Green Renewable and Alternative Energy Sources

Hello,

I would like to compare the costs of the energy costs of the fuels we use today (non renewable) to the current cost of green energy (solar wind water etc). What is the best way to do this?

Cost in cents (or pence, if you’re in the UK) per unit of electricity produced over the whole life cycle.

You have to take into account discounting too: money spent now is worth more than money spent later, because if you’d invested the money now you would have got more money later from interest. You also have to include the likely cost of fuel in the future, maintenance etc.

The calculations are relatively simple if you just want to work out how long it’ll take for a solar panel to pay back its cost. It’s quite hard, so I’d rely on published work.

So look up ‘electricity costs per kWh by source’ or something like that!

What do you think about Green Energy?

Wind mills?

Solar Power?

Power from water?

Thanks for your Ideas!

Green energy is our only option for a good future. The world as we know it was built on cheap fossil fuels. We have not hit peak oil or will hit it soon. Prices are only going to go up. If we don’t replace it with something sustainable we’re going to find a recession like we’ve never seen before.

As for specific green energies:

- Wind: It’s great for now as it’s the cheapest option and the easiest to get going. Yes, it may interfere with some birds (that may not be the case with newer, slower windmills) but I assure you that the Alberta oil sands do much, much worse. The downside of wind is that the geographic distribution is quite limited.

- Solar: This is ultimately the energy of the future. The sun shines everywhere in the world (although to different degrees). As solar gets cheaper it’s going to be economic to deploy it everywhere. Solar is also the only energy that is truly renewable (at least for the next 5 billion years).

- Power from water: If you’re referring to usually the actual water atoms for energy, it’s impossible. If you’re referring to hydro and tidal, then this is what I say: Not a viable future energy source. At this point in time we’ve pretty much maxed out our hydro resources. Add to it the fact the hydro destroys ecosystems and that recent research has shown it to release tons of CO2 (by promoting the rotting of forests), and hydro doesn’t look that good. Good tidal sites simply aren’t available in great enough numbers to have any impact.

As to what another poster said about environmentalists blocking nuclear and natural gas: Nuclear is blocked for good reason. Nuclear is disgustingly expensive and it’s hardly "green". The mining of uranium is hugely destructive, and the production of nuclear energy creates millions of gallons of water that are no longer useable. Of course, there’s also the issue of spent fuel. We can burry it in the mountains? Oh wait, it’s been 30 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and there’s still no completion in sight for the Yucatan storage facility.

As for natural gas, it’s still a fossil fuel. Ultimately it too will become scarce, and ultimately it does produce pollution (albeit much less than coal or oil). I will concede that solar and wind do need some form of backup. In the near future the best option we have IS natural gas – it’s flexible and the best of the bad options we have. Ultimately though, we should transition to using hydrogen fuel (generated by solar and wind) to provide the stability the grid needs.