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Originally Posted by FL 4Motion
Increasing energy efficiency is a win win since it also saves you $$. 
Fusion is much more efficient than fission but hasn’t been scalable up beyond the lab yet, we really need to push that since the waste is so much vastly reduced. Iirc, South Korea is leading the world in nuclear fusion development which is bs, USA should be working way harder on this.
Longer term a hydrogen powered economy is the real sustainable solution that won’t handicap amount of power production but again, we need to figure out how to produce hydrogen on a large scale w/o still using fossil fuels.
Solar is definitely a great addition in certain areas and like hotrodz said, eventually in the south west and Florida, every roof should have it. We also need technological breakthroughs regarding solar panel efficiency as well.
Basically we just have engineering and tech barriers which I’m bullish our country can overcome within the next decade or two.
In the meantime, we have plenty of oil and especially natural gas to bridge the gap without resorting to a omg, the sky is falling mentality, looking at you lefties.  |
Don't hold your breath on fusion. It won't happened in our life time. Take too much energy to produce it. You put more in then what you get out. My reading on it. They say 2025, then turn around and then say 2030, then 2035.
Think hydrogen is closer. It's the prefect fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen, and you get water for the by product. The problem now is that it still takes more energy to produce it. They are working on hydrogen generators to produce it cheap enough. The one draw back is when it burns. You can't see the flame. You could walk into it and not know it until you feel the heat and burn. We used it at the power plant to cool the generators. Talk about safety precautions.
Solar, you HAVE to keep the panels clean. If they are in a dusty area. You will have maintenance people that their only job is to keep the panels clean. Anything on the panels WILL cut down their output a lot.