deltede

spam-deleted
Didn't want to delete users comments though.
Peter

Last week I had an email from a friend who is an engineer for one of the nation's largest power companies. He said their company has already made a decision to no longer support solar energy. They are now considering the discontinuance of wind turbine farms because neither is cost effective for mass production of energy and the wind turbines have a short production life.

He is not affiliated with The Southern Co. but I know for a fact they are building 14 power plants in TX and OK. Some are older hydro, fossil, and nuclear plants and they are upgrading, adding scrubbers and adding 2 additional reactors to some of those plants. There are 4 new nuclear plants being built by Bechtel, and Fluor.

The Southern Co. already has DOE permits plus $400 million in tax incentives and $2.4 billion loan approval to build a Coal Gas plant at Liberty, MS. They will be mining lignite (young brown coal) to fuel it from their own mine a short distance from the power plant. It will be the first power plant in the world that is able to recapture most of the CO2 and coal byproducts and sell them on the open market. Money from the sale of the byproducts will be part of the recovery cost for building and operating the plant.

(The last paragraph is a part of a news release from the CEO of The Southern Company)

Rooney 11

You left out my favorite hydro electric we should build one thousand more Kentucky lakes think of the electric, wildlife, transportation and the tourism this would generate (no pun intended)

IMO neither one are cost effective right now - maybe sometime far in the future.

I've seen photovoltaic systems incorporated into some of the federal and state funded jobs we've worked on and the cost to install these systems is not worth the return . . . they won't pay for themselves for many years.

It just seems in these hard economic times our government could put OUR money to better use.

[QUOTE=ElectricSLT;419296]I've seen photovoltaic systems incorporated into some of the federal and state funded jobs we've worked on and the cost to install these systems is not worth the return . . . they won't pay for themselves for many years.[/QUOTE]

"Many years"....yes, many many years, like more than twenty years, maybe even forty years? All the hype about solar energy, photovoltaic, building green, etc is just that in my opinion, just hype. Lots of building owners think going green is all the rage...but it comes with a price. And too...has any one wondered what happens in 20, 30 or 40 years after payback has occured, what will happen to these buildings and the systems associated with them? Either the building will have outlived it's original intended use or purpose or the system itself will need to be repaired and/or replaced won't it?

I'm not sold on the Green Scene...not 100% anyway, lighting controls are good, day light harvesting seems to be pretty good too, as well as a host of other energy and resource saving options, but these wind farms and photovoltaic systems, I ain't sold on none of that stuff yet.

I think solar will be the future, but the technology has a long way to go.

$300 for a 50 watt panel....NO THANKS....I'd be better off making some type of generator powered by a exercise bike.

[QUOTE=Catfish Bob;419330]$300 for a 50 watt panel....NO THANKS....I'd be better off making some type of generator powered by a exercise bike.[/QUOTE]

I think someone somewhere has already implemented this idea into their childrens television time. "If you all wanna watch tv you better start peddlin'!"

I was wondering who it might be making such breathless claims about solar and wind energy being panaceas for the world's energy problems. The link doesn't work in my browser, so I Google'ed the target, worldenergymedia.com, and found out it's the part of the corporate web site of WorldEnergy, Inc. Their site is actually here: [URL]http://www.worldenergy.com/[/URL] One of the things they do is buy and sell energy credits.

Tell me, ROONEY11, what is your position with the company? Marketing, I take it?

[QUOTE=RoadToad;419571]I was wondering who it might be making such breathless claims about solar and wind energy being panaceas for the world's energy problems. The link doesn't work in my browser, so I Google'ed the target, worldenergymedia.com, and found out it's the part of the corporate web site of WorldEnergy, Inc. Their site is actually here: [URL]http://www.worldenergy.com/[/URL] One of the things they do is buy and sell energy credits.

Tell me, ROONEY11, what is your position with the company? Marketing, I take it?[/QUOTE]

I read some of their reports a few days ago and discovered that they had done a lot of embellishment on Fluor's ability to extract 90% of the CO2 and other products at some of their plants. WorldEnergy's figures are inflated and don't match up with the ones Fluor provided to us.