Discussing power is fine, as long as you make it very clear what you're talking about.  As soon as you start talking in GWh instead of GW, I'll take your articles more seriously.

(for those that don't know what I'm talking about - a GW of wind power means when wind is blowing at design conditions on every one of the turbines, and a GW of solar is sun shining at noon on a cloudless day)

...like geothermal, landfill gas, tidal...

Ron,

Various types of residential load management have been in use in the US for many years, they just haven't spread. The relatively low cost of electricity in the US has limited the incentive. The rising costs, reduced reserve margins and significant recent reductions in the cost of the load management hardware suggest we'll see a lot more of it.

For a while it was quite common for customers with electric heat to get a much lower rate for heating power in exchange for agreeing to be interruptible. I think this went away in some cases because utility regulators banned any discounts that would encourage electric heat as a way to avoid building new power plants.

Wisconsin Electric is paying customers 23 cents per kwh for their solar power here.  11 cents retail plus 12 cents in subsidy.  

Why can't the feds pay everyone 10 cents per kwh?  Then the power company could pay you retail and you would get a check from the government for 10 cents extra, per kwh, every month.

It would work very well.  divert the money to pay for it from subsidies for the old failing energy economy.  Coal, nuclear, oil, all the big pork industries.  Oil gets 13 billion per year alone and a pass on 7 billion in oil lease fees from the Bushies.

Agribizz subsidies are huge!  It would be feasible to divert 50 billion per year.

Germany is doing this to the extreme, this is a milder plan.  more acceptable to US politics.  A populist movement behind direct subsidies to homeowners and farmers to supply power should work.  Farmers riding biogas powered tractors, shunning foreign oil.  Thaty sort of image.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

The biggest source of immediate conservation savings!  36% of GHG comes from building heating/cooling.

Geo heat exchange heating/cooling is a well dospered and undrstood technology.  it needs incentives to expand.  Conservation subsidies.

Every equivalent kwh of power saved with geo heat exchange should get a 10 cent government payment.  The systems can be easily rated and monitered and subsidies dispensed based on power bills before the conversion.

All that ultra expensive coal fired electricity going to air condition buildings, peak summer blackout type load.  All that can be canceled with geo heat exchange.  Cool ground heat transported by simple circulation pumps.  A fraction of the energy of a window air conditioner.

The same on the heating side.  No combustion heating with a heat pump operatinmg from ground temperature.  Very efficient heating.

With solar electric and heat panels, cogeneration, powering the heating/cooling and storing the heat/cold for a 24 hour cycle in the building mass.  That gives a smart grid system a huge storage component to control demand.

This is the biggest, quickest savings area.  With a huge economic stimulus in green jobs.  Manufacturing, istallation, everything.  Better giving the stimulus money out with clean energy checks.  It would impell this whole boom.  The checks help pay the monthly payment on the new energy saving equipment.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

...when you consider that most countries have nationalized their oil companies, and the US and Britain are about the only ones who haven't -- maybe all of our oil company profits are really subsidies?  In other words, if we nationalized our oil companies, the government would get all the profits, and could funnel that into solar/wind/geothermal.  whaddaya think?

It would be good Jon, but politically impossible.

Thanks to Alito, Roberts, and Scalia.  Corporate
citizens have rights that supercede our rights.

Direct incentives are far less socialist, especially if they involve diversion of present subsidies rather than new taxes.

Give taxpayers back their own dollars to spend on renewable/conservation energy investment.  spent according to actual kwh saved and GHG free generated, the decisions won't be skewed by lobbying or bureaucrats.

oil companies do not need that 13 billion per year in government subsidy, renewable/conservation investors do.  Help pay for my solar panels, exxonmob, thanks.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Sharon, I liked your critique of Staniford -- $400 trillion of solar buildout at 1/2 lb carbon/$ is indeed a shitload of CO2. But I can't really see a $300 trillion economy by 2050. Infinite growth on a finite planet just won't happen.

But the sorts of projects Jon proposes are much more modest, on the order of several trillions of dollars. He has another breakdown of oil use which shows oil for construction is only a few percent of our total use. So we could easily double and double again construction activity if we were prepared to transition away from the automobile. (And Hansen says we can use all the oil without endangering the planet -- if we phase out coal, plant a shitload of trees, etc.)

So I think the opportunity is there to transition to a low-energy industrial civilization as long as we give up the idea of infinte economic growth.

It's certainly good to prepare people for a low-energy future, a "harsher reality, just in case". (And I think that is the default position if we don't change our ways rationally.) But I think it's also true that the more low-impact technology we retain and build, the easier our lives will be in the future energy-constrained world.

In any case, your idea that we need to think about the carbon footprints of building out renewables is a good one.

Thanks for commenting on my idea, and Colin brought up much of what I wanted to say, so I'll elaborate on some points --

I remember that you once asked the question about needing windmills to generate the electricity to build more windmills, which is a very important insight -- the industrial system is self-reproducing.  Meadows et al were one of the few people, in "Limits to Growth", to show how this self-reproduction can get out of control.  But it is also the key to industrial growth, and hopefully, post-carbon growth.

I think it can be argued that the "true" energy basis of a civilization is electricity, and that oil was a terrible distraction, never was necessary, and now will require Herculean efforts to get out from under.  But as I tried to show in those two articles I referenced in my previous comment, the guts of the industrial system, the factories themselves -- at least, the nonchemical, paper, and metallurgical ones -- use a pretty small amount of electricity, relatively.

I think there is enough metal around in the world that we could always make enough machinery, such as windmills -- I'm assuming we could use the metal in cars, aircraft carriers, etc., if we had to, but even a certain amount of new steel in manageable.  If all transportation was electric and used renewable sources, most of it from local renewable sources, again, I think this is doable.

The big question starts to turn on the culture change, as you point out.  Yes, it might look very different (I would hope that, for efficiency's sake, for instance, all firms would be worker-owned-and-controlled as well).  We might be in towns and cities with no cars in the center -- j.h. crawford type cities -- with no planes flying overhead, etc.  The overwhelming majority of people might be in apartments, not single family homes.  As you have pointed out, upwards of one quarter of the population might be gardening and farming. Is this too huge of a culture change for all of the adults in this civilization?  Children can adapt, I don't know how well adults do.

What I'm attempting to put forward is envisioning a different kind of civilization, but one that is both industrial and sustainable.  Might not work, but then again, it might.