I think we should think about why some would argue that breakthroughs in energy technology are the way to go and that is the enormous improvements that have come about in transistors and follow Moore’s law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law

Transistor density increases about double every 24 months.
It’s quite understandable to see Breakthrough’s in computers, commutations, cell phones, Plasma and LCD TVs, Satellites, vehicle engine controls and everything electronic because of the increase in the number of transistors that can be put into smaller and smaller volumes. We’ve gotten spoiled. New products and applications come out all the time that use transistors.

That’s different than what breakthroughs come in mass products like houses, cars or aircraft. Are houses cheaper now than 20 or 30 years ago? Maybe houses are becoming cheaper than 4 years ago, but that’s not because of house building breakthroughs, but because of short term economic and financial changes. All these mass products are stuck with the costs of materials, labor and capital that go into their production.

Energy, whether from energy avoidance, energy efficiency or energy renewable, come from sources closer to mass products than transistor products. Much of energy avoidance would come from the use of more insulation which are mass products and follow mass products costs. The collecting of wind and solar for require quite a large amount of mass products. All these products are from mass products and follow mass products costs, not the advantages of transistors and Moore’s law.

Energy efficiency products can and do take advantage of the transistors breakthrough with more efficient engines other products with better controls, but much of those energy efficiency products will still have large mass product costs. Look at how much industrial metals and most raw materials have increased in price the last few years.

Designs can be improved, such as better designed passive solar houses, but that architecture has gone through many generations of design and modification. Not much left to improve.

Energy collection is tied to mass product costs, not to the miniaturization of transistors. Breakthroughs are harder to make a difference.

As they used to say at Bell Labs: “Never schedule breakthroughs.” (And by that they did not mean evolutionary improvement. John Mashey will correct me if I’m wrong on that.)

Example would be cell phones. Cell phones are everywhere, but that didn’t used to be. Because of the transistor density improvements, there application was able to be used in cell phones and in the cell technology that runs it.
Another example is electronic control systems on ignition in cars controlling fuel economy, pollution, etc.. There is so much more information that engineers can program into these things that they become breakthroughs in engines.

Costs must come down to at least parity by some combination of technology evolution, breakthrough or economies of scale. Merely saying we should do it to fix climate change isn’t going to be enough.

http://www.pelletheat.org/ 3/ institute/ 2008summerConf/ JoeJames.pdf

Here’s what I’ve found per kWh for new plant electricity (not from already built/paid for plants)…

Nuclear $0.14
Coal $0.09
Gas $0.10
Wind $0.07

These prices include Fuel, Transmission and Distribution, Firming and Integration, Operation and Maintenance, and Capital.

Nuclear price is nuclear industry estimates.
Coal price does not include cost of carbon sequestering or health impact.
Gas price does not include cost of carbon sequestering.

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php

Add in approximately $0.08 per kWh of compressed air storage to shift nighttime wind excess production to peak hour needs and “peak wind” is about the same as nuclear. Averaging in $0.07 “during peak” wind brings the price of wind well under nuclear.

More and more scientist are probably starting to think the political will is just not there and this might very well bes so….

Extreme and risky action the only way to tackle global warming, say scientists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2008/ sep/ 01/ climatechange.scienceofclimatechange2?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.