Well, this guy seems to know what he's talking about. I recall however, that energy savings in cars have been spent mostly on increased power and increased size, and only marginally on increased MPG. I wonder if a world using his stuff would use less energy, or just do more. Not sure, but that's the kind of problem that I'm sure we'd all love to have.
Until next time, remember that the all-time score remains Technology: eleventy billion, Malthusians: 0 (i.e., "we're not dead yet.").
3 comments:
More information (I haven't watched the clip.):
This month's scientific American does a breakdown of non-nuclear alternatives, and it's possible that geothermal and wind energy have the potential to be cheaper than standard energy. Unfortunately, the online edition doesn't include the prices, but the print edition says that consumers pay an average of $0.11/kWH for the current combination of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric (without any externality pricing). While transmission costs might not be included, the costs for renewables are listed as: $0.061-0.084/kWH (Wind), $0.062-0.076/kWH (Geothermal), $0.199-.281/kWH (Solar-Thermal), and $0.469-$0.705/kWH (Solar-Voltaic).
Seeing as many of the renewable technologies are nascent in comparison to the more-traditional ones, it seems to me that they're more likely to decrease in cost as time progresses and that bypassing them in favor of more nuclear power is people in the middle of the 20th century saying "why waste money on these expensive transistors when we already have perfectly functional vacuum tubes?"
I dig what you're saying, but we definitely had wind mills before nuclear... =)
And we definitely had wires before vacuum tubes...
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