Plant Conversions the Answer?

Refitting, redesigning, demolishing etc we haven't got robotic like analysis of everything yet so usually the costs of building new are significantly cheaper and able to meet current standards without rethinking and reapplying for them. Also if power companies aren't being accessed then power at current output would be efficient and sufficient but new loads drive the industry into the ground. To meet new demands the industry has to rethink everything with a way to escalate costs! People could easily generate their own power and sell it's benefits but haven't traded for many years and wish to remain part of a comfortable consumer society. The current ecological crisis is about overconsumers and their ability to shift the blame onto big corporations. It's called public education and innovative thought but consumers think those domains are magical lands tended by wizards. People used to be able to find educators and create products all on their own but with six more billion the still enabled humans are seen as odd (almost possessed, too crafty, lame unit etc.). It's always hard to enterprise in people size one but a lot of communities are starting to attempt carrying some of the load and plenty of companies see dollar signs flashing in the environmental scene. Speeding the rate of demolition of old power stations would be the best option until retrofitting becomes more automated.

I think everyone should get a new pair of pants. Then just build nuclear plants, forget about cleaner forms of energy.

Kurt has it about right; The tree hugging pantheists want all the benefits of abundant power, but are unwilling to allow any development towards that end. No hydro, the rivers must run free. No wind farms, they kill birds. No coal, global warming and acid rain. No nukes because of Chernobly. Cover the earth with solar cells and we still lack enough power.

But in the meantime, keep running the old fossil stations as trash burners just to send the enviro-whacks right over the falls.

I lived in coal camps much of my juvenile life and usually within a couple hundred yards of spontaneous combustion-ed coal waste. The only place that the air was more foul was in a town hosting a paper mill. When the Viet Nam anti-war crowd ran out of a cause, the next most visible target was coal fired and nuclear electrical generating plants.

By now, all of our electrical generation should be nuclear. Coal could have picked up the slack and cleaner plants could have been had at the same time. I do not believe that the minuscule time span of the industrial revolution could damaged the environment to anywhere near irreparable damage. Having seen the last fifty years of nature almost completely erasing the evidence of strip mining of my youth, I am convinced of the ability of the earth to heal itself.

Having no children of my own and being 68, you should ask, "what's it to you?" I have an aversion to wishful thinking. I suspect the oil in the Mideast has been vastly over-stated. Build, refurbish, retrofit and reclaim decommissioned coal plants. Drill baby, drill. Do not wait another fifty years for pristine fuel to fall out of the sky. Cancel 90% of regulations purporting to save the environment and start building nuclear plants and recommission any that you can.