Oil Vs. Alternative Energy

99% of environmentalists are idiots, the other 1% just hasn't realized it yet.

Fishin, were it really so easy for houses to get themselves off the grid, people would be doing it on their own; you wouldn't need to push for it.

The real problem there comes in cost and return on investment. Sure, you CAN buy a roof full of solar panels, your own wind turbine, and a geothermal heat pump. But you're going to spend significantly more on those systems than you would on the electricity that you want to generate. And on top of that, the expense for the various green power systems needs to be paid up front, so you're really gambling on the reliability of the units that you're getting installed, aren't you? (I suppose that you could build the price of them into the mortgage, if you're building a new house...)

People talk about the costs of large-scale installations because, frankly, that's what we'd need. Until things get significantly cheaper and more advanced, individual solar/wind/geo is going to remain the province of the wealthy eccentric. And when they DO get cheaper and more advanced, the large-scale installations are going to become feasible faster than the individual installation.

We're certainly aware that, despite the downsides, wind and nuclear energy are replacing electricity that is generated by taking something and setting fire to it, and that that process generates a lot of ooky stuff. But we can also see the problems that the nuclear industry has of getting anything approved anywhere, and even potential wind farms being erected anywhere but unpopulated wasteland, and can come to the conclusion that for some people, the perfect is indeed the enemy of the good.

Sure, but when there are problems with the grid, or if grid prices rise, you are insulated. There are benefits which must be priced in, other then the actual price of the energy produced. And they aren't near as expensive as they used to be.

I envision neighborhood-level sharing arrangements; localized, sun or wind power shipped over on high-voltage (buried and insulated!) DC lines. Very little transmission loss, but every house in the neighborhood doesn't have to have a roof full of solar panels...

Cycloptichorn

The cost of electric power is getting almost the same as grid power.with the expenditure of capital excluded. Its about 0.098 $ per kw hr in the Tideter-inner Piedmont and solar (with Pa at about 80% of avg solar energy as Fla) about 0.1$ kw hr. Source Pa council on energy. An avg house can go "off the grid" with about 2 square of PV panels and a full solar water heating system . With a south facing roof or installing solar using "Sun chaser technology" .
T Boone Pickens (AMericas Fourth most famous living geologist) is heavily financing wind farms. Hes been drilling all his life and has rarely gotten skunked.

THeres a bunch of individual developments with heir own Energy Authorities on the planning books in several counties of Pa. (These are all very touchy subjects with local planning commissions) I think that my company may become involved with some because of the incentive to do something really novel.

As far as "large projects" , Ive not equated individual residences as large projects, No matter the size. A large project is a multi use , govt or industrial center or complex such as a school, hospital, prison, ect. My guys have alreadcy designed and built a landfill gas energy system in MAryland over 20 years ago when it wasnt cool, we did this as part of a landfill gas control system that worked into a planned residential care facility.

These systems have all been subsidized by the locals and , if the dirty secret were known, oil and gas are subsidized by several levels of incentives that alternative energy systems arent able to get hold of. Consequently, by voting to extend certain incentives for alternative energy, Congress will be doing a very meager thing to even up the playing field that is so heavily subsidized .

If you'd read my previous posts in this very thread you'd see that I've already expressed concern about the lack of information available to the end consumer and the complexity of existing incentives. In other words, you aren't telling me anything that anyone didn't already know.




This is only true if you take a short-term view of the overall systems.




And you aren't gambling on any other system? How is buying a geo-thermal heat pump any more of a gamble then buying a gas or oil fired furnace for your home? It's a gamble any way you want to slice it.



Nonsense. It may be "what we need" in your black/white, on/off binary little world but that's a pretty small world. A $2,000 solar system (a self-installed kit) is enough to take a studio apartment off the grid (minus heat and/or A/C). It would also be enough to take an average home partially off the grid. Removing a complete average home from the electrical grid can be done for about $5,000 if you can assemble the system yourself (and it can be done in stages so you don't have to lay out $5,000 all at once either).

The cost factor isn't one of technology or equipment - it's the manpower to have a system installed for you. It isn't something reserved for the wealthy or eccentrics. It's simply something for people who aren't scared to get their hands dirty once in a while.

To be cost efficient; almost off the grid is your goal. Power companies, contrary to popular rumor, are not required to purchase your power at the same rate they sell it to you. I've yet to read of a profitable Solar array, but windmills pay for themselves easily in windy areas. If you have a creek; hydro is the bomb. Do it yourselfers can all but eliminate their power bills.

A great deal of power money goes to power transmission; so small home systems can be VERY economical. I have some bookmarks on my other computer of how-to's on building small hydro-generators if anyone is interested. We're talking CHEAP.

Maybe we can rescue some of the used cooking oil from O'Bill's restaurant to fuel our modified autos.

A LOT of both energy and money is lost in the overall transmisison process. Every time electricity is converted through a transformer of some sort there is waste.

One of the things that I've found with most of the solar/hydro/wind projects is that the designs all have you generate electricty at 12v, 24v or 48v DC which you store in batteries and then convert (using an inverter) to AC power to run your typical household items, etc... But as I look around, a whole of of my electrical devices have power transformers that are taking that 115v AC and converting it right back to DC voltages. Other items (like lights) don't have transformers but can easily be converted to run on 12v. By my own measuremants/calculations I'm converting as much as 40% of my electricty use to 12v or less.

There are lots of cheap plans for using things like PVC tubing and car alternators to create a small hydro-turbine. If someone lives on a stream/river with adequate flow/drop there isn't any reason not to use one.

I'm building my own battery charging system for my RV right now. I had been using a 10hp 5500 watt generator to run a 140 amp battery charger but that's another waste. I'd generate a whole bunch of AC current only to convert it to DC to charge my RV batteries. I picked up a 3.5hp engine for free on Craigslist and I'm building a frame so I can connect it to a belt drive and run a 115amp car alternator off of it and charge my batteries that way. That's 1/3rd the HP to do the exact same job and it'll weigh 1/4 of my current setup. Hopefully I'll have the solar system installed on the RV next summer and I'll just be able to drop the whole thing.

Sounds like some cool projects Fishin! I'd caution you not to "drop the whole thing" though. The sun don't always shine. :wink:

I spent countless hours designing a system to harvest the energy from wave action, only to later locate a plethora of companies who were doing pretty much the same thing. One design was so damn close to identical; I wonder if I didn't hear about it and store it sub-consciously... or have it stolen from my big mouth. The companies official founding did take place very shortly after I initially conceived of the idea, but for all I know they had a decade of research in before that. (shrugs) If I was still living on the water; I could easily generate WAY more power than I consume.

Auto alternators are pretty good, but there's a cheaper more powerful solution (800 watts, $150!) here if you're handy.

Well, right now I don't go out longer than a week at a time. I've rigged the RV up with 5 deep cycle batteries and converted everything electrical inside to be as efficent as possible. I can run up to 5 days without having to fire up the generator to recharge the batteries as it is. With a 220w solar array I'd only need 6 or 7 hours of sunshine during that 5 days to extend me out to a full week of power.



That sucks! lol I'm not trying to come up with anything new though. My objective is to generate as much DC power as I can as cheaply as I can and then find ways to cut my usage on the other end. I'm stealing everyone else's ideas.

I started replacing all of the CFL bulbs in my house with 12v LEDs. 1 75-watt incandescent bulb = 10.5 7watt CFLs = 21 LED "bulbs". I only have 17 bulb holders in my entire house so I'll have cut my total energy usage for lighting to less than 1 75-watt incandecent bulb here shortly. Once I get the solar panel on the RV I'll run 12VDC from the RV to the house and just run the house lighting off of that.



*runs off to Craigslist in search of a bigger engine to run it*

Very, very cool, Fishin. One more word of caution though: During my exhaustive research I read a convincing article about battery life. Ideally, even Deep Cycle shouldn't be run much below 80% capacity if you can help it and try never to go below 50% capacity and never let them sit long periods at low charges. Rule of thumb: A fully charged battery is a happy, healthy battery, so shorter bursts of your generator will prolong their life until you get your Solar running. (I know; opposite of Cell phones) Also: occasionally disconnecting them and hooking them up to a "smart charger" for proper conditioning is a really good idea. Especially if you accidentally run them to failure.

*nods* I'm familar with all of that! I have an entire collection of articles on deep-cycle survival bookmarked.

This tells us who gets rich from drilling offshore.


Who Is Coastal Drilling Really For? Follow The Money.


Who is really going to benefit from opening up our coastal shores to oil drilling? You, or Big Oil?

Follow the money and get your answer.

Last month, Sen. John McCain changed his position on coastal oil drilling. And all of a sudden, the fossil fuel crowd took a big liking to his campaign. The Washington Post reports that even though "oil and gas executives have not traditionally been a major source of campaign money for McCain," in June McCain took $1.1 million from oil and gas corporate executives -- five times more than in the previous month.

(Check out Huffington Post's David Donnelly for more.)

Why? Because while coastal drilling amounts to nothing in regards to lower energy costs for you and me, it does amount to a fat giveaway to Big Oil.

You may say, so what? Who cares if oil companies do well, so long as they increase the supply of oil and lower prices for me.

Except that there's not nearly enough oil off our shores to lower the price of oil (both the White House and McCain concede, when pressed, that opening up the coasts for drilling won't lower prices.)

And there's no reason to expect that oil and gas companies would be in any rush to use the leases and actually drill.

Remember, with supply of oil as it is, and the price of oil as it is, oil companies are doing quite well thank you very much. ExxonMobil recorded the highest annual profit of any company in the history of companies last year, $40 billion.

Tight supply + high gas prices = good times for Big Oil.

Same reason why oil companies don't invest in more refineries.

Not because of environmental standards, as they typically complain about. But because they're not interested in increasing supply, driving prices down and reducing their profits. The National Resources Defense Council explains: "...refiners reap higher profits when capacity is tight, so they actually have a disincentive to significantly expand production. In fact, oil executives have stated that the reason they did not expand refining capacity in the 1990s is that the low profitability of the business did not justify the investment."

Same reason why oil companies aren't drilling in all of the 68 million acres of federal space for which they already have leases. As Sen. Joe Biden recently noted in a Wilmington News Journal op-ed:

First, the oil companies in this country now hold 7,000 leases to drill offshore, yet only 20 percent of those leases are producing oil. That is 68 million acres for which they already have the rights to drill. Nearly 80 percent of our offshore oil is already available for leasing -- approximately 54 billion barrels total. They could be drilling in these areas, but they are not.

...

Here in Delaware, we are paying $10 more a day for gas -- around $3,600 a year -- than we were seven years ago. That is a bite out of a family's budget.

During the same period, permits for new oil drilling leases increased by 361 percent. Put simply, allowing more drilling does not equal cheaper gas.

Sure, it's not fair to expect drilling in every inch of that 68 million acres, because oil wouldn't be found in every inch. But even a defense of oil companies from the Houston Chronicle acknowledges that there is available crude that Big Oil chooses not to pursue because "it still is not cost-effective to drill for oil in some places" and "some oil companies hold onto leases to prevent competitors from drilling on them."

What's "cost-effective" for Big Oil isn't the same as what's cost-effective for you.

What's cost-effective for Big Oil, in the era of dwindling oil supplies and rising gas prices, is to string out what oil is left for as long as possible, and slowly prepare for an inevitable transition to alternative energy sources (What oil company TV ad doesn't try to assure you, "We're investing in clean energy, really! Nothing to worry about! Go buy oil.")

While fighting off a rapid transition to clean energy which would mean actual competition and consumer choices (Eek! Capitalism!) from upstart alternative energy companies.

That means a painfully slow transition to alternative energy, with you still having no choice but to buy increasingly expensive oil for decades, as Big OIl, propped up by conservative government policies, keeps making a mint.

It does not mean Big OIl would be in any rush to exploit what little oil is there off our shores. They want leases wherever they can get them, but just so they can string out oil supplies for as long as possible, not to provide any relief to you. If they did, they'd be working their current leases harder.

Big Oil is making money now. And if you're them, it ain't broke, so don't fix it. No need to rush and extract all the oil we have.

But for us energy consumers, our energy policy is beyond broke.

As Al Gore sharply put it last week:

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it.

If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again.

But it's not just Al Gore warning that there's not enough oil to lower prices. Oilman T. Boone Pickens, trying to get ahead of the curve on wind power, lays it out:

Can't we just produce more oil?

World oil production peaked in 2005. Despite growing demand and an unprecedented increase in prices, oil production has fallen over the last three years. Oil is getting more expensive to produce, harder to find and there just isn't enough of it to keep up with demand.

The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone.

We can recognize that fact, and develop policies that make sense for us energy consumers. Or we can keep propping up Big Oil and let them suck our pocketbooks and our planet dry.

Oil companies keep shoveling in campaign cash to conservative politicians in hopes of keeping our government, our tax dollars and our resources in their service, with no benefit to you.

But we can choose to change our energy policy to serve us, not oil company CEOs. We can invest in clean energy and energy-efficiency instead of allowing yet another boondoggle for Big Oil. We can give ourselves the ability to power our lives without dependence on expensive oil.

We are under no obligation to remain subservient.

--ourfuture.org

So curtailing exploration will instead benefit consumers by lowering supply?

Great reasoning, Advocate.

If I don't like the price of apples, quit planting more apple trees darn it, that has to be the reason. In fact, cut a bunch of them down, the less apple trees, the cheaper they will become. After all, thats what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi says.

As usual, your reply is well-documented and persuasive (NOT). Your irony is a bit boring.

Advocate, if there were money to be made in building new refineries, and the current companies weren't interested in expanding, then new companies would fill the gap.

That's where the environmental regulations really hit you. The established companies already have staffs that are capable of dealing with the paperwork; it's a drag on them, but they're at least familiar with what they're dealing with. For a new company, it's a much more difficult prospect - screw up, and your profits all go the way of big government fines.

(There's also the uncertainty factor involved in possible future regulation. Nobody wants to put in a billion-dollar installation and then be told by the government "sorry, you will not be allowed to use this." More specifically, nobody wants to FINANCE that installation...)

I don't think a shortage of refineries is the problem. It is that the demand for oil has soared and the oil producers and oil companies can, and do, charge more. Under the present system, drilling off the coast would be foolish. The oil, which would come years from now, would be added to the world's supply of this commodity and would barely lower the price. The oil companies would continue to tack on their huge markups, and we would pay high prices. Moreover, our dollar will have less and less buying power relative to oil and other imports. Should the government take over the oil companies, domestically- produced oil could be sold in the USA at a small percentage of world prices.

Oil gets priced on the margin, Advocate.

The demand for oil hasn't suddenly tripled over the last decade. It has increased - as China, India, and other third-world countries industrialize, their use of petrochemicals goes up - but the price increases are significantly greater than the increase in actual demand.

Part of this is due to the elasticity of demand for oil. Part is due to actual stocks of oil (already pumped oil, that is) being low. Part is due to perceived instability in the Middle East. Part's due to speculation, and if you don't believe that, why did it drop $15 bucks a barrel in the last two weeks? ;p

Since oil is priced on the margin, a relatively small increase in supply can have a large effect on the price. A domestic US supply might also have a larger effect than normal, in the sense that it reduces possibilities of instability - in an emergency, the US would have a larger supply of oil than would otherwise be the case. Finally, as an indication, it serves to signal that the US government is actually friendly to increasing production here, as well as abroad...

I did not, and don't, differ with what you say. However, the price at the pump will not go down significantly should we drill in the areas at issue. The decrease will certainly not justify endangering our coastlines and dissolving 20 B barrels into the atmosphere.

Do I have to document the obvious, Advocate? Do you have documentation that curtailing drilling will lower the oil price?

Likewise, can you prove that lowering the supply of apples will lower the price of apples?

I think what grates on you is I break down your partisan spin into a simple principle, and blow your theory to shreds, and you don't like it, simply because it does not fit your template of idealism. Reality trumps your idealism, Advocate, every time.

Further, your demonizing of oil companies is a crock, plain and simple. The country and the economy likes it when oil companies make money, and a large percentage of people own retirement plans, mutual funds, etc., which returns them money, plus landowners and communities are profiting greatly by royalties and jobs provided by energy companies. Wake up, and quit biting the hand that feeds us. The demagoguery of the left is truly sickening.