Posted on 02/05/2007 1:56:56 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Yet the rate of growth continues and order books are full. You can find people that complain about trees and puppies if you look hard enough.
Not really. I grew up in a rural area of comparable "remoteness", and the local governments in such locations are VERY sensitive to desires of the local constituency. It is that local constituency which controls their continuation in office, and what that constituency wants, it gets. If a sufficiently large number o f the near neighbors tell the country government that they don't want such a development, it won't happen.
They can get all the energy industry lawyers they want---those guys don't vote. The locals do.
Yeah, but they don't derail billion-dollar projects and put the nation's energy security as risk. These other wackos do.
Look, here's the deal. You've got an energy source, wind, which in 2005 had an average capacity factor of 26.8% (which was better than solar at 18.8%). You're looking at an average capacity for nuclear plants at 89.3%, over three times more. You've got coal-fired steam turbine plants at 72.6% average capacity factor. Combined-cycle gas-fired capacity came in at 37.7%. Now, compared with the nuclear-coal capacity factors, for wind capacity you have to build around three times as much infrastructure (generating capacity plus transmission) to get an equivalent amount of energy production. You're talking about huge differences in land use. Even with the advantage of zero-cost "fuel", that is a striking difference.
Just the added transmission infrastructure alone makes it a dicey proposition. In my state a local utility consortium just gave up after trying for seven years to site a high voltage transmission line that would run from the southern part of the state to the north, where it would tie into the regional grid. That was just for the transmission line, mind you, not anything to do with a generating plant. I can imagine the ruckus that would cause.
Yeah, the writer just wraps Jacksboro up into Abilene....they ain't "near" each other in any respect.
You're right about being out in W/SW Texas desert... a true rancher does not turn down a $12k/yr windfall from a windmill or a oil well because it has "blinky red lights" at night. A true rancher knows that kinda side money might just be the difference between the amount of hay you can afford during an extended drought.
Interesting, and yet another confirmation that James Earl Carter, Jr. was and still is a damned fool.
...well said. I heard that the taxes are getting high in places down there. Quite a few Texans have owned Colorado land and moved back and forth for over 100 years. They encounter the same kinds of neighbors and problems up here. For the most part, Texans are good to have around in meetings about property rights.
It's beautiful down toward Real County (TX, Leakey and all that), for sure. But man...what a drive from eastern parts of Texas!
Haven't been to Real County, but eventually, maybe this spring...I'll just pick up and drive the convertible off that direction in a careless attempt at recreating a David Lynch movie.
One thing Colorado folk and Texans can always agree on: Californians! =)
In Ft Worth and Austin, and likely many, many places...the cities have closed downtown generation plants that have been there for decades instead of refurb and modernizing them, and instead, pay higher rates and add more pollution for transmission losses....oh....but the environmentalists think they are so brilliant to have closed down those "eyesores."
Generate at the load! Generate at the damn load!
BTW, do you guys know each other? Never thought I'd see a conversation between a Chimera and the Dungeon Master!
Hey, I'll talk to just about anybody (except Bellerophon, who'd probably try to kill me)...
Yep. You might already know about it, but I'll Freepmail the name of a place to you.
See #126 about the credits regarding windmills.
It is for the credits it appears.
I wouldn't know about that. I use Motorola.
And if you lived downwind from a coal plant, you would get more radiation. Nuclear plants are not allowed to release radiation outside containment, but coal plants can belch all they want.
We could generate the most energy by regulating generating facilities in the same way we do aircraft - by type. If you could prove that your solar cell or nuclear reactor met the established standards for its type, you should be able to build as many as you want.
Actually this was not as bad a decision as has been painted. Nuclear recycling is costly, given the present state of technology. France and japan do it because they have no uranium of their own, and so safe place to store waste. The US, with plenty of both, is better off storing waste until recycling technology gets cheaper. Today's nuclear waste will then become tomorrow's low-cost fuel that requires no mining.
hmmm, bump for later reading about NIMBYism
I did enjoy my time in the desert. Being an Easterner and just finishing three years in lush Hawaii I found it refreshingly different. I generally followed I-10, and swear I didn’t see more than small patches of green between the pepper fields around El Paso and when I came to Houston. If I saw an exit sign with an interesting name I went for it. One “town” consisted of a dinner/bar/gas station across from the post office/general store and one trailer. A 5,000 gallon water tanker supplied the towns water needs.
The immense size was different too. I parked the Harley in the middle of the highway for close to an hour and didn’t see a single vehicle, building or telephone pole. Not what I was used to.
LOL Actually DMs get way too involved with their monsters and take it out on the players.
I'm not finding any information quantifying emissions trading. I've been reading about it for years in my windmill magazines though. We have 12 gw worth of windmills in this country which means they produce nearly 30,000,000 mwhr/year of power. The wholesale value of that power is about 1 to 1.5 billion dollars per year. I doube that emission trading is of equal value. At least not in this country yet. The think about emission trading is that there are a lot of people telling their politicians they want to pay more for electricity if it is from a clean source.
I don't buy into global warming though.
The only way around that is to have a reliable, intense energy source available that has a lot of stored energy. On those counts, nuclear is pretty hard to beat.
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