Academics, who depend on the carbon-auto industry for their grants, will talk for hours and not say the obvious - get rid of the auto!
It takes a lot of education to be able to ignore the obvious. Electric cars a just a switch from oil to coal.

Its all about a vision we have short sighted people who have no choice and dont have the time to see beyond getting their kids to school and putting some food on the table and aswering questions like why cant i have an ipod? then we have far sighted people who have good ideas with out the ability to fully explain all the little details.how do we rebuild the infrastructre or how can we afford the new powerplant. history tells us that the details will be figured out by bright individuals that will be born into this challenge washington and adams hamilton jefferson they had good and bad around them and none was popular all the time. but evetually we did get to have a country but now it's time for a remodeling i say it's a good challenge worthy of our generation.  people that complain should put themselves on their parents shoes or maybe even their grandparents and see if they could swallow that medicine.

flying under the radar

i just recalled that a lot/most? of the lighthouses, at leas up here in new england, are now automated and running off solar power. so, how unreliable can it be? "i'm sorry your ship ran aground, but it was cloudy to day so we didn't have enough charge to power the lighthouse"?

yeah, in a lot of the country, like here, electric cars would actually be regressive, thanks to those filthy coal plants grandfathered in by the clean air act. however, in the long run, that will make the cleanup easier, as it's then down to the question of cleaining up electricity generation in general, eliminating the question of cleaning up cars.

there's still the problem though of either providing for rapid recharging in the middle of the summer daytime peak loads on  the grids, or telling the American people they can't drive to their vacations any more. neither of which sounds easy.

making a push for local point-of-use generation, with solar panels on the roof, a waterwheel in the streamm out back, whatever will have the benefit of being more rapidly doable (although i don't know whether industry could deliver the products fast enough) and avoid the need to upgrade the power grid; plus, the American people might respond well to "having control over their energy" or some such thing, that pioneer spirit we're supposed to have.

of course, all the companies that make all these things are overseas now. shows where our past energy policies have taken us.

again, if a lighthouse can store up enough energy to power it through the long winter night, even on a cloudy winter day, with near 100% reliability, i imagine it could deliver all of my own lighting needs and a good fraction of my heating, i'm not expecting to find a single solution that will enable me to do things like trying to heat a 2500 square foot house with minimal insulationn to 85 degrees. at least it would cut my oil consumption down. if the lighthouse has to have enough batteries to carry it for a week or something, then fine, it takes what it takes.  

New data show bird kills up in Altamont
By Chris Metinko
Oakland Tribune
Article Launched: 07/23/2008 10:05:27 PM PDT

Click photo to enlargeA raptor spreads its wings and glides effortlessly between two... (Bay Area News Group file photo)«123»The Altamont Pass windmills are killing more hunting birds than ever after two years of trying to cut the deaths by half.

From October 2005 to October 2007, the deaths among four raptors studied -- golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels and burrowing owls -- increased 27 percent overall, according to a review committee following the project to protect the birds.

Only the golden eagles as a group showed fewer deaths, a decline of 21 percent.

The panel estimated a total of 2,236 raptors were killed annually during the study period. The two-year increase was measured against a baseline study of the kills from 1998 to 2003.

The problem is big wind, big solar, and big anything else.  Wind generators in people's yards, on roofs, in parking lots = good, windfarms = bad.

And BTW, there will probably be litigation on this, as the companies that own some of the windmills refuse to take the necessary steps to adequately reduce these killings.

Altamont is an example of what happens when big wind is done wrong.  A disgrace. But this does not happen with most big wind farms.  Wind towers are now built not to attract raptors. Better spacing, even in raptor territory also avoids harming raptors. And of course there are lots of places where turbines can be placed that are not raptor territory.

The western idea that bigger is better is completely wrong.  Bigger is almost always worse.  Specifically, big wind is ecologically destructive of whatever former natural area the wind generators and power lines now occupy.  There is no way to do big wind "right."

ugghhh...and we come back to birds again.  do i really have to say this?  buildings are the number one killer of birds BY FAR.  followed by house cats.  people are missing the point.  first of all, there's no silver bullet.  there's no cold fusion that will produce no waste, little footprint, and massive power.  ok, so now what...

let's see the big picture - why are wind turbines better than coal?  because our best climate scientists tell us about the consequences of global warming.  otherwise, we wouldn't need solar or wind or biomass or geothermal in the U.S.; we'd just build more coal plants.  our coal reserves are massive, the power is abundant and dispatchable, and we don't have to think outside of the box due to the heritage of the mature coal industry.  ok given that we cannot keep emitting carbon into the biosphere, we need clean energy sources. and if you can't follow this post to this point, then go do some research and get educated already!

will wind turbines kill a few birds?  absolutely.  will a fossil-fuel-powered world eventually make extinct thousands of bird species?  without a doubt.  will there be a case of a few birds that see the bright light of a CSP plant's receivers and fly to it and get fried?  probably.  again, compare apples to apples here - fossil fuels = eventually lead to the extinction of thousands and thousands of species, wind turbines = will kill a small percentage of a species that's much more threatened by high rises and your cat.  wanna stop human-caused bird deaths?  take that office window of yours and cover the exterior with something opaque.  there - now stop complaining about birds.

and people - an electric car TODAY running off of electricity generated at a COAL PLANT has LESS carbon emissions per mile than your standard I.C. gas-fired automobile.  With all of the embodied energy involved iwth the processing, transportation, etc, and taking into account the ~15% poor conversion efficiency of the I.C. engine, it works out that way.  so an electric fleet right now today would at least be a step (albeit small) towards carbon reductions.  so let's switch out our dirty electric infrastructure ASAP...this ambitious goal is absolutely attainable.  We just need to be get on the same page and attack it and stop wasting our time with blogs...ugghhh....too late.

I agree in general. But Altamont is an exception. It was an early deployment, was done very badly, and defending renewables should not including defending Altamont.  With what we know today about how to deploy wind turbines you could tear down the existing turbines at that spot, and put up new ones and not kill any golden eagles. You could come close just by moving turbines; there was a suit a few years ago to force Altamont to do just that.  Unlike some of our purity trolls, I have no objection to big wind or big solar done right. And in the U.S. I think mostly it is done right. But I do think it can be done wrong, and we need to hold industries feet to the fire when it is done wrong.  Altamont was a case where it was and continues to be done wrong. And it turned a lot of people against legitamate wind powers. I know some people concerned with raptor health who are absolutely unhinged about wind power, who are level headed on other issues. And when I talk to them it comes down to Altamont. They are so angry about that particular wind farm that it spill over onto the   wind industry as a whole, and they hate all windmills. Not rational, not right, but an understandable human response that is not helped by continuing defenses of Altamont. If you understand that big wind is essential (as I think you and I both do)  and want to convince others, then I think it essential to condemn Altamont, support shutting it down, and then point out we know how to deploy modern wind farms without threatening raptors - even in raptor-rich ecosystems, and insist that the wind industry continue to use proper spacing tower construction to avoid the problems of Altamont. (Altamont is not comparable to cats, tall buildings or cars because it hurts raptors and golden eagles in general, not just "birds". Again an exception not the rule. )

If killing birds were the only thing wrong with big wind or with coal, Solarwind would be totally correct.  But power plants and power lines in a natural area destroy that area just by being there.  Leave the natural world alone, put power generators where the people who use the power live, and eliminate power lines!

Furthermore, air pollution, including global warming, is not the only thing wrong with coal.  Mining is every bit as destructive as burning coal, maybe even more so.

Those who advocate projects and power lines in natural areas instead of reduced consumption and solar and wind on roofs, yards, and parking lots, are advocating against the natural world.  Other species, the land, air, water, sky; none of them get any benefits from human generation of electricity, so why should they have to suffer from it?  This stuff is an insult to nature when placed in natural areas.

as stopgreenpath has been arguing, they might destroy desert ecosystems, but wind turbines, as far as I know, do virtually nothing to the ecosystem -- and compared to coal, fugedaboudit.  As far as transmission lines, I'd like to know more about that, are you talking about the large towers that the transmission lines are on, or the lines themselves?  and are you talking about the electrical fields?  

Certainly it would be better to decentralize energy production, and the better solar pv gets, the more that will be possible (and if geothermal heat pumps were cheaper, that would help, and it would be nice if there were good microwindturbines you could put on buildings).  But if we're faced with a choice between coal on the one hand and solar thermal/wind farms on the other, I'd have to take the latter.

Jon,

I really don't think that words alone can explain why placing human contraptions destroys natural areas, although as a friend posited recently, placing large numbers of wind turbines in an area might change natural wind currents.  But that possibility aside, industrial human contraptions are just an insult to the natural world.  If you don't understand what's wrong with placing them in a natural area just by seeing or envisioning them there, I don't know what else to say.  I mean, it certainly ruins the view, but it goes way beyond that.  I guess you could say my objection is spiritual?  DR likes to make fun of me when I mention this, but if you have any connection to traditional Native Americans, ask them, maybe they can explain it better than I can.