Another Inconvenient Truth
Green is not profitable or economical; depending on which side of the product you're on.
Why? Because there's no demand.
Let's do a comparison.
Mobile phone technology changes faster than you can say "hello moto" andthey become obsolete in a matter of months. Big demand there; people must have the most up to date phone even though their previous one still works and is in perfectly fine condition. As a result, the price of the same phone will half in a year or two.
Meanwhile, after all these years, energy saving light bulbs are still around $10 - $15, compared with your average globe that costs less than a dollar.
This is the argument my brother came up with when I said we should replace more of our lights with energy saving bulbs.
But, funnily enough, the price of plasma TVs start from $1000 compared to a couple of hundred for a normal TV. And yet, there is demand for these huge TVs.
Why? Cos they're cool!!
How many people feel the same way about solar panels or the Sunball or Hybrid cars?
............
Go round my house and borrow "Cradle to Cradle" for a different take on the phone thing. It's not very long. It's on the bookshelf just inside my door... Little blue and green book made out of very recyclable polymer.
Solar panels, at the moment, with (very) conservative estimates, would cost 2-4 times as much as electricity from the grid, depending on how much you buy, and how you finance it. BP estimates grid parity (on-roof solar costing the same as power from the grid) by 2020. It could be much sooner.
Wind, in many circumstances, is so close to coal as to make no difference to the consumer, and often times cheaper. Even before you take in to account the huge hidden cost of coal that's not reflected in the price, of course. In some US states wind is cheaper than electricity from coal & gas.
It doesn't really help that your brother is using outdated information - green is profitable and economical, essentially because pollution is waste- reducing polution is in essence becoming more efficient. There are many examples of companies increasing profit by reducing waste (again, see Cradle to Cradle- it's a trend that has increased since that book was published though.) It is true, though, that there are gaps in the availability of green products- but that's not because green products can't be cheaper- they are almost guaranteed to be, in the long run, because of the inherent inefficiencies of pollution.
Read that book (and then pass it around to all your friends. I'm not using it at the moment.)
Sorry for the excessively long comment... but it's just not true that green is not profitable or economical, though the slow uptake of smarter, more efficient, greener processes is inconvenient.
PS- there's also a book on my shelf called "Natural Capital" that goes in to these issues in a little more depth... it's longer and maybe not as interesting, but if you're interested.
PPS- All this assuming that my folks haven't turfed all my stuff and turned my room in to a VR deck.
You can get energy savers that last 10x as long as a normal light bulb for under $5; anything more than about $8 and you're being ripped off royally unless it does something special. You're already saving money right there ($5 for 10,000 hours compared to $10 for $1 per 1000hr lightbulb).
As for hybrids and solar panels, I want them a lot more than I want a plasma screen. :D Hybrids right now are a stop-gap, as Karan said, but the next generation of hybrids - ones which run exclusively off electric power for short distances (<50km at this stage) and can be recharged from the mains grid - could be the Next Big Thing. Combined with ethanol or biodiesel, it could make a person completely free of petrol prices. Frankly, as long as it's not hydrogen I don't mind.
Yeah, there's a lot of improvements to be made on the hybrid front. I wonder though, stop-gap to what? For urban transport, electric cars are viable, but for long distance? (Though I wouldn't mind not needing a car, or only needing an electric car, for urban travel, and hiring a diesel when I wanted to go to the country-side.) Electric cars charged from mains power got from coal are eeevil though. So you need a lot of solar panels.
Ah, but I didn't say electric, I said hybrid. Plug-in hybrid, to be exact. It's an electric car for short distances or slower speeds, with a CI/SI engine for more performance. The first question is where do you get the power from to charge these cars...solar goes a long way, if we decentralise the grid and have each property utilising wasted space on their roof for solar panels. That'd boost the base power loading on the grid during the day, and cars will generally recharge during the night when demand is less. Coal's going to go the way of oil eventually, so the replacement for that is trickier, but fusion has the potential to be a reality before that happens. Replacing coal is a difficult question unless you like nuclear, which I'm fine with but it ain't gonna happen in this country.
The second question is what does the combustion engine run on...my personal preference is biodiesel, but it could just as easily run on ethanol. No infrastructure change required in the petrol stations and the farmers can stop whinging. Ethanol can have a positive energy ratio (energy used/energy produced) with the newer methods, so it's viable if it can be made on a large enough scale.
Yes, I think about this too much.
Nathan, you shoud stop aiming to become a pilot and use your overthinking to improve the planet! :D
What's wrong with hydrogen cars? Other than the fact that it uses a lot of energy to isolate the hydrogen in the first place, energy that is still coming from evil coal.
Cos supposedly we're getting them in Australia in a few year's time.
And what's wrong with nuclear power? Yes, there are risks of radiation getting out and making people die slow horrible deaths, but surely technology nowadays has pretty much reduced that risk to 0.
Is it the problem of disposing of nuclear waste? Just buy a cheapo rocket from China and send it to the sun!!
Apparently the Civic Hybrid is a non-plug-in. The battery recharges when the car is running on fuel and when brakes are applied...I'm not too sure of the nitty gritty details, but that's what Product Planning Manager said when I asked him. Which makes me wonder how much is it really reducing carbon emissios by?
I think you're right.
The main problem with plug-ins (and everything else) at the moment is that everyone is still hooked up to coal energy. So people think "Well, what's the point?"
So in order for plug-ins to really take off, we need everyone to get onto green energy.
It all comes back to demand. The more interest is shown in green energy, the more the energy providers will invest infrastructure and R&D for it.
I think I'm just crapping on now...
I'll probably end up working for an automotive company anyway, there's no market for aerospace here. :P
Yeah, all hybrids on the market just recharge during the car's normal operation, you can't plug any in yet. Some people have converted their Priuses into plug-ins by throwing some big batteries in the back. The problem with hydrogen, aside from the fact that you need lots of energy to create it, is that its energy density isn't great, making storage in any large amounts a problem. Have you heard anything about if we're getting some hydrogen fuel pumps to go with the Honda FCXs (I assume that's what is coming out here)?
I know you said hybrid. I was making a seperate point- that if hybrids are a stop-gap (as Karan said) then what will replace them? Although the recharge issue applies equally well to plug in hybrids. You need a hell of a lot of solar panels if you want your plug in hybrid to be better than a normal hybrid (especially a hybrid running on ethanol or biodiesel, fuels which are carbon-neutral.)
Things we can do now: Walk & use public transport. Don't own a car, but share it. Get rid of heating and cooling. If you need heating and cooling in Melbourne, your house is badly designed. Spend the money to retrofit. This applies especially strongly to heating.
Get a solar water heater with an instantaneous booster.
Do those two things, and you'll probably have halved your energy consumption. Ensure that the rest of your appliances and lighting are energy efficient. Buy enough solar cells to meet your remaining energy needs.
If everyone does this, then coal won't be such a big issue. A little bit of coal with GCS, wind, gas for peak, geothermal, centralised solar... base load should be easy to meet.
And the costs involved here are not that extreme. (Especially with the first two steps.)
Sorry to go on and on, but I think all this hand-wringing about coal v nuclear is a little odd when we get more than enough energy hitting our roofs each day. (Don't even need to use the whole roof, either.)
We can definitely be more efficient, that's for sure. On the topic of car-sharing, there's this company that parks cars in various places around the city and lets you book them for use...can't remember the name of it, but it's a good idea if you live in the inner suburbs. There's plenty of things we can do to save electricity, I just love my environmentally-friendly technology. :D
I didn't realise that that type of car sharing had got to Melbourne. Thought it was just Europe.