I have been listening to a handful of podcasts talking about energy and energy production. In general the argument seems to be that one side wants to push for renewable energy only production meanwhile there is another side that does not want to support renewable to expand power. I am thinking that there is a yes-and opportunity between these two ideas. The data seems to show that renewable energy production (solar, wind, etc.) simply cannot scale very well, it is not efficient enough. So, pushing for that would seem to be a dead-end or at least inefficient, on a national or even statewide scale.
These renewables do seem to do well on very small scale though, an individual’s house say. I could do quite a bit on a personal level in Zambia with my little solar panel, recharge my cell phone, charge a battery for more light than I needed etc. Basic things, I was not charging an electric vehicle, but my personal electronics functioned perfectly well on that energy. We have a lot of small personal electronics that do need power fairly consistently but could run off of that during the day. Or at least use that sort of power to charge their relatively efficient batteries.
On the other end of the spectrum, more centralized, less renewable, sources of energy seem to scale better. They power our world, coal, natural gas, nuclear. They are on a geographic and weight basis multiples better than even the most efficient renewable energy sources, these are the sources that charge our electric vehicles, keep our air conditioners running, power our refrigerators and stoves, not to mention our computers and the internet in general. The big important things for life. We cannot live without these.
As can be seen, I am not entirely for renewables. I do like the idea, I like to hunt, fish, trap, hike and in general take in the absolute wonder and beauty that is nature and preserving that is important to me. I am not sure that covering landscapes in huge solar panel farms is the best way to accomplish that goal.
The other thing to say in full honesty, I am all for nuclear power. It seems to be the most obvious and easy answer to the question, how do we provide effective, efficient, reliable and cheap energy overall? In general, it always has seemed to be so. I also think that Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and other very lightly populated states would be the perfect location for nuclear power as well since so many people are afraid of stuff like Fukushima and Three Mile Island, disregarding improvements in safety that have been made that that, in general, putting a nuke next to an ocean prone to tsunamis and earthquakes may not come off as the smartest move. Put the nukes in Montana and Wyoming, there is NO ONE HERE! I can say so because I live in one of the small towns where the next nearest thing is 40 miles away in any direction, we have the Fort Peck Dam and Reservoir to supply water for cooling if necessary and lots of empty space. If there is comparatively few people, if something does go wrong, comparatively few will be hurt. Not to mention the economic boon that the construction and maintenance of such huge projects would be for the rural-nigh-frontier locations I am thinking of.
So, I am definitely for expanding power, especially nuclear as the obvious solution to supply more power to more people for less money. Where do the renewables come in? I think they can help promote more resilience on the smaller scale. If we put in policies that provided incentives for individual households or buildings to put in renewable energy practices such as putting a solar panel on one’s own roof, maybe a small wind-turbine to supply only that house’s own power, we’d suddenly have a lot of small amounts of energy being generated everywhere nearly all of the time.
My primary example is consider the summer throughout most of the U.S. in the summer we tend to get hot and may be getting hotter, this means that during the day our energy demands on a national scale go up as air conditioners have to work more, harder, longer to try to keep our poorly built houses and buildings cool. Hey look, it’s extra hot and sunny! Good time for a solar panel to be soaking up sunshine to create some energy! While it may not provide all of the power for air conditioning, a handful of solar panels on a house can certainly stave off the worst of the peak demand from that house. Scale this up and it would mean that on a national level, we do not have as big of spikes in demand as often on our overall grid supplied by coal, natural gas, nuclear etc.
I think this would then help those run more efficiently as well without having to constantly increase then decrease production or entirely start up and/or shutdown production during peak demands.
Therefore, policies that allow and promote the expansion of power production for both renewable, and non-renewable sources seem like the best approach. get a stable energy system in the U.S. to my limited perspective.
Fleeting Thoughts of a Bad Student 