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[joeposh]

Awful plan proposed, were the leading nation on natural gas production, why give up American energy independence on enforcing this measure when it is more logical to move to nat. gas while further exploring nuclear power and more.

"We now have over a 100-year supply of clean-burning natural gas that we didn’t know about just a few years ago. The natural gas industry supports nearly 3 million jobs and adds more than $385 billion to the national economy"

Wind farms and solar power would take up so much space on the natural landscape that it makes no sense to throw all our eggs in that basket. Our current legislation is fine as is or needs scaling back.

Confused by your stance on this. The very thing you quoted said that we'll lean MORE on natural gas in the short term to offset the diminishing presence of coal-fired power plants -- that's not ideal due to the carbon pollution that still goes out, but you need to fill the gap while renewables grow their presence and energy efficiency policies take hold.

One of the most exciting things about this is that it finally gives private investors a reason to get off the sidelines and invest in some of the more impressive and aggressive renewable technologies. The uncertainty about what the energy sector would look like in the near term and the year to year nature of many tax credits has long been blamed for keeping private capital on the sideline. That's largely off the table now and should help to continue to drive down the cost and efficiency of solar, wind and advanced battery/storage tech, and speed up commercialization.

 

[Chittagong]

Cuba
Iran
Cutting losses on Middle East
Universal healthcare
Equal marriage
Climate plan

Obama is basically the Sony E2015 Press Conference of presidents, and going to Mars is Half-Life 3.

 

[hydragonwarrior]

I want him to start educating people more on safe nuclear. Passing on an educated populace is the most realistic he can do imo before he goes.

 

[pigeon]

Why so confident?

I suspect we'll have widespread nuclear fusion before we have any sort of "smart storage". The scale and energy constraints of storing power at the utility scale are too large to be practical. The energy density of the plausible solutions are too low. It's not gonna happen any time soon. Even when somebody prototypes a system, reliability will be decades away.

I mean, that seems pretty bizarre to me. We've been working on fusion for decades with no progress and no apparent progress in sight. We've only just recently been working aggressively on energy storage and we're seeing Moore's Law levels (that is, exponential) of improvement in our energy storage capacity. I'm not sure how confident I am that storage will be strong enough to use renewables as baseload power, but I definitely think that will happen much sooner than us solving the tiny little practical problem of getting fusion to operate at less than billions of degrees C.

 

[Elfforkusu]

I mean, that seems pretty bizarre to me. We've been working on fusion for decades with no progress and no apparent progress in sight. We've only just recently been working aggressively on energy storage and we're seeing Moore's Law levels (that is, exponential) of improvement in our energy storage capacity. I'm not sure how confident I am that storage will be strong enough to use renewables as baseload power, but I definitely think that will happen much sooner than us solving the tiny little practical problem of getting fusion to operate at less than billions of degrees C.

Moore's law: transistor counts double (increase by 100%) every two years.
Lithium ion: energy density improves 8% a year. (per Tesla Motors)

It's not even close. And it's fine if you think something will supercede lithion ion -- I do too. But Moore's Law is a happy anomaly where technology is concerned. Growth isn't usually so convenient.

re: fusion, you don't have to believe me. But the version I'm confident in is inertial confinement (if I had to guess, inertial electrostatic confinement), not the tokamaks which have cannibalized funding for decades. The high temperatures will be an engineering problem (keep the outside of the apparatus far enough from the reaction for it to not melt), that's not so worrying as stuff like Bremsstrahlung energy losses, radiation for non pB11 reactions, etc

I'll be disappointed if there's not a working prototype within a decade, tbh. Though it'd still be an uphill climb from that to power plants...