As we all know (I think...if not...check it out in the news!! lol) , there are many debates and disagreements about how to provide more energy in the United States in the years to come. Outside of the United States there are also debates about the humanity of such new options as Ethanol - which is essentially consuming an unbalanced amount of foog.

What are some “solutions” common in your field to deal with the energy crisis?

If you could set out a plan to help the United States (or your own country if other than the US) become more energy independent, what would it be?

My field (software engineering) is not really doing much about the energy situation, but I have a few ideas…

I love the idea of bio fuels, but not made from food crops like corn and soy beans.  You can make bio diesel from used cooking oil and we should be doing that.  You can make bio fuels from grass clippings, saw grass (no one eats that) and other non food vegetation.

We can harvest the methane gases produced by landfills to generate electricity.

Several universities (including MIT) have been working on better, cheaper, safer nuclear (pebble bed reactors) and we should serious consider these.

Wind is great.  Solar is great. 

And in the end, I think we should diversify our power generation efforts.  Why do we think we should have a single solution?  There are so many good and renewable solutions and if we made power generation more regionalized we could take better advantage of these.

The thing that always gets me, is we already know how to do all of these.  It is not an act of genius to come up with this list.  So, why are we spending more time worrying about why they can’t work (it isn’t sunny enough in Boston for solar to be effective, for example or wind power is bad for birds—seriously the birds are not that dumb and they fly around)?  In my mind, what we really need to do is just implement solutions we already have now.  And we can continue to research and work on new and better ways as we go along.

Excellent points.  About an hour or two outside of Pittsburgh there is a whole line of seven larger wind generators.  However, there has been a lot of resistance from communities on giving up portions of their land for this.  Some argue it is a visual blight (obviously they never lived near Pittsburgh when the majority of coal was going into the air! lol). 

I think the other side of the energy debate, for example with bio fuels, is that (from my understanding) there needs to be some modifications to the actual cars and other machines to utilize the bio oils.  Much like there are diesal and gasoline cars. 

I like the idea of hybrids, which in the current models seem to be efficient in cities. 

As for being in the computer field - I decrease my “carbon” footprint by working from home.  I think more companies should consider offering flex hours.  For example, you can easily work ten hours for four days and save on the trip into work on the fourth.  My parents, who commute two + hours to work have started to do this and have found many benefits all around to health, gas consumption, and work effectiveness.

Interested to hear from more of you!

PixelGeek - 23 July 2008 09:54 AM

I think the other side of the energy debate, for example with bio fuels, is that (from my understanding) there needs to be some modifications to the actual cars and other machines to utilize the bio oils.  Much like there are diesal and gasoline cars. 

The bio dielsel made from used cooking oil can be used in any diesel engine without any modification at all and is actually better for the engine than regular diesel fuel.

I also work virtually, so my compute involves walking down stairs with a cup of coffee in hand.  I walk my kids to school until the temperature drops below 20 degree F.  And I have been using CFLs in all my lights for more than 10 years.

most of my weighing in is defending my industry… general aviation. airplanes in general are being vilified like crazy these days.  especially GA… people think it’s nothing but fat cat CEOs guzzing enormous amounts of fuel so they can toodle around the country without talking to “little people”.  In truth, most companies with their own airplanes use them in incredibly efficient ways.  They’re not doing the multi-hop airliner thing, like going from St. Louis to Dallas by way of CHICAGO.  They’re packing extra light, upgrading the plane’s equipment faster, and landing at smaller airports outside of the already polluted cities.  But people want to blame the problem on us because the finger pointing game is way more fun than looking at what’s actually wrong with the world.

But anyway… I am all for recycling and reducing consumerism.  we waste too much in this country.  it’s upsetting.

spacefem - you make some excellent points.  I dated a pilot once, he flew the smaller charters, and indeed they were short flights and not usually to large airports - though sometimes I think he landed at LaGuardia.

Regarding the diesel, that’s great - but so many cars are not diesel - thus the majority of independent car owners would have to change their cars.  Is this feasible?

We have an interesting case here in Pittsburgh that I think is interesting. Pittsburgh has a pretty extensive bus system - IMHO.  Recently, despite the cost of gas going up, the ridership of buses has gone down.  The cost of a bus trip is next to nothing!  But the authority will not raise the cost of a bus trip because they fear ridership will go down even more.  So, they proposed increasing our property tax (from 10% to 20% ouch!).  Then someone came up with the great idea to tax poured drinks.  Essentially, they added 10% tax to all drinks that are poured at restaurants (alcoholic).  So, now they are dipping into a successful industry that then felt loss because more people decided to stay home and drink beer poured without a tax.

So - again, it seems that bureaucracy comes into the mix to mess things up. lol. 

But I digress.  I think it would be good to have additional sources of fuel, such as bio.  But it will be interesting to see how well the public will adapt to new costs for changing the way things are done.  Heck, there are still houses in Pittsburgh with their old coal furnaces.

Does anyone know of any good resources that catalogue the amount of energy expended to produce energy with these different sources (coal, petroleum, bio)?

PixelGeek - 23 July 2008 06:38 PM

Regarding the diesel, that’s great - but so many cars are not diesel - thus the majority of independent car owners would have to change their cars.  Is this feasible?

Does anyone know of any good resources that catalogue the amount of energy expended to produce energy with these different sources (coal, petroleum, bio)?

First, the bio diesel is not a one solution for everyone.  It is part of a solution.  School buses could run on it and it would save school districts big bucks!

Second, this web site: http://www.eia.doe.gov/ is a wealth of information.  You can actually see all of the energy production by source for each state in the US and for each country as well as whether the energy source is natural to that country or imported.  I gave the general link because there is so much data and this way you can dig around and see all kinds of information.  This is the link into all of the spreadsheets.  Click on one of the links and you have to ability to download pdfs and excel spreadsheets.

And of course, wikipedia gives a nice and quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

You rock! Thanks for the link. :-D.  Good point about the buses - I hadn’t considered that!!

Hi It is my humble opinion that we should have been looking at alternate methods for energy since 1980. To my knowledge nothing special happened that year. here is my reasoning: When computer components first come out they are very expensive then as technology impreves along with better distribution and cheaper parts the price becomes affordable to most of the population. Renewable energy technology is the same way. It is way expensive and will remain so as it is now coming into demand. Manufactures have not had the processes in place to commerically mass produce renewable energy options. When they do install there are bugs to work out before the technology becomes efficent.

Since we cannot go back int time and correct our mistakes, we have to deal with today and prepare for tomorrow. So my energy soultion for today would be to develop a specialized community where people who choose to live there agree to limited numbers of hours of electric (say 2 hours) with the rest of the energy requirements met by solar or wind. I would also like to see a community not depending on electric period regardless of where it comes from. Think cave man days.

We are making a huge mistake that our children will have to pay for. By opening perservered land for drilling and further energy exploration we are destroying these areas.

I think our energy sources need greater diversification in our dependencies: wind, water, solar, kinetic, chemical, bio, oil, nuclear, etc. Right now it seems that politicians talk as if we’re going to shift to being a nation fueled by corn, but I think that’s just a corn blight away from disaster. (Corn: good source. Only corn: bad source.) (Besides I’d rather like some of that corn to be left for me and the cows. And it’s not like we can completely destroy the ecology of the world by replacing everything with corn.)

We also need to continue to reduce the power consumption of our products: everything from heart monitors to rocket ships. (Hurray for engineers!)

I struggle to advocate diminishing consumerism because people buying things provides so many jobs to salespeople, truckers, manufacturers, designers, businessmen, etc. Now, creating more earth-friendly products? I’m all for that! Whatever happened to that movement to reduce the amount of packaging that products come in?

Sorry, mine isn’t really sciencey, but it’s common sensey…

I would put railways all across the US connecting each city or town and in each city or town, I would put in a subway system that gets you to within one city block of any destination.

I would make local produce MUCH more available to the consumer (think how much diesel and gas is consumed each year by trucks alone!!!)
For the goods that cannot be local, I would use the train system that I had put in (see above) to traffic the goods to the stores.  I would change the 24 hour stores to 12 hour stores and give people a 2 hour break in the day to eat lunch at home with their families/friends/birds in the park (it doesn’t matter with whom, just as long as the energy is not spewing forth at the hottest times of the day (i.e. lunch)) This could be in the summer if that’s better for corporate America (3 months is a good start), but it would give people time with their kids and families AND reduce power usage.

And mostly, I would have a class in the schools from grammar school age on HOW to use resources more wisely - at this point, we are such a consumer nation, we need to learn how to save and preserve.  I would also offer free trips to our state and national parks (again on the rail system)...kids that are only into video games have often never seen ANY of our national parks (even though Tony Hawk’s video games are super fun), and some people just don’t have the money to go on vacations.  They have to see what we have in order to want to keep it safe.  It’s not even as if we HAVE to invent anything, we already have all the resources and technology we need, we just need the will to use them.  Plus we already have the forum for it...the forum is our world!!!!

zazilinguist - 25 July 2008 02:18 AM

Sorry, mine isn’t really sciencey, but it’s common sensey…

It should be common sense in my mind.  We are not trying to do anything that crazy, we are simply trying to change the way we produce the energy we use so we are not as dependent on oil.  I think we already have most of the solutions, we just have to implement them.

zazilinguist - 25 July 2008 02:18 AM

I would put railways all across the US connecting each city or town and in each city or town, I would put in a subway system that gets you to within one city block of any destination.

This is a very good suggestion.  This also moves product shipment from roads via trucks to the rails.  That would mean less wear and tear on the highways (and they are really suffering) and it would improve highway safety too.

Good thoughts Knockitoff, the road safety issue is really looming, I don’t know the stats, but the number of people killed in highway crashes each year is astounding...plus a railway would really cut down on the amount of drunk drivers on the road.  I don’t understand WHY we haven’t done the rail thing in the US yet.  It would be fiscally beneficial and would probably make the money they have spent on it back very quickly.  We have to give alternatives to use if we want people to start using alternative methods!!!!  Again, it’s just common sense.

zazilinguist - 25 July 2008 11:41 AM

Good thoughts Knockitoff, the road safety issue is really looming, I don’t know the stats, but the number of people killed in highway crashes each year is astounding...plus a railway would really cut down on the amount of drunk drivers on the road.  I don’t understand WHY we haven’t done the rail thing in the US yet.  It would be fiscally beneficial and would probably make the money they have spent on it back very quickly.  We have to give alternatives to use if we want people to start using alternative methods!!!!  Again, it’s just common sense.

I think one of the things that has made rail less attractive is that it is not as fast.  We are ll in this FedEx mindset where we can order anything and have it in our hands the very next day.  Even business work on Just In Time inventory systems so that they get new shipments of merchandise daily based on what they need.  Rail is not that responsive.  We may have to change our expectations before we see a huge increase in rail usage.

On the other hand, where I live a train goes by on one of 3 sets of rails every 7 minutes.  And, I have noticed an increase in both the number and length of trains.  So, we may be seeing a gradual increase in rail use.

I used to live in San Francisco, and they have the BART and MUni. but it isn’t that great a system, it doesn’t get to all areas of the city and it breaks down quite frequently.  I had a conversation with one of the cabbies up there (they always have an inside track on what’s goin on in a city) and he told me that they wouldn’t put in a better public transport system because the taxi union is too strong, they want the fares.

However, your point about instant gratification and next day delivery is quite valid.  It’ll take a compromise, I think, at least when we start changing our methods, but change is in the air.  I also see more ridership on the buses and commuter trains.  The price of gas is awful, but could it be a blessing in disguise?

What do you think?

I don’t really know much but i think using solar energy would be beneficial to both the environment and the country itself.

Regards,
Kailey
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