+$4.00 Gasoline. How does it change the Energy game
by designs 89 Replies latest social current
-
-
designs
You can setup a nice Solar-powered charging system for EVs pretty cheap.
Solar panels-charge controller-battery bank-inverter- plugin
-
bohm
How Neckbeard think cars work
<a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/01/01/funny-pictureshttp://icanhascheezburger.wordpress.com/files/2007/12/funny-picturs-cat-in-exhaust.jpg" alt="funny pictures" /></a><br />see more <a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com?utm_source=embed&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=sharewidget">Lolcats and funny pictures</a>, and check out our <a href="http://memebase.com/category/socially-awkward-penguin/">Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!</a>
-
Duderino
Hopefully this time it will ween the US off its horrible addiction to oil.
Canada 71.009 bbl/day per 1,000 people
US 68.672 bbl/day per 1,000 peoplehttp://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_percap-energy-oil-consumption-per-capita
Canada too?
-
sir82
Doesn't Canada have like 1/10 of the US population?
The real issue is increased demand from India & China.
-
JeffT
Sammie
Statistics can be deceiving. Yes, the US military is the largest single energy consumer in the world - but it only uses 2% of the fuel consumed in the United States. http://www.peak-oil-news.info/military-oil-usage-statistics/
The vast majority of our fuel is used in homes, cars and buildings for the simple reason that there are more of us. All those SUV's use tons of gas.
-
designs
Back in 2000 in France we rented a Renault van with a small turbo-diesel, got something like 56-60 mpg hauling 5 of us around. I thought 'why can't we get these in the States'.
-
straightshooter
Also at issue is that Iran with sanctions and they cutting oil to different nations have affected the price of gas.
-
botchtowersociety
You can setup a nice Solar-powered charging system for EVs pretty cheap.
The math doesn't work. Maybe Bohm can verify this. How many kiloWatt hours per mile does an electric vehicle require for an acceptable amount of range between charges?
To give some idea, a gallon of gasoline provides 33 killowatt hours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_content_.28high_and_low_heating_value.29
Balance that against how many a solar home charging system might provide.
For example, this person's installation provides only 4.7 kilowatt hours average per day.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bgoodsel/solar/blog.htm
Using that as a guide, it would take an average of one week for the solar installation to put the energy equivalent of a single gallon of gas into the battery of an electric vehicle--and this doesn't take into account any conversion losses.
What about using a solar plant?
This excerpt provides a sense of it. How large does a solar facility have to be to provide 1 megawatt of output?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan3.1.1.html
Solar Dreaming
If the way forward into the future calls for higher energy densities, the notion that we can depend on solar or wind (which is another form of solar) represents a move backward. To get an idea of just how dilute a source solar is compared even to coal, consider a lump of coal capable of yielding a kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long the Sun would have to shine on it to deposit the same amount of energy that the coal will release when burned. The area of its shadow, which measures the sunlight intercepted, would be about fifteen square inches. In Arizona in July, with a 24-hour annualized average insolation of 240 watts per square meter, it would take 435 hours, or almost three weeks , for this amount of surface to receive a kilowatt-hour of sunshine. For the average location in the U.S., allowing for bad weather and cloud cover, a reasonable estimate would be twice that. But to obtain a kilowatt-hour of electricity, at the ten to twenty percent efficiency attainable today, which appears to be approaching its limit, we'd be talking somewhere between thirteen and seven months.
The Sun shining on forests for tens or hundreds of years affords an enormous concentration of energy over time that Nature performs for free. Subsequent geological compaction into coal adds another dimension of concentration in space, which humans carry further by their activities of mining and transportation. Hydroelectric power is another form of highly concentrated solar. The Sun evaporates billions of tons of water off the oceans, which fall on wide areas of land and drain through river systems to strategic points suitable for building dams. Once again, most of the work involving the concentration of energy in time and space on enormous scales is done for nothing by Nature.
I wonder if the people who talk glibly about attempting to match such feats artificially really comprehend the scale of the engineering that they're proposing. A 1,000-MW solar conversion plant, for example – the same size as I've been using for the comparisons of coal and nuclear – would cover 50 to 100 square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and titanium – a thousand times the material needed to construct a nuclear plant of the same capacity. These materials are not cheap, and real estate doesn't come for nothing. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hungry industries in their own right that produce large amounts of waste, much of it toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power.
The comparison doesn't end there. When a power engineer talks about a one-thousand-megawatt plant, he means one that can deliver a thousand megawatts on demand, anytime, day or night. A nuclear plant can do this; so can a conventional fossil-fuel plant. But a solar plant can only operate when the Sun is shining, which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50 percent – low enough to be considered prohibitively uneconomic for any other type of power plant. To ensure supply when the demand is there, some kind of regular supply would have to be available as a backup anyway, making the whole idea of solar as a replacement unrealistic.
-
Celestial
In this system of globalization, multinational oil corporations wield vast power. Predictions were made by the intelligence community in the year 2000 about the rising demand for oil in relation to globalization.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2000/dci_speech_020200smithson.html
The CIA in the New World Order: Intelligence Challenges Through 2015
At the same time, growing populations and increases in per capita income will drive the demand for more energy. By 2015, the world’s demand for oil will have grown by as much as 60 percent over present levels. Fortunately, this demand will not be difficult to meet.
Unfortunately, this demand will be difficult to meet. Not only will the growing populations and increases in per capita income will drive the demand for more energy, there's also the problem of newly industrializing countries.
http://enews.tufts.edu/stories/1061/2002/08/19/NotEnoughEarth
Not Enough Earth To Go Around
The world's natural resources cannot continue to support the lifestyles of millions of people who live like Americans, says a Tufts expert.
Representing less than five percent of the world's population, Americans consume 30 percent of its resources and produce 25 percent of its greenhouse gasses and waste. The impact of the "American Dream" -- and the excesses it champions - is felt globally, according to a Tufts expert, who says at this rate, it will only be a matter of time before there isn't enough Earth to go around.
"The American Dream is no longer confined to these shores," Agyeman wrote in his opinion piece. "Globalization and free trade, together with an unaccountable World Trade Organization, have internationalized the Dream."Billions of people around the world - in places like China, India and elsewhere - have watched America's use of the world's resources grow, and are poised to adopt a similar approach.
The results, Agyeman wrote, could be disastrous.
The following table presents the list of countries consistently considered newly industrialized countries by different authors and experts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newly_industrialized_country#Current_NICs
Turkey and South Africa are classified as developed countries by the CIA. Turkey was a founding member of the OECD in 1961 and Mexico joined in 1994. The G8+5 group is composed by G8 members plus China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil.
The only solution for the United States is to nationalize their oil industry and gain exclusive control of enough geographic locations with oil resources to sustain their economy.
