Contrary to many opinions that the sky is falling, I think the future will not be so bleak. The rising gas prices are actually strengthening my opinion, because they already force people to change their lifestyles despite the fact that gas is still pretty cheap here. So here it goes:
1. As the prices rise, the public transportation will start to
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A really good petrol engine is about 20% efficient, which means that assuming the electric car replacement is 100% efficient (they are rarely better than 90% in practice) then the 30MJ = 8 1/3 kWh in a litre of petrol would need to be replaced with 1.6kWh of electricity.
The USA consumes 140,000,000,000 gallons of petrol (gasoline) annually. Put that into our 1.6kWh per litre and you get a figure of 851,200,000,000kWh of consumption annually.
Unfortunately, the current USA annual generation of electricity is 3,883,000,000,000kWh annually, so any plan needs to start by adding another 1/4 extra capacity to the grid ( ... )
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The US could, IMO, easily provide 25% more electrical capacity simply by conserving. We waste an unbelievable amount of juice. All that is required is incentive and will... (Even the UK wastes a lot of electricity. I was astonished to see every High Street shop blasting electric heat out through the open front door in January!)
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If such a change can be effected, then retooling the electric grid doesn't seem impossible to me. Sure, it's a big job, but so was building it in the first place. America historically has accomplished this kind of rebuilding several times; only our self-absorption keeps us from doing it again.
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You seem to believe that this is about where our energy is directly derived from, not the true issue of whether there is an infinitely large amount of it. That's the core of the problem: Malthus. Our economy, our ideologies, and even our species is designed for limitless expansion.
But there are limits to the earth, to the supply of oil, to the amount of land that we can tap for wind or solar or hydroelectric.
On the one hand, you have offered us a picture of how we can get out of peak oil, but not out of the peaks period. We simply create a new peak with uranium, a temporary one with tar sands and coal, or with materials regarding solar panel production. It's addressing one flavor of the problem, and plugging our ears and humming to ignore the next.
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I'm gonna have to argue with that last point, since for most of our species' history we did just fine without expanding to stupid levels. It's only been in the past 10-12 thousand years that a few of us started living in unsustainable and ever-expanding ways. Now that these people (us) cover most of the earth, it's easy to disregard those other cultures.
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Yahoo.
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That said, as a baseline power resource uranium is our next best bet, unless you want coal everywhere, and knowing most people they would likely not care about the pollution those things tend to spew. Nor the ammount of energy needed to haul the hundreds of tonnes of coal they would burn EVERY day.
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