"For someone who has a swear word every second sentence ... well it might be hard to understand for you that having a discussion with you is kinda ... irritating"
That you can't see the content for the swear words says something about your usefulness. Still, I'm going to briefly assume you're not simply being an incendiary troll and try to address you with some respect this round.
"Your geographic knowledge just sucks."
On the contrary: I was able to visit most of Europe's major cities on a three month sabbatical last year, spending a good bit of time in each of the major cities. Three months in the states with the same methodology would have gotten me maybe half the east coast. Europe is /tiny/. I mean, my commute alone is about an hour long; that would get you into another country on your side of the pond. E.g., Karlsruhe to Strasbourg.
I'll put it this way: When was the last time you suffered 45 C weather before noon? Floridians get that shit in the spring. When was the last time you got 2 meters of snow? Upstate New York gets that 4-5 times annually. Virtually anyone south of the Mason Dixon is running their AC virtually 24-7 between June and August - in many cases /so as to not die/ - but in most cases so they're not so hot they can't think. Almost anyone north of Pennsylvania has to heat their houses for 3/4 of the year, for the opposite, but similar reasons.
The United States is large enough, vertically, and stable enough, industrially, that is unsurprising it uses more energy per capita than Europe based on climate gradient alone. You can ignore that if you like, but that would be valid reason to apply the moniker "ignorant".
"your cars burn fuel like insane"
That's fair; too many Hummers, not enough Fits. As long as we're using gasoline and diesel vehicles, though, we have the same set of problems, all based on one fact: there are a diminishing number of ways to centrally, unintrusively reduce our vehicles' emissions profiles. Conversion to electric vehicles as a standard is how this is is solved. There are the complaints that you're just shunting the pollution to a central source - but it's a central source that can - will - be replaced if other best practices go into effect. Replacing coal with nukes and renewables - and later, Gen 4 nukes and renewables.
Back to the Hummers v. Fits: that's not who you're talking to; I drive a Mazda2 and get about 35 MPG (~15 km/l). I bought it specifically because of its fuel efficiency, and would have gotten electric if not for the practical concern that I live in an apartment, don't have the hookups, and don't have the right to install them. Our gasoline consumption is something we /all/ need to work on - but that's not who you're talking to.
Point is, with the economic downturn, more people are using that methodology - lower cost, higher mileage - but there are other problems as caused by a downturn and a geographically sprawling country: my commute, for example, is roughly an hour each way. You take what jobs you can, and they're often farther than you'd like. It's not always practical to move house either. My wife is a city planner, and how to avoid and solve that sort of urban sprawl is one of her main concerns.
So do me a favor: Leave the broad brush in its sheath next post, will you? Your objections, so far, may apply to my countrymen, but not me. I'm a conservationist, efficiency-concerned, and careful about my energy choices in /all/ sectors. Further, you've been complaining about how I should be Googling, but if you actually /understood/ anything I was saying, or what Google and Wikipedia brought you, you'd notice that my complaints are valid: "numbers" are given, but only the ones you can't draw actual conclusions from. I have real money to invest, and concrete numbers are important to that.
Incidentally, Aquamarine got back to me (if you were paying attention to the other threads, you'd know I'd contacted the maker). The capacity factor for the Oyster 800 is 65% (meaning expected generation of 520kW on average based on nominal wave activity), and the standard deviation they measured from the Scottish coast is 130kW for that 520kW mean. They wouldn't provide real cost numbers, as they haven't quite worked out the manufacturing chain, but they're aiming to be competitive with wind at $4/W capacity, or ~$6/W generated, given their capacity factor.
These, by the way, are real numbers. Not "homes". Not "peak". Numbers that actually have an impact on the decision to invest, and the comparison between one generation technology or another. In essence, these are what Inhabitat - or any responsible news organization - /should/ have teased out of the manufacturer.
We're both programmers, and I'm going to assume that you're in some way concerned with performance. If I were to apply your logic (peak numbers are good; arbitrary units are good; who cares about the deviation and mean?) to algorithm performance numbers, I'd end up with no idea of how to optimize my cycles and piss poor performance. I might as well just use outer joins for everything: after they've been cached, they're /wicked/ fast, right?
"kWe is in no way any standard"
I came from an engineering background, with a focus in power generation. You did not. So forgive me if I think your idea of what "standards" are cursory at best. It's standard nomenclature when talking about electrical power generation to denote the source of that power, as heat and kinetic, and nucleovoltaic (photovoltaic, alphavoltaic and betavoltaic) devices have an efficiency factor. (Heat: kWq, kinetic kWv, nucleovoltaic: kWf (flux), electricity kWe).
As for whether it's "killo watt hours electric" or "killo watts electric", do you see an "h"?
"if you had read the article, you just had divided the power yield of the "number of house holds" and you had the average house hold energy consumption"
Except the power yield doesn't include the capacity factor, so the numbers given in the article are effectively useless.
"Average electric power consumption in USA per person: 7000kWh (San Francisco) - 16000kWh (Dallas) , germany: 1700kWh (I use 1200). For germany we dont have regional split numbers (At least not I). A german house hold is like 1-Person: 1.700 kWh, 2-Person: 2.900 kWh, 3-Person: 3.700 kWh, 4-Person: 4.300 kWh."
7000 kWh per what? You use 1200 kWh per what? I think you need to learn the difference between "energy" and "power", and either get more accurate numbers, or learn to read charts.
Search Wikipedia for "Energy Sector in {country}" and select the "Use" column from the resulting table. Germany's average use /per person/ is 7,051 kWh / year as of 2009, or an average power use of 0.8kW/capita. The US Average per person is 13,642 kWh/yr/cap, or 1.556 kW/cap. My household of two is 9518kWh/yr/cap, or ~0.55 kW/cap. Of course, I made no suggestion that the US' power generation was lower than Germany's.
What was yours again? If I'm going to guess by measuring yours against what you thought your country's average was, I'd say ~ 10,000 kWh / year, or 0.56 kW. Do you live alone? How many in your household? that "1200", where did that number come from? Was it the sum of your electric bills over the last year (like mine was), or was it just a guess (as round numbers imply)?
Or, does it really matter? I mean, the reason I brought my electricity consumption up is that you were ignorantly painting me as the "opulent american", and using that as a reason to dismiss my concerns. Dirty pool, by the way, which was the impetus for my initial angered reaction. I needed to illustrate that I'm not, in fact, the horrid stereotype you portrayed. (I mean, how would you like it if I were to portray you as some goose-stepping, beer-swilling, sausage-sweating book-burner? I work with German dudes. I know they're not as asinine as you were being as a class, and I know Germans have nothing to do with the "Indiana Jones" stereotype. Do you actually know any Americans, or have you just formed a caricature based on the same pseudogreen propaganda that's motivated your government to ditch nuclear?)
I don't know why you brought your consumption up at all; I never once accused you of anything but brash ignorance - which I still feel is accurate.
As I had said before, I'm not surprised that my consumption is about equivalent to Europe's (as I live in a temperate zone), and significantly lower than the rest of my country (as the majority of us do not).
