This might be a stupid question and I haven’t really thought of all the potential ramifications but that’ why I bring it here, to some of the most brilliant minds of the internet!
Why not just pass a law that says every new personal auto manufactured starting in 2010 must be a hybrid?
Why not just pass a law that says every new home/building built starting in 2010 must have solar panels attached that supply (some portion - 50%?) of that building’s power?
Yes, it would seem too expensive at first but overall it would be cheaper in the longrun right? I know millions would complain but I think this might be one of the few things that should be “forced” on people for the good of the future. Whether climate change is good, bad or neutral, hogging up all of our non-renewable resources is obviously bad.
It’s still quite costly. Improving every day, but it would still drive the cost of a home or car out of reach for a lot of people.
Just as an example, in this article Toronto Star the cost of a solar powered hot water system is $5,000 to $6,000 Canadian. That’s just for hot water, not even accounting for electricity.
Are you asking “why don’t we regulate more for energy efficiency” in general or specifically “why don’t we legislate these particular regulations about hybrids and solar panels”?
In any case, you answered your own question with your comment about millions of people complaining. Such rigorous energy-efficiency regulation is not going to be mandated by law because it would be unpopular in the short term.
We may see some more restricted regulatory attempts such as modest increases in CAFE standards coming soon, but we’re not likely to see any attempts made at large-scale regulation of the sort you’re suggesting.
(One point about one of your specific proposals: AFAICT, a requirement that a solar photovoltaic system should cover half of a building’s electricity needs would be on the high side. A typical residential p-v system saves 2000–4000 kWh of electricity in an average year, whereas annual residential electricity use for a family of four can be three or four times that. That’s not to say that the savings from a p-v system wouldn’t still be a good thing. But with p-v installation costs at dozens of thousands of dollars, it would take a long time to recover the up-front costs in long-term savings. In preview: and what Lionel said, too.)
By mandating this, all you would do is ensure that Americans will start buying foreign cars almost exclusively (unless you mandate that any new car sold in the U.S. must be hybrids) or that the used car market will be a lot more vibrant. By making new cars more expensive you keep people in their old cars (which generally have lower gas mileage and/or pollute more than newer cars) and you shift people’s car purchases towards old cars. Furthermore, what do you hope to accomplish by mandating that all new cars must be hybrids? Most hybrids aren’t really all that much better in gas mileage than a lot of conventional cars. Furthermore, there are some who contend hybrids are actually worse for the environment when you consider the manufacturing processes that it takes to make them, their shorter life, and the disposal issues of such cars.
On the solar panel issue, again you will simply push people to buy older homes. These homes are more energy inefficient than new homes, so you’d really be doing more to hurt the environment than help it in this case.
Rather than invent new laws to hassle people, why not strike down existing hasslements (hasslations?) to encourage more nuclear power? Force Yucca Mountain through, expand development of new reactors, keep an eye on fusion development, have nuisance lawsuits thrown out?
It always bugged me that the message of Who Killed the Electric Car? was that the EV1 could save America with no regard as to where all this additional electricity was supposed to come from.
Not every home being built is going to be a good candidate for solar panels, even if it was economical in a broad sense. But even more to the point, requiring every new home to have solar panels is probably one of the least efficient ways to generate clean energy. Just like a big natural gas power plant is more economical than every home running a small generator, a large scale wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, or other green energy would be a better solution than the solar panels on individual homes. There is a third cost. you can hok up every house to solar panels, but you still have to have all sorts of energy producing capcacity available for when the sun don’t shine. Without a full studyof it, i would guess that that generation would be dirtier as they would need to start up and shut off more quickly.
What if the house is on the north side of a mountain which gets little sun, perhaps it has enough wind to produce power, or even small scale hydro power or geothermal, would those work also. What about if none of those options are practical, should someone be prevented from building there?
If you want more fuel efficient cars to be popular, you have to simplify your attack:
Any vehicle that gets >50 MPG AND is ultra-low emissions or equivalent is sales tax and registration fee FREE. Don’t worry about HOW it gets >50 MPG, just draw that line in the sand. The market will respond to the demand, since you will have dropped the price of those vehicles by more than 10%. This would cover mini-Euro style city cars, motorcycles with emissions systems, hybrids, etc.
As a second bit, make those same vehicles qualified for the accelerated depreciation schedules for tax write-offs that the big SUVs get.
When you force the market to hybrids, you might destroy the chances of something else emerging. Just tell people that they will be rewarded for buying high MPG cars (in addition to the drop in their personal gas expenditures) and see where the market takes them.
Sounds pretty dubious to me. The one study that I heard about was completely bogus. They used cost per vehicle as a measure of environmental damage…and they threw in all the R&D costs for the Prius into the cost per vehicle, not factoring in the use of this technology in other cars, and worse yet, they just divided by the number of Prius’s that had been sold thus far at that time…not the full run for the model.) Here is one article on the study…and here is a blog post giving Toyota’s response. See here for a further critique.
The general rule of thumb for cars is that 20% of the environmental cost is in the manufacture and 80% in the use. I think the NiMH batteries pose less of a disposal issue than lead acid batteries, plus there are already processes in place to deal with them. And, I don’t think hybrids necessarily have any shorter life on average than any other car.
[On the larger issue though, I agree with Algher. Inflexible mandates are not as good as flexible incentives that put the goals first without advantaging one particular technology to meet that goal.]
That seems rather expensive, although the article does say it is for water heating.
Probably an ethylene glycol loop that won’t freeze heating water in the collector in turn heating an isolated tank of potable water. It would be much less expensive to directly heat potable water when the temperature is above freezing using convection to move the water into a tank above the collector, but that is probably too much maintenance for the average user, and inconvenient. From my few engineering classes on the subject, heating water is the least expensive use of solar energy.
Why would you want to do this?
To save fossil fuels? We are not even close to running out.
To fight global warming? Maybe, but read the abundance of post on this issue before jumping the gun.
To make people feel better and make them think they are doing something really beneficial - to uphold the illusion.
No it sounds pretty accurate. The standard engine/car has been around very long and manufacturing plants are great at reducing the waste and environmental impact. Hybrids are still ‘new’ and auto manufacturers are still learning the best way to make them with the least environmental impact. Over time these cars/SUV’s should get ‘greener’, but that does not mean they are there now.
As I noted, most of the environmental impact of a car is in its use, not its manufacture. And, a hybrid is still mainly just a regular car…except it has a particularly small engine and then also a motor / generator and NiMH batteries. And, as I noted, the one study quoted made clearly ridiculous assumptions to arrive at their result.
The most recent solar arrays send to the ISS produce 66 kW and weigh in at 15, 824 kg. (basically 4W/kg). To scale that to 10 MW would require 2.5 million kg costing $25 billion to launch ($10,000/kg). But wait! You want to take advantage of perpetual light so you need to get the array up to GEO not LEO so chances are the cost will at least double.
Regardless, this isn’t even counting the system’s manufacturing costs and building of the base station building. The payback period makes it likely you’ll breakeven about the same time as the completion of the space elevator
[QUOTE=Grey]
You want to take advantage of perpetual light so you need to get the array up to GEO not LEO so chances are the cost will at least double.
[QUOTE]
IANA astronomer but I don’t think that putting a satellite up in geosynchronous orbit would give it perpetual light. The satellite tracks over the same spot on Earth so when it is dark on Earth, it is dark for the satellite.
Nope your right. Since the satellite needs to be over a recieving station that removes one of the few advantages they have over ground based solar systems.
