Energy is close to free. Peta-Watt-hours per day come into the earth from the sun.
The problem, in the US, is that the median income in real dollars has actually declined in the last decade/s. This means the mass market has lower purchasing power. For a while, debt was masking that effect, but that band-aid was ripped off.
The fix is to increase median real income. This is mechanically simple, and politically next to impossible.
Oh that old saw... we get so much energy from the sun it's all hunky dory. The challenge of converting that energy to a usable form at the kind of scale needed to power a civilization is not mechanically simple. The supply chain and energy inputs (including fossil fuels) required for photo-voltaic are non-trivial. Conc-solar is still not proven at scale and again requires natural resource and energy inputs to build and maintain the systems. Energy return on energy investment is the key metric here and one that is not well understood by many, nor favourable for a lot of the proposed solutions.
Peta-watt hours of energy came in from the sun for all of human history. Most of it is used by the ecosystem.
In any case we didn't use it then. We aren't going to magically use it now.
The fact that we're drilling for fossil energy in increasingly hard to reach places is strong evidence that using more solar energy is non-trivial. You can't just hand wave away the energy issue.
I think that the drilling in hard to reach places proves how lucrative the oligopoly on oil really is to a few powerful, politically connected corporations.
Comments
Energy is close to free. Peta-Watt-hours per day come into the earth from the sun.
The problem, in the US, is that the median income in real dollars has actually declined in the last decade/s. This means the mass market has lower purchasing power. For a while, debt was masking that effect, but that band-aid was ripped off. The fix is to increase median real income. This is mechanically simple, and politically next to impossible.
Oh that old saw... we get so much energy from the sun it's all hunky dory. The challenge of converting that energy to a usable form at the kind of scale needed to power a civilization is not mechanically simple. The supply chain and energy inputs (including fossil fuels) required for photo-voltaic are non-trivial. Conc-solar is still not proven at scale and again requires natural resource and energy inputs to build and maintain the systems. Energy return on energy investment is the key metric here and one that is not well understood by many, nor favourable for a lot of the proposed solutions.
This is a critical point. Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is a concept everyone should be familiar with.
I suggest beginning with the work of Professor Charles Hall of SUNY-ESF.
http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/energy.htm
Peta-watt hours of energy came in from the sun for all of human history. Most of it is used by the ecosystem.
In any case we didn't use it then. We aren't going to magically use it now.
The fact that we're drilling for fossil energy in increasingly hard to reach places is strong evidence that using more solar energy is non-trivial. You can't just hand wave away the energy issue.
I think that the drilling in hard to reach places proves how lucrative the oligopoly on oil really is to a few powerful, politically connected corporations.
What's the mechanically simple answer?
>Peta-Watt-hours per day
Also known as 41.66 terawatts.