Putting $700 Billion in Perspective...

[garybeck]

Putting $700 Billion In Perspective…

Prez-elect Obama’s has a bold “New Energy for America” plan to take us off foreign oil. According to his website, it will create 5 million new jobs. It will help put one million new plug-in hybrid cars on the road. It will enable us to get 10% of our energy from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% from renewables by 2025. It will even provide financial assistance to low income families when fuel costs are high. This energy plan does come with a pricetag, and it’s part of the”new spending” that McIdiot criticized Obama for during the campaign. With the lofty goals outlined, you’d think it would would cost a lot. So what is the pricetag of the New Energy for America plan? A total of $150 Billion, spread over TEN years. That’s $15 billion per year for 10 years, to change our energy course into a completely new direction and create millions of new good green jobs.

Now consider the recent $700 billion bailout. That’s almost FIVE times the cost of the energy plan, and it’s basically all at once. While the energy plan money will go to specific programs, each with targets and goals, the bailout money is being handed out like a lottery prize. Secretary of Treasury Paulson looks like a deer in the headlights every time he gets in front of a microphone to explain what he’s doing with it all.

The way it’s being handled is bad enough, but when you put the plain numbers into perspective, it’s just appalling.

Here’s another comparison. According to USGovernmentSpending.Org the government spends $99 billion per year on education. That means we just handed out the amount of money we spend on education, nationwide, IN 7 YEARS! Just think of all those schools in every town, all those teachers employed, all those books, all those school buses… SEVEN YEARS of all that, we just handed out.

And it's OUR money we're talking about! It’s enough to make your head spin. Or boil your blood.

http://solarbus.org/blog/?p=41

[lapfog_1]

1. Here is another one

just for comparison.

For $700 B, we could install 2KW (peak) of solar panels on 50 million homes and businesses. This amount would buy the panels at the CURRENT single unit (200W panel) list price. It would employ something like 150,000 installers (and a bunch more at solar panel manufacturing plants) for 10 years or more. The electricity produced would total something like 5,000 TWhrs (at .29 expected efficiency from peak) over 20 years, which, when sold to rate payers at $.14 per KWhr would generate about $700 B in revenue.

It would be more than enough to directly power one electric car per household, it would be enough to do that, plus meet peak AC needs in the summertime, and likely remove a number of coal fired power plants from the grid.

Of course, when buying 500 million solar panels (10 panels per rooftop) one might expect a quantity buy discount.

So a conservative guess is that for that same $700B we could double the number of panels and double the expected power generated and revenue (actually we could well exceed the $700 B in revenue and still give rate payers a break to something like 10 cents or 11 cents a KWhr).

It would directly employ something like 150,000 and indirectly employ another 50,000 workers, all making good money (avg $60K with $20K benefits per year).

Another advantage is that while improvements to the grid would be required to most efficiently use the generated power, we don't HAVE to do those improvements before we deploy... we can incrementally add them as needed.

People still have to buy the new electric cars... but think of the savings in green house gases. Not to mention that we wouldn't need NEW coal plants, and might be able to mothball a number of older dirty coal plants. We would likely still need the nukes and the gas fired plants... and all the wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc, etc we can get our hands on. At least until phase two.

But we could do it all for $700 B. And if we kept the rate at, say $.12 KWhr, we could double the amount of panels in the following 10 years with new technology panels which are even more efficient than the current generation. All without covering more ground than we have already covered with our houses and buildings now.

[garybeck]

2. thanks for that... but it makes me want to pull my hair out! Are you sure the numbers are correct?

According to my simple math,

700,000,000,000 / 50,000,000 = $14,000 for each household

I believe PV systems are going for about $10 / watt installed, including system components.

That would give about 1,400 watts or 1.4 KW for each household.

Even that is a lot of juice... but if you take an average 4.5 hours of peak sun that gives you 1.4 KW x 4.5 hrs = 6.3 KWH/day. I don't think this is enough to "directly power one electric car per household, plus meet peak AC needs in the summertime". I think the typical household uses more than 6.3 KWH/day, even without an electric vehicle.