> Solar power, at roughly $1/watt (and then "free" for 10-20 years), price falling on a nearly Moore's Law trajectory.

Ummm, no. Current prices, all in and spinning the meter, is around $1.70/W. Those are the latest cross-US numbers.

> Wind power -- expensive, unreliable but simple technology and humidity isn't reliable either.

Whereas wind actually is about $1/W (same source, DoE) and has a CF of 30% as opposed to 15% for PV.

Both are inexpensive and work well. We need both, and are installing both faster than any other power source ever. 95GWp combined last year.

Really MIT? Stooping to ripping off the University of Dayton?!

http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZgEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA75

"Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil"

Who are collectively batting zero when it comes to predicting the future.

This is akin to telling her not to get into aerodynamics after reading Well's "The War in the Air".

"No matter how full of computers a car is, it will still have the same mechanical components - valves, pistons, camshaft, throttle, steering, suspension"

Electric cars eliminate most of those things.

So basically you just invalidated your argument.

More to the point, you argue from your specific case - someone who drives a very old car and does his own repairs, as if this should be cogent to the topic as a whole. For the vast majority of drivers, newer cars are safer, more efficient, cleaner and far, far more reliable. I'm sure at least two of those apply to you as well.

> However, a carburetor does not require a computer and my car uses a carburetor.

You have a 1982 W123 without injection? I thought all carb models went out for 80/81?

> Fail there too. Studies have shown that as miles per gallon go up, people drive more.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Driven miles go up with urban sprawl. This happens independently of the CAFE standards, which were largely a response to the problem of more miles driven.

You might also be inclined to offer up the sparky gem that people with hybrid cars drive more. No, people that drive more buy hybrid cars.

" It's not a number that needs to go down, because we have no reasonable level of non-CO2 emitting grid capacity"

I think I'm missing your point here.

But this is only true in certain places anyway. Quebec would take issue with this statement, as would Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Arizona, California and a lot of other places.

" nor initiatives to build out more at a pace likely to keep up with a reasonable level of demand increase."

Solar and wind are being installed today at rates faster than any other power source now or ever. 95 GWp of renewables went in last year, as opposed to about 70 of everything else combined, or about 60 at the maximum of the nuclear install era in the 1960s.

So basically there's a lot of people out there actually fixing the problem while you're busy complaining that no one has a plan.

I have a relatively new expensive dishwasher. In "eco" mode it uses over 22 litres of water, god knows how many kwh (water post-heater), and takes 99 minutes to cycle.

I can do the same amount of dishes in less than 10 minutes, using maybe 10 litres (I don't soak, I like rinsing) and zero power (gas hot water in either case).

Plus, for whatever reason, I find washing dishes very zen.

I will say, however, that modern washers are EXTREMELY good at cleaning. My parents model from the 80s was a joke.

And, closer to home, Gears.

> The Navy-funded research

The *formerly* Navy-funded research. Formerly as in "shortly after Ritter's paper was published".

> Installed panels in utility scale installations are now cheaper than nuclear without subsidy

Good point. Everyone that gets here, you need to go look carefully at page 2 of this report:

http://gallery.mailchimp.com/ce17780900c3d223633ecfa59/files/Lazard_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_v7.0.1.pdf

As you can see, utility-scale PV systems (solar farms) are significantly less expensive that modern nuclear plants. And yes, those are UNSUBSIDIZED costs.

> I think you and I have different definitions of "easily".

In a thread on fusion? Really?

> Even with subsidies and a substantial government policy push the percentage of electricity generation by
> renewables has gone from 9% in 2008 to just under 13% in 2013

I'm curious, can you provide similar numbers for the uptake of coal between 1700 and 1705? Or oil between 1905 and 1910? I suspect their share of the overall energy pie increased much more slowly.

> Doubling or tripling our nuclear power output in the next 30 years would be the only possible way to really limit

Bologna. Wind is going in faster than nuclear did in '69, its best ever year.

It's done, stick a fork in it. (Which we did up here in Canuckia, selling off AECL for much less than the tax write-down).

> is unclear if ITER is a money pit but let's assume for the moment that it is not

It is perfectly clear to everyone outside the fusion labs that ITER is a money pit. Here, let me quote them:

"First, we have to recognize that practical fusion power must measure up to or be superior to the competition in the electric power industry. Second, it is virtually certain that tokamak fusion as represented by ITER will not be practical."

That statement was written by Robert Hirsch. He used to run the entire US fusion effort. Or how about this:

"Long touted as an inexhaustible energy source for the next century, fusion as it is now being developed will almost certainly be too expensive and unreliable for commercial use. Scaling of the construction costs from the Bechtel estimates [...] capital charges alone would contribute 36 cents to the cost of generating each kilowatt hour. This is far outside the competitive price range."

That's from Lawrence Lidsky, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT. When he published this he was shunned, and soon quit. To understand the problem, base load power is selling right now (checking...) for 3.21 cents/kWh, an order of magnitude lower than the lowest possible price from a widely optimistic paper design. And then all I have for room here is a snippet of a masterpiece:

"However, among those who are not part of ITER and who do not expect miracles, an ever increasing number of scientists is coming to the conclusion that commercial fusion reactors can never become a reality."

That's Michael Dittmar of the Institute of Particle Physics of ETH Zurich, and also CERN.

"yet another aircraft carrier that we really don't need"

An aircraft carrier might actually be used. Or it might end up being dumped as junk on a distant planet so Kurt Russell can walk past it. In either event, it will *actually work*, which is highly unlikely for any fusion design known to man. Yes, this includes the IEC devices like the polywell and focus fusion, which have been known to not be able to ever work (even in theory) for at least a decade. They're all smoking uncut hopium, and getting the press all excited on their slow news days.

> The variable you are neglecting to consider is transmission losses.

Overstated almost always. The total US loss in transmission is 6%.

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3

If you consider only the HDVC lines it's much smaller than that. The Manitoba Bipole 2, a 1000 km, 500 kVDC line, has losses on the order of 3.5%, and more modern designs are less. So crossing the ocean using the latest technology might cause losses on the order of 20%. These sorts of numbers can't be ignored, but they certainly aren't a "big deal". You'll lose 5% of the power from a PV array because of dirt.

> Therein, as the "Watts Up With That?" commenters point out, lies the problem

Incorrectly, as the math demonstrates.

> You can *only* achieve that kind of ROI if you're connected to a power grid

*Every* source of power has *some* down time, and relies on other generation assets during those periods. Pretending this is a new or unique problem simply demonstrates the poster's lack of knowledge of the way the grid works, and always has.

For instance, nuclear in Ontario would not be able to provide a stable power source if not for the presence of hydro, gas and coal plants (the later now shut down), which take off the peaks.

However, when discussing wind power in Ontario, inevitably someone brings up the tired old bromide about wind needing backup sources. Yet they never do the same when discussing nuclear in Ontario, which many of the anti-wind campaigners suggest as an alternative (to be more accurate, a subset of the pro-nuclear crowd is anti-wind).

> Power plants have a nasty habit of costing money every second while they're being kept in readiness

Without actual numbers, such statements are meaningless sophistry. Here is an article on the actual numbers:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/cost-of-the-variability-of-renewable-energy-is-dwarfed-by-the-savings/

What it says is that by mixing sources, you can lower the overall cost of the system as a whole. So even though a good PV day means the NG guy isn't selling all he wants, *the total profitability of the system as a whole is still greater than either of the sources on their own*. Just as interesting is the conclusion that once you have even a little bit of PV or wind in the system, the cost of adding more keeps going down.

Why anyone would find that surprising is a bit of a mystery to me, but so is a lot of the "line in the sand" sort of argument that always crops up - like this one.