http://www.stirlingenergy.com/default.asp

The SES SunCatcher is a 25 kW solar power system that has been designed to automatically track the sun and focus solar heat onto a power conversion unit (PCU). This in turn converts the intense heat to grid-quality electricity. The concentrator consists of a 38-foot diameter dish structure that supports 82 curved glass mirror facets, each three feet by four-feet in area. These mirrors concentrate solar energy onto the heater head of a high efficiency, 4 cylinder reciprocating Stirling cycle engine, generating up to 25 kW of electricity per system.

http://www.stirlingenergy.com/default.asp

They’re currently working to develop arrays that will generate up to 1,750KW in Barstow and El Centro, CA. My university campus (UNLV) has one of these units, you can see it on Flamingo Dr., but the engine’s been removed from it for some time now.

Also in Nevada: the Solar One project, a solar thermal plant that just came online in Boulder City. 64 Megawatts, baby!

It seems that long-term power purchasing contracts from utilities are the key to getting these big utility-scale projects financed.

The company that built the system at Solar One, SolarGenix, uses a trough-like reflector that doesn’t need to track the sun’s movement. They design smaller industrial and commercial-scale systems as well.

Then there’s the Infinia unit (prototype, not in production yet) that’s the same concept as the SES, but smaller with a more efficient engine design. It’s a 3kw unit, appropriate for a home and about the size of a large satellite dish.

http://www.infiniacorp.com/applications/clean_energy.php

But hey, those are some pretty big companies, with big money raised and big ideas for big projects.

And they’re also just using reflectors to concentrate the sun; how about those lenses, hmm? And what about the do-it-yourself approach?

http://www.greenpowerscience.com/

Watch the videos. It’s all backyard benchtop steam and stirling engine stuff, but it’s obviously do-able. He’s also converting old cd/dvd and harddrive disks into Tesla generators. He uses recycled rear-projection tv screens salvaged from a junkyard for lenses that can burn holes through rock.

I’d like to try this with a hot-air expansion system to spin up an automotive turbo connected to a generator.

Actually, even without solar thermal power applications, you can tell these folks really just loves burning holes in things and cooking omelettes in the backyard.

Don’t even get me started on wind; there are too many diy wind turbine designs to list. I’m rather partial to the vertical-axis designs, myself; look, ma, no windmilling!

As for small-scale home-use wind and solar technology, ask anyone who’s cruised aboard a sailing yacht anytime in the last, oh, 20 years if the technology is workable and economical. They’ll wonder where the hell you’ve been.

It’s going to take a combination of switch-grass style ethanol, solar, wind, geo-thermal, conservation and a large investment into new technologies like hydrogen fuel cell. Vehicles should be equipped to integrate a variety of power sources. Much more of our defense budget has to to be swung towards energy independence, because it’s a defense issue.

I know, duh.

My point is that we can’t always innovate ourselves out of every mess, and in this case, while I agree with most of what you’re saying about the potential in these emerging technologies, I have misgivings about whether or not we’re capable of making a graceful transition.

And sure, by graceful, I mostly thinking about our democracy, but further down that road is the Cannibalism exit. Which sounds highly unlikely, but seems to happen towards the end of several chapters of Collapse.

I don’t think the problem is whether or not we can figure out how to turn sunlight, tides, and geothermal heat into electricity. I think the problem is that we’ve built up a system to support 6 billion people that is going to take a fuck of a lot of effort (politically, economically, across the board really) on a global scale to make it backward compatible with its current form. And projections are for 9 billion folks in 42 years.

In fact, I think it’s reasonable (I must, musn’t I) to imagine what it would take to make this happen, if there was a fully developed, masterfully mapped out plan to do it; and then, to weigh the chance of it happening given the amount of good planning, foresight and cooperation among the states and corporate entities of the world that would be required to do so. And then to come away from it feeling like the odds just ain’t that good.

But that’s just me. I can’t wait to be wrong about this one.

The point is, a doubling of oil prices would be a *good thing*. Not unlike a carbon tax, rising oil prices bring the cost of burning the stuff closer to the true social cost.

Of course, anyone who claims to know what the price of oil will be in 2012 is being silly. Besides the uncertainty about technological imporvements on the supply side the Editors talks about, there’s also the demand response. Short-term, demand for oil is highly inelastic, but longer term is a different story, especially with a little smart gov’t intervention to smooth the response. (It’s sort of arbitrary whether you call something like increased use of biofuels a supply- or demand-side response; the point is the same either way.)

Peak oil people think that Civilization is Doomed becaus we’re running out of oil. They’re wrong for two reasons. First, over any time scale longer than a couple years, both supply and demand for energy are quite responsive to prices. And second, we need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels regardless: from a climate-change pov, scarce oil isn’t the problem, it’s (part of) the solution.

Not very in accord with the “because we have too much oil” mindset I saw above.

Different people sometimes have different opinions. I guess that’s the answer to your question.

Also, that link says that the 33 billion barrel estimate was wildly off, and may only be 600 million.

No, it one person saying one of the 5-6 sub-fields has 600 million, for ~3 billion total. But others say 33 billion. But nobody has completed surveying it. So I quoted the range of estimates.

So far, the story of the last 150 years or so is not how the Amazing Gift of Oil gave us a cheap and abundant, yet clearly finite, source of portable energy at about 40 kWh/gal, and we amazingly used that to innovate new ways to tap the practically limitless sources of energy from the Sun and Earth, and then built our infrastructure around that.

Because oil is cheap, and the technology exists. There’s no financial incentive to fix what works well enough. Maybe oil prices will stay high or go higher, in which case we’ll have an economic reason to change, or else we’ll all end up living in caves. If I really knew what the price of oil was going to be in a few years, I would shut up and buy oil futures instead of talking to myself on the internets. You can apply this rule across the board. But the 50+ year history of the oil business is prices jumping dramatically in response to political crises, and then returning to the $20-30/barrel level, all the while demand increases. Past performance strongly suggests we’ll go back there, and there will be no financial incentive to invest substantially in alternatives. But nobody knows.

People of my grandparents generation once thought that Science was going to figure out a way to make nuclear waste non-toxic, and in reasonably short order, so they buried the waste in steel drums, in the ground, knowing full well that the drum would give out before the waste would.

That’s great. ‘The popular imagination of technology rarely comes to pass’ I guess is your point. But Brazil runs on 20+% ethanol now, has for years, and Brazil is not exactly the land of rocket packs and teleporter machines. Getting energy from the Sun is not terribly difficult, it’s just not terribly lucrative in the market, and it isn’t supported by the government to any real degree. But – in addition to fusion and more speculative things – there are any number of immature but absolutely viable technologies which are marginal because, rightly or wrongly, they aren’t perceived as being able to compete financially with inexpensive oil.

Short answer: I let the little people do calculations. I am much to elitist to dirty myself with numbers and equations. My beautiful mind is only comfortable when amongst the downy pillows that are vague generalities.

Long answer: Well, I was only paraphrasing from a book that I read a few years ago(Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller) and don’t really have any estimates. Also, the book itself was written many years before that, so I can’t say that any estimates in it are still accurate(not that I actually have the book with me right now).

Putting that aside, I know that copper piping and wiring are big on the scrap market. BF was focusing on the copper that goes into many electronic devices. At that time, and to a lesser extent today, those devices were simply thrown out when they broke or unwanted. The copper in those devices could be removed and reused, though how easy/feasible would depend on the design of the item. He looked at world copper production and usage, and it seemed that, because of the trends he saw in the development of technology, more could be done with the same amount of copper(also with other resources, see ephemeralization). That sets the stage for “Cradle to Cradle” design, where items are designed to be easily broken down into constituent parts for reuse, closing the resource loop. Business designed around “services” as opposed to “items” facilitates this process. For example in a “cooling service” business, as opposed to an “air-conditioner business, the company that uses your services does not buy an AC unit, they just pay you to keep their building cool. You then upgrade and maintain the AC unit to save yourself money. This idea comes from both “Cradle to Cradle” and “Natural Capitalism”.

I know this answer is incomplete and long. That’s too bad. Work is over and I got to get the hell outta here.

If we were to resuse the copper we already have instead of throwing a lot of it out, we would be fine because of ephemeralization and such. Of course, there is a difference between could and can or will.

I wasn’t aware we were throwin’ it out? Every anecdote I’ve heard about copper for the last several years involves someone gettin’ their pipes or gutters or what have you stolen for scrap? How much do they think we could recover?