Joe, I have read the article in Time about you, and few things make me sad.
one is that you “filtering everything through your own firmly fixed values”.
For me it means that you are “believer” with whom there is no debate about if there is real a man made global warming. Even, as read many times all these worming theories are just “theories”.
Another thing makes me sad that for you everybody who is not “believer” is “denier”, simply said somebody almost a criminal.

environmentalism is COMMON SENSE

Tony Castaldo Says:

Wind and CSP are short-term solutions.

Why would they be short term? That makes no sense to me. We aren’t going to run out of wind and sunshine.

Tony says:

But the short term solution du jour is Wind and Solar, two partial solutions for intermittent generation that both require massive investment in new distribution networks, instead of one complete and permanent solution that generates 24/365

Solar thermal with heat storage is not intermittent.

We need the distribution network anyway to beef up the grid. Especially if we want enough capacity to run transportation with electricity.

The solar proposal at Scientific American says that public money would not have to be used for HVDC, but rather to assure enough tax credits to attract investors so the CSP companies can get up to scale.

Here is the correct link (one posted above didn’t get to the right place):

http://news.cnet.com/ 8301-11128_3-9945005-54.html?tag=bl

Would that be on the same continent with the 1 billion displaced people trying to drink glaciers, and where 70% of species have been lost?

Check your info, again.

I am in Texas, and on the right highway going past San Antonio, I can watch wind turbine blades making their way north all day long. We have plenty of space for that. I have driven across New Mexico and all over Arizona, there are thousands of square miles of sunlit space to put in some CSP plants. So sure, if you must, get started there. But Geothermal is still the greenest of the green energies. It has a tiny fraction of the footprint of CSP or a wind farm, requires no special placement, it has no more environmental impact than building a large office complex, it is cheap ($5-20M per plant).

The common wisdom is now Wind, but geothermal is literally 1000 times bigger than wind, and wherever you are standing or sitting there could be a zero-emissions plant. Unlike wind, geothermal has enough excess capacity to scrub the CO2 from the atmosphere, if we wanted to do that.

Wind and CSP are short-term solutions. It is misleading to claim geothermal needs 10 years of testing to become viable; Greenland has done most of the necessary research for us over the last 20 years. It is viable right now, as the MIT report says. But the short term solution du jour is Wind and Solar, two partial solutions for intermittent generation that both require massive investment in new distribution networks, instead of one complete and permanent solution that generates 24/365, regardless of season or weather, requires zero electric storage capacity, delivers electricity for cheaper than we pay now, and that can be adapted to the existing grid.

It is hard for me to get excited about CSP or Wind when the proponents seem completely ignorant of the one and only permanent and elegant solution with essentially unlimited capacity for the foreseeable future. That ignorance makes me suspect those proponents are not the experts they pretend to be, they have not studied the problem with an independent mind, and they are just parroting some fad of the year with which they have become enamored, dismissing all countervailing views out of hand because they don’t want to hear anything contrary to their preconceptions.

I am not bitter, I am saying, as a full time research scientist (in computer science, not energy), that if I were to choose a route toward independence there is clearly a best and most certain technology which deserves far more attention than it gets, there is only one approach that is not a stopgap or partial solution and that one is geothermal energy, not wind or solar of any flavor. it should not be “in the mix”, it should be the default choice and only supplanted when wind or CSP, with their huge footprints and permanent environmental impact, have clear and compelling economic advantages.

and I direct your attention to pages 1-27 through 1-30. Geothermal is available everywhere in the USA. The resources are 200 times our entire national energy consumption, forever. It is zero emission, tiny footprint (it can actually fit in something the size of a warehouse in the middle of downtown), safe against terrorist attack, completely distributable, non-intermittent, on 24/7, cheap to tap, completely scalable from small town to big city, and the technology is easily explained to anybody — Drill down 3-8 miles, and use the bottom of the hole as a firebox for a steam turbine that generates electricity. It can produce electricity cheaper than we pay right now; in fact for some shallow western wells in California, at half the current cost. On top of all that, it really is zero-emission, green, and environmentally friendly. Greenland has already led the way, and we have many working geothermal plants in the US already.

It makes no noise, kills no birds, and does not require any exotic elements. If wind and thermal solar are key technologies, so is Geothermal, and in fact geothermal alone plus hybrid cars could have us independent of all Middle Eastern oil in under 20 years, and independent of all fossil fuels in about 40 years. Not only that, but if America leads the way on the research and technology the rest of the world will adopt it pretty quickly, and we can get past the fossil fuel era within the lifetimes of today’s children.