Oh look, Peak oil turns out to be bullshit

[leicsmac]

Nope, feel free to enlighten us.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

 

It's a theoretical method of measuring how advanced a civilisation is in terms of the amount of energy it can gather from the surrounding environment, ranging from Type 0 to Type IV. It's speculative, but interesting.

 

Given humans aren't even close the transition from Type 0 to Type I yet we've got a long way to go, and it's likely the transition will result in trouble as the limits of energy production and consumption will be pushed. But utilising fusion may get us close, and harnessing matter/antimatter annihilation energy will get us across, as it is the most 'pure' method of energy production - all of the mass of both matter and antimatter is turned into pure energy.

[MooseBreath]

In the meantime we really must be looking at harnessing all the free energy around us, how many people have investigated if their house is suitable for free solar panels? A number of companies offer this, it is a no brainer, free energy 0 cost. Why haven't the government stipulated that all new housing should have solar panels built into the design as standard and be as energy efficient as possible? .

Government controls the building regs which set increasingly challenging standards on energy efficiency. Any compliant new build these days will be pretty damn efficient. But of course there is a balance to be found between increasing energy efficiency in homes and providing affordable housing. Developers won't build houses that no-one can afford to buy, so if you set standards too high then you end up with a housing shortage and hundreds of thousands of construction workers in the dole queue. It's not a one-dimensional issue.

As for solar power itself, it is not the be all and end all. It carries a lot of embodied energy and has high startup and maintenance costs. For individual houses it is some way down the list of best-value energy efficiency improvements. For the country to go all in on solar power now would be like buying an iPhone 5 for £500 today when the much improved iPhone 6 is almost certainly coming out next week and will only cost £200. We'd be totally screwed if we had burdened ourselves with the cost of maintaining a huge solar power stock while competing countries were lapping up nuclear fusion.

[The Doctor]

Thank god.

 

Can't imagine getting the train and seeing miles and miles of that monstrosity through the beautiful countryside.

 

Yeah they're a bit of an eye-sore, but as far as power-supplies go they could be really useful, Get it running at a decent level of efficiency and we'd need a plot the size of france to power the entire world for a year with just them. Or in other words - let's flatten France and coat it in solar panels.

 

Combination of fusion and renewables is the way forward. Fusion to power large-scale infrastructure, renewables for smaller-scale projects and personal use depending on preference. But as I said in my last post, I reckon we're going to have to wait until the big energy companies are ready for the change before it actually happens, as they probably control the patents on most renewable tech.

 

Of course that's just a prelude to the next step - harnessing matter/anti-matter annihilation energy anyone? Heard of the Kardashev Scale? 

 

Could do with actually cracking Fusion first. Still, Fission is a decent substitute until that's sorted.

[Rincewind]

Something needs to be done and we cannot always be doing what is 'right' if we are to maintain our species. We have to fight to survive. It won't matter to me in 50 years I just hope my rotting corpse can help in some way in the future.