Quote:
Originally Posted by marketsmart
to me its about not relying on foreign energy.. we send way to much money to our enemies directly or indirectly in the form of oil consumption.
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Politicians lie. Energy independence is a pipe dream. Oil is fungible.
To realize dependably lower energy prices, you need to either increase supply or decrease demand. Alternative energy sources are a possible way of increasing supply and gaining more control of the market as a whole, but to be effective they need to supply energy at competitive prices - competitive while excluding government subsidies.
Unfortunately, this is currently impossible to achieve. If, through some miraculous technological breakthrough, prices on alternative energy sources suddenly dropped, the members of OPEC would simply slash their own prices as well.
So even if prices for alternative fuel sources drop, heavily investing in them will still end up losing any significantly influential country money. Up to the point where the base cost of energy from alternative sources is lower than that of energy from fossil fuels, anyway. Assuming that OPEC continues undercutting alternative fuel sources, that means heavily investing in them puts significantly influential countries at a competitive disadvantage compared to other countries.*
A much easier step to take is to reduce demand. This would be fairly easy to achieve, had it not been for people being self-absorbed morons. However, it is still a much more attainable goal than creating a stable, profitable and significant supply of energy through alternative sources.
But even with both reduced demand as well as increased supply (through alternative sources), energy independence would still be a myth. The only way to achieve it would be to become the world's chief energy supplier. Otherwise, other energy suppliers could still significantly affect the price by increasing or reducing their own output. Unless you have a closed system, where all energy is produced domestically and domestically produced energy is illegal to export - which would be a prohibitively expensive system.
TL;DR version: no energy independence. Ever.
* "heavily" and "significantly influential" are key terms here - minor investments and investments by less influential countries do not carry enough weight to affect OPEC pricing.