Yes Man

Kurzweil’s argument is that energy is an “information technology” – and Moore’s Law is generally about information technologies, not just transistors. His book “The Singularity Is Near” has an extensive argument that information technology capabilities, measured in many different ways, has been doubling at a steady rate for centuries and even millennia (sp?). Of course, this doubling results in exponential growth, even though the *rate* of doubling doesn’t change.

So, to the degree you can construe energy as information technology, it’s doubling. The argument is what proportion of energy is IT? Since Kurzweil thinks we’ll be building things atom-by-atom within a few years, which is a quintessentially IT operation (much like building a person, using DNA as the code and our cells as the computers), everything becomes IT, and therefore everything is doubling.

This relates to the original point in that, yes, we have the technology today, although it will be a “moon landing” type of project to get it deployed, and it will be very costly – although perhaps very cost-effective or even profitable as well. But technology breakthroughs, or even just a few doublings (ten, equals a factor of 1,000) of solar electricity price-performance, will make it a no-brainer.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/ cneaf/ coal/ page/ coalnews/ coalmar.html

Look down the page at the graph for the longer term trend.
Harder to locate is the corresponding data for the world coal spot prices, but these aree similar or even more extreme.

Maybe David Rutledge is right.

Otherwise all you are saying is that you don’t want to believe the data presented you as it doesn’t fit your ideas of how the world should be.

And don’t confuse what power from existing plants costs vs. what power from similar “to-be-built” plants would cost. What is cheaper than electricity from a hydro project built 70 years ago like the first TVA dam? Norris Dam was built when $0.50 an hour was a good wage and it was paid for decades ago. Pencil out the cost of building a new major hydro project and get back to us.

Same with coal and nuclear. It used to be much cheaper to build these things. No longer. Construction prices are well up and fuel is only going to increase.

And just think what coal generated electricity would cost if coal plants had to capture and sequester their pollutants.

There’s a reason that private money is flooding into wind generation. And why it’s almost impossible to finance new nuclear. We’re beyond the tipping point for renewables.

With most of the diurnal storage covered, that leaves just a relatively small portion of longer term backup or storage to deal with. Could be CAES, but even gas turbines will do fine. Plenty of biogas available in the US (see the billion ton vision report) and you wouldn’t need much in this energy system configuration.

Solar is perhaps the biggest questionmark. What’s it going to do in terms of economics? Guess we just have to wait and see.

The reality is that coal is the cheapest way to make electricity. China has access to all the other technologies but chooses to burn ever more coal (1/3 of the world’s total) because it is cheap.