Geothermal,solar,and wind tech. obviously save money?

Question

and resourses,but are too expensive right now to impliment for the average homeowner.Is science studing ways to make mass marketing of these feasable?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/19/ccview19.xml

Found this about solar.

Answer 1

One of these, wind energy is competitive economically with electricity generated by fossil fuels.

The cost of production of electricity by wind energy is approximately 4 cents per kilowatt hour. This is very little more than the cost of producrion of electricity by the use of coal and it is much cleaner and safer.

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Answer 2

Let me show you some information that I have based on 10 cents per kWh. Most areas are more then that. It is as well based on a 6.5% inflation rate for fuel cost. You can ad in a 3.5% increase in the cost of living to it if you like as well. Remember there is sales tax on every kWh you buy from the electric Co of 8% to 11% on every dollar.

A home owner paying a $200 a month electricity bill. Could save as much as $30,000 and as much as $54,000 if you are a business owner by adding solar electric.

If your Monthly Bill is: $200.00

Last year you Paid: $2,400.00

With inflation:

In 10 years you pay: $29,140.78

In 30 years you pay: $128,230.73

Return on investment: ZERO!!!

You can pay your electric company a total of $128,230.73. And see a zero dollar return on your investment.Or you can invest your money into a Solar Electric System and receive a huge return on your investment.

I have ran the numbers every way I can think of an in the long run you put money back in your pocket. Big money.

As far as a nuke plant as someone above said.. There is no need for even the ones we have now if everyone would put solar on their homes. We would be able to get by with just our water power plants.

If you want you can download this excel spread sheet and play with your own numbers. It will warn you that there are micros in the file when you try to run it and it is true. I hid a lot of the tables and math to make it easy to use. I

http://store.oynot.com/media/Oy-Not-Costing-Planer.xls

Answer 3

In the past there's been very little money and resources made available to study these types of energy. Often the research that has been conducted has been at the expense of private individuals and companies or as part of student research projects.

It's also been very much a political issue. The big players in the energy markets - oil and nuclear have successfully swayed governments away from such schemes. In one such case (which I'd love to go into but can't) a scheme was presented to the UK Government that would have harnessed the power of the waves. The Government convened a meeting to consider whether it was worth investing in, the only people who were allowed to attend the meeting were representatives from the oil and nuclear industries. Needless to say, you can guess what happened.

The economic climate has been changing in recent years, driven partly by depleting stocks of fossil fuels and the demands of consumers. Consequently, several of the large oil and power companies are investing in alternative technologies. British Petroleum have had an active programme for several years, the other oil companies couldn't stand by whilst a competitor developed new technologies so they've joined in. Shell and BP seem to be be leading the research into renewables.

Some private corporations are also investing in research and development of renewables. Nissan is one such company, the cost and amount of power needed in their motor manufacturing plants is enormous so they're developing technologies themselves to power their own plants.

I suspect that in the next 10 to 20 years there will be significant developments. One area which is potentially promising is in wave power, if it were possible to harness even a small amount of energy from the waves we could produce a lot of electricity. One large wave can have as much as a million Watts of power for each metre of length. Unfortunately we can't harness anything like this amount, if we could obtain 1% of this power then an average house could be powered for a day form the energy of just a single wave.

Answer 4

Of course. The links below are just giving you a few examples of much stuff going on.

There are very serious research efforts going on all around the world to make solar panels cheaper.

http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-2/p16.html

Denmark leads the world in developing and producing wind powered generators, and there is also worldwide research on these.

http://www.iet.auc.dk/Research/research_prog/wind_turbine/

Geothermal has a bit less going on as this is only feasible for power plants in limited areas. But systems that use buried pipes to heat and cool your house are another area of active development.

http://www.toolbase.org/Technology-Inventory/HVAC/geothermal-heat-pumps

See also:

http://www.nrel.gov/

Answer 5

The only problems is that these energies are either intermittent, or restricted - like hydro - as to where they can be deployed. We need more nuclear...yesterday.