At 4:02 PM 3/7/5, Jed Rothwell wrote: >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > >I like the big picture approach, but this analysis is too oversimplified. >The cost of making millions of wind turbines or thousands of nuclear >reactors cannot be estimated as a straight-line projection of today's >costs. Mass production on that scale would reduce the unit cost by a huge >margin -- maybe even by a factor of 10. It is conceivable that the direct >cost of energy derived from wind would be cheaper than today's fossil fuel >energy. It almost certainly would be cheaper when you factor in the cost of >pollution and war.
That was my point Jed. Once the cost of the initial tranportation, storage and generation infrastructure is absorbed, renewable energy will be cheaper even at today's prices and technology. A suitably phased program should be feasible right now via ordinary capitalistic means, though the scale is large. This was also the basis of The Energy Legacy Plan I posted here a while back. I agree that large and nearly immediate benefits are available through conservation, if there were a public will to make it so. Regards, Horace Heffner
