Top 7 alternative energies listed

Admittedly, I have only glanced at this link briefly, but I doubt it would look so good if a proper study was done.

It is all very well to say that there is so-many MW of waste power being 'thrown away', but much of this is likely to be effectively unusable. A machine putting out some huge flow rate of gas at two degrees above ambient temperature will indeed be 'wasting' a large amount of energy. However, the conversion efficiency of ANY method of recovering this energy would be ridiculously low due to the small deltaT involved.

Recovering waste heat can of course be useful for things such as space heating and running auxiliary processes, but the amount of energy recovered is generally a small percentage of the total heat 'wasted', since there are diminishing returns for further effort in reducing 'waste'.

Things challenging accepted laws of physics that the establishment think are all done and dusted bar the '6 decimal place' (in the famous Michelson expression at the turn of the 20C).

Currently the model is big physics and nothing new and fundamental can be discovered unless billions is spent with a team of hundreds contributing. They will be in for suprises. Basic ideas about energy and what you can do with it will be shown to be wrong. Here is not the place to elaborate but keep an open mind as to what the establishment is telling you and the vested monied interests: big oil, big physics (we don't want to lose research grants and be made to look fools).

Reliability is another strong supporting factor for centralized production; if your individual PG station goes out, it's up to you to repair/replace it, which means unless you have parts available you could be out of power for days or weeks, whereas with centralized generation a single system failing may not even be noticed, and will certainly be repaired quickly.

That being said, there's certainly some argument for running primarily off the grid as much as possible with fallback availability provided.

Here you go: http://www.cogenmicro.com/index.php?select=165

Distributed energy production has many advantages:

1. Economics - Renewable energy systems, like PV, pay for themselves in a few years (solar takes typically around 7 years) and then give many more years of free energy. This is actually MUCH cheaper than the pollutive technologies, but you don't see governments pushing it realistically because it would eliminate corporations' "cherished dependent consumer" and therefor, the associated taxes.

2. Energy Loss - The DOE has varying estimates but says that somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of the power that is produced is lost "in line" on the way to the consumer. When you produce the energy at the point of use, your loss is more like 5% or less.

3. Security - It is impossible for anyone to attack every house at the same time (at least so far), whereas centralized power stations make obvious and vulnerable targets. This is especially true for nuclear facilities, but those should be eliminated due to safety, environmental, and economics reasons.

4. Independence - People often want to be more independent and less reliant on outside factors, whether at the world, state, or county level. Strangely, this is a major conservative mantra but they forget it when they speak of distributed renewables.

5. Grid Load Leveling - By having distributed production, at the point of use, less demand is made on the energy grid, reducing voltage sag under heavy load (brown and black outs) and allows us to save a huge amount on grid upgrades. While this is true, there will need to be significant increases in grid infrastructure anyway to support centralized wind, ocean, and geothermal production as well as EV charging at homes.

I'd think that there are other benefits as well, but those are the ones I came up with immediately.

The only thing stopping communities in the U.S. from forming coalitions and generating their own power is economic viability.

Some communities are supplementing their power with wind generators already. But I am not anticipating the dismantling of the grid any time in the near future.

Unfortunately, the hope was to STABILIZE prices. Most recent prices have fallen to nearly where they were before the bubble of last year. sigh.

Going further algae could in the future be converted into biofuels much more efficiently than corn is at present. Using food crops to produce fuel is idiotic but there are many possible ways to be explored.

see http://www.bioenergy.cam.ac.uk/abc.html

There is work in progress right now, not 20 miles from where I sit typing this in San Diego California, on scaling up an already demonstrated process that produces hydrocarbons from algae that are compatible with our existing refining infrastructure. The fuels produced this way can go into your fuel tanks right now and work well, since they are chemically identical to existing fuels. Petrol, Diesel, and even Jet Fuel have been made this way. There are many advantages to the process, and it offers a viable alternative getting much of our oil from the Middle East. Space wise, it uses much less space than crop based biofuels and can be done in many areas that are not arable.