Frankly why not let them create an account for you?

I mean does it matter? They're creating false profiles about you in their banking system - in a lot of places that's actionable. Just like if someone else opened an account in your name in Bank of America, or Barclays, it doesn't make you liable. And should their demonstrably false information materially harm you then you can recover that cost, and pretty much recover the cost of recovering the costs, etc. It's hassle, but you add that to the costs that facebook would have to host. Not to mention the legal minefield of libel when your 'friends' say unpleasant things about you on their (or your) walls and it suddenly increases the cost of your mortgage as you're now a higher risk. Would facebook assume that liability? Because some has to, giving random people the ability to materially detriment your life is going to be a lawyers wet dream I'd expect.

The article mentions 680million facebook users, the facebook stats themselves http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics say 500+million users, and then goes on to say that only 50% of them log on per day. Then a quick look at the number of farmville users http://www.facebook.com/FarmVille gives us about 48million users active in the last month. Now maybe this is just me, (and yes I'm aware that facebook games are more than just farmville) but I would suggest that the vast majority of the 'active' facebook users don't play games, and probably don't spend money to do it - so few of them would be using facebook credits, the underpinning of this idea in the first place.

It sounds like the stats have been inflated to say that everyone using facebook plays games, and everyone playing games gushes money into facebook, this really isn't the case.

Why would companies suddenly try and use facebook (and on Mark's terms, not theirs) to data mine and find out which people are good or bad credit risks? For that matter how truthful is facebook? Is all the stuff you put up there real? Or as I've seen so many times exaggerated to make the poster seem a much 'cooler' person.

It's good for headlines, but I'm pretty suspicious that it has any real world possibilities.

Z.

Sorry but the responses didn't miss the point.

What did you think you were going to achieve with a troll post, other than a troll response.

If you want a reasoned debate about something you have to start with being reasonable, blowing everything out of proportion and attacking like you did doesn't achieve anything.

You can be as sarcastic as you like, but remember again you're using a medium that does not convey emotional content easily, and different people from different backgrounds will interpret the same words in a different manner, especially when they are removed from the context of tone.

If you believe as you do that the phase 'Nuklear hysteria' is terrible and denigrates people to that extent I'd suggest saying that, disagree with what the person is saying and say that specifically, do not jump on the hysteria bandwagon to attempt to disprove it. Hysteria only begets hysteria.

I have a friend in Japan, a moderate distance from from the affected area and he's not too worried about it - at least he's certainly not obviously in a panic - but as this is second hand unsubstanciated information and of course incredibly subjective I wouldn't expect you to take that as a calming influence.

Two things I would like to mention, firstly people in the most heavily earthquake and tsunami directly affected areas aren't too worried about the radiation - there's sufficient struggle to survive and frankly not enough time to worry much about something you can't really see.

Secondly most people who are incredibly concerned about the radiation (I'm really ignoring the people in the US as that is just hysteria - it's too far away to worry that much) aren't directly affected by the tsunami and weren't too badly affected by the earthquake, they have time and a media that is using the fear of the un-understood to sell panic.

The reactor situation is serious, it's a problem but it's being dealt with, there's some radiation leaks and some lovely headlines of 10,000 times allowable levels. The number of times I've read an article that states 'officials say' and then some prognosis of doom it's just hilarious. I mean seriously, how much do you trust a news organisation that sticks in a article 'officials say' without mentioning which officials? I mean arguably a binman working for the government is an official. About the only reason I can see that they wouldn't mention who says it is that it's not a credible source. I don't really have time today to pick 10 articles from 'credible' sources and pull them apart but this should be an exercise that you do, don't let them blind you with FUD.

Oh, and also look at minimum allowable levels - and note the difference between those and the maximum safe levels.

Everything you read (including this post) should be taken with a grain of salt, you should look at what the person writing it is trying to say, and what they stand to gain. Don't just believe everything you read, good or bad about something and please please challenge your assumptions!

Z.

No problem, pretty much I agree with you which is why I wrote what I did but I'm glad you approved :)

I did like finding out how much radiation you got from eating a banana, or even just sleeping next to someone - it's entertaining. Told someone at work and they freaked no matter what they were told, or how small the radiation is....

Z.

Dang! You have a very good point, that would be a pretty good solution..

Any encryption except one time pads can be broken (well assuming you use the one time pad only once), but you're quite right, the likelihood of someone breaking into the server and then happening to have either the ability to crack the public/private encryption through algorithm vulnerability or computing power is low.. Arguably there are still many ways to break into it, from social engineering to physical breakins etc but really low order probability if it's done correctly.

I'd probably accept that as a viable solution myself (and I wish I'd come up with it so as not to look too stupid there :) ) - I'm still not 100% confident of a company that can retrieve your password however it is done as it's just not as secure but if the law does remain in force it's not too bad a solution.

I still think the law's rubbish tho, there's no requirement to grab records of all the passwords someone's had over the last year unless you're fishing somewhere you can't legally force to comply.

Z.

But good catch :)

Just a question.

Why on earth do you think that if someone doesn't relocated half way around the globe into completely different country with a different language and culture that they are a 'blowhard' and a hypocrite? (I actually had to look up blowhard, never heard that before... odd phrase). Especially when they were talking about a spacecraft launch? I mean this isn't even suggesting building a nuclear reactor, it's about a radioisotope thermal generator. Talk about projecting.

Aren't you really exaggerating it a little? If you were being honest, and seriously looking at what you think and what you're afraid of wouldn't you admit to exaggerating a little there?

So you're in a panic about Fukushima, awesome, but I fail to understand what this has to do with Cassini's RTG?

Obviously radiation is radiation, so that's scary, I mean it's not like there are different types like alpha, beta etc? Or things like alpha sources, like say the Plutonium 238 on Cassini's RTG can be stopped by a few cm of air, and in fact about the only way to be harmed by it is to ingest or breath it (I suppose if one of the RTGs from it hit you in the head if the launch failed it'd harm you but that's not really radiation). Or that it's insoluble unlike the iodine you're petrified of in local produce and fish so wouldn't really get out of the soil and so there's only a tiny window in which you could possibly get a tiny amount of it into you. But obviously that's really scary and will destroy everything.

The reason he wants to slap people who say things like

is because it's moronic and they don't have a clue, they're afraid it will destroy the world and when it comes down to it they're petrified of cancer and death and radiation == cancer.

People fear what they don't understand, people don't understand statistics, radiation and frankly technology and people do stupid things like try and compare a spacecraft launch like Cassini with an RTG on it with swimming inside of a nuclear reactor. Your exact response is stupid, sensationalist and not based in reality, just your fears of it. (Yeah I know, the swimming in the nuclear reactor was sensationalist, but seriously, it's a fecking tsunami hit area and you think they're on the beach swimming? Riiight, good to know your priorities)

Also, seriously you're suggesting drinking from streams in tsunami hit areas in Japan? If you do that I'm pretty sure radiation that might cause cancer 40 years down the road is the least of your problems, ignoring the possibility of things decomposing into the water and all the bugs you'd get that way I'm also pretty sure there's a pot load of toxicity from all the rest of the stuff washed on the land, like say oil, gas, and who knows what other industrial run-off.

As for increasing the chances of dying, yes it would, living in a tsunami hit area you're always going to have a higher chance of dying, I mean it's not the most healthy place in the world - I mean gas is carcinogenic, so any of that being around is bad and I'm pretty sure that cars didn't magically survive the wave intact, nor were their tanks empty. They don't have all the bodies removed yet, so they're going to decompose and potentially have a bunch of nasties in, things like rats are going to multiply it's just an unpleasant place to live.

And yes, there is an increase in radiation, pretty much all of it short lived - half lives of 8 days isn't too worrying if you're careful for a month, but to be frank the highest risk to anyone there isn't from the reactor, it's from everything else. There is a small, and unmeasurable risk due to the radiation from the reactor, whilst in the individual this may translate to death it's impossible to attribute that to the radiation from the reactor - you may have just had sucky genetics, or for some reason you used an antique tritium dial watch, or you spent too long flying around, or you had gas splashed on you at some point, or you were stupid enough to smoke. You can only give a statistical association between the radiation leaks and increased cancer rates at much higher levels of radiation and greater exposure - unlike things like car crashes were you can say they died from a car crash, what cause the cancer that kills someone you can't say for certain unless they have a statistically significant exposure to radiation - and even then you can only assign part of the blame to the radiation.

If you really are that petrified about radiation and the possible implications for you in the future I suggest never getting out of bed, cause it's risky out there doing absolutely anything.

Z.

Summary isn't completely wrong, you're actually wrong.

The article specifically states that

Which means that they would have to store the password, and be able to give it out to authorities.

So, to take your points:

Yes, but this is stupid and really gets rid of the point of having the hashed password in the first place. Now you have two copies, and even better if you hack the french data you start potentially having information necessary to recover passwords from other more secure countries. As for the 'write only' file, seriously? the only write only file is /dev/null, if you can read it at all there's the possibility that it can be read by bad people - that's what a security breach is... I suppose you could use a printer and print them all, if there's no digital way to read it then it would have to be a physical security breach, but the cost of compliance?

Kinda plausible, if only hashes were guaranteed to be one to one, only they aren't as it is possible to have hash collisions where two passwords can point to the same hash. This doesn't usually matter but it does mean you wouldn't be able to guarantee that there was no hash-collision and you were giving the authorities the wrong password, which would be illegal under this law. Granted the authorities may not know this and many not do anything about it, but if they wanted to be evil it wouldn't be hard to prove non-compliance.

Yeah, as above this would be giving them the incorrect password and would be violating the law. You really think they want the password to log into the site? Seriously? When they can just demand access? Most likely they're taking advantage of the fact that people tend to use the same passwords, so getting a historical record (and note this information has to be held for at least a year) of passwords for that user means there is a high likelihood that they'll be able to access data outside of their country. The law isn't asking them for their current password, or should I say not JUST their current password, it's asking for ALL of this data for the last year.

It's a data retention law, not a you must provide this to authorities when asked. You have to gather the information all the time and keep it for a minimum of a year and provide all that historical information on request (this is not just the current information). Which means you cannot just provide the current information, or reverse a hash etc.

The law is broad reaching, really intrusive and will cause far more problems for anyone than the french might hope it will solve, but for some reason you (after apparently reading the article) missed entirely the point of it.

Z.

Damnit forgot one more thing... Peak flipping demand!.

All this maths is based around averaged demand, but grid usage is anything but average.

Peak demand in 2003 for electricity generation comes up to over 140MW - don't forget that average power generation !=power usage. Of course you can ignore it and just go for the average - which is fine but you'll have daily brown and blackouts..

So we would need sufficient generator capacity to cover that.

Gas 150MW generator = $150million
Solar 30x5MW generators = $750 million

Which makes it more expensive of course.

Z.

Sorry matey, your math wasn't correct.

Power consumption of Humboldt county isn't 100MWH, or even if your mistake was typing that extra H and you meant 100MW that is also false, although not as badly.

But if Humboldt County did only consume 100MWH then it would only need 1 plant (you know 5MW = 120MWH, right?) - which would be awesome but not what you said....

Humboldt County used 940GWH in 2003 as per this report: http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report
From that same report: "Based on past behavior it is expected that growth in electricity demand over the next 20 years will range from about 0.5% per year to 1.5% per year."

So if we assume 1% annual growth in electricity consumption then by 2011 you should be using about 2786MWH daily, or if you want to know what level of power generation is required 116MW - which ironically is different from 100MW and especially different from 100MWH.

even the 2500MWH figure doesn't support 100MW, that comes out to 104.2MW, which ironcially is almost exactly one of your solar plants more than you suggested.

Whilst I did make a mistake - you shouldn't really be running around thinking that your maths was any better... tsk.

Z.

Ahh bollox.

I had typed out a huge reply including the stats and links and I stupidly clicked on the ricesolar link above hence losing it all...

Ok, 2 things.

Firstly you're correct I forgot to convert between MW and MWH when I was taking the rated output of the power plants, so assuming the solar plant can provide power 24x7 it would produce 120MWH and yes the number required would be many times less. Ironically this doesn't really help with the costs as much as you'd think because I did the same with the gas power plant, and rather than needing 8 of them you'd actually need a third of that one plant. (Interestingly renewable plants are often rated on their maximum output which they rarely ever reach - wind is particularly guilty of this but so is solar - obviously solar input changes over the day and isn't present at all at night)

Secondly, don't be an idiot, not all my calculations were incorrect, in fact as far as I can tell and as far as anyone has pointed out I made one mistake, and it was a noticeable one as (and I hope they told you this when you were at school) I showed my workings, including sources. I still have no idea where your 100MWH daily energy usage came from. Your calculations were also wrong, but you were lucky that your incorrect energy usage matched... Interestingly I go back to your first post and I notice that you said that 20x5MW generating stations would generate 100MWH - er, doesn't just one of your stations generate 120MWH if you multiply up properly? Why would you need 20? Ahh I know, you forgot to convert between MW and MWH - weird it's the same mistake I made, and also weird if I'm bad at math then you must be.....what?

As for the 7 acres thing, well I had gone so far as to calculate the solar insolation, area of mirrors, separation of them before I screwed up and lost it. I'll leave the maths to you but yes, average solar insolation for Humbolt County does support a plant with an average 7 acres of mirrors for a 5MW plant, of course those mirrors are over a much larger area (has to be to avoid mirror shadowing and killing the land below it) and in order to account for losses, seasonal variations and cloudy days etc it seems that the rice solar plant at 50 acres for 5MW continuous output is actually fairly doable.

The rice solar plant which appears to be a molten salt continuous generation plant appears to come down to $25million for 5MW (at the low estimate), so your 5MW plants of which you'd require 21 (2500/120=20.8) would cost the state $525million to build, and would require about 1050acres of land. The same amount of gas generation would cost about $50million, still an order of magnitude more for the solar.

Cost dispersed over the 2008 estimate of 130k people comes to a much more acceptable $4038 for everyone in the county, but this is still around 24% of the total income of everyone. Compare that to the gas plant which is the equivalent of just $385 or just over 2% of the total income of everyone in Humboldt County.

This is assuming your 21x 5MW plants can have the efficiencies of an 150MW plant (which it can't) and you have increased thermal loss from greater numbers of smaller storage (thermal loss being heavily affected by surface area to volume - which means the larger the store the greater the insulation efficiency one climbs with the square, the other the cube) although that could probably be offset with reduced transmission losses through distributed generation.

Maintenance costs look to be about $5-7million annually for the ricesolar plant, so lets take $5million as the annual maintenance cost for a 150MW plant, you'll have to assume greater maintenance costs for distributed plants as there are more components, but that looks at being say $200k per plant annually x21 for the plants gives about $4.2 million for annual maintenance costs, which is the equivalent of the fuel.

Hmm, looking at gas fuel costs (http://www.cres-energy.org/blogs/blogs_roedern06Jan.html) an efficent gas turbine appears to get about $0.08 in gas for each KWH hour produced, which means that the 2500MWH daily consumption comes to about $200k or about $73 million a year. I've not been able to find maintenance costs for a gas power plant, so I'm going to assume $1million annually, it may be much more than that, but I have no idea, I do know there are fewer parts to maintain and it is less exposed to the elements, and there's only one of them.

Finally we have property taxes, something that 1050 acres vs say 50 acres probably doesn't come down on the side of solar. I don't actually know how much that would be so can't include it, biasing this towards solar.

Assuming one gas plant was constructed and the 21 solar plants were constructed it would take 8 years for solar to be cheaper than gas (also ignoring interest on construction capital), and remember this is ignoring property taxes (and yes I'm sure the taxes on solar plants would be less due to some grant or such which is artificial and really just shuffling the money) I read that property taxes could be $15-20million annually on a gas plant, but it didn't say where and when (not to mention losing the link) so I can't really include it, but lets hypothetically say that property taxes worked out to be $15million for 50 acres... er that means solar is never cheaper, as total costs rise to $319.2million annually compared to $89million for gas. Even assuming a 66% reduction in property taxes for solar still means it's more expensive, it's not until it drops to $4million for 50acres of industrial plant that it breaks even with gas.

Add in fracking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing) which is quite popular in the US atm (and of course also hated by some) which as far as I know can provide a continuous gas stream for decades after the initial well is drilled (yes there are safety and CO2 issues, but...) and solar looks less and less viable.

I'm going to guess that the property taxes aren't present for solar plants or they are massively reduced, so the hypothetical situation isn't likely to be the true one but when you provide a discount to someone you're really just shuffling the money around, the land is still being used it's just that instead of receiving property tax there are cheaper bills for end users - the cost is still there it's just hidden.

Personally I like solar, and when I finally manage to get the land I'm planning on putting up many different versions as I can as I'd like to be completely power self-sufficient (actually I'd like to be completely self-sufficient but that takes a lot of time) but without the drop to pre-technology standards that a lot of off-grid people seem to prefer.

One thing I don't do is stick my head in the sand about solar - it really is expensive, it really is difficult and there really are technical issues. Gas plants are old, they've been well tested and they aren't likely to have unexpected consequences (we may not like them, but they aren't a surprise), solar plants are relatively cutting edge but they will have unexpected consequences (probably not in the order of additional pollution but you never know what the environment impact will be when they break) and of course they cost more - this will change over time as things become more robust and more of them are built and new technologies come in, but it'll never be smooth sailing to begin with.

Z.

P.S. I'm going to guess that the post was modded as informative, because, well it was informative. Even though I made a mistake I put in enough information that it actually helped people, including the links to my sources. Honestly it wouldn't be that difficult to refute what I said, after all I'd even included the links to the sources. If you'd wanted to you could have typed a decent response re-done the maths and gotten it right to disprove me, instead we get what?

Actually we have all the technology we need now - we don't need to use a ribbon, you can use kinetic exchange to balance gravity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain

The idea's been around for a long time, it'll work, but it's expensive.

SJBE: FTL on the other hand doesn't really have any basis atm other than the possibility of wormholes afaik. We can build a space elevator (not tethered) now if we make the economic case for it, or just have enough money and the drive to do it.

There's usually more than one way to skin a cat as the saying goes.

Z.

Ok, so I found 3 Humboldt Countys in California, Iowa and Nevada, but based on size it appears you mean the CA one, of course it only really has 2.2million acres of land, the rest is water.

According to this report (http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report) Humboldt county (apologies if I got the wrong one or anything) used 940 GWh of electricity alone in 2003, which comes out to around 2500MWH averaged daily - that is a heck of a jump from your 100MWH, 25 times as much. And that doesn't count usage growth over the last 8 years, nor the natural gas heating, cooking and hot water (about 45million therms) nor transportation energy costs.

I'm pretty concerned by your numbers now, but even taking your 25 acre 5MW station at face value, and even allowing that it's a molten salt plant and stores enough energy to provide that 5MW continuously day and night with backup storage to last several weeks and to provide that 5MW during the local solar minimum you would need 12500 acres to provide just the electrical energy. 10 cubic meters of molten salt can provide 1MWH of storage, since you'd need 2500MWH of storage for a single day, and several weeks of storage you're talking about 350k cubic meters of molten salt, a heck of a lot.

Sure all of this is relatively minor compared to the actual size of Humboldt county but I'd guess the cost of manufacture of a 5MW plant to be around the $20million mark (unaccurately based on http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/ and scaling down), so if you have to build 500 of them just to handle the electrical load you're talking about $10billion to manufacture (and remember this is for purely the electrical generation of 2003, not transport or natural gas). The population of 2008 is estimated at about 130k (http://mapzones.org/Humboldt_County_California.html) meaning that would cost about $77k per resident. The same report shows that the average per-capita income of Humboldt county residents is $17k annually - or 4.5 times the cost.

I don't know about you but I'm a little puzzled as to how you're going to pay for all of this? Not to mention over doubling it for powering hydrogen/electrical vehicles and replacing natural gas completely - something you'll have to do to have this green revolution of yours.

What you, and everyone who thinks that "popular pundit b.s." is just "b.s." seem to fail to understand is that this is a huge engineering, financial and technological issue to overcome. There are many reasons why it hasn't happened already, and aside from energy density and reliability the biggest reason is cost, are you really willing to have an additional 50% tax on all income in your state for the next 10 years to pay for constructing the plants necessary? Think of what that would mean, can you cope with 50% less money every payday?

Just as a comparison a 320MW natural gas power station costs about $150million dollars (http://www.power-technology.com/projects/laverton/), so you're looking at about the equivalent of 8 of them, or $1.2billion dollars - your solar plan is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you're saying that they should be built with loans and then amortised over the lifetime of the plant with the cost being the energy, you're still looking at about 5 times more expensive electricity (yes I know the fuel costs are minimal - mirror maintenance is a pain but you don't have to buy gas) unless you subsidise it somehow (in which case it's still 5 times as expensive but you're pretending it's not).

If you're going to have statements like "Now you see where the science behind green makes sense, and the popular pundit b.s. that is constantly echoed is just exaggerated doubt and nonsense claims." then you had really better match that with actual verifiable numbers and facts. Rather than just repeating what you've heard without really understanding it - it is completely possible, but then again so is building a tower to space, or orbiting solar power satellites but these haven't been done, possible doesn't mean viable.

Please, when you're next commenting on this think! and back up what you say, just because you say something doesn't mean anyone should believe you - especially when it is as wrong as this.

Z.

Ahh ok..

I hadn't actually looked up the temps the molten salt plants work at, but that effectively gives them about a max of 1200 DegC thermal difference, giving a maximum theoretical efficiency of 81% at maximum temperature (assuming 0 degrees outside) down to 28% right before it stops boiling. Obviously the outside is not likely to be at zero, so the max efficiency drops even further, but that's actually not too bad you could probably get an average of 30% - possibly more with supercritical steam turbines . It also depends on how the energy is extracted - there's a big difference between a coal fired plant at a (fairly) constant source temperature to a solar plant that has to extract as much power as possible from the heat store, it has to run across all the temperature differentials.

The boiling point of the water was when you stopped being able to extract heat energy in a regular steam turbine - I checked the melting point of an existing molten-salt solar reactor (sodium nitrate/potassium-nitrate in 60/40) and it melts at about 232C the 'cold' temp is about 287C and the 'hot' temp is 565C (http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/salt.htm). I'm sure different mixes of salt can have different temperature ranges, and the design there simplified the thermal issue with a separate hot and cold tank. A quick calculation shows that you need storage of about 10 cubic metres for 1MW for an hour. The US uses about 10,034 MWH/day so a single days storage would be around 100k cubic metres - which actually doesn't sound like too much.. Hmm maybe it is doable to store that much, you'd need several times it as there could be fairly bad days / weeks (although the more you store in a single place the better the insulation is - volume vs surface area) and I have no idea how much space it would take up to gather that much heat... but...

You've got a very good point though, many more people will be happy with a molten salt plant than a nuclear plant, and yeah there's much less to go wrong - but I wouldn't say nobody would complain. People complain about wind turbines enough and for no real reason - I think they tend to look pretty decent but a lot of people really get up in arms when new ones are sited.

I still suspect it'll be much harder than most proponents suggest, but mebbe it's not the complete nightmare I'd thought it would be. I wonder if you could shrink the technology for rooftop / backyard operation, the necessary storage space isn't very much, and I quite like the independence of localised power.

As for the nukes, yeah I think they'll be around, they are much denser than solar power (and not everywhere has the same amount of land per person as the US does), although I'd personally prefer the molten salt thorium reactors to current pressurised reactors.

I'm not exactly a convert ;) but I suspect you're not as insane as you first sounded.

Z.

So you're talking about solar-thermal plants that store heat.

It certainly does reduce the need for direct electrical storage, but it's still not a good numbers game.

Firstly, there is a maximum amount of energy you can store, then there's the issue of diminishing returns on thermal storage (both leakage and pushing more energy into the store is a function of the difference in temperature).

80% efficiency of conversion of thermal to electrical energy is impressive but I have to admit I really doubt it would be attainable in real life, the maximum theoretical efficiency of a a heat engine is the difference in temperature between hot and cold divided by the absolute temperature of the hot side. This means that as you extract more and more heat out of the molten salt you're constantly reducing efficiency (not to mention that as the molten salt heats up it absorbs less and less of the heat from the sun) - also I'm under the impression that these are steam plants too, which gives a point below which they cannot extract any more heat (boiling point of water) to turn to electricity.

Weather is relatively predictable over the long term (approximately) but you're falling into the trap of the generic versus the specific, averaging all of the plants over the US for example, and over years you can work out what is necessary to keep power running. However what you can't do is keep any specific plant generating 24x7, then of course come the transmission losses, the storage losses, meaning that the size of the plants and their storage have to be increased again and again. The more you store, the more you lose to thermal leakage, the more you transmit from one side of the country to another the more you lose, each requires more storage and generation capacity to offset. Anyway, back to my point, saying that X amount of generation and Y amount of storage will cover the US (or any country) for their power requirements over the next 5 years will actually give you localised brown and blackouts (there are always events outside of the bell-curve that the system cannot adapt to) - it will mean a change in lifestyle from that of certain power to that of uncertain power.

Since the solar plants can't ramp up (or they run out during the night, or the next cloudy day), and the wind can't be certain to blow when you need more than the baseload (which is all the time, the baseload is just the average lowest usage) this isn't a replacement technology, sure you can replace some plants with this, but personally I'd replace the fossil fuel plants before I replaced the nuclear plants with these.

As to the US being under 80% cloud cover for a month or two? It's possible, likely, no, possible yes. If you're happy being without power for a week or so then all is good, but most people don't have the capability to cope for a week or two without power, I mean no heating, light, refrigeration or cooking (obviously everyone will have gone electric for everything as fossil fuels shouldn't be used) is quite difficult to do without.

To be honest, I really wish I could believe, or that the numbers supported a fully renewable future - but unfortunately they don't. It's personally possible to be completely on renewable energy (with enough land) but much harder for millions of people to do the same.

Z.

Wind can generate power yes, so can solar - but it is very important to know that wind and solar CANNOT generate power ALL the time, not only that they also sometimes do not generate power at the same time - and inconveniently at the time of peak requirement.

Nuclear power can generate all the time (as can gas and coal and oil etc).

People use power ALL THE TIME, this means that you cannot rely on solar and wind power without massive storage systems, and of course many times more generating capacity than you actually need - as significant energy is lost in each conversion.

Take the UK, mid winter records show that the entire country has been becalmed for up to 2 weeks at a time (no wind power - and of course minimal solar power) - what this means is that if the UK converted to pure wind and solar we would require 2 weeks of peak energy storage (you use more energy in the winter with lighting and heating), and the ability to keep it charged (or of course accept that there may be no power during the coldest time of the year). The problem with this is that the battery technology does not exist, pumped hydro storage is pitiful compared to the UK load. If you want to have power during these times then you need to store the energy from the bright and windy times. This applies to absolutely every country world-wide, but I know that limit of the UK wind.

If you want to live off grid it's completely possible, I mean firstly don't worry about a fridge / freezer etc as they use a lot of power, so use dried foodstuffs that don't need to be chilled. Then don't worry about cooking with electricity - you don't have enough for that. Then also don't worry about heating your house with electricity, you don't have enough for that. Don't worry about using a TV, computer, you don't have the electricity for that - you have enough for light, and a couple of small devices. Granted you could use a laptop as a TV / computer some of the time, but it's unlikely you'd be able to keep it charged for continuous use.

If you live off grid you heat your house with oil, coal, gas or wood, same with cooking etc, the energy you gather from your wind and solar isn't enough to run these devices.

Is this a world you want? To not have the power to run anything? To drop back into victorian times? To have a massive change in lifestyle enforced on you? Oh and forget actually having an electric car - if you can't power all your home devices how can you power an order of magnitude higher electricity use car?

Some people will say that the technology is there, that magical X will solve all the storage problems, and to them I'd ask a simple question - what is the range of an electrical car compared to a fossil fuel powered one? And that's cutting edge, incredibly expensive and polluting battery tech.

The ideal of completely renewable energy is great - the reality isn't workable, and for all you think wind and solar are cheap, you're actually paying higher bills because of them - the subsidies for wind and solar to make them competitive basically get added to the cost of electricity generated through other mechanisms. The belief that if you only just try and put it all in place it'll work ignores reality, if you can come up with a plan on paper that matches the requirements and keeps our quality of life I'll leap on it (heck, just get it in the rough same ball-park of quality of life and I'll be happy), until then saying it'll just work is pointless.

The point about nuclear is that it works, all the time, day, night, windy or not it means you have heat, light and even possibly electric cars - wind and solar cannot do this. It's not an obsession, it's reality and reality doesn't care if you have the 'will to commit to them' it only has what will happen if you do.

Z.

I'm pretty sure you've not thought that through.

That was purely the cost of the oil - which is only about 40% of the US energy usage, so assuming costs are roughly on par for the rest of the energy usage then it's over twice as much, so you could say that the energy costs we're spending over the next 40 years adds up to $240trillion, but then again you've ignore that 85 million barrels a day is crude oil consumption - for lots of different types of fuel, for plastics, for fertilisers etc. This might make the figures much more acceptable except that they're incorrect:

3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines ($19 trillion @ $5m each)
49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants ($59trillion @ $1.2billion each - http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/)
40,000 300 MW solar PV power plants ($44trillion @ $1.1billion each - http://www.thebioenergysite.com/news/3845/300-mw-solar-plant-planned-in-ningxia)
1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems ($102trillion @ $60k each)
5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, ($1.6trillion @$300million each - http://www.globalenergymagazine.com/?p=2438)
270 new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, ($135billion @ $500m each)
720,000 0.75 MWwave devices ($6.48trillion @$9million each - http://cleantech.com/news/4276/pelamis-sinks-portugal-wave-power-p)
490,000 1 MWtidal turbines ($3.92trillion @$8million each - http://www.energyefficiencynews.com/policy/i/3710/)

Giving a rough total of $236trillion... Of course not even close to counting the hydrogen infrastructure the electrolysis plants needed to make the hydrogen, nor the new global transmission infrastructure or the necessary energy storage.

And this was to handle the projected consumption of 2030, not 2050, so what it really works out to is something like $59trillion in oil costs up until 2030 - and this isn't just fuel at the pump, it's all oil, from fuel to plastic to fertiliser.

Which means it's not double, it's not triple it's 4 times as much as you're paying now - for all oil. And even of the oil that is burnt 72% of that is used for cars... Cars that won't magically convert to running on electricity and hydrogen, that's a lot of cars you need to replace, and filling stations, and human behaviour.

To be frank I think the cost will be an order of magnitude higher than it is now - 10 times as much as you're paying, not your double.

Finally, don't forget you'll have to pay it at the same time as everything is built, meaning it's oil AND these costs (in fact this will drive oil prices up massively as all the materials have to come from somewhere, there's transport, manufacture, installation etc - all using oil) which are really optimistic.

Oh yes, and the report mentions a new improved electricity grid, mainly because the power is never where (or when) you need it - no idea of the cost of that. It

And this ignores the fact that the world would be a very different place after this big change occurred, I mean who actually needs constant uninterrupted power? That's a luxury we can all do without. Not one of these studies has ever dealt with the variability of the energy source, the need to ship it half way around the world and the fact that roughly 20% of it (the solar) doesn't work at least 50% of the time, and that 73% of the energy generation comes from wind, wind known to have long periods when it's useless; from too windy to no wind, for weeks at a time.

Storage is hugely inefficient, transmission is very inefficient and I must have missed the part of the report that mentions it all. With costings..

My conclusion? Wow, they just don't bother looking at it seriously, after all who wants to read the truth when you can say, sure it'll all be fine just do it.

Economic hurdles? Very much so.

Technical hurdles? Like you wouldn't believe.

The report? What were they thinking!