Painful Night Rather Than Waste It = Rough Number Crunching

I don't know what is going to happen as we run out of fossil fuel.

I do know that we can't depend on the regulating agencies to provide thought out solutions. Here are a few examples of the problems I live with daily because of poorly thought out or untested regulations:

A water saving toiled that uses much more water than the old one I had in a prior house. Everyone that uses it has learned to flush early and often to avoid it being plugged up. And lets not talk about several flushes to clean it.

A gas can that spills gas every time it is used. It is supposed to prevent vapor entering the atmosphere.

A lawn I was forced to put in that I am now being told to tear out to save water and avoid fertilizer.

I wish that these ideas were tested before being implemented.

My friends that advocate a complete immediate change to solar have a childlike faith that it will work and resist any conversation about how that would happen.

Then do distributed power generation with mini grids in neighborhoods. It is successfully being done elsewhere.

Change the building codes to require solar panels for water heating and power generation.

I'm looking forward to all these developments and changes. All the problems and issues can be solved. Great days are coming.

bighatnohorse wrote:
California does have a lot of sunshine though.
PV panels are cheaper and improving. Battery technology research has many improvements, some quite stunning, waiting in the wings.

The problem with solar energy is that it is not NEAR the location that you want it at and TRANSMISSION of electricity over long distances is not without some losses.

Plus the INFRASTRUCTURE to get it from where it is generated to where it is needed typically do NOT EXIST !

Biggest issue isn't 'generation' of energy it's the 'transmission' of that energy

Power Transmission GRIDS are overloaded.......more energy is flowing across transmission lines because the 'limits' were artificially raised to allow it.
No new major transmission projects

And that has a lot to do with 'NIMBY'

All electric sounds nice, warm/fuzzy BUT that energy has to be generated

Generation is easy ....transmitting it is KEY Issue

The cars themselves may provide storage for energy.

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
California 20 million electric cars. Annual average mileage data taken fro state online sources. Mileage based on various online estimates. Remember these are ROUGH figures. 4.5 hours worth of crunching.

To dedicate power to this number of electric cars and trucks will take the equivalent of the total capacity of 3.43 Hoover Dams generators.

Amortizations have to be made to homogenize this figure into current electrical production.

One thing is clear to me. California emerged from rolling blackouts SOLELY BECAUSE of millions of solar panels. The state does not have a big surplus of energy.

Food for thought. Sore fingertips :)

Do you have a better answer for the upcoming fossil fuel shortage? OK, not going to happen in my lifetime, but it is going to happen. We MUST find alternatives to fossil fuel. Electric cars powered by fuel cells seems to make more sense but maybe nuclear is best! :W I am still hopeful that we will figure out how to fully harness the wind and solar power available to us or discover a new source we were not aware of. I call that discovery Plutricity and it will be the defining moment that turns around Global Warming and the end of mankind.:B

California does have a lot of sunshine though.
PV panels are cheaper and improving. Battery technology research has many improvements, some quite stunning, waiting in the wings.

For the investor, your research could be a good weather vane.

Yep! maybe we should all just go back to the horse and buggy. Much simpler. However, the the horse has to be feed, poop cleaned, and housed somewhere. Can you just imaging folks who live in high rise apartments having the basement garages full of horse stalls! It baffles the imagination.

It doesn't matter what it is, humans are "consumers" and we have the need to consume whatever resources there are. When one resource runs out we find ways to consume something else until it's gone too. There is no sure-fire answer to anything.