rocket exhaust plumes on the atmosphere in part because eventually most of the resources will come from the Moon and the effects from rockets will then be minimal. Cost of Energy The purpose of this section is to establish a cost baseline against which to judge the data presented in the later sections on energy from space and solar fuels. In this section we are dealing with prices not costs . For example the true cost of a kW-hr for a village in Alaska or India which is produced from a small diesel-generator set is about $1.50. The price paid in Alaska is about 12 cents and considerably less in India. Electricity has a wide range in both cost and price. In the US the price that residential consumers pay ranges from a low of approximately 3 cents a kW-hr or 30 mills to a high of about 14 cents. The price charged residential consumers in Europe approaches 22 cents per kW-hr. Opponents of new sources claim the new sources must meet the lowest cost, which is generally being produced by older plants, while proponents claim they should only have to meet the highest or avoid costs. Issues of tax incentives, credits, subsidies, a revenue source for governments are ignored in this discussion partly because of both complexity and space limitations and partly because we are focused on the bottom line bare minimum cost of providing energy to fuel economic development. Based on this discussion a target cost goal for energy delivered to the grid, not to the household, should be between 5 and 8 cents per kW-hr. Not included in the above cost are the costs avoided by the utility such as the upstream and downstream effects. An example of a new cost that is not yet widely included is the carbon tax that some countries are levying on companies in order to provide free market incentives and price differentials to encourage change. Gasoline is included here because of the discussion on solar fuels which is presented later in this paper. It is also included because most of our civilization depends on some sort of liquid fuels like gasoline be it diesel, kerosene for aircraft or simply gasoline. Given the large sunk costs of the liquid fuels infrastructure, the volumetric energy density, and the versatility it seems unlikely that liquid fuels, especially in developing and third world countries, will be displaced in the foreseeable future for medium and long range transportation. The question is rather how they will be obtained or manufactured. Conventional alternatives to running out of liquid fuels include opening up offshore and wilderness areas, strip mining coal for use as feed stock to synfuels plants like SASOL in South Africa or synthesizing it from basic materials like air and water Technological and economic alternatives in the industrialized nations include electric cars for commuting, hydrogen powered fuel cells for buses, roadway powered vehicles and high speed ground systems. A global alternative is the creation of solar fuels using sunlight, water, and air.
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