Solar kicks coal's ass #2, Funny

Coal-fired power plants are killing our planet. It's time to invest in solar, wind, and geothermal power.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• coal
• solar
• ABEC
• fire
• energy
• policy
• wind
• geothermal
• alternative
• mercury
• pollution
• funny
• humor
• balancedenergy

[ClaudeParish]

Shouldn't you replace Dick Cheney with Barack Obama by now? The new prez is all about Clean Coal Technology. So, you'd better get on board or you're a racist.

[RFKactionfront]

Obama's EPA is moving quickly to regulate CO2. They are also supporting global regulation of mercury which will likely result in limits on coal fired power too. Furthermore, Obama's choice of Nobel prize winner Steven Chu as Sec. of Energy shows he gets it and is a welcome change from the criminal Sam Bodman in the Bush administration. So yeah, like you I'm not thrilled by everything BO has said on this topic but there is a huge difference between Lord Vader Cheney and BO on this matter.

[duvallweb]

I wonder where the power in your home comes from because your other options are pretty expensive. I am willing to bet you are a hipocrit and your power comes from exactly what you claim to oppose.

[RFKactionfront]

And I am willing to bet you don't know how to spell hypocrite. I know exactly how much of the power in my home comes from coal -- 50%.  How do I know that? I went to ilovemountains[dot]org[slash]m­yconnection and typed in my zip code so that I could see exactly where my power comes from. I suggest you do the same. It is precisely because I know how much of my electric power is coming from coal that I want to work even harder to covert our energy supply to renewable energy. See how that works?

[duvallweb]

Did you know that all the power- coal and green feeds into one main power control and on given any day there is no actual way to tell what percentage of your homes power is coming from green energy? Companies are constantly buying and selling power based on power load and equipment outages. Believe me I think green is the way to go too but I think solar energy has a long way to go before it can be a viable replacement to coal, it would require thousands of acres to repace a 500MW coal plant.

[RFKactionfront]

Utilities contract with power suppliers for a set amount of power generation -- so even though the mix of supply varies over the course of the day -- the total ratio over time is relatively fixed. In CA, NM, NV, AZ, TX, UT, etc. there are thousands of MILES of desert that could accommodate solar facilities. Solar is already cheaper than coal and Google is gonna drive the price down further. New technologies can "print" solar cells using dot matrix-type technology. The future is here now.

[solericb]

Well said. Anybody can go throwing around claims that anyone is a hypocrite. Look at religion, there whole game is hypocracy. Anyways, the fact is that we didn't create the current dilemma, we can't take the blame. We can on the other hand do something about it at this point. This video from RFKactionfront is doing more by spreading knowledge about RE than making accusations will do. The energy embedded in a PV module takes about 1.5 years for it to recoop in free energy from the sun.

[JohnDeBunkTest]

Solar is almost as cheap as coal.

Wind is now cheaper than coal.

More, we can save excess wind/solar power by making hydrogen, then burn it in old coal plants for peaking and emergency power.

The Battery Electric Car can fill 90% of our transportation needs.

We don't need coal.

But we do need a new tax structure change to make the new technology happen fast.

I say, "push for targets to implement the new, not just targets to phase out the old."

[RFKactionfront]

Coal isn't used in cars either, so that's a different conversation. I think many of your other concerns have been solved by new technology. Biomass and geothermal plants can meet base load power needs and solar thermal plants can even store the sun's daytime heat for overnight electric generation. Cloudy old Germany is actually leading the solar industry right now. In a coal-fired plant, 64% of all the energy burned to generate electricity is lost as heat -- there has got to be a better way.

[juscurious]

Solar Energy will never account for more than a few percent of our energy. It will not be used at all for transportation industries. Does anybody think that a solar powered car is feasible? Besides what do you do when the Sun does not shine? You only get about 6 good hours a sunshine a day and this is when the sun is shining and in the summer months. What do you do at night? I guess the solar people never thought about that. Wind is almost as stupid but I'm running out of characters.