Although I can't eliminate uncertainty and won't try, I suspect there is indeed a "fundamental and unsolvable" problem with so-called renewable energy sources that arises from the nature of "embodied energy."
Currently, the cost of wind and solar infrastructure depends on cheap inputs of fossil fuels in their manufacture and construction. Wind and solar built by wind and solar would be much more expensive than wind and solar built by coal and petroleum. However, if that problem was solved it would give rise to yet another problem: the low cost of renewable energy inputs would then be available to subsidize unconventional fossil fuel extraction just as today the availability of cheap natural gas makes tar sands oil economically feasible. On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:20 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The substitution of fuel for labor is cost effective only to the extent >> that fuel is cheaper than labor. Currently, the relative cheapness of fuel >> results from the shifting of the social and environmental costs of >> extracting and burning the shit. Sachs and Kotilikoff discuss the machines >> as if they run on some mysterious unknown substance. Clue: 85% fossil fuels >> at present. Among the words that do not appear in their paper: energy, >> climate, emissions. >> > > > What about the theoretical possibility that fossil fuels are replaced by > wind and/or solar power? > > I am well aware of the many technical difficulties with alternative energy > sources, but is there any reason to think that these difficulties are > somehow fundamental and unsolvable, rather than merely being a limitation > of our current state of knowledge? > > -raghu. > > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > > -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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