Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.
Pardon me, but I'm a liberal and I support nuclear power.
Inconvenient truth spokesman Al Gore's home uses twenty times as much energy as the average. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/28/politics/main25228...
I take it that George Bush and Al Gores houses will not be that far apart in total energy consumption.
Al Gore should be ashamed of himself and his energy footprint, but that goes for every joker that went to the climate summit by plane.
If there was one place where they could have shown that they were serious about the subject matter and invest a bit in video conferencing that was it.
Just to clarify, do you mean grid energy consumption? Unless I read incorrectly, George Bush's Crawford ranch house is twice as small as Al Gore's house. Does that not matter much in terms of total consumption?
I believe Bush owns a huge home in Dallas, and it seems obvious that the ranch was a PR vehicle, so I doubt his combined personal energy footprint is worth talking about, but based on the article above his Crawford ranch is impressive.
The amount of money spent on the installation and insulation of the property is the big factor, and I suspect that if grid power was available where that farm is located that it is nowhere near cost effective.
The house I built was to learn, not to save, just to give you an idea of how inefficient going off the grid if grid power is available is.
If grid power is not available, in other words if you do not have any other options then it is a totally different matter.
The total cost of a 10 KWh/day installation in the Northern latitudes of Canada was 5 years ago about $CAN 60,000, probably in Texas where you have much more sunshine the cost will be significantly lower, but you still have to factor in stuff like the cost of charging / discharging batteries, which alone already costs more than using the grid...
It's not that easy!
(Not that it's not the right choice, of course.)
It's not clear what nuclear power costs[1] and so it's difficult to say if it's a better investment of public resources than wind, solar, geothermal, etc.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...
I'm not sure if Fusion would be much better than fission (which isn't to say that it's not good, just that it doesn't seem nearly as much of an improvement as some would want us to believe (many of those people writing grant proposals)):
http://www.rationalfuturist.com/writings/fusion.html
What I'd really like to see is a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Check out this Google Tech Talk about it:
EX: H - H fusion in our sun is a vary slow and stable process. But that's simply based on the conditions of our sun, under other conditions H - H fusion can be extremely fast.
EX2: Under specific conditions the Uranium in a fission power plant can generate an explosion equivalent to a similar mass of TNT. It's not what we think of as a nuclear explosion but it's not exactly peanuts either. The basic problem is creating a film of boiled water see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsMV1MglA4&feature=relat... for some simple related experiments.
EX3: Lithium isotopes are either stable or far to short lived to be radioactive. At worst your dealing with a half life of 840.3 ms which means it does not accumulate in the reaction chamber and within 1 minute of shutting down the reaction it's hard to detect.
Funny, I've heard people tell me that's what they said 40 years ago.
You'd think people would realize that while nuclear, or wind, or solar, are imperfect, each one is better than fossil fuels.
Now, if you can show me that migrating to wind or solar or nuclear will be much much easier, cheaper, simpler and more efficient if we do it 10 years from now instead of next year, then it might be a good idea to wait.