I'm still overtaxed at work, so I'm only partially plugged in here, but
thought I'd pass on a question that's been buzzing through my head during my
morning commute for the last couple of days.
Being a commercial lawyer in Houston over the last 15 years, I've naturally
had a lot of involvement with the energy industry. As much as I think that
eco-doomers overhype both the rate at which we are depleting natural
hydrocarbon reserves and the impact of fossil fuel use on the environment,
there is no question that natural hydrocarbons are a limited resource and
that they have some negative impact on the environment and the quality of
human life. In the long run, fossil fuels are a dead end.
Driving along the freeway on many of these 106 degree (that's 50, for you
progressives), cloudless days, I can't help but be struck by the obvious
direction we should be going, which is solar energy in the most direct
fashion. So how are we doing? Can someone point me to good resources to
quickly get up to speed on the state of the art in direct photovoltaic
technology and the rate of progress in that field? How close are we to
practical industrial-scale photovoltaics?
The "independent power" industry that is one of my main clienteles is moving
rapidly to dismantle the old, lumbering institutional machinery of regulated
monopoly electric utilities and, in the process, is making the power market a
fluid and flexible transmission system for inputs from lots of different
generating technologies at a broad range of scales. It strikes me that we
might see a beneficial "line crossing" of two trends soon: The rebuilding of
our power grid in a more rational fashion and the coming of new generating
technologies that can be plugged into that grid. I know what the line is
like on the business front, but what's the line really like on the technology
front?
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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