How Green are you?

[Stick]

My question has always been why the heck I should pay more for "green" electricity.
IMHO hydro power is pretty green, although obviously not as green as wind.
I understand the initial cost of setting up wind turbines needs to be covered but I suspect a wind farm wouldn't cost much more than a new gas turbine plant of equal output.
Understand this is coming from a guy who pays for deregulated coal fired power.
The local suppliers want to lock us in at $11/KW these days. OUCH!!

11 DOLLARS? Sure that isn't per megawatt? Our price here is less than 6 cents a kW.

Gas turbines are cheap to install, but they're really expensive to run. We have two here in MB that rarely run because of it. We've converted our coal plants to burn natural gas too, and they seldom run anymore because they're now too expensive. Coal was cheap but dirty.

Maintenance is the problem with the wind units. They need very frequent mtce and it's expensive.

[Tom Slick]

I used no VOC paint inside of my house. it costs more but has zero smell.
vinyl double pane windows

at work I am trading out highbay HID lighting for highbay florescent fixtures. they pay for themselves in a year and put out better light. the bulbs all get recycled.

we have a very good recycling program. everything goes into a single recycle bin and is picked up at the curb. the pick up oil for free too.

[LCHIEN]

I was in Norway last January - the price was 12 Kroner per liter which I worked out to around $8 per US gallon.

[Kristofor]

Gonna take 5 more years of $3+ per gallon gas and if it continues to drop as it is now we're are going to be sorry next time the prices go up and find we've gone and purchased even more gas guzzlers in the model year end clearances of 2006 when gas hit $2...

I don't think that if all else was equal people would buy a vehicle that gets lower gas mileage... The problem is they're not equal... Hybrid models of conventional cars have a payback time of several years even with $3+ gasoline. A Carolla gets much better gas mileage than a pickup, but it won't have 4WD for off-road driving, the ability to pull a boat/trailer, etc. Those are "occasional" use items for most people, but you can't rent a car to do those things. For folks that can afford 2 vehicles perhaps they can have specialized cars for daily commuting and utility or weekend fun...

Not many of us carpool or take public transporation.

Gas is cheap at $3 (now $2) and would still be cheap at $5, $10 or more for the amount of 'required' driving I need to do... How much is my time or your time worth? I'd pay $20-30/day to save half an hour of waiting/slow bus time, more if it also gave me the option to run errands and avoid having to hit specific time windows for a ride.

Where that cut-over point is will be different for different people, but I don't see a fast change coming at $3-$5. It may make folks gradually adjust at those prices, but I think it would have to hit much harder to see any type of rapid change, but that's just my two cents.

Kristofor.

[Stick]

Funny how there are more people in the poll who vote for "green" candidates than actually bother to use public transportation. . . .

Maybe they live where there is none, or live or work where public transportation doesn't go to.

[vaking]

A different "green" question.

Given we talk green here, let me ask a different question.
Wood is supposed to be renewable resource. It grows. Oil and other fossil fuels are not. From that perspective energy (which primarily comes from fossil fuels) is harder to replace than wood. I have seen some published data that says that planet Earth has approximately 40 years worth left of oil, 65 years of natural gas and 150 years of coal. With this information in mind - what do you think of such product as particle board? I believe it is made of wooden scrap at the expense of additional energy. Given that energy might be worth more than wood - does that make sense? Would it be smarter to burn the wooden scrap instead and try to recover some energy rather than spend more energy to produce a substandard quality product anyway.
What do you think?

[norwegianwoodworker]

I've always found it interesting that other countries can build nuclear plants much cheaper than the US and don't seem to have problems (Russia excluded). Why can't we adopt their policies and build more?

One reason US nuclear plants have been expensive to build is that each one applies a different design (custom build) - that prevents cost effectivness. If I remember right, France have built many nuclear power plants with the same design (standardization), cutting construction cost and maintenance cost as they don't need to custom order replacement parts etc - economics of scale.

The US is not ready for nuclear power, the cons still outweigh the pros for most people. But give us a few more years with rising fuel prices and high cost of cleaning pollution from coal- or oil-fired power plants - and even the "green" ones will agree to nuclear power....

Nuclear power is quite green, but the largest problem is how to deal with the waste. So far the US Government has not done a good job in this respect with many areas in the US contaminated with uranium, plutonium, strontium 90, cesium 137 etc etc from the Governments own processing and reprocessing plants. A site has been proposed for future storage of nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain, Nevada), but even if this gets approved, it will not be able to store all the waste we have today.

The sad part is that the US could get independent of oil if it wanted to, but there is a lack of political will, and the vision of independence doesn't help anybody stay or become president.

[norwegianwoodworker]

I was in Norway last January - the price was 12 Kroner per liter which I worked out to around $8 per US gallon.

Yep, that is right. My brother (in Norway) laughs at me when I complain about the gas reaching $3 a gallon here in CA....

[LCHIEN]

Given we talk green here, let me ask a different question.
Wood is supposed to be renewable resource. It grows. Oil and other fossil fuels are not. From that perspective energy (which primarily comes from fossil fuels) is harder to replace than wood. I have seen some published data that says that planet Earth has approximately 40 years worth left of oil, 65 years of natural gas and 150 years of coal. With this information in mind - what do you think of such product as particle board? I believe it is made of wooden scrap at the expense of additional energy. Given that energy might be worth more than wood - does that make sense? Would it be smarter to burn the wooden scrap instead and try to recover some energy rather than spend more energy to produce a substandard quality product anyway.
What do you think?

Wood does not flow or ship as easily as coal and or oil or gas which can be piped and trucked easily. not sure what your point is, we should burn wood instead of making particle board? As particle board is just glued wood particles, there is not much investment in energy in making particle board, I imagine.

As for published data, I find it all highly suspect... it's all just some predictions, not fact. Time = supply/usage rate. The fact is as oil gets more expensive, there's a lot more supply. There's lots of oil, just that it has varying degrees of difficulty to get it out of the ground. So 40 years is a W.A. guess, probably based upon then current prices and economic recovery at that price. Also any prediction of how long something will last depends upon the rate of usage. Will it go up or down? Who knows? Will conservation win out or will emerging economies such as China and india drive up the consumption? So how did your predictor base his supply and usage rate?