Alternative Energy Is Crap [Reader Post]

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“TANSTAAFL”

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

The first place I read that was in one of Robert Heinlein’s novels.

Nothing is free.

We can not create energy; we can only convert it from one form to another.

Every conversion of energy from one form to another takes energy leaving you less energy than you had when you started.

Hydroelectric: water flowing downhill, courtesy of gravity, has kinetic energy (mass in motion) which turns a turbine, which turns an electric generator. A “generator” is not an accurate name for what happens. An electric “generator” converts energy form mechanical to electrical; therefore it is a “converter” and it does not generate anything. This conversation of energy will heat the “generator” causing a loss of energy to heat. This heat loss comes from friction in the generator’s bearings, from hysteresis loss in the generator’s core, and the resistance of the conducting windings of the generator. Energy will also be lost in the resistance of the conducting cables that distribute this electricity.

Coal fired plants: coal is burned to heat water to turn it into steam, that steam is used to turn turbines, which drive generators to convert that mechanical motion to electricity. The same losses apply, plus some heat is lost up the chimney, and some heat is lost in the friction of the bearings in the turbine.

Natural gas: natural gas is burned to drive turbines, which drive generators to convert mechanical motion to electricity. The same losses apply, plus some heat is lost up the chimney, and some heat is lost in the friction in the bearings of the turbine.

Nuclear: heat from radioactive decay is used to heat water for steam, which drives a turbine, which drives a generator to provide electricity. The same losses apply as above.

Conversions: (remember each conversion has losses, every time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose energy, and you will not get out what you put in)

Hydroelectric: mechanical to electrical, one conversion.

Coal: coal to steam to mechanical to electrical, three conversions.

Natural gas: gas to mechanical to electrical, two conversions.

Nuclear: radioactive material to heat to steam to mechanical to electrical, four conversions.

Solar: sun to direct current, to alternating current, two conversions.

Wind: wind to alternating current, one conversion.

My Ford F150: gas to mechanical, one conversion.

Looks like the best choices would be hydroelectric, wind, and my Ford F150.

(The Ecotards oppose all except wind and solar)

Wind generators only work when the wind blows; if it is blowing too hard the wind generator is turned off. Wind generators take thirty to fifty years to recover the costs of construction and installation, depending on the wind, at which time it will have to be replaced. You will not break even; you will lose money on wind power.

Solar: solar panels will not last long enough to reach the break even point. Solar panels will not pay for themselves.

The only justifiable use for wind or solar power is in a remote area where conventional power is not available. Even then you would be better served by hydroelectric power, if running water is available.

My Ford F150 is twenty one years old, still works, and should last another twenty years.

I can drive it 248,928 miles for the cost of a Chevrolet Volt. I can drive it 109,285 miles for the cost of the Volt’s replacement battery. The Volt’s battery weights 400 pounds; that equals 65.57 gallons of gasoline which will take my F150 1,114.69 miles at which point I will not be carrying a 400 pound weight. The Volt has to be charged every forty miles, which takes hours. The electricity to charge this Ecotrard vehicle comes from coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear electric plants through the power grid. The only thing the Volt can do is make some Ecotard feel good. It actually adds several conversions of energy to the cycle. IE: after the grid; battery charger (which has losses) to a battery (which can not give back what it takes) to a DC motor (which has losses). When the battery is discharged a gasoline motor takes over to make DC current to drive the DC motors. The discharged battery still weights 400 pounds which this supplemental motor has to carry. (WOW that is what you could call efficiency, if you were obama or some other idiot).

There were electric cars why back when they were called “horseless carriages”, they were not practical then and they are not practical now.

You can not ignore the laws of physics. You must take into account the energy density of matter when choosing your source of energy and the safety of storing that energy.

Propane or compressed natural gas requires a heavy pressurized storage tank.

Hydrogen causes metal to become brittle and is very hard to store and control.

Gasoline can be stored in a simple plastic bottle and has more energy per volume than either of those.

Gasoline burns; hydrogen explodes.

The safest energy source for automobiles is gasoline or diesel, easy to store and control.

The issue of waste.

Hydroelectric does not have waste products.

Coal, natural gas, diesel, and gasoline, release co2 which plants love and need more of.

Wind generators consume a lot of energy and materials in their manufacture and they kill lots of birds; you could say that their waste is dead birds. But there is also the tailings from the mines that provide the various ores that go into the materials that make the blades, transmission, turbine, and electronic controls for the wind “generator”, once again a “generator” converts energy from one form to another, it does not generate anything. Did you know that when the wind does not blow, wind generators use electricity from the grid to turn the blades? (Something about flat spots on their bearings) Wind farms take room; each wind generator needs an area to itself, no other wind generator within a certain distance. A wind farm capable of supplying the Oklahoma City metro area would be the size of the OKC metro area and you would still need a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant for the times when the wind does not blow, or when it blows too hard; wind generators are shut down in winds over a certain speed. In Oklahoma the wind blows too hard very often. A normal Oklahoma wind gust could bring down a wind generator; that would be a very expensive “waste”.

Wind generators are incredibly noisy and the flickering shadows can drive you nuts. Do not support wind generators until you have spent at least 24 hours within 100 feet of one when the wind is blowing and the blades are turning. Also make very sure that you live on the southwest side of a wind farm so the debris from that wind farm carried by a tornado will not fall on you. Wind generators often stand 300 feet tall and have 200 foot blades, which will make for some very serious debris.

Solar panels work when the sun shines, less than half the day (if it is not cloudy). Their waste is the tailings from the mines that provide the various ores that go into the materials that make the panels and the shaded ground where nothing grows, well, OK, maybe mushrooms, or mold, or things that go bump in the night.

Nuclear does not have to have waste, we can build plants that reprocess and reuse their waste again and again until what is left is not hazardous. A lot of nuclear “waste” is used for medicine. Krypton for example can be used to make light bulbs. Radiation can be used to sterilize food that will store without refrigeration indefinitely; have you ever heard of MRE’s; that stands for “Meals Ready To Eat”, these MRE’s feed the military in the field and have for decades. You can treat milk with this process and it will store without refrigeration for years and still be nutritious. Any food could be stored this way; then people without electricity could have food that does not perish.

Alternative energy has nothing to do with energy independence.

We use oil for transportation, aspirin, and about 6,000 other products.

NO amount of alternative energy will affect that.

In case you missed that, NO amount of energy used to provide electricity will affect our need for oil.

For a parting note: do not support solar, wind, ethanol, or democrats until you have done the math. Anyone who cannot do math is two or three notches below human.

And just a little rant: the consequences of foreign oil dependency include a lack of security and a high cost of everything.

Oh, a brief note about ethanol. It takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get back out of that gallon. The only justifiable use of ethanol is in a glass with ice.

I think now I will consume some (amber colored) ethanol.

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So, smart guy, exactly how many birds are killed by turbines? I gave you some facts; got some, hmmmm?
WWF not ecofreaks? Gosh darn, that’s so good to know.

I love Mother nature, and my planet. And even I know that the ROI on alternative energy is a myth. The ecotards cannot see the forest for the trees and are very, very misguided on this issue. PC at its most abhorrant. Amongst almost everything that has been written in these comments before this, we must also remember that the infrastructure to support the ecowhackos pipe dreams isn’t even close to becoming a reality. The ecofreaks are expert at the Chicken Little point of view.

I want the government to stop subsidizing corn ethanol for gas. I cannot believe that anyone would take food from their family to burin in their tanks. But that’s what were doing. The US sits on more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil. We should be as rich as the arabs if we got off their teat and use our own resources. Give a subsidy to people to buy Natural Gas vehicles or convert existing ones.

@Michael A. Reesby:

The number of birds killed by wind turbines is highly variable. And biologists believe Altamont, which uses older turbine technology, may be the worst example. But that said, the carnage there likely represents only a fraction of the number of birds killed by windmills. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that U.S. wind turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Justice Department is not bringing cases against wind companies.

February 4, 2013: Wind energy in Spain sets record—25% of the electricity Spain produced in January came from wind

Spanish wind farms generated 6 terawatt hours of electricity in January, according to an industry trade group, enough to power nearly every household in the country.

The Spanish Wind Energy Association said wind energy accounted for 25 per cent of all electrical production in January, more than both coal and nuclear power.

“The Spanish economy has gained 3 euros for every one euro invested in incentives for wind farms,” the association said in a blog post, adding that the fossil fuels needed to generate the same amount of electricity would have cost $406 million.

Alternative energy is crap?

@Greg: Gee…. a “wind energy trade group” says windmills are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Who’d a thunk it. 🙂 A quick calc shows that to generate 6TWH of electricity, would take almost 2700 of the worlds largest windmills running at full capacity all month. Unlikely. Incidentally, that 6TWH is about half the needs of a state of 10 million…

Gee…. a “wind energy trade group” says windmills are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

So, we shouldn’t believe the information provided by anyone having a horse in the race?

I guess, then, we can also write off all of the negative information promulgated by the fossil fuel industry and their various paid political front organizations and toadies.

@Greg: Well, it should be viewed with skepticism at least…. something I’ve seen you do here to those “fossil fuel industry” flacks on several occasions. In the case of windmills & solar, you don’t need info from potentially biased sources to see that they are impractical. It’s basic grade school math and science…. at least it was when I went to elementary school… it’s no doubt an advanced degree track now. ;-/

This skeptic asserts that wind power is an outright fraud. He’ll cheerfully sell you a book to prove it.

I’m a little skeptical that the world would be pouring so much money and resources into the rapid expansion of a technology that can easily be proven to be impractical and unworkable with a bit of simple arithmetic. It isn’t just the United States or Western industrial nations that have bought into the technology. Over the past couple of years, China’s total wind generating capacity has surpassed that of the United States and Germany. China certainly isn’t motivated by CO2 or global warming concerns; China is obviously more concerned about encouraging industrial expansion than about climate or environmental issues. Their planners apparently see alternative energy development as an important part of their nation’s energy future.

@Jim S: #58,
Here’s some additional background for your grade-scool math calculator:
These windmills harm more than birds and abuse more than taxpayer check books, they harm animals, playing a role in the triggering and onset of equine flexural limb deformities.

Skook is an expert in equine matters and may have seen evidence of this so he might opine with more clarity.

I know nothing about horses, however my own relationship with windmills has been from the financing end of that dog and I can confirm unequivocally, “this dog don’t hunt.”

A current and powerful mountain of evidence against windmills comes to us from North of the 49th parallel in Ontario, Canada, where the Liberal Premier of the Province was unceremoniously sent into retirement for lying to the Ontario taxpayers on costs of moving a gas energy plant, and sliding hundreds of millions of dollars into windmill boondoggles. There is a large body of info on the internet available. The scandal is broad, involving union fraud, conservative citizen intimidation (ala Obama/Jarrett/Holder), and waste of hundreds of millions. The liberal Premier was convinced that windmills would save the Ontario economy. He signed a contract worth billions for building the windmill energy farm. With the help of windmills, the Provincial debt is now around a little less than a third of a trillion dollars. NICE JOB. The windmill project has been brought to a permanent halt and is a serious slam on windmills in general, as a result of facts and truth coming out of the woodwork concerning the impossibility of windmill viability at any level – even if you were to ignore the money – they are currently just not feasible.

@Greg: I wouldn’t be so skeptical… people are stupid. Politicians get to claim they’re “working on a solution” or “creating jobs”. They also get to pander to the green mafia. Wind companies take advantage of tax credits to rake off a profit before the uselessness of their toys is apparent. Then they vanish and leave the cleanup to those same taxpayers.
As to the Chinese, well those folks have a tendency to let ideology trump logic… which is why the old soviet union sucked in biology for years due to Lamarkism as mandated from Stalin. Anyway, installed wind generating capacity is not the same as delivered capacity. Most info I’ve seen is that wind farms never generate even a fraction of their rated power. That’s why I don’t believe the Spanish even managed to harvest 6TWH.

@James Raider: Getting politics involved with anything is a serious problem. It should be fairly obvious that the needs of the people is better served by the random interactions of people going about their own self interest than by some top-down garbage directed by the political class.

@Greg: Spain?
25% of the energy needed for a country in deep recession with 27.2% unemployed.
Sounds like a plan to follow….NOT!
Huge sums have poured into the Spanish financial system by major European banks have eased bond market pressure on Spain, but the recession is deep.
Spaniards tightened their purse strings and yet investment plummeted.
The International Monetary Fund sees Spanish unemployment at 26.5 percent next year….so, no end in sight.
And you, Greg, have the nerve to tout Spain as a model for us.

THE DECREASE OF BIRDS IS NOW VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE,
I can forsee an increase in MOSQITOES and other stingning insects,
it take me to virus collections on the rise, and death of humans on the rise,
that’s our punishment for killing the MULTIPLE BIRDS who don’t belong to any COUNTRIES,
they are the beautiful friendly visitors who come and sing for our entertainment and eat the zillions mosqitoes and other propagator of virus even the PLAGUE come from them,
yes you did a good deal with WIND TURBINES, WAIT FOR WHAT IS COMING IN THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN who will hold you accountable,
I personaly suspect the WIND TURBINES TO INFLUENCE
THE EXTREME WEATHER WE ARE EXPERIENCING, that’s my take for you smart brains to challenge.

@Nan G, #63:

Did I suggest that Spain should be a model for the United States? That would be ridiculous. Spain is far smaller than Texas—195,364 square miles vs. 268,820 square miles. (Although Spain had the higher 2011 GDP: $1.477 trillion for Spain, vs. $1.332 trillion for Texas. )

What I was suggesting is that wind energy works in practice, and that Spain demonstrates that fact. If you build wind turbines they generate power, and will continue to generate power for a very long time, with relatively low maintenance costs. If you buy a ton of coal and burn it, it’s gone—except, of course, for the particulates, the mercury, the persistent radioactive isotopes, the acidic sulfur compounds, and a load of previously locked-up CO2. (Sometimes referred to as the hidden costs.) So, you’ve got to keep on mining and buying and burning more—until it eventually becomes uneconomical, chokes you, heats up the planet to the point that even the most dense finally catch on, or runs out.

Some people seem to dislike the evidence of the practicality of alternative energy. They have a problem, because the evidence is rapidly spreading.

@Greg: CLEAN???
On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/01/28/article-1350811-0CF36063000005DC-625_634x286.jpg
That is Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.
To extract neodymium leaves an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Greg, the Chinese people near that are forced to wear masks all the time.
They cannot farm.
It would take them 40 days of work to earn enough to but 1 kilogram of the rare earth used in wind turbine magnets.
Talk about your ”hidden costs!”

@Greg: What I was suggesting is that wind energy works in practice, and that Spain demonstrates that fact. If you build wind turbines they generate power, and will continue to generate power for a very long time, with relatively low maintenance costs.

…snip…

Some people seem to dislike the evidence of the practicality of alternative energy. They have a problem, because the evidence is rapidly spreading.

Well, Greg… since you decided to bring a 2011 post back to life, I might as well chime in too. There’s several ways to look at this older post, leaving the “crap” title aside. And of course wind energy works “in practice”. When the wind blows, mills will turn and generate power. The real point is what constitutes a successful “practice”? Not to mention the stable longevity comment is way premature…

A quick review indicates that Al Cooper was pointing out that everything has a cost for alternative energy – i.e. the cost to conversation rate – and no matter what you do we will still need that pesky fossil fuel. It’s not only used in gasoline, but is the mainstay for manufactured goods as well. The plastics and medical equipment constructed from materials dependent upon fossil fuel cannot be built with the sources used by alternative energy.

That said, I don’t think anyone minds a mix of alternative energies. What bothers most of us is that it’s some sort of feel-good, save-the-planet mandate that costs taxpayers an arm and a leg. And this is the problem in Spain.

I did a post about Obama’s idea for jobs-all-in-the-wrong-places back in January 2010. The poster child for the erroneous theory that alternative energy is beneficial to a State’s economy is Spain, and their Royal Decrees.

Using Spain’s post wind energy grand experiment, a March 2009 study from the University of Rey Juan Carlos was released, and their predictions about it’s effect on the economy are proving to be dead on. What they predicted was that for every single job created with public funds for alternative energy projects, 2.2 private sector jobs are lost. Over five are lost when you compare annual productivity over two decades, and it would result in a decline in industry. Fascinating report even back then, but even more fascinating when reflecting on Spain’s economic free-fall today.

The larger irony is that Spain didn’t embark on the Royal Decree energy path for lofty, save-the-planet reasons. They did so because they thought it would be an economic boom. This pie-in-the-sky talking point was still being advanced as late as April 2008 by an article in MIT’s Technology Review.

Oh what a difference hindsight makes…

In 2009, they were sure that the rising unemployment trend was reversing. At that point it was about 18%. By 2011, it was up to 21%. Flash forward to 2013, and it’s just over 27%. Not exactly working out as they predicted, eh?

They’ve got the trending loss of industry going – mimicking America’s past when we moved from being an industrial giant after WWII, and in to being a nation of service/retail/consumers instead. Not only do those service jobs depend upon tourists and consumers in the nation who spend, but the jobs are lower paying as well.

What with all these taxpayers, funding not only the grand energy experiment, but those high speed rails as well, the cost and resulting job losses are more than the taxpayer can bear. And of course, that’s not the end of it. Energy costs just keep going up, which further belies any economic benefit for the alternative energies.

If the world were economically sound, and could afford to pamper their AGW beliefs by blowing lots of taxpayer cash on such policies that actually drive negative growth and employment, while raising debt to GDP, such grand experiments might be met with different attitudes. As it is, it’s a feel good policy that is tantamount to nothing but minuses economically, and we can’t afford to massage environmental egos. This means it is anything *but* “practical”.

Thus Obama talking points that this kind of direction, using Spain as the model, is a good idea for the economy is nothing more than pure bull shit.

This toxic lake poisons Chinese farmers, their children and their land. It is what’s left behind after making the magnets for Britain’s latest wind turbines… and, as a special Live investigation reveals, is merely one of a multitude of environmental sins committed in the name of our new green Jerusalem

This isn’t a consequence of the quest for green energy. It’s a consequence of capitalism and greed in action, operating in what many capitalists would consider an optimal regulatory vacuum. It’s a consequence of exploiting a marketable commodity as cheaply as possible, without giving a damn about the effects on disposable “human resources” or on an environment that the chief beneficiaries of the exploitation don’t have to raise their own children in.

Neodymium is actually as common as other widely used industrial metals—no rarer than nickel or copper. The problem is greed.

@Nan G: To say nothing of the impact of mining the aluminum, steel, and copper used in these monsters… and the fossil fuel used to make the blades. Then there’s all the copper used to connect these things to the grid. To replace a single 1000MW coal burning plant, requires at least 330 windmills, even under ideal winds.
BTW, I understand that the rare earths are really not that rare. It’s just that they are all so chemically similar that they are difficult to extract from ores… hence the mess.

@MataHarley, #67:

Though they’re given center-stage in the world of politics, economic cycles are actually relatively short-term phenomena. I think the most important question might actually be whether or not human civilization can continue to rely on fossil fuel-based economies over the long term—as in, over more than another century or two. I think it’s entirely possible that the rapidly expanding global population may push already dysfunctional energy technologies to the breaking point much sooner than expected.

Maybe a fusion power breakthrough will ultimately be our salvation, but I’m more comfortable thinking that mankind will have a workable fall-back position. It seems important to me that all possible alternatives be explored without delay, not just in theory but in practice. To me, the need to push both wind and solar power seems obvious. Corporate America won’t do that without economic incentives. It seems to me that their thinking is most often about as short-term as it gets.

@Greg: Though they’re given center-stage in the world of politics, economic cycles are actually relatively short-term phenomena.

That might have more validity in the past, when the global economy wasn’t in a large downturn, and the public debt wasn’t as high compared to the GDP. When your debt gets to a certain level, there is simply no way to back out without repercussions.

To me, the need to push both wind and solar power seems obvious. Corporate America won’t do that without economic incentives. It seems to me that their thinking is most often about as short-term as it gets.

I might counter that corporate most certainly views long term as a matter of smart fiscal investment. Those that are notorious short sighted are elected officials.