If you really need security for some reason, use it to match the person to the badge at the clean room entrance. That will keep someone from using a stolen badge.

/. has always been a personal blog, it just happens to have a lot of links to other people's articles.

Did you forget, or do I need to engage on a UID pissing match?

I'd say the guy performing the cost estimate, because efficiency at extraction is a key indicator to how much space you'll need to produce your target amount of power(or how much power your limited space can produce), which determines how much equipment you need to do it, which drives cost. That's without considering that if you need to purchase/lease/rent land or area rights there can be a cost there as well.

But as an executive deciding between different options, you're right.

Electricity is fungible - IE most people don't care where it comes from, so any one kWh is equivalent to any other.

Consider if Biodiesel is $3.50 and fossil diesel is $3. You're going to sell vastly more diesel than biodiesel. Make Biodiesel 22% cheaper and it's now $2.73. The situation will reverse practically overnight. More realistically what will happen is that investments in BD would languish until diesel hit $3.50, then plants would be built right and left, pushing down the price of both, but as process improvements decrease the cost of BD and capacity is increased even as fossil oil becomes harder to extract, that more and more BD would be sold even as FD sales decrease. Eventually FD would occupy more or less the same position as BD now.

To put it another way - alternative energy is very cliff-like - you don't notice much change until you actually fall of the cliff, then change happens very quickly. We're relatively close to the cliff right now. Hawaii is holding onto the old production model by it's fingernails. It's possible that very soon daytime electricity will be cheaper there than nighttime.

Nice to see that even Apu reads /.

Strat

To avoid the chads problem I think we should stick with the 'fill in the bubble' or 'finish this line' type optical scanning ballots. Easier to write what counts and what doesn't, as well as easy for verification/counting by hand if necessary.

It's less about absolute accuracy than it is about being auditable.

Why not? Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant, though some would be converted to biomatter plants. That's a massive game changer right there.

The idea is that at 20% solar covers the daytime increase in power usage. It should be installed such that, normally speaking, it only covers 50% of daytime usage. 20% wind is within reach without massive grid modification. My peaking/windless generators are the hydro and biomass plants. I would encourage the use of thermal storage systems though - bigger water heaters that operate only when electricity is at it's cheapest(most plentiful).

As for transmitting electricity for thousands of miles, at least in the USA you wouldn't have to. You would just 'trade off' production towards the area having a shortfall.

Well, yes, I keep forgetting to put 'for the USA' into my statement. It also averages out to the world. Specific countries have different ideal setups. Brazil and Canada can keep using it's hydro and neglect solar in favor of wind. Hawaii and other equatorial islands can go nearly all solar. Alaska would probably end up being more nuclear(as I understand it our hydro prospects aren't that great).

Finally, I'll say there's a reason I said 'roughly'.

There's a lot more wrong with hydro than just 'takes too much land'. There's lots of ecological issues, which is why the USA is considered pretty much maxed out on hydro. It' also not zero CO2, it's really low, but making all that concrete does produce it. Plus you eventually have to dredge the lake to get rid of sediment build up.

For some reason this irks me. It's the same chemical as the majority of natural gas, IE CH4. NG tends to be a bit dirtier depending on how well they've filtered/cleaned it.

Southern half of the USA for that matter.

I think you're glossing over a number of issues. There are real-world concerns with the growth, harvest, processing(moisture removal), and delivery of biomass to the plants. There are also serious pollution concerns when you do a lot of it. Mostly fine particulates and NOx compounds. You have a very interesting outlook if you think that 'high costs' = 'high profits'. You get the highest net profits from high-gross profits combined with low costs - IE cheap to produced, sold high. Electricity is normally a standard in fungible goods - if you can produce it a cheaper way, that's the way to make a profit.

Unwanted to take advantage of this,

Now *that's* a freudian slip typo if I ever saw one!

Huh, that made total sense when I wrote the post. What's captured? Costs. 'externalities' are costs that are not directly paid for by the company. Pollution is normally an externality because while it causes harm(which is a cost), it's imposed on others. Such as the population as a whole for air pollution, those downstream for water pollution, etc...

There's not a lot of external costs with nuclear power - the waste isn't going up the smokestack.