The Renewable Energy Disasterby Christopher Calder
If we have fancy boutique priced energy, we will have fancy boutique priced food!
It is a mathematically provable fact that you cannot replace oil, coal, and natural gas with windmills, solar panels, and biofuels.
Hobbits may be able to live poetically, generating energy from the wind, the Sun, and the soil.
Real human beings living in an industrialized civilization need highly concentrated nonrenewable energy sources to survive.
Renewable energy schemes other than hydroelectric and geothermal power are resource hogs that take up huge amounts of space while providing very little usable energy in return.
Contrary to popular belief, solar, wind, wave energy, and biofuel schemes are not "energy efficient," and their ultra-high cost is an accurate measurement of that inherent inefficiency. If they were efficient they would cost less than using fossil fuels, not dramatically more than using fossil fuels.
WIND AND SOLAR FUTILITY To satisfy 100% of New York City's electricity needs with
wind power would require impossible around-the-clock winds within a limited speed range, and a wind farm the size of the entire state of Connecticut.
Solar photovoltaic cells are so inefficient that even with recent improvements in solar panel design it would take about 30 square miles of expensive solar panels to generate just one gigawatt of electricity.
How much wind and solar energy can we collect on a still, windless night? Solar and wind are inherently intermittent and unreliable energy sources.
Would you hire a drunken employee who only showed up for work part of the time, and on his own erratic schedule, not yours? On top of that, the sloppy drunk demands a far higher salary than do reliable workers.
Wind EnergyLawrence Solomon exposes the lies and hype of the renewable energy faddists in his Financial Post article, "Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels? Not a chance" "Virtually every major German solar producer has gone under."
As both wind and solar subsidies are withdrawn, wind and solar projects become a financial burden rather than an economic asset. "The cost to the German economy of its transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050." "As Warren Buffett said, wind farms don’t make sense without the tax credit."
Because of their extremely low power to weight ratio, windmills require the use of huge amounts of steel and other materials in their construction. Wind turbines are being sold to the public as a carbon neutral product, but manufacturing windmill components is not a carbon neutral process.
Windmills are mainly made from power generated by burning coal and other fossil fuels. Because of the enormous amount of resources required for windmill construction, and their intermittent and unreliable performance, windmills do not reduce CO2 emissions.
Building wind turbine farms covering vast areas of land will kill large numbers of birds and bats, and torture animals and humans living nearby with audible sounds as well as infrasound. Infrasounds are very low frequencies below 20Hz that travel long distances and can cause headaches, insomnia, and other serious negative health effects.
According to "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL," "The states with (wind power/renewable energy) mandates paid 31.9% more for electricity than states without them.”
Solar EnergySimple passive solar design features for home construction and passive solar hot water heating are sound investments, but solar power is a wasteful and counterproductive investment for large scale energy production.
You don't get any solar energy at night; you get less on cloudy days, less in the morning, and less in the late afternoon.
That makes large scale solar power schemes horribly inefficient no matter how high we can pump up the theoretical peak output of solar panels.
Solar panels will always be exposed to the weather, and their lifespan is short; about 25 years. Unlike other power systems, solar panels cannot be repaired and upgraded to extend their usefulness beyond their very limited lifespan.
This fact dramatically increases their cost per kilowatt hour compared to other more affordable alternatives. Solar power is great for running pocket calculators, remote vacation cabins, and other small scale high cost per watt uses, but solar power is inherently the wrong choice for large scale power grid use.
As William Tucker points out in Food Riots Made in the USA, solar power is an extraterrestrial nuclear power system where the nuclear reactor is located 93 million miles away from us in outer space,...the Sun.
We need terrestrial nuclear reactors right here on Earth so we can affordably capture their highly concentrated energy without taking up huge amounts of land space. Our extraterrestrial nuclear power source is great for growing crops, but its output is far too diffuse and intermittent for practical large scale electricity production.
Read the whole gory story of renewable futility herehttp://renewable.50webs.com/