Forum Moderators: goodroi
The United States government has been unable to fix the country's energy problems, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, but the Internet giant on Wednesday proposed its own 22-year solution."We have seen a total and complete failure of leadership in the political parties of the United States," Schmidt said in a speech at the Commonwealth Club here. "We've been working on a plan to help solve this problem."
Earlier in the day, Google unveiled that plan, which doesn't lack for chutzpah: Clean Energy 2030 aims to wean the United States from its dependence on fossil fuels within 22 years.Schmidt said the plan requires $4.5 trillion in spending to pull it off, but it'll pay for itself with $5.5 trillion in savings. "With this plan, it's cheaper to fix global warming than it is to ignore it," Schmidt said.
Clean Energy 2030 - [knol.google.com]Google's Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels
Commitment to Sustainable Computing [google.com]
Saving electricity one data center at a time [googleblog.blogspot.com]
Anyhow, if we use many different sources of energy we're safer, I think that's fairly widely agreed upon. There's also the benefit of energy providers being forced to compete. Enough competition and the only way to get an edge would be to cut your costs. Ideally, that means companies reinvesting in their product and improving the technology.
As for Google, I commend them for putting a plan forward. T. Boone Pickens did it, and it's nice to see people coming up with ideas, even if Congress is still flailing around over everything.
I'm writing Google in for president on my vote.
I'm writing Google in for president on my vote.
1. According the EIA, the US consumed 4 million thousand megawatthours in 2006.
2. The most efficient solar panels produce around 13 watts per square foot. Let's call it 130 watt-hours per day (assuming 10 hours of light on average) or about 50,000 watt-hours per year.
3. Doing the math, we need 80 billion square feet of solar panels.
If we covered the rockies mountains (let's say an average of 2 miles high) the mountain range would have to be 1,434 miles long to fulfill our needs.
The rocky moutains are over 3,000 miles long so we'd only need to cover half the range!
Of course converting all cars to electric vehicles and the fossil fuel we burn to heat our homes will increase our electric needs so maybe we might have to cover the entire range to be safe. Oh yeah, we're going to need to store that energy unless we want all the lights to go off at night. So maybe we need a storage array of batteries a hundred miles long too.
My Google checks have paid for my new Prius (it seems Google likes them too) so I'm using that as an interim measure until I can purchase and drive an electric-only vehicle. I'd love to get a vertical axis wind generator for my home (and maybe solar panels someday too) but I haven't been able to find anyone locally who sells them or installs them or knows much about them. Granted, I have no idea what they cost.
It seems Google's social/environmental conscience is pretty well aligned with my goals and I support them for that. Plus them sending me nice checks every month doesn't hurt either ;-)
Good job, Google! Keep it up!
Please go back and read my post. I hate having to explain things twice. Solar panels have absolutely nothing to do with solar towers. We will only have to cover the Rockies with solar panels if we hire illiterate engineers to construct the towers. The city of Seville, Spain is currently being powered by such structures and they don't have to turn out the lights at night.
Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know that oil sales to the US account for 36% of the exports of Venezuela? Wasn't it great when Russia delivered billions of dollars worth of weapons to Venezuela using OUR MONEY last week? Isn't it cool to buy palaces and ferraris for Middle Easterners? I'm personally a little bit tired of it.
We landed human beings on the moon four times and safely landed them on Earth again 40 years ago while the number two power in the world has only managed to fly past it last year! You guys don't think we can build power lines from the deserts of the SW to the existing power grid? Wow, maybe our empire deserves to crumble if that's the best we can do. We just can't wait 10 more years for expanded domestic drilling to pay off. It will take too long and it isn't politically viable anyway.
One last thing, I'm a Texas Republican, so don't call me Moonbeam or hippie or anything else ;) I'm a real American who's tired of being a slave to enemy regimes. I'm sick of our dollar being devalued due to half of our oil requirements being imported. Global warming does not come into play for me. It's all about retaining American power in the world and continuing on the path we're on now will end us soon enough.
All I ask of the American public is that when people have ideas on how to free us from our addiction to foreign energy that they at least read more than the first line of the proposal.
How long will you live in that fear. We need to see the bigger picture.
Also these will be spread across states so there will not be a single point of failure.
Also it seems google wants to become another IBM !
We as a people can do this!
:)
And by the way, these towers are 200 MW each. We need closer to 5,000 of those towers to fulfill the needs of the US, not 600. The US has nearly 1 million megawatts of generating capacity.
