more recycled plastics in auto manufacturing is something we can do
right now to cut the costs of building cars and help the environment
at the same time - and reducing our consumption of petroleum to some
degree.

[Towntalk]

My point is, how can you guarantee Lordstown with all the power it requires 24/7 - all year around using all the solar panels it would require reliably?

Who would pay for all the solar panels?

Again how many hundreds of acres would be required to install a solar or wind farm, and how many families would have to have their land taken by the state for the farm which would have to adjoin the Lordstown facility?

How many years would it take to get control of the land ... build the windmills ... install the solar panels ... connect them to the Lordstown plant, then give an absolute guarintee to Lordstown that they will have uninterupted power?

[irishbobcat]

Towntalk:

If you are asking the Greens can we provide 100% renewable energy to Lordstown today or tomorrow? the answer is no.
But we can begin installing wind and solar panels to reduce the huge amount of electricity used at these plants.

And the more R &D and renewable energy manufacturing we can bring to the valley, we could improve renewable energy alternatives to the plants.

As far as plastics for the cars, I haave no answer at this time as I have not researched that area.

But what i can tell you, as long as the current two-party systyem or in reality one party system is in place that takes huge handouts from lobbyists and Corporate PACS you will not see a massive attempt to have renewable energy replace the current system.

Greens are not bought by lobbyists, Democrats and Republicans are.

Dennis Spisak-Green Party Candidate for State Representative-60th District

campaign site: http://votespisak.tripod.com

[Towntalk]

So far, we've been speaking of residential consumption of energy, and driving our family cars, so I pose this question.

As you all should know by now, Lordstown will go back to a third shift producing over a thousand jobs in the valley. We also know that in running a car plant 24/7 consumes huge amount of electricity. I dare say one shift at Lordstown consumes more electricity than a family in a year (and this is being Conservative).

The modern car uses a great deal of plastic, (a petroleum based product), and the plastics plants need oil to produce the plastic that will go into the thousands of cars that Lordstown will produce. As oil prices skyrocket, the costs of that plastic skyrockets for Lordstown, and Lordstown in turn passes the costs on to us.

How do the Greens propose providing Lordstown with the power they need?

How do the Greens propose aiding the plastics industry?

The steel mill in Warren uses a huge amount of electricity daily ... it also uses oil in large quantities.

Just addressing the right here ... right now what are the Green proposals for these two industries. Wind power is out of the question as are solar panels. Hydro power is out of the question since it would require building a huge dam whose size would take a large quantity of land both in Mahoning and Trumbull counties and multi millions of dollars just to build, and then more millions to bring on line.

Nuclear? That's out of the question also since the very last nuclear power plant was built in the 1970's, and none have been built since then.

Finally, both Lordstown and the steel mill require the services of Conrail, and Conrail uses huge quantities of diesel oil.

Without rambling on about new technologies that are 10 to 20 years away, how do the Greens propose making it possable for these industries function right here and right now?