So you don't care about cost, you care about CO2. So it doesn't matter to you what anything costs, we have to reduce CO2.

This debate has been about ROI and cost not CO2 emissions. You've been barking up the wrong tree with me.

Logically your position leads us to having to greatly reduce human population of the world. If CO2 is your primary concern, there is no other way. So let's just cut to the chase here and start talking about who you plan to kill and why? And start discussing how one can enforce this mandate in places where the USA has no control.

You need to start asking yourself a lot of "what happens then" questions and thinking though how you think all this will work on a geopolitical scale, because if you don't have a world wide solution that everybody follows, you will have failed in your goal and killed the industrialized world in the process. You will be responsible for the unnecessary deaths of billions of people both at your own hands and as a side effect of your policies.

IMHO, going down this road is stupid, even if we have to deal with global warming. We need to be careful with the environment in all respects, but just living on this world has environmental impacts so we cannot avoid it, in order to survive, we must deal with it.

Not even close, not even close to reality. $25 MW/h? You wish. It's more like $80 MW/h when you consider the full costs (setup, maintenance, transmission costs etc) for wind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Natural Gas is cheaper, thus wind is not cost competitive. It makes sense for peak load production, but if your investment only provides you a return during peak load when the wind's blowing, you made a bad investment and should have built a Natural Gas plant instead.

I don't know where you are getting your numbers from, but when I look at the following: http://www.awea.org/Resources/... It shows that Natural Gas is still slightly cheaper than Wind. This from a site that is obviously pro-Wind power. I'm digging out their original source material. But, what this site assumes is that you build both kinds of plants. Build your wind farm, just remember the wind doesn't always blow so you need to pop for a Natural Gas plant too. I don't see the savings when you still have to build the NG plant....

But look at my original post.... "All of the above" where it makes financial sense. When and where it's cost effective, build it. Wind is still not quite there and requires subsidies to make it close. I'm betting your number reflects the subsidized price, not the actual price, in the USA.

Almost the same thing happened to my Mother in law. She got diverted from HP's tech support to some third party who proceeded to help her printer to work. I think it was an HP CSR that gave her an alternate number to call, but they went though the song and dance, talked her into paying big bucks to load and configure her printer drivers and loaded their "support" software package.

Took me 2 weeks to get the credit card charges reversed and I had to totally reload the laptop from scratch to undo all the stuff they did to her machine.

I don't know if HP actually sent her to this company or if the CSR did that on their own, but this is a growing problem. If it was the CSR, I hope they got fired and quick. If it was HP, well they get what they deserve... Personally I don't use HP for anything, but I won't go into that story here...

I doubt their success rate is 1%.. Maybe 1% of people they actually talk to who happen to be sitting next to their computer.

But, even if you can get 1 call out of a thousand, it's an easy $300, not to mention a paypal account or credit card and a continuing "customer" you might be able to string along. Say you get 2 a day, $600/day isn't that bad for 8 house of getting hung up on.

The poster was saying that they think this is all valid, so that the CLSID always matches and is always the same thing doesn't seem to be a problem to them. I figure, they are just not bright enough to really think about it, which means this could be true.

But, I'm with you... It looks pretty clear that the operator and the engineer are pretty much the same person and if not, have to be sitting next to each other and are obviously both in on what's going down.

Yes, Windmills and solar both use water to clean their collection devices for efficiency. Solar cells get dirty/dusty and have to be cleaned. Windmill blades collect bug guts which disrupts airflow over the carefully designed airfoils and spoils the efficiency. It doesn't take much to really take a bite out of the energy a windmill can produce. The cleaning method involves spraying blades with fluids (water with surfactants) to soften the offending material enough to get it to fall off.

For the rest of your post.. I'll call the careful reader's attention to the various qualifications you make and from where your links come (TreeHugger.com? Really? No bias there.. ) Renewables are not cost effective and environmentally friendly, or they would be adopted on industrial scales. As you freely admit, Wind is not even at parity in the USA without the subsidies. Even with the subsidies, it's not proving cost effective. It's the nearest, but still comes out a few pennies above Natural Gas which has the distinct advantage of working even when the wind is calm and the sun isn't shining.

Now if you are really serious about this... I suggest you just go whole hog and cut yourself off from the power grid. Slam up solar cells and windmills with a pile of batteries in the basement, buy yourself an electric car and go totally without fossil fuels. You CAN do it, I am just going to maintain that it's not likely you can afford it, but if it makes you feel better, go and try. Problem here is, most people would not be able to afford to live this way and going back to the 1800's technology is simply not an option, unless you want to draw straws to figure out who's going to be allowed to live..

Not exactly true.

Renewables are not yet ready or cost effective and there isn't enough that can be cost effectively developed. Solar panels have just recently become self sustaining (where they create more energy than is needed to make them). Solar also only works well in areas with lots of sunshine and when there are no clouds which is a small part of the USA. Industrial scale solar plants out in desert areas have their own issues, they use lots of water, some kill lots of birds and make significant changes to the environment when they are installed. Windmills are a bit better, but are still not cost effective, use water in dry areas, kill birds and some say they look bad. Geothermal is only possible in a very small area, uses local resources but is actually limited in capacity. Other renewables are already fully developed (hydroelectric) or the possible further development involves significant environmental impacts.

The problem with your solution is that if the issue is about who we buy our energy supplies from, you are going about it in the wrong way. If we stop buying their stuff, the price just goes down and folks like China and poor countries in Africa will just burn what we don't, and the terrorists get rich off of them. In the mean time, we cripple ourselves by producing our energy at costs that are many times more than the competition. So what's your goal?

My solution is "all of the above" plus conservation and development of new energy sources. We need to drill and frack for natural gas with a purpose. We need to get to the point where we are the major exporter of CNG, drive the prices down and undercut the competition. Then we need to become more efficient in how we use the energy we collect. Finally, we need to fully fund a project to industrialize Fusion power, more than fully fund it. It is only Fusion that will finally replace fossil fuels, the rest can only supplement. Until we get there, fossil fuels are here to stay, unless you want start killing off the world's population.

Oh yea.. Personally, I think we should go drill said areas, use fracking and recover the methane before it gets loose....

As a side benefit, we can burn the stuff for fuel... Hey, it's being released anyway, so why not?

Just one thing.. EMP, is pretty universal and long reaching. It can reach thousands of miles from ground zero. So even if the nuke was used only on military targets, there is going to be significant EMP induced for at least a few hundred miles.

Ah, come on. Ever heard of VPN's? They go encrypted over the internet. Just use some reasonable equipment and keep your patches up to date.

Perhaps you mean... Not connected though unencrypted connections to the public internet...

But, most distribution companies DON'T allow this anyway. There might be one or two rural providers who still have dial-up equipment, but the big transmission line operators don't do this and I'd bet are not allowed to by their region's rules. These companies have to live up to some seriously strict standards for how their facilities operate, what and how they report their status and how fast they must respond to commands from their region's grid manager.

I figured I'd pipe in and call your idea stupid, but I thought better of it. Let me show you why we have a grid..

Transport of power - The power grid is designed to transport power from where it is generated to where it is used. This means we can use hydroelectric power without having to build our houses and businesses near the dam. It also allows us to transfer power from regions where there is generation capacity to regions where power is needed.

Efficiency - Efficient power generation is easier to achieve on an industrial scale, and the ability to put the plant near a fuel source saves transportation costs. It also lets us use the more efficient generation plants from other regions when power is available.

Redundancy - The power grid provides redundant paths for power to flow from where it is generated and where it is used and it also provide the ability to have multiple generation plants providing power so the failure of one plant can be made up by the rest.

The problem you are going to have with "remove the grid" idea is reflected in all of the above. If you need reliable electrical power, you have to keep the grid. If you want efficiency, you need to keep the grid. If you ever need more power than can be generated locally, you need the grid.

I'll conclude with this.. If you want to keep using all the things that make modern life possible, you need reliable, efficient and abundant electrical power and that means you need the grid. Unless of course you don't mind giving up modern life, which I consider a stupid idea...

Yes, that's the company.

The FCC could have easily ruled on this company's request instead of spending years stringing the whole scheme along. But some campaign contributor got their panties in a wad and the full commission agreed to hear their appeal. That caused a lot of investment to be made in Light Squared that simply shouldn't have happened and it happened for political reasons. It was very clear from the start that if Light Squared was allowed to proceed, GPS in the USA would have been rendered unusable, there was no need to waste all the time and money on the question.

Light Squared is just the well known case of this, there have been others.

Your speed must be sub dial-up then... You do see the joke right?