On Jul 16, 2007, at 3:07 AM, Michel Jullian wrote:
The article below from today's NYT throws some light on the reasons
why US energy research funding doesn't make sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/business/16solar.html?
_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
It is really all a matter of where prices are heading, a subject
about which the author seems to have no grasp. See:
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/EnergyCosts.pdf
Solar has been experiencing exponential growth and price drops for
some time and will continue to do so. The price of energy is going
up. Solar will soon be competitive with coal steam turbine (for many
applications, especially car battery charging), based on
manufacturing capacity increases alone. It appears solar panels have
already beat the sterling engine solar collector game by a large margin.
Effective energy storage systems are just now coming into the
picture, and can change things dramatically. The problem is
developing the political will to make things happen fast in the face
of lobbying which not in the best interest of the public, a fact the
author covered well. One of the arguments against making things
happen fast is typically protecting jobs. The fact is, there are few
jobs in the energy industry at present compared to the number that
could be generated by replacing the cost of mining energy (low local
labor intensity) with the cost of producing equipment to manufacture
it from a free source and install and retrofit existing real estate
and vehicles (high local labor intensity). The key to making things
happen right may be to simply get the message to the people.
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
