With all the technology we have in the 21st century why do we still have to pay for energy and electricity?

Question

Solar power has been around for 50 years yet it's not used widespread. Why is that?

sorry i meant to ask this in another category. oops

Answer 1

Capitalism. They can't figure out how to put a meter on the sun and privatize it.

Answer 2

It goes something like this...I understand that many years ago, not once but more often then not, that they had created an engine that runs on water. I believe that that can be possible because the only two fuels used to raise a rocket out of our atmosphere is Hydrogen and Oxygen...the same two parts that make up water, i.e., H2O. Whether a car powered by water would replace the fuel burning, pollution pumping machine is highly unlikely...why, there's so much money in oil! To many high players that do not want the game to change...the stakes are too high.

At this point, the same goes with electricity. It's something that everyone needs, much like gas. Do we have panels that can generate a sufficient amount of power to run a house? Probably not one...but a multitude; at least not with a sufficient amout of them. The other side of the coin is that these panels generate DC power. For it to work, you would have to have a inverter that changes the DC voltage to 120 Vac at 60 Hz. There are power inverters that do that job so that's really not an issue. The issue comes to be that if this was done in the home, then there would need to be a bank of batteries that would carry the required energy and power for the night. Typically the batteries are charged as the inverter converts the power for the home.

If this was done at the hydro level, they would have to build local stations at each of the neighbourhoods to be able to generate the power needed to run 100+ houses...very impractical with the level of technology we have with respect to solar power and solar panels.

The technology is growing stronger by the day but it will still require a lot more time before we get to the point where power companies can supply solar power. At that point you would still have to pay for your electricty because someone will have to maintain the system that powers your home. In the end, unless you go on your own and build your own system in-house, and remember, that requires inverters and a bank of batteries that you will need to maintain, along with the solar panels...there will always be a cost.

Answer 3

The only way energy would be free would be to live in a world that has an overabundance of it. And we don't live in that world. Maybe, with fusion, it might become possible, except you still have to have the infrastructure in place to transfer the energy. I'm presuming we won't have little fusion generators on the back of our cars that we can fuel with coffee grounds.

As for cars running off water, I haven't had a chemistry class for a quarter century, but this doesn't work. You can look at the two sides of the equation and see that it doesn't work.

2 H2O <> 2 H2 + 1 O2

Now, we know if you mix hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of a flame, you get water and a lot of energy. That's what puts the Space Shuttle in orbit (at least, from the external tank and engines). Going the other way, you have to add energy to water in order to get it to split into hydrogen and oxygen. For this to work in an engine, you would have to use less energy for splitting the water than what you get from burning the resulting hydrogen and oxygen. And thermodynamics indicates that just isn't so. You will lose energy somewhere, due to entropy.

Answer 4

Because for you to have electricity, someone has to build power plants, and the distributions systems. If you were an electrician working on line maintenance, would you be willing to work for free?

As for solar power, it simply costs more per kilowatt than other sources. Besides, I once read that in order to supply all of the power to run Sacramento, you would have to cover the entire state of Montana with solor panels. That doesn't sound very practical.

There just aren't any utopian solutions out there. And blaming the power companies is not going to change the facts.

Answer 5

Because the current solar technology costs more per kilowatt hour than petroleum based methods.

Now you can buy a computer with thousands of times more power than you could only ten years ago, and for a fraction of the cost. This is because the technology was both desirable and producible in marketable amounts.

Solar energy seems cheap but the up front costs are astronomical.

Answer 6

Well Dr's sexiest... let me 'splain it for you. I doubt if you'll understand it, but I'll try anyway. In a word the reason is MONEY!!

1. It costs lots of money to produce solar cells.
2. It costs money to install solar cells
3. Solar cells produce direct current (DC)
4. Direct current must be transformed to Alternating Current (AC) before it can be loaded onto the power grid. It costs money to convert DC to AC.
5. It costs money to operate and maintain EVERY power producing system... every power plant, every sub station, every transformer.

Now how about wind power? Just ditto 1 through 5 for the same reasons.

How about nuclear power plants? Again ditto 1 through 5 and add the expense of producing fuel rods, and disposing of them after they are spent... an extremely expensive proposition.

If you think producing electricity is cheap or free, just because solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity... you are seriously retarded.

Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is still cheaper to produce electricity by burning fossil fuels such as coal of oil.

Answer 7

People are money hungry. They would rather charge big money for something than try to make it better for consumers and cheaper. That's what I think aleast. My power bill in my area has went up 3 times as high as last year and we only have one company to chose from.

Answer 8

oil companys greedyness and our un ability for us to convince the mass population and the corperate figures that it is bad money keeps everyone in line its the one thing everyone needs with out it the damand for big houses nice cars would be so big that the industry couldnt keep up so that is essinitally why money exists to keep people in line.

Answer 9

The oil companies wouldn't benefit from it...but what does this have to do with Family & Relationships?

Answer 10

think about the people who work to make that electricity we still have ALOT of problems i even understand the answer to this question and i still amd younger than 13yrs old