Re: Energy - The Big Picture

[Jed Rothwell]

I like the big picture approach, but this analysis is too oversimplified. The cost of making millions of wind turbines or thousands of nuclear reactors cannot be estimated as a straight-line projection of today's costs. Mass production on that scale would reduce the unit cost by a huge margin -- maybe even by a factor of 10. It is conceivable that the direct cost of energy derived from wind would be cheaper than today's fossil fuel energy. It almost certainly would be cheaper when you factor in the cost of pollution and war.

In North America, the cost of wind turbines would fall dramatically, but then as the best sites for towers -- with the most wind -- filled up, the cost of wind powered electricity would gradually rise. I do not think that northern Europe would ever run out of good offshore wind sites in the North Sea, assuming the population and the demand for electricity does not grow much. The cost of nuclear power reactors would probably fall even more dramatically (in percentage), because in order to implement something like this you would need a radically new equipment, such as the pebble bed modular reactor. If both wind and uranium fission were developed, I doubt that nuclear plants would ever become as cheap as wind turbines per megawatt of capacity, because they would always require elaborate safety precautions and so on. I doubt that the cost of uranium would be a major factor because there is a huge supply of it and sooner or later someone will figure out how to recycle it or how to make an effective breeder reactor.

A sane energy policy for the U.S. would begin by emphasizing conservation because despite 30 years of improvements, conservation is still the best, fastest and cheapest way to reduce U.S. dependence on OPEC. There is still a great deal of "low hanging fruit" -- especially with automobiles.

Last week my 10-year-old Volvo station wagon needed an expensive valve job. It turned out it cost 4000 bucks! Anyway, I thought about getting a new car and I spec'ed them out. My car gets ~20 mpg city and 30 mpg highway. I was disgusted to find that the new station wagons get 18 mpg city and 26 mpg highway! Apparently this is because they are "all-wheel-drive AWD" -- which I assume means four-wheel-drive. A few of the old front-wheel drive models still get 30 mpg. This is crazy. Who the heck needs four-wheel-drive in suburban Atlanta for crying out loud?!?

There are probably not more than a hundred people in greater Atlanta who actually do drive off-road a few times a year, and it is ironic that I happen to be one of them, but as my mother used to say, any car will do. My mother drove "anything with wheels" starting in the Model T Ford era, including WWII trucks. The people I know who actually live in the countryside do not own SUVs. They drive a Volvo or a VW bug into the woods to collect firewood. On the few occasions when really need to get someplace off in the woods we borrow a 35-year-old tractor from the neighbor. *That*, by golly, is off road.

- Jed