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30 (38%)

2050?

13 (16.5%)

No, 2100.

5 (6.3%)

Never, you god damn cretin, Antarctica is an icy hellhole.

31 (39.2%)

Total Members Voted: 78

[Flying Dice]

Don't be so sure about your three sources staying that way for long. Wind is already growing exponentially and Solar is beginning to follow. It's small at the moment, but when your capacity doubles every year....

Wind and solar are just utterly ridiculous at the moment. Solar panels (electricity) are just not rentable today without governement grants.

Cough. Cough.

It can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany.

More than one million Germans have installed solar panels on their roofs. Australia also has a streamlined permitting process and has solar panels on 10 percent of its homes.

If you had to pay for everything, maintenance, etc, you would lose money over the life of the panel. Solar cells are damn expensive, and not very clean to produce. Wind turbine aren't much better, and got some pollutants, especially in the alternator.
Considering the low output, I'm not even sure wind and solar are less polluting, energy wise.

Technology improves over time, and costs fall over time. Also, wind and solar emit relatively nil in comparison to fossil fuels. Granted, you need petroleum to manufacture some parts, but that's still not equivalent to burning it as fuel.

And, even if we had 100x the energy produced, we still couldn't use it widely because of the restrictions of consumption. I still need energy when there's no wind, and I need more energy when it's night. They're not reliable over constant production, so there is no way they could be used as a wide way of energy production. I doubt wind and solar are ever gonna go over the 15% of total production for a country.

There are methods for energy storage, you realize? Batteries, air compression, and hydrogen, to name three.

Dam and geothermal plants are much more interesting, but they're still not up to the capacity of production of nuclear, oil and coal.

In most of the industrialized world just about every waterway that could generate large levels of electricity is already home to a hydroelectric plant. Geothermal is very heavily limited by geological conditions, typically to areas near plate boundaries. Also note that in environmental terms hydroelectric dams are possibly the most destructive of the clean renewable energy types; they fragment ecosystems, disrupt spawning behavior, and flood large tracts of land, among other things.

One point: Coastal/Tidal hydroelectric power. I seem to recall that if the U.K. exploited the viable sites for such plants, they could generate something like 20% of their power purely from tidal power plants.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

In addition, some geothermal plants have started to deplete the surface heat they operate off of, and may not be as sustainable as previously thought.

[Flying Dice]

So when are we going to start trying to set up a core tap? After all, it fits right in with fracking, mountaintop removal, and giving control of energy production to private business as potentially catastrophic. 

[misko27]

As soon as we're sure there is valuable stuff there. As of now, it's nothing but rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, some metal, more rock, rock, semi-molten rock, molten rock, MORE semi-molten rock, and then Core. Which is magma and iron.

There had better be something damned valuable down there.

[Flying Dice]

As soon as we're sure there is valuable stuff there. As of now, it's nothing but rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, some metal, more rock, rock, semi-molten rock, molten rock, MORE semi-molten rock, and then Core. Which is magma and iron.

There had better be something damned valuable down there.

Magma. Heat. All the heat we'll ever need within the foreseeable future of our species.

[misko27]

Yeah, but that is pertty hard to mess up though. We use alot of electricity, but we'd need to be significantly (use of adjectives is limited till I can get some actual statistics) larger then we currently are. And we don't really have that much more space.
 
Unless the robots take over, but the point is moot to all but robot capitalists in that case.

[PanH]

Cough. Cough.

Here's a federal grant for homeowners (has been extended to 2016). I think there's also several grants to solar panels business. Plus some states grants. And most developed countries also grant electricity companies to buy solar electricity as an higher price than the real one.

Technology improves over time, and costs fall over time. Also, wind and solar emit relatively nil in comparison to fossil fuels. Granted, you need petroleum to manufacture some parts, but that's still not equivalent to burning it as fuel.

Technology improves for every means of production. Until an important breakthrough for solar, there's not much to do with it. I don't think you can exactly compare pollution (though, yes, coal/oil pollutes a lot, probably the most of all, but I was thinking more about nuclear), but solar cells and wind alternator have some dangerous materials/chemicals too.

There are methods for energy storage, you realize? Batteries, air compression, and hydrogen, to name three.

For private use, maybe. It's just too inefficient for use in an electricity network. Electricity companies wouldn't try to predict accurately and adapt the production comsuption if they could simply store it. I remember seeing graphs about the variations of day hours use, seasons use, etc.

For dams and geothermic plants, I was saying they were more interesting as a relatively clean source of energy, not necessarily to develop more about it.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Here's a federal grant for homeowners (has been extended to 2016). I think there's also several grants to solar panels business. Plus some states grants. And most developed countries also grant electricity companies to buy solar electricity as an higher price than the real one.

The subsidies for oil and gas are multiple times that of renewables in the US. But here's the thing: once renewables get good enough that support isn't needed, they'll stay that way. Fossil fuels are only ever going to need more propping up.

[PanH]

Here's a federal grant for homeowners (has been extended to 2016). I think there's also several grants to solar panels business. Plus some states grants. And most developed countries also grant electricity companies to buy solar electricity as an higher price than the real one.

The subsidies for oil and gas are multiple times that of renewables in the US. But here's the thing: once renewables get good enough that support isn't needed, they'll stay that way. Fossil fuels are only ever going to need more propping up.

I'm thinking more along the way of nuclear taking over fuels (as much as possible seeing technical issues). But yes, coal and oil should (hopefully) decreases. Which is why it's really dumb to close a nuclear plant to open 2 coal ones.

[10ebbor10]

Well, first of all, as everybody here probably knows, both solar and wind energy aren't clean. (And depending on location, also not profitable). In order to make things worse, the most high tech variants rely on so called rare Earth's , on which there's currently a supply crisis*. In fact, several green plans for complete conversion to green power by 2030-40 would fail because of this, as there simply isn't enough material being produced**

If we also add the other costs, like transportation and such, I'm pretty sure that over the lifetime of the plant Nuclear power*** comes out better than wind, which is then way better than solar.
And, Nuclear power has the advantage of being really stable and predictable, whereas all green power needs large, often expensive and polluting battery installations. And, in case there is a supply shortage, blackouts would be much worse. (Power shortage causes ampere to drop IIRC. Now generators can be damaged because of that, so they shut down automatically. The smaller the power generation unit, the easier it's damaged and the smaller the margin. It's also rather hard to restart all green power generators at the same time)/

The main advantage of nuclear lies there, in that it doesn't require significant changes and investements in infrastruce, whereas renewable requires significant investements to be made.

Oh, and about the geothermal thing. A core tap kindaish is exists, in Iceland. There's a giant mantelplume there, allowing large amounts of geothermal to be produced and exported.

*Which is not expected to improve for the first 15 years.
**Sure, alternatives exist, but these are expensive.
***We're talking about High tech 3th-4th generation plants though.

Here's a federal grant for homeowners (has been extended to 2016). I think there's also several grants to solar panels business. Plus some states grants. And most developed countries also grant electricity companies to buy solar electricity as an higher price than the real one.

The subsidies for oil and gas are multiple times that of renewables in the US. But here's the thing: once renewables get good enough that support isn't needed, they'll stay that way. Fossil fuels are only ever going to need more propping up.

I'm thinking more along the way of nuclear taking over fuels (as much as possible seeing technical issues). But yes, coal and oil should (hopefully) decreases. Which is why it's really dumb to close a nuclear plant to open 2 coal ones.

Unfortunately, due to fuel/ energy prices. It's unlikely you can replace nuclear by anything else but coal without driving up the price. Coal is the only other resource cheap enough.

[Scoops Novel]

Isn't there a current debate over whether we should build a nuclear plant or a hydroeletric dam, which i think would help with the rise of the thames?

[10ebbor10]

Isn't there a current debate over whether we should build a nuclear plant or a hydroeletric dam, which i think would help with the rise of the thames?

I thought the plan was to build a storm surge barrier(which you're going to need anyway) with integrated hydroelectrical power generation and attached airport. Problem is that it can't generate to much power. You can't completely dam the Thames, as there's still quite a lot of shipping on it. The proposed project provides power mostly from the tides, and only somewhat from the river flow.
Also, the generated power is quite a bit less as that of your average power plant.

Problem with building a nuclear generator is that it has to be close to water, but not too close. You don't want it to get flooded.

[Sigulbard]

Have you guys heard about the Antarctic-Atlantis conspiracy thingy? Apparently, some people believe that there are remnants of a super advanced civilization from thousands of years ago under that layer of ice, that it's there because of a polar shift or whatever it's called.

[Flying Dice]

Have you guys heard about the Antarctic-Atlantis conspiracy thingy? Apparently, some people believe that there are remnants of a super advanced civilization from thousands of years ago under that layer of ice, that it's there because of a polar shift or whatever it's called.

Bu-what? It's been more or less proven that while there has been true polar wander in the past, they were functionally insignificant shifts (something like <1 degree per million years). A quick wiki-check says that there's been less than 5 degree of deviation in the past ~130my.

On the other hand, everyone knows that Cuba is actually a bit of Atlantis that's still above the surface. After all, the only way for dirty commies to succeed is for them to piggyback on lost Atlantean technology.

[Sigulbard]

Is it a coincidence that there's an Atlantis-based game in your signature?