That's why I included the linked story, as they claim hundreds of millions, but I did read trillions somewhere, and pointed out that the speculations vary.

But the worst is over now?

An excellent rule of thumb for this day and age.

Indeed. But while that ploy is rampant on sites like USMB and CapitalHillBlue, I doubt it permeates here too much. Could be wrong.

Either way, when it comes to the energy question, they are easily crushed by merely asking, "ok, where's the data? how much? where? how fast to production? at what rate?"

They almost never answer those questions. Even the paid shills.

The cutting edge (I assume? That's a lot of money on bad tech) of solar generation and power storage

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Solar-Po...ews-14225.html

.... that's absurdly high $/kwh.

That is not high, if they can sell the electicity at 5 cents per KWH it should generate $48 million in revenues per year. These things are going up all over California. The nice thing about this is the nighttime power generation since the heat is stored in the salts.

110000*24*365*.05

Some of the largest photovoltaic plants are being installed much larger than this, but they are pv so at night they don't generate power.

NRG is a stock you can buy involved in pv plants, a good one.

PV and solar is much cheaper than coal now.

Be extremely careful buying energy company stock, especially ones that own nukes, as the marginal price, hence profits, is set by natural gas prices. Natural gas prices have been getting murdered for the past few years. NRG is a company whose value has tanked and I believe is still struggling. We almost bought them a few years ago.

Fracking causes earthquakes yo

Thought this an interesting article. With Japan and Germany ending their use of nuclear power, with America's large natural gas reserves we could do well exporting this natural resource.

"Exporting U.S. Oil And Gas Is Good For The Economy"

http://news.investors.com/article/60...ant-energy.htm

snippet:

^^^ It actually is a good article if you ignore all the BS non sequitur like "Keystone XL"

That's a very interesting graph. I am curious as to why it doesn't show any data for magnitude 3 or greater quakes in mid america before 1970? No seismic records in america pre 1970?

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/top...arthquakes.php

TLDR: we're much better at detecting small earthquakes than we used to be.

PS: I also do think fracking causes some earthquakes... but Mag 3 earthquakes are harmless.

Yeah until a fracking earthquake kills someone or does massive damage no one is going to care. I have to charge my iPhone at an affordable rate!

It seems to me that it might actually be a good thing...cause small earthquakes, small earthquakes spaced out over time prevent huge magnitude 8 ones that build up over time. But I failed one class in college, and that class was geology, so I'm like almost the last person who should even be commenting on it.

Also, my friend who's a complete Honda nut sent this to me:



$26,305 Suggested Starting Price MPG 27 CITY 38 HWY (Automatic)

The 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas

http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-n...120418180532:s


http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-n...gas/price.aspx

I just thought it was odd that for 30 years there were precisely 20 mag 3.0+ quakes in that area and no data before it.

Also, according to wiki's piece on the Richter scale there are about 130,000 mag3.0-3.9 quakes recorded every year world wide!

Then I read the mother jones article from which the graph came:

I don't know why, but I'm starting to feel that since the momentum has left the zomg we have to stop burning fossil fuels due to global warming, then the next item on the agenda is zomg, quake-a- mageddon is coming due to fraking. better stop it quick.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but I saw a piece on this the other day and thought it had real potential.



Basically they are able to produce twice the amount of energy as landborne air turbines being as the wind blows harder in the upper atmosphere.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57...turbine-power/

When they say twice the amount of energy is that before or after transmission loss. A 1000 watt turbine will lose at least 1/3 of its power transmitted over a 1000 feet, using very heavy copper wire (1/3 inch diameter or so). Drop that to 1/4 inch wire and you're losing all of the power gain (assuming their doubling is before transmission losses).

I want a moon base solar station (no power lost due to weather or atmosphere) that shoots microwaves at power stations.

Preferably US owned, so we could use the microwave beams as weapons.

Finally, practical green energy.

Fracking video explaining the process. Interesting stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DniNI...eature=related

LNG would be nice to export, it'd obviously raise demand. Natural gas cars would be awesome too since the price, at this current level, would be less than half of what gasoline is. The problem there is there are no pumps. If every gas station had 2 natural gas pumps, I'm sure people would buy natural gas cars in a heartbeat as long as they cost relatively the same.

I thought it was really cool that my Dodge Ram was E-85 ready until I discovered that there are no E-85 pumps within 100 miles of me.

what exactly does nuclear waste look like?

I know this is an old thread, but DoTheMath was implying that we had some beef in politics and I don't remember, so I thought I'd search. Coming across this though I just wanted to point out how incredibly wrong he is about something that's pretty easy to look up. Pumped storage hyrdopower is 70% efficient at the very low end and up to around 90% efficient at the high end. There have been large projects in use for decades to balance power needs completly unrelated to wind or solar. That he could have ever said that thing about "5 times" really calls into question the reliability of someone who presents himself as quite the expert.

Anyway. if you do any vanity seaching and catch this post, here's a message: next time you should actually do the math.