...Every day, Big Oil’s executives, geologists, engineers, lobbyists and political cronies wake up to an existential threat. It cannot be destroyed by a proxy army. It cannot be bribed. And all the lobbying the world will never, ever keep it from rising each and every day, looming over them and challenging their every move.
Big Oil cannot hide from the Sun.
It turns out that Old Sol not only provides the essential energy that powers all life on earth, but—thanks to the ingenuity of some particularly troublesome human beings—its reliable light can be “transformed” into “usable electricity” through a “miracle device” called a “photovoltaic cell!”
Just imagine—what if people could stop burning oil and gas and even coal, and just use these miracle devices to transform Old Sol’s sunny disposition into the power needed to run just about everything?
Well, if you are one of the masters of the oil universe, you’ve probably lost a lot of sleep worrying about that very question. But worrying is not enough. Big Oil is taking action to stop the Sun’s onslaught on their energy monopoly. Big Oil is working hard to counter market-driven innovations that are not only making solar power more and more affordable, but also making solar power a progressively more attractive investment to Big Oil’s heretofore reliable benefactors on Wall Street.
In fact, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) recently issued a report touting the future of renewable energy as an investment. Suddenly, this is not about tree-hugging ethics. Now this is about the bottom line.
solar energy 408 Big Oils War on the SunAccording to BNEF, annual investment in new renewable power capacity is going to rise significantly between now and 2030. The report states: “The likeliest scenario implies a jump of 230%, to $630bn per year by 2030, driven by further improvements in the cost-competitiveness of wind and solar technologies relative to fossil fuel alternatives….”
But wait, there’s more...
http://www.laprogressive.com/big-oil-solar-power/
'Alternatively, we could go this route:
'Hybrid' nuclear plants could make a dent in carbon emissions
Combining nuclear with artificial geothermal, shale oil, or hydrogen production could help slow climate change, study shows.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
Many efforts to smooth out the variability of renewable energy sources — such as wind and solar power — have focused on batteries, which could fill gaps lasting hours or days.
But MIT’s Charles Forsberg has come up with a much more ambitious idea: He proposes marrying a nuclear powerplant with another energy system, which he argues could add up to much more than the sum of its parts. Forsberg, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, describes the proposals in a paper published in the November issue of the journal Energy Policy.
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The paper outlines three concepts, which Forsberg says could have potential in the coming decades. They involve pairing a nuclear plant with an artificial geothermal storage system, a hydrogen production plant, or a shale-oil recovery operation.
The last of these ideas would locate a nuclear plant near a deposit of oil shale — a type of deposit, technically known as kerogen, that has not been used to date as a source of petroleum. Heated steam from a nuclear plant, in enclosed pipes, heats the shale; the resulting oil can be pumped out by conventional means.
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http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/hybrid-nuclear-plants-carbon-emissions-1105.html
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