Rain and snow amounts are increasing as the atmosphere heats. We need to start working to put some of the additional perceptional underground rather than letting it flow to the oceans.

Wow! Most excellent investment opportunities. It looks like the James A FitzPatrick plant in Oswego, New York and Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, Vermont are going to be operating at a financial loss for the foreseeable future. Pilgrim nuclear reactor in Plymouth, Massachusetts may also be losing money. http://vtdigger.org/2013/05/05/groups-to-tell-nrc-that-entergys-financial-problems-are-a-nuclear-emergency/ Someone could probably pick these puppies up on the cheap and make a mint when they come in fresh and the milking starts. And the nuclear industry is reassuring us that the future glows bright. Natural gas won't stay cheap forever (they forgot to say that wind and solar will). "Making the financial case to build nuclear energy is a tough sell right now. After all, this is the era of cheap and abundant natural gas. But market conditions will assuredly evolve and necessitate fuel diversity, meaning that the investments made today in modern nuclear energy technologies will eventually bear fruit." And Southern Company's federal loan guarantee is only 16x that of Solyndra's. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2013/02/20/despite-difficulties-nuclear-energy-will-regain-strength/ Crack open those piggy banks. Get your very own cash cow on the cheap....

(Oops, forgot it was already May. I entirely missed February one year. ;o) "In 2 years, Kewaunee would have been a cash cow. Madness." Two years for Kewaunee to become a cash cow. Wonder why no one was willing to buy this sure money maker when Dominion put it on the market? Warren Buffet, for example, is sitting on $60 billion and looking for some good investments. You'd think Dominion would just give it to him and avoid the shutdown costs they are facing. Maybe work a deal to get a portion of future earnings. Why wouldn't Dominion just eat a couple year's loss themselves and then rake in the dough that you see coming. Two years of modest losses for a major corporation is nothing if it's going to lead to milking a cash cow. Madness somewhere....

A brand new company bringing a very innovative product to market breaking even this soon in its history? Celebrate. Think past the current quarter. Elon seems to know where he's going. The Edsel lost a couple billion for Ford....

"The only way to make nuclear power production fall off is to regulate it out of existence or ban it outright." You forgot "drive it bankrupt". A number of our current reactors are operating very close to the financial failure threshold. Dominion Power is currently closing its Kewaunee, Wisconsin plant because it is no longer profitable. They are laying off staff, having scheduled at final shut down in a month or so. Crystal River has announced that it will not come back on line. Repair costs would make the power too expensive to sell. Oyster Creek will close in 2010 due to unaffordable repair costs. They need a cooling tower rebuild. Talk is growing of San Onofre's two reactors not coming back on line. Cost is the issue. There was a recent news piece about another reactor being close to bankruptcy but I failed to note the name. Post Fukushima required safety upgrades are likely too expensive to continue operation. Cheap wind, cheap NG and getting cheap solar are making nuclear power production fall off.

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I think we need to be cautious about our predictions of how much natural gas we actually have and how much it will cost over time. Here's an article on how quickly production is falling off in most gas fields. And the annual cost to keep flow going at current levels - much higher than gas prices support. Unlike oil wells which can produce at a somewhat steady level for years, natural gas wells tend to put out a lot and then quickly drop off. In order to get more gas out of the field new wells have to be drilled or old wells re-fracked. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/01/1946781/faster-drilling-diminishing-returns-in-shale-plays-nationwide/

It's a bad time to consider a big site change, but Discus does not have this problem. At the minimum there should be a "whitelist"/"trusted user" list function. That would be a small software tweak.

Envia got a trial run with Chrysler, IIRC. They didn't do so well when rapidly charged. They probably need a liquid cooling system like the Volt uses. -- EOS, while not a vehicle application, is going into trials with the New York grid. They've been testing under the radar with some other systems. -- Big oil will not stop battery development. There is far too much money to be made from batteries going forward and too many companies/universities engaged in research and development. Oil doesn't have enough money to buy up and bury everything. It's time to let this tinfoil hat stuff fade away....

Monday, April 22, 2013 – "Georgia Power announced today it has entered into an agreement with EDP Renewables North America that will add wind energy to the company’s diverse energy portfolio. Through the contracts, Georgia Power will source 250 megawatts (MW) of cost-effective wind energy from EDP’s wind farms in southwest Oklahoma. Georgia Power will begin receiving the wind power Jan. 1, 2016. This agreement is expected to deliver cost savings to Georgia Power customers over the life of these contracts...." http://www.georgiapower.com/docs/about-us/news/wind-deal_041113.pdf "Alabama Power is now receiving energy from the Oklahoma-based Chisholm View Wind Project as part of a 2011 power purchase agreement. Kelley said these purchases are expected to displace higher-cost energy Alabama Power would otherwise produce using other resources." http://www.alabamapower.com/environment/news/chisholm-view-project-provides-low-cost-power.asp

Kit, median is one of three central tendency measurements. Average and mode are the others. Each has their appropriate use. There was a wind turbine in Scotland that malfunctioned and burned up. Then there was TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima.... Last year wind produced 3.5% of US electricity. This year the percentage will be higher. And the following year it will be higher again.

My numbers are from a DOE site. http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/ New wind farm capacity is now averaging over 40%. Median capacity for all wind farms is 38%. ’Stretch rotor’ machines like the GE 100-1.6MW and the V100-1.8MW and V112-3.0MW can often hit 50% capacity factor onshore. http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/27/wind-turbine-net-capacity-factor-50-the-new-normal/#7yxScOBdRkBViPAl.99 The Bloomberg video I linked is very much about investment/financing of energy. "The Summit is an invitation-only forum providing an unrivalled meeting place at the intersection of the energy markets, industry, finance and policy. Year on year industry stakeholders convene to network, to tackle the issues that will drive these sectors forward and to do business." Michael Liebreich is Chief Executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance http://about.bnef.com/summit/ One of us makes stuff up, Kit. People might be able to figure that out based on who posts links to data.

Kit posts - "“Adding thermal stress in the case of nuclear and fossil fuel plants compounds the problem. ” There is thermal stress for wind and solar as well." Right. Those boilers and steam pipes sure stress solar panels and wind turbines, don't they Kit? --- Kit posts - "“wind cheaper than a simple turbine ” So what? It is not cheaper than steam turbines which is how 70% of the power is produced in the US." It is important to compare like to like, Kit. Otherwise your argument has no value. The median cost of new wind is $0.06/kWh. The median cost of new coal and nuclear are over $0.10/kWh. --- From the Bloomberg New Energy Financial annual Summit http://bloom.bg/17gA7ia --

Kit posts - "“Wind does not have a high maintenance cost “ Sure it does. BS Bob has belief system build on ignorance and wishful thinking." Let's check the data.... Fixed maintenance costs - median $/kW Onshore wind $10.95 Combined cycle NG $13.71 Nuclear $85.66 Scrubbed coal $27.50 A range of $11 to $86 dollars with wind being the least expensive. Even if we adjust the numbers for output capacity wind is lower than coal and, especially, nuclear. -- Variable maintenance costs - median $/MWh Onshore wind $6.45 Combined cycle NG $2.86 Nuclear $0.49 Scrubbed coal $3.70 Onshore wind is the highest of the four in variable maintenance costs. About $0.006/kWh which hardly rises to the level of expensive. Especially when one considers it has zero fuel costs.

"I think wind and solar are great in the correct location. However, they are very high capital cost, high maintenance cost, and very, very unreliable. As a result they do not make very much electricity." Solar is uniquely low in terms of maintenance. Almost none. In most cases the panels don't even need cleaning if installed on an angle. Wind does not have a high maintenance cost until about the time the turbines are worn out. That's somewhere in the 30 year range and likely longer with new turbine tech, especially those without gear trains. Of course anything with moving parts tends to wear out. Adding thermal stress in the case of nuclear and fossil fuel plants compounds the problem. Reliability is quite high for both solar and wind. (Perhaps you were thinking about variability?) Overnight capital cost for onshore wind is 2x to 3x that of gas turbines. But the lack of fuel costs make wind cheaper than a simple turbine. Then with the low capacity of gas peakers the lack of sufficient operational hours over which to spread capex and financial costs makes their power quite expensive. Natural gas run in a combined cycle plant and operated at high capacity is slightly cheaper than wind, but unlikely to stay cheaper. The overnight cost of NGCC is about 2x of onshore wind and the overnight cost of wind is headed downward. Wind is expected to get cheaper, gas prices will almost certainly rise. Global investments in fossil fuel plants are dropping while investments in renewable are rising. While the total amount of fossil fuels continues to rise, the rate of increase is slowing. Bloomberg Energy is predicting global fossil fuel use peak by 2030.

"Not true, The grid does just fine." Right. "What is true is that we can build wind and solar fast enough and them keep them working so that wind and solar would over load the capacity of the grid." We'll simply do what we do right now with fossil fuel generation. When we don't need it all we'll turn some off. We have natural gas plants that run only a few hours a year. During parts of the year we turn some coal plants off for months. At this point in time it's cheaper to build more wind generation than we need in low demand/high wind hours than to build storage. Cheap storage would change that math. Unless storage gets very cheap we'll likely continue to overbuild.

2025 Well before 2020 wind should be about 3c/kWh and PV solar about 5c/kWh (or less). It's likely we'll have inexpensive storage as well long before 2020. How many of these things does one have to build before economies of scale kick in? It's about 500,000 for EVs. And if new nuclear (very optimistically) could be brought to market for 11c/kWh how exactly would this stuff compete? How does building little reactors, fighting community resistance, and furnishing technicians/security for many small sites cost out to be competitive? Sorry. Fails the smell test....

AcA - "Bob, one more thing, regarding your last sentence, I do not think your feeling is based in reality...." I did not say that electricity would be less expensive immediately. There will be a cost in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. New infrastructure to be built. But consider.... When we build a coal or nuclear plant and pay it off over 20 years we still have to fuel the plant. Fuel and maintenance for a paid off nuclear plant can run as high as the cost of electricity from a brand new wind turbine. When we install a wind turbine or solar array we pay them off and then enjoy a decade or more of fuel-free electricity from wind and decades of fuel-free electricity from solar panels. Our first wind turbines operated about 30 years before maintenance costs caused them to be replaced. Newer technology should operate longer. Our oldest solar panels have been operating for 40 years and are still producing at roughly 80% of their original output level. Solar panels lose about 0.5% output per year. No one has ever observed a "solar cliff". And there is no limit on how much wind, solar and other renewable capacity we install. There will never be a fuel shortage.

SATire - " It will be pure electrical in the cities (with the new batteries in development) and pure oil on the Autobahn, with max 4 l/100 km (min. ~60 US mpg). Maybe hybrid can come close to that in the future, but hybrid is considered just a marketing joke here to sell more silly SUVs in Californian cities." I don't understand your thinking here. Are there a lot of German drivers who drive long distances most days on the Autobahn? Or is it more the case that lots of people drive modest distances on normal days and long distances occasionally?

"Tell it not to." Thanks. I whipped it into shape.

So, just to be clear. If we click on the link in this sentence from the above article - "I've set up the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, that together with blog and daily graphs forms the holy Arctic Trinity." - our stuff is encrypted?

(I sure wish we could edit comments.) The UK probably should turn to offshore wind in a big way. Don't bother so much with the onshore land use battles but go out where the wind is likely better and resistance lower. That's likely the answer for Japan and other European countries. It's certainly the answer for the east coast of the US. Our offshore potential is much higher than onshore. Offshore winds are generally more regular and tend to produce more during daylight hours.

crandle/James - Wind turbines use only a small portion of wind farms for their tower foundation, service buildings, etc. Often the service roads are the shared roads that the farm uses. A wind farm may leave 98%+ of its space available for 'original use' purposes - agriculture/grazing/wildlife. Because of behind-turbine turbulence turbines generally are widely spaced. In an area in which the direction of the wind is mostly from only one direction you may see a line of turbines placed close together, perpendicularly to the wind direction. But behind them there will generally be a large open space. I think the formula is something like a space of 10x the blade rotation width. Here's an example... http://www.thewindpower.net/windfarm_skyview_en_167.php (Some great images on that site. Sky views of wind farms around the world.)

crandles - I still don't see how our quality of life will suffer. Travel/transportation. EVs will almost certainly become as cheap or cheaper than ICEVs. And they are already significantly less expensive to operate. 13,000 annual miles x 0.3 kWh/mile x $0.12/kWh = $468 to charge an EV. 13,000 annual miles / 50 MPG x $3.50/gallon = $910 to fuel an efficient ICEV. Add in significantly higher maintenance costs. Our houses are becoming more energy efficient, and that makes them more comfortable. Our appliances, TVs, computers, light bulbs, etc. are becoming more efficient. That also saves us money. Food is likely to go up some in cost, especially meat. That may offset the savings from transportation and housing but it doesn't mean a standard of living decrease. Medical care is likely to become more effective and less expensive. Our air and water are likely to become cleaner. The materials needed for people in less developed countries are available, energy is abundant, labor waits for jobs. The people low on the ladder can have better homes, clean electricity and more/better food. Where is this lower standard of living coming from? -- I've left off the pain and cost that's likely to be caused by extreme weather/climate change. That will hit us whether we use fossil fuels or renewables. Although with renewables we can limit the long term pain.

SATire - the US is lagging Europe, and now China. Largely, I think, because we have such a large number of climate change deniers. But we're out of the game. We just made our wind subsidy program more reasonable. Wind farms no longer need to be completed in the subsidy year but just need to have made adequate progress toward completion. Solar installation prices are falling and the installation industry is maturing. Look for us to install a lot of solar this upcoming year and more the next. We're also increasing our geothermal capacity and are about to stick our first wind turbine into the ocean. I think we're in the lead in terms of public places to charge EVs. The US is really good at doing things on a large scale once it gets going. What was that thing that Churchill said - something about the US always doing the right thing. After they had tried all the wrong things.