Thanks especially for the link to The Oil Drum. Interesting stuff.

There is a philosophical point here that I think is important. The problem is that massive investment in wind power would lower power prices to a point where, in the short to medium term, would make wind power uncompetitive relative to carbon fuels. (The same is true of solar, but at a higher price point at the moment). Making such investments would greatly lower our vulnerability to oil price fluctuations, and represent the only real economic "stick" we can wield against unfriendly petro-regimes like Iran and Venezuela (and Russia!).

But in a purely market-driven system, with no accounting for the associated costs of burning carbon, a massive investment in wind or solar power is unlikely to occur until investors are confident that the FLOOR on the price of oil will remain low enough to make these non-carbon power competitive at all times (otherwise they would have to put up extra capital up-front to cover any times when energy prices dropped below their break-even floor). This strikes me as a situation where blind adherence to markets is against our long-term economic as well as national security interests, If we were willing to guarantee a certain price for the long term for wind and solar power, that price guarantee would probably bring us lower long-term power costs on top of the environmental and climate benefits.

Brad I have one issue with your otherwise astute and informative post. You said "it's worth waiting for solar photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies to mature a bit before going full speed ahead on deployment." I completely disagree with the waiting part. It's like the people who sit and wait for the price to processing ratio on home computers to stop dropping. That is if they wait just a little longer. The same kind of waiting for solar PV and therm technologies to improve before rolling them out only prolongs the actual implementation of the best available technologies we have now to do what we need to achieve. We've had almost 100+ years of PV development, while thermal solar techniques have been around for centuries.

One way to push the technologies towards actual implementation is getting beyond the initial installation costs of solar systems. There are companies that would actually lease the equipment and at the end of the lease reclaim the system while upgrading to the next best thing. Perhaps this is one way to fast-track getting these technologies into the market. I firmly think that while the Obama administration is busy pushing Federal policies that move the country as a whole towards energy independence, they should also continue the R&D and implementation tax credits for solar and wind that small businesses and individual homeowners and other property owners can take advantage of.

The upside is I'm starting to see a lot of cross-talk between people making the connections between policy, implementation and on-going infrastructural improvements at the macro- and micro-levels. For every major power plant overall or dismantling we need 25,000+ individual property owner and small businesses taking pro-active measures to ensure that they are 1) moving towards higher efficiency modes and methods of energy consumption and 2) implementing energy production at some level through wind or solar and this means for new homes being built solar therma or PV is part of the package. And the coming explosion of green jobs is retrofitting existing building stock for solar. By doing that the demand on existing power plants diminishes while the demand for new plants decreases.

Why not mandate CO2 reductions on a year by year basis, have an open market for carbon credits and let idustry sort this out? It worked for SO2 and it can work for CO2. But if the new adminisration has a not-so-hidden agenda to bankrupt coal and oil companies, we will not take it lying down.

single -

Brad is only saying to wait before going "full steam ahead on deployment", not before getting started.  I agree with him on that.  You're right that we can't sit around waiting for the price-to-performance ratio to drop in the way it has for PCs, especially since it likely won't drop much without huge (read: governmental) initial investment.  But neither do we want to wind up sitting on a pile of TRS-80's when the Pentium D's come out.  So I would prefer to go slowly at first, then ramp up exponentially, just as the PC revolution did.  In the meantime, let's dump that money into Gore's other project, transmission, where the available tech is way closer to what's needed.  It's an easier sell politically, I think, and that way, we'll be ready when non-carbon generation comes into its own.

Brad, the first projects to be implemented will be efficiency improvement projects. The industry would love to do them because they save money so have a real return on investment. Unfortunately, in many cases, utilities run up against New Source Review Standards which make the investments uneconomic. So the utilities continue to run their plants without the energy eficiency revamps. Totally counter productive policy that makes us wince at bureaucratic regulation which achieves precisely the wrong result.

I voted for Gore in 2000. I see now that he is a showman and an opportunist.There is about 500,000 MW of installed power related to fossil fuels. A decent sized replacement plant has about 1000-3000 MW capacity. As of now, there is exactly one 3,000 MW wind turbine plant and no nuclear plants under construction. If we succeed by 2118 to do what Gore says he wants to do by 2018, it will be a miracle. He is nothing bit a partisan windbag.

dhauck....

I don't think Brad's wrong in the go slower approach but I can see that "go slow" approach being used by those on the other side of energy issues as a reason to bog down the implementation which they've done successfully so far by saying the technology isn't there yet. But I also think the time to push for market implementation at micro and macro scales needs to happen sooner. I think a way to get current technologies to market is to figure out a creative way to do so without having the shadow of "built-in obsolescence"  haunt our endeavor. Most manufacturers are concentrating on a one-off product meaning that the minute the product leaves the factory it's not their problem anymore. But another way to approach the every evolving PV technology versus when to push for implementation is working with and encouraging the PV industry to produce products that can be upgraded as the technology improves. Much like the PC has that capability to upgrade. The saving grace of PV technology moving so slowly (we're just getting to 30% efficiencies) is that we can get the systems installed now w/ credits and long-term leases and then swap out older technologies as it improves without having to completely throw out the system to upgrade. This also provides long-term job opportunities for maintenance and upgrades. This becomes very important as we push for a Smart-Grid system. The end-user/consumer is key to getting this going as much as the provider/producer is.