58. weSwinger:

Charles: Love @9 – Big problems with @5. Come and sit at my electrical dispatch desk out west or indicate a desire for a more intensive and educational exchange of e-mails to inform you of the problems with your infatuation with renewable energy. Particularly the ~ $1 trillion investment in grid infrastructure required to tie enough renewables together to enable them to even count as reliable capacity.
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The numbers I’ve seen so far for the grid are 15-150 billion. Obama people are currently claiming that they’re not getting enough green projects.

I think T Boone Pickens is right. The quickest way to slash 25% off US demand for oil is to convert US trucks over to gas. That will give time for other renewables.

I think most of the borrowed money that obama spends will be poured down the toilet. It won’t do anything. The grid however, will do something. But I don’t think its fully understood.

I do know however, that the Hoover dam built by the Dept of Interior Bureau of Reclamation in 1932–is currently turning a profit for the government. But likely the time to profitability for the hoover dam was and remains likely far outside the range of most private companies. That dam sells both power and water.

This power and water combination is something that people in the water industry have seen repeated over and over again–from water pumped into wells to extract oil–to waste heat from coal plants used to flash distill salt water. Somehow power and water projects go together. The new extended dynamic grid would enable new sources of both power and water.

In this week’s post I discuss the geothermal rush out west.