East of San Diego they have geo-thermal and solar thermal power system in use or being built, and many more are being planned.

Our local utility uses coal, but we are still being charged for price increases in natural gas as a separate item on our electric bills, because they can.

Every region is different, and we don’t have many large buildings here, so our solutions won’t work for California, but people need to start “doing for themselves”, rather than waiting for others.

I have a large gasoline generator for one reason, my Mother can’t survive in the heat and humidity if the power goes out for an extended period. That is a problem that is address if her house had solar panels. You should have to bet your life on the competence of large organizations.

Bryan, the main reason California uses less energy per person now is because so much of California’s heavy manufacturing base is gone, replaced by R&D centers and server farms for the most part. A server farm uses a lot of juice but still uses less electricity than an auto assembly plant. Sure, homes are now required to be insulated and have 12-SEER air conditioning units, but it’s not the utopia you seem to think. Solar and wind power provides less than 10% of California’s energy needs, and it seems unlikely that they’ll ever provide more than 30% of California’s energy needs.

Finally, regarding nuclear plants, the old-style nuclear plants are not going to be permitted by the DoE. The DoE has a Next Generation project going for some greatly improved designs and those are the only ones that will be permitted. Even the most conservative of the new designs are much simpler and safer than the old-style plants, which were derived from military designs that, like most military designs, were both over-engineered, overly expensive, and not originally designed for safety. When the rolling blackouts start because your local utility can no longer get oil for their antique oil-fired boilers, I suspect nuclear power will start looking a *lot* better to a lot of people…

And it’s not that Americans need to be living like third-world peasants: it’s that we will be living like them, unless we deal with some of these energy-related problems. As I said above, there’s a lot that individuals can do (if they own their own structure) that does not involve grossly compromising our standard of living. But if we don’t do those things, I’m convinced we will in fact suffer a precipitous decline in standard of living before our lives are over… and I say that as someone who is rapidly approaching age 60.

BTW, Badtux, if you think the Northeast and West are the only innovation centers in our economy, I suggest you glance at Austin, TX and the surrounding area. They don’t call it “Silicon Gulch” for nothing.

California uses a heck of a lot less energy today, per person, than it did in 1976, because the state got serious about the problem. The other 49 states need to get just as serious.

There is no one best solution to the problem. Maine can’t get the benefit from things that work wonderfully on the Gulf Coast. Hawaii can do things that none of the other states can possibly replicate. Each state has different strengths and weaknesses, but every state can do a much better job of cutting back on energy use, and diversifying energy production.

You described a new type of reactor, but the local utilities down here only want to build the old style reactors or coal-fired power plants. We have natural gas even in my dinky county, but the local Southern Company affiliate burns coal in its main regional generation plant, which has been rated as one of the worst coal-fired plants in the country for pollution.

You have different requirements than we do, which will require different solutions. We don’t have industry any more, the jobs were shipped to Asia.

But it’s not stand-alone residential that’s going to be the big problem. I just worked the numbers and if you put solar panels on every square inch of your roof and insulate the place to a fare-the-well and put in an 18+SEER A/C unit, around $60K of solar panels will do the job of keeping your single-level Florida ranch home cool, assuming you don’t have lots of days of gloomy weather in a row and/or are near an ocean where you can catch a sea breeze for evening and morning power. The problem comes in when you start talking about multi-family housing (apartments, high rises, etc.), dense office buildings, industrial areas, etc. Basically you need 1 square foot of roof area for every 2 square feet you need to heat, cool, and light, which means that my office complex could put s0lar panels on 100% of their roof and still only power the top two floors of the building. And once you consider our other electrical requirements — the server farm (not only do we need a lot of juice for the servers, the A/C is a bitch for it too), the lab facilities, the manufacturing facility — there’s no way we’re going to be able to maintain a modern high-tech environment with solar. There simply isn’t enough square feet of surface area on the building. And the same applies to every other technology building in the region. And manufacturing facilities… fughettabout it. No friggin’ way you’re going to even run a simple fabrication plant off of solar. Do you know just how much juice it takes to run a friggin metal basher to bash out metal computer cases? Or run a plastics injection machine? Or any of the other gizmos needed to manufacture stuff in other than a hand-crafted one-off manner? We’re talking a *lot* of juice… I mean, our sheet metal basher has multiple 3 phase 480v power drops into his shop. And then there’s the fab that has gigantic heaters to heat up and refine the silicone for solar panels. That’s not gonna happen with solar. There just isn’t sufficient energy density to do it, short of going out into the Central Valley and paving all that farmland with solar cells. Yeah right, and then what are we gonna eat?!

In other words, the economy goes to hell in a handbasket without some dense form of electrical generation that can keep the only innovation centers in our economy (the tech centers of the Northeast and West) up and going. The farm belt in the Midwest simply does not generate enough wealth to maintain a 1st world economy. If you want the entire economy to resemble that of, say, Brazil, fine and dandy. But that’s not what most Americans want for their nation, so you aren’t going to get what you want. Maintaining a high-tech economy with reasonable standards of living takes energy, and takes more energy than solar or wind can provide. Given that, we have a choice of coal or nuclear in the near term (since we’re running out of oil and gas). That’s just how it works, unless you can convince the majority of Americans that they need to be living like third world peasants, impoverished and half-starved. Good luck on THAT one!

Some of Houston’s power comes from STNP. I’ve seen the plant from a distance, and I admit the very sight of it scares me. It’s been in use far too many years to claim, “we’ll deal with the waste by the time we have to.” No, we won’t, or at least it seems highly improbable to me. And that recently approved surface-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas convinces me we haven’t dealt with it yet.

An oboist colleague who lives near Smith Point down by the bay, a gal with a real do-it-yourself bent, has installed solar panels on her tiny home, and they supply a fair amount of her power needs. We don’t have to live like cavemen to reduce our electricity consumption considerably.

yep. also, i’ve actually lived here for several years without a/c, and keep it set on about 82 when i do run it.

I view centralized power generation with the necessity of moving the power around to be part of the problem, not the solution. Solar is used in Florida specifically for air conditioning because it produces the highest power at the peak of the need, and peak demand is a major problem in sizing the electrical grid, so anything that reduces that peak has a major benefit. Photo-voltaic cells and solar water heating are two major ways of reducing demand on the system. Even in Britain, a solar roof can reduce demand on the grid to a quarter of what was required before the installation. Solar is having the same results in Germany. Newer, more efficient cells are being produced every year, and increased production is reducing the cost.

Once a successful LED for residential lighting is being produced at a reasonable cost, we can eliminate the CFLs, which are a stop-gap on the road away from incandescents.

When you live in a hurricane area, you either learn to cope with life off the grid for weeks, or you move, because the grid fails when trees fall on it. People still move here.