Idiocracy. It’s all just a move to protect vested interests in fossil fuels.
Tesla has the right idea with solar roofs but we need better options than shingles or giant panels mounted. Wind gen is amazingly good if you have a consistent supply.
When I was sailing, the sun and wind would recharge my batteries during the day. At night, wind would keep the batteries charging so I could run lights, laptops, VHF, and NMea2000 equipment.
The future isn’t this. Banning renewable energy is like banning breathing.
EDIT
Coming back after a walk, I can't stop thinking about this. When I worked at an energy tech company, me and a couple data scientists actually worked out that if, theoretically you had solar panels capable of capturing sun energy with 99% efficiency - you could power all of humanity on 1 day's worth of sunlight. (granted you had the storage capacity, we did fun things like "You saved 254,143 trees by reducing your water use" kind of stuff).
The wind farms off the coasts in the EU countries are producing massive amounts of energy at fractions of the cost. Yes, the engineering is hard. Yes, the big tall windmills are ugly (paint them, put LED lights on them, who cares). You don't need the giant big ones, a field of smaller ones works too at the same altitude (key part... wind is faster at altitude). Make a wind mill kite and send it up. There's so much energy around us. We just need to find a way to trap those electrons.
At least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho cared about things enough to make things better for his people, hired the smartest person he knew and genuinely tried to fix things.
To be fair there is a considerable amount of power used in creating products that isn't directly accounted for by someones home energy needs. And that number gets a good bit bigger if we want those production processes to be clean themselves. The energy we pay for directly through electricity and fuel is only a part of our energy consumption pie.
It's not really good for those vested interests. If the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels, they'll be stuck, in a market with shrinking growth. Instead they could invest in a different, growth market. If they get mixed signals from the US govt, they risk making poor strategic decisions
It may be short term good for them but long term fairly idiotic (for them and the US).
Long term isn't even that far away. Much of the developing world will be happy to adopt renewables and battery storage, just as they've been happy to adopt mobile networks over fixed lines. It's a leapfrog moment and the US is not supplying the materials nor participating in the improvements gained from it.
The current moment is a bit like seeing the internet take off and investing in print. Sure it’ll be around still in some form, but it’s the wrong time to double down.
And the US's economic opponents are taking advantage of the moment. China is spending massively on solar production and deployment, and selling their panels to other countries. The US will be the loser here:
1. More expensive power from non-renewables. Especially as the global consumption of fossil fuels decline (so domestic costs will likely rise). This will become a drag on the US economy.
2. Not participating in the production and sale of solar panels to other nations.
Trump decries the US trade deficit while simultaneously discouraging one massive upcoming market that the US could become a net exporter in.
He's doing the exact opposite of making America great again. If there was ever a time for other countries to leap frog us and get ahead, it's now. Just don't touch our AI bubble.
Tesla has the right idea with solar roofs but we need better options than shingles or giant panels mounted. Wind gen is amazingly good if you have a consistent supply.
When I was sailing, the sun and wind would recharge my batteries during the day. At night, wind would keep the batteries charging so I could run lights, laptops, VHF, and NMea2000 equipment.
The future isn’t this. Banning renewable energy is like banning breathing.
EDIT
Coming back after a walk, I can't stop thinking about this. When I worked at an energy tech company, me and a couple data scientists actually worked out that if, theoretically you had solar panels capable of capturing sun energy with 99% efficiency - you could power all of humanity on 1 day's worth of sunlight. (granted you had the storage capacity, we did fun things like "You saved 254,143 trees by reducing your water use" kind of stuff).
The wind farms off the coasts in the EU countries are producing massive amounts of energy at fractions of the cost. Yes, the engineering is hard. Yes, the big tall windmills are ugly (paint them, put LED lights on them, who cares). You don't need the giant big ones, a field of smaller ones works too at the same altitude (key part... wind is faster at altitude). Make a wind mill kite and send it up. There's so much energy around us. We just need to find a way to trap those electrons.