The oil companies must want to sell energy in the future.?
Aren’t they looking into alternate forms of energy, I mean, income? Sure, I know, they want to milk as much revenue as possible from oil because they have the infrastructure in place for petro-dollars.
Wouldn’t they look forward to the development of solarvoltaic or wind or, my favorite, Geo-Thermal?
The state and federal governments give tax incentives and rebates to people putting up solar voltaic panels to cover up to 70% of the cost. Add to that a Geo-thermal heat pump that reqires little more than electicity to heat and cool your house and an electric car and the savings in not having to buy heating oil or gasoline will have repaid the cost of the solar panels in five years.
Take the long view people.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 5th, 2010 at 8:18 am
In my opinion the most important information that you need to answer this question is accurate cost data for the alternative forms of energy..
I have found that accurate cost data is the most difficult information to come by.
Each form of alternative energy has its fans, however when it comes time to discuss actual cost, the information that you need is nowhere to be found.
I find comparison cost estimates in the term of an energy equivalent equal to the amount of energy contained in a gallon of gasoline to be the most helpful.
This is becuse that is one of the major fuels that I hope we will replace with another source that does not produce greenhouse gas emissions and can be produced in this country so we do not have the balance of payment problems and the funds to terrorist problems that we have with imported oil.
Curently the cost data that I have indicates that wind energy will produce elecricity at a cost equal to approximately two dollars ( $2.00) for an amount of electricity that has an energy content equal to one gallon of gasoline.
Industrial scale solar photovoltaic will produce electricity at a cost equivalent equal to ten dollars ( $10.00) for a unit of energy equal to one gallon of gasoline.
Small scale solar photovoltaic of the size that you have on your roof will produce electricity at a cost equivalent of fifty dollars ($50.00) for an amount of electricity with an energy content equal to one gallon of gasoline.
I do not have any cost data for geothermal. If you have cost data for geothermal, I would be very interested.
Currently as I see it, only electricity produced by windpower has a cost of production low enough to make it economically competitive with gasoline at this time.
In my opinion, the cost of electricity produced by a solar photovoltaic system is too high to be competitive with the cost of gasoline at this time.
the cost of electricity produced by wind does appear to me to be very competitive with the cost of gasoline.