Interesting things from treehugger.com

[unixronin]

Found by cymrullewes, Treehugger posts teasers on:

• Multipurpose broad-spectrum OLED panels -- It's a window!  It's a light panel!  It's a HD TV!  The article -- or the USC researcher quoted in the article -- tosses around a claim of "100 percent efficiency out of a single, broad spectrum light source."  I'll believe THAT when I see it.
• "Zero footprint energy" in Ontario -- or, lease-to-own your own ground-source heating/cooling plant.  US power utilities would probably hate it enough to buy a Congressman or six to pass a law making it illegal.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

$0.01/kw-hr is still possible through nuclear.

So they keep on telling us, anyway. Remember the early claims ofnuclear power yielding "electricity too cheap to meter"? There isn't a nuclear power utility in the world that's delivered on that prmise yet, nor one that looks likely to. In fact, now that a number of nuclear plants have completed their entire design lifecycles, some experience seems to indicate that the costs of fully decommissioning a nuclear plant and dealing with the radioactive waste it produces may exceed the sum of the cost of building the plant in the first place and all the revenues generated from it during its lifetime.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

The costs you cite are largely independent of the amount of electricity being produced by a nuclear plant. In fossil plants, fuel accounts for a clear majority of all operating costs.

If the US had grown up with nuclear instead of fossil, we might see a different, flat-rate pricing model. Or, since distribution networks are tied to neighborhoods like water and sewage, handled entirely at community level.