Comments

rnojonson: hold the phone folks the wonders of new technology are put on hold because of the overwhelming cost of retrofitting reality. I am talking about pushing technology down into the fabric of society where they are usually stuck with energy sucking appliances, leaky inefficient houses and minimum wages to where profits are thin. They make up the majority of homes in most already built cities and towns. Green just can't be a rich boys dream time play ground and the word "cost competitive" is tainted by the high profit motive. A big wealthy company doing green shouldn't overly pass the cost on to folks to where they can not enjoy the cost savings they are hoping for. The cost savings over time formula is thrown out by folks who live pay check to pay check. This is why green to us is saving plastic bags, cans and trying to justify swirly fluorescent bulbs when incandescents are way cheaper. I would put a not so smart 12-24 volt DC subsystem in average homes sort of like whats in RVs. Then attach every low power appliance and lights and computing and communication on that system. A single house converter handles solar/wind/battery for the subsystem and the grid supplement tie-in when necessary. The big appliances stay on the grid until further development. There should be an incentive to move all equipment to the low power sub-system and also to raise the green power input to that system. In this light, OLEDs are innovation and solar/wind/batteries are practical in places where the sun doesn't shine so much. But you got to put green in better reach of the masses else the pie in the sky's cream will drip in the eye obscuring the vision and 10 years later we are still grid slaves.

When you have a nation of end product users, the need to make better dries up. Also if the old technologies are in full sway and meeting the need here, you can't expect new technologies to take their place until old stuff goes away. Why dump heavy investment into wind, solar and bio if oil is still making good bucks. Old technologies have a solid infrastructure and is cemented into the everyday habits of citizens, we are so uncertain of new technology which requires a transition in both infrastructure and personal habits. Then ideas are locked behind legal walls and people can't pick and poke and fiddle to get the skills to devise new stuff. So what, if we aren't leading in technology if we haven't pushed the technology we have down into society. Outside of college, most of us live as do developing nations. Technology has not lowered the cost of living nor raised our standard of living, we struggle against too many home grown forces. Mr.G lives in a totally different America. We might be better off if we go abroad for schooling and bring the technology back home, the same as other nations have done with us. Not living here would awaken us to possibilities missed because of our entrenched culture and mindsets. What's wrong in America is that money and ideas stopped flowing.

Mega farming on land or in a building and you still get mono-cultured crops, less jobs and a central management as inflexible as the tomatoes are tasteless. Better go with smaller distributed systems, varied crops, lower technical and chemical requirements that don't promote cancer or need a college degree to do. Food should be grown local for local consumption that way it won't have to endure shipping to feed the world. The system should be able to be scaled up or down. I might could replace my present garage with a greenhouse food producing unit or rehab a vacant building or this towering agri-edifice built from scratch. So, my recommendations is smaller scale, distributed systems, varied crops, people need to work (don't over automate) and local consumption.