Reader J.Pickens replied to yesteday's post on Are Hybrids Really Green?, with some followup items for debate. I think I shall indulge him!
... the comment that solar cells being "just near the point of breakeven" has been claimed for at least the last thirty years. I'm sorry, but photovoltaic electric power generation just isn't the answer. I personally was a member of a team which produced the first thin film photovoltaic cells able to get greater than 10% energy conversion in large area cells. This was back in the mid '80's, and the cells haven't gotten much better since then. Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics are a bitch. Even if we were able to use 20% efficiency cells, and plaster them over all the available land in the sunny southwest, we still wouldn't produce as much electricity as the current nuclear power plants in the US. In addition, the energy used to produce, mount, and maintain the cells would not reach breakeven for many years, so you'd actually CONSUME all that power BEFORE you got any of it back.
And the "peak oil" comment is laughable. There are many times the amount of hydrocarbon fuels available in the ground in the US than has already been consumed. It is a matter of political will and cost per barrel to get at them.
Now, maybe we can talk about other "Green" pseudoenvironmentalist disasters, like the need for thousands of daily round trips by diesel fueled trucks to remove municipal garbage from population centers like New York City and deliver the refuse to places like Ohio and West Virginia. If this refuse were burned in incinerators to produce electricity, you would offset more in energy use in one day than all the windmill generators in operation in the US produce in one year.
My comment on solar panels was not meant to imply that solar panels would be a good choice for powering cars, or for massive implementation to power the US grid. As you pointed out, the surface area required would be huge. I do however think that solar cells on a small scale basis may be viable, for example reducing (or eliminating depending on where you live) a home's energy bill by using cells on the roof.
The point was that the break even point in terms of energy required to produce a cell, vs the energy generated by that cell over its lifetime has just recently been met. In essence, the first generations of a new technology are ALWAYS inefficient, and more expensive than what they replace - but that doesn't mean they aren't worth pursuing. This went hand in hand with the horse argument, but I can think of lots of other examples, most of which have nothing to do with being green. IE The first electric lights probably cost more (and provided worse light) than the oil lamps or gas lights they replaced, but the were still the wave of the future.
Your peak oil response is somewhat weak I think. Firstly, nobody knows how much oil is really out there. Clearly there is more oil out there, and areas that we haven't tapped yet like the Alaskan preserve, but there is good reason to think that the mideast (and other) supplies are declining, and they have good reason to over-estimate over there. But, for the sake of argument assume there is a significant amount (centuries) of oil out there- you already gave the problem in your own response. Of course it is a matter of will power and cost per barrel. The point is that that cost per barrel might be more expensive than switching to a new source energy (not even counting the enviromental effects of burning petrol). Already we are at the point in terms of traditional oil costs where technologies like oil shale extraction, and conversion from coal to oil are starting to pick up momentum. It doesn't need to go much higher before battery power (with the ultimate source being solar, nuclear, hydrogen, etc) becoming a viable alterative.
As for burning refuse - it is an interesting idea. Certainly there would be savings in terms of transporting the refuse, and you would also get some land reclaimation out of it; in addition to the energy created by the burn - but the enviromental impact might be huge. From a clean perspective burning refuse I would imagine is somewhere on par with burning coal, and even worse perhaps, because you would be burning plastics, dyes, chemicals of all sorts, vaporizing mercury in the air, etc. You could do some sorting to reduce this, but that sorting and seperating (particularly if you tried to break down items into smaller components to get the maximum extraction) would be a logistic nightmare, and significantly reduce the cost effectiveness.
My personal thought, unless some major breakthrough like cold fusion or zero point energy comes around, is that nuclear is the only viable option long term. New generation pebble reactors significantly reduce the danger of nuclear power, and nothing else is scaleable to the level of meeting current world demand long term, plus the additional load caused by adding billions of Chineese and Indians as power consumers. Hydro power is good, but it is only usable in a localized area, solar (at current and near term efficiencies) takes too much surface area, wind also takes a lot of surface area - and may do more ecological damage than good.
update 7/12/06 4:37 pm : CWilliams asked for some detail regarding the ecological impacts of Wind Power. I would suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power as a good source. In the “Arguments of Opponents” section, it lists out several problems with wind power. Primarily the ecological impacts of wind power deal with destruction of wildlife habitats due to the area required, and injury (often death) of birds, bats, and other flying animals near the turbines. In Scandanavia, the enviromentalists often protest AGAINST wind power...
update 7/13/06 2:14pm Part III of Are Hybrids Really Green