Wind Power Industry not as strong as expected

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by Azure, Oct 13, 2012.

  1. Azure

    Azure I could kick your ass

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    http://www.businessinsider.com/investing-in-green-energies-is-a-nightmare-2012-10#ixzz29ChRYaO1

    Thank the government and their subsidies for that. Now hundreds of people I worked with have lost their jobs because the industry has been built on shaky ground. Time to get out.
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  2. skinofevil

    skinofevil Fresh Meat

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    That depends on whose expectations we're talking about. Most conservatives expected this and nothing but this to happen. There's a reason why most of this crap is "alternative" energy, after all -- it already showed that it didn't have what it takes to be mainstream.
  3. oldfella1962

    oldfella1962 the only real finish line

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    Hmmm...same thing for "alternative" lifestyles? Just askin'
  4. Midnight Funeral

    Midnight Funeral Cúchulainn

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    Well, that blows...
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  5. oldfella1962

    oldfella1962 the only real finish line

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    Harness every politician's hot air - we could have enough energy to finally break the speed of light.
  6. skinofevil

    skinofevil Fresh Meat

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    Yep. "Alternative" music, too. If it was any good, it wouldn't be the "alternative", it'd be mainstream.
  7. Aenea

    Aenea .

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    My dad is a mechanical engineer and he refused to talk alternative energy beyond geo thermal 2 years ago. :shrug: He said then it couldn't really pay for itself.
  8. Dinner

    Dinner 2012 & 2014 Master Prognosticator

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    Much of the problem in renewables lately has been that the Chinese government jumped in with some truly MASSIVE subsidies of their own thus allowing Chinese imports to under cut everyone else by 50% or more in price. No, this has absolutely nothing to do with the market viability of renewables and everything to do with Chinese protectionism.
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  9. skinofevil

    skinofevil Fresh Meat

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    [​IMG]

    Damn them derrteh Chinee!
  10. The Exception

    The Exception The One Who Will Be Administrator Super Moderator

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    In this thread, skinofevil and others use the failings of one or more energy industries as justification for the lack of general government intervention in the marketplace...on the internet.
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  11. Tuttle

    Tuttle Listen kid, we're all in it together.

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    I get a kick when people claim Internet as a justification for higher taxes or more borrowing from China because government invests effectively. Talk about cherry picking.

    Plus.

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  12. skinofevil

    skinofevil Fresh Meat

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    But "you didn't build that."
  13. The Exception

    The Exception The One Who Will Be Administrator Super Moderator

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    I'm not sure where that guy came up with his math, TCP/IP was first described in 1974, 30 years would put it at 2004.

    In any case, even though TCP/IP was created in 1974 (by a bunch of Stanford researchers no less), it wasn't until 1990 that HTTP was proposed, and it wasn't until the early 90's that computers had come along far enough that there was any real interest in purchasing them. It's also worth pointing out that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, the inventors of HTTP, were themselves government employees at CERN. Furthermore, the creation of Mosaic (the web browser responsible for popularizing the web) was the result of funding specifically targeted at developing the internet, and the team responsible for Mosaic later went on to develop Netscape Navigator. Plus there's the fact that much of the internet backbone, as well as the local access many rural users enjoy, is the direct result of government funding and resource allocation.

    I should also point out that while the government's growth of the internet was slower, it only took the private sector two years to begin the creation of a speculative bubble.
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  14. Volpone

    Volpone Zombie Hunter

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    Go stand in the corner, dumbass.
  15. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Disinformation. Man you guys absolutely refuse to give credit for anything to the government because of your absurd rhetoric. It's drool worthy

    The technologies that created the internet:

    ARPAnet - developed by IPTO within DARPA, completely a government project, the testbed of the concept envisioned by JCR Lidlicker and developed by Lawerence Roberts and Robert Taylor. The RFC, request for comment, the technical specifications that built the internet, was formalized and created here.

    NPL, the National Physics Laboratory within the UK, that developed packet switching.

    Merit Network, Michigan Educational Research Triad, where the first packet switched network was implemented.

    X.25, developed by the International Telecommunications Union in Europe, which became the basis for the first internet companies, Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy.

    UUCP and Usenet, developed at Duke University, originally for use of the students.

    All of this was already in place (and note already started to be commercialized) by the time we get to...

    Cerf Defender already correctly pointed out worked for the government, recruited from Stanford to work for DARPA. TCP/IP came from RFC 675. It also is the first recorded user of the word 'internet.' It was finalized in 1981 as RFCs 791,792, and 793.

    By this time it was being run by the Department of Defense directly under the Defense Communication Agency.

    Lee did the work for http at CERN. You know, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire aka the European Organization for Nuclear Research created by 20 European governments for large scale research beyond the capacity of any single member state.

    Enough of the truth to confuse laymen, but also clearly bullshit. It was a work station with an individual processor, it was never intended for home use. Its more accurately termed a minicomputer. Look it up.

    Ethernet is a derivative of ALOHAnet - once again, one of those government sponsored publicly funded university experiments. Look up Ethernet, ALOHAnet, and Robert Metcalfe.


    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA.

    Because it already tried to sell personal computers in the late 60s and got its ass handed to them by IBM and their mainframes. In other words, the market.

    Yep. However, again, BULLSHIT. Government led view of business? WTF? This is XEROX, not the Fed, not DARPA.

    It was a business mistake by business people. Period. Full stop. To argue that the government had something to do with Xerox not figuring out the potential of the Alto is absolutely absurd.

    Dogmatical, rhetorical, bullshit, founded by a need to force reality into your ideology, when in fact your ideology has nothing to do with this and trying to cram it into this situation means you are wrong at best and actively lying to promote your agenda at worst.

    That was the development of the personal computer, an entirely different thing. If you start talking about how Steve Jobs invented the internet, anyone with a brain will point and laugh.

    But they put that in there because they can't talk about the development of the technologies of the internet, because those were either directly created or directly came from technologies created by the government and their university researchers.

    But we have to always argue that business makes everything. So we have to lie to try to get people to believe that argument.

    And the dumb people don't know they are lying.


    Yep - but internet companies had been commercializing the internet for years by that point. They just switched from X.25 to TCP/IP.

    Because of the market. Again, absolute complete and utter hogwash. The problem with the internet back then was the cost of the personal computer, the high level of technical knowledge required to work it, and the fact that nobody wanted the things. This is back when Bill Gates was saying nobody would ever need more than 640K of memory - because THAT seemed absolutely enormous.

    The technologies existed, companies were trying to implement them, the technology just wasn't ready yet.

    Despite the fact almost all of the heavy lifting had been done by the government.

    OK, its point and laugh time again.

    The problem with employing a bunch of liars full time to service the needs of those with $$$ is eventually everyone starts believing their own bullshit.

    The government created the internet. They then handed them over to commercial companies which took about a decade to really get started. The first internet companies were around in 79-80. Arguing that the government was somehow stifling innovation because they were still running some form of DARPAnet until 1995 is simply counterfactual. Compuserve was selling internet access in 1982. It was slow as shit and was $30 an hour. But it had email, file transfer capability, and even offered games.

    If it wasn't for the government development, we'd eventually still have gotten the modern internet - but it would have been decades later and somebody else might have gotten there first.

    Commercialization isn't the same thing as invention.

    There were a lot of way points along the way, and the internet continues to develop and grow.

    But there's no doubt at all that it got its start with government funding in government labs working for people that ultimate source of their pay check was the government.

    To blame the fact that it wasn't a commercial off the product shelf at that point in time is sheer idiocy.

    And born of a need to fit the fact to ideology.
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2012
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  16. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Yes, please do.

    Just because it fits the rhetoric you want to be true, doesn't make it true.

    Dumbass.
  17. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    BTW, you could have been making the same arguments of the internet in the 80s - everybody could see the potential, it just wasn't there yet.

    It's certainly possible specific alternate energy sources will never get there.

    It's also true that in the case of solar China is desperately trying to drive everyone else out of the market by offering huge subsidies, as CS pointed out.

    Why would they do that if they didn't see the potential there?

    The technology for solar as one example has grown tremendously in the last 4 years, dropping price while increasing efficiencies. Most analsysts expect the technology to be viable as a true alternate energy source later this decade, and then begin to increment into the market share over the next two decades. It will take a while.

    But then, so did the internet.

    It is very much a good thing that we increase efficiencies in renewables and find where they can be utilized as part of a comprehensive solution that includes oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear.

    But it will take development $$$, and it won't be easy.
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  18. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    Being contracted by the government for a job isn't the same as the government subsidizing your already existing product. And when it comes to solar energy, these subsidies are very nakedly not about solar power, yet you and others just seem to keep glossing over the protectionist tariffs against cheaper foreign solar panels and the like.
  19. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    You have that backward. The reason for the tariffs is the dumping:
    The tariffs are just going into place now.

    Again, why would the Chinese sell these for less than cost if there wasn't a strategic reason for the development of solar power?

    And if you want the government to directly R&D solar and get rid of the subsidies to wasteful companies, fine by me. :D
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  20. Captain X

    Captain X Responsible cookie control

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    I'd be curious to see what evidence the Commerce Department based its ruling on.

    Sorry, but it all seems like bullshit to me. I've seen how inefficient solar panels are, so frankly even if they were cheaper they still wouldn't be worth it. But the simple fact that the market is being robbed of a cheaper alternative for those who might actually want them makes me inherently suspicious of subsidies like this, especially since the last one was basically just giving money back to a campaign donor.
  21. Tuttle

    Tuttle Listen kid, we're all in it together.

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    Shit's a waste of taxpayer money. Solar tech won't be viable economically absent a major breakthrough, despite biggov like Germany, Spain, US and China pouring billions upon billions of taxpayer/public funds into it. At this point there's no good reason for public subisidy of this failure that's only exceeded by corn ethanol mandates as the worst bit of energy policy this century.

    Way too long, I'll try to bold a few highlights.
    In Germany is now blamed on lobbyists, in the US we can thank the Lyingcocksucker in Chief. I forget who the spanish should blame, in China is just part of their mcjobs-so-they-don't-riot policy.
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  22. Tuttle

    Tuttle Listen kid, we're all in it together.

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    Shit's a waste of taxpayer money. Solar tech won't be viable economically absent a major breakthrough, despite biggov like Germany, Spain, US and China pouring billions upon billions of taxpayer/public funds into it. At this point there's no good reason for public subisidy of this failure that's only exceeded by corn ethanol mandates as the worst bit of energy policy this century.

    Way too long, I'll try to bold a few highlights.
    It's from Spiegel.

    In Germany is now blamed on lobbyists, in the US we can thank the Lyingcocksucker in Chief. I forget who the spanish should blame, in China it's just part of their mcjobs-so-they-don't-riot policy.
  23. Azure

    Azure I could kick your ass

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    The only place where solar has been successful is in places where it has been developed as an alternative energy source with limited subsidies. In countries where the industry has been heavily subsidized, most of the companies involved are failing and at times going bankrupt.

    Those are the facts. Anyone who wants to argue with that needs to come with me on my yearly trip around the world to major Vestas projects.
  24. Spaceturkey

    Spaceturkey i can see my house

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    In that it takes 20-30 years to become simplified enough for the suburbs?
  25. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Different argument. Note the timescale I gave before. Germany is attempting to implement solar NOW in a land that isn't exactly known for consistency of its sunshine. I'd agree that this isn't the best use of solar, and is very wasteful.

    However, that doesn't mean that investing in solar is by definition a waste. It depends on many factors, and the R&D going into it has dropped costs massively - solar prices halved in 4 year since 2009. Its getting to the point where it is cost efficient in some locales - and its expected to be extremely competitive in the future.

    So no, it can't compete with fossil fuels now, but that's the point - developing so it can in certain locations is a laudable goal.

    But yes, you get cheaper power by coal and natural gas right now.

    So go on that as a basis, but work towards a future that has less pollution and less supply concerns.
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