I consistently hear that Sen. McCain voted against alternative energy. I have to imagine the only vote that comes up is to pay for a subsidy. So, in reality he's voted against providing money for something that may be accomplished by private industry. Do people really think anyone other than coal or oil execs are AGAINST wind power, solar, geothermal, etc.? I also hear the claim that candidates voted against things like "children", "education", etc. My point is what's wrong with voting against spending bills? Why don't these candidates turn around and accuse those who wish to increase the budget with these programs and say "I don't think that's in the purvue of government and can be handled by making them to work more efficiently or to let the market pick the winner."
Agreed. I guess my larger part is that these charges consistently go unanswered. Why not come back with the rationale for not supporting these bills instead of accepting the talking point?
The big solar energy bill hasn't been renewed this year, which is pretty crazy IMO. McCain has missed all 8 times it's been up for vote, which is why he's being criticized: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/opinion/03friedman.html As to your point that government shouldn't be picking winners, and the free market should. Well. The free market right now isn't operating in the current oil industry. It's receiving massive subsidies from all angles, not the least of which being our military service. Keeping those pipelines running in places like Iraq doesn't come cheap, and it isn't reflected in the price at the pump. So if you really want to see the free market at work, we'd need to pull our military out of the middle east, we'd need to implement taxes on carbon emissions to make them truly reflect the real costs of pollution and global warming, and we'd have to cut a lot of tax breaks going to the industry. Since nobody sees that happening, the next best step is to subsidize competing industries in much the same manner we subsidize oil to create a level playing field. Now I'm not a big fan of the government picking winners. I dislike the idea that we should subsidize solar panels, for example, because it may turn out that wind or hydro or nuclear is more cost-effective. But I can life with it if it's the only way. I'd prefer the government go with a strategy where we implement a gas floor tax. So gas can never, ever be cheaper than, say, $4.00/gallon, and that the tax increase every year by 10%. I'd like a similar strategy for coal. That takes the guesswork out of corporations who don't want to invest in green technologies (as they did in the late 1970's) because the market could just vanish in a few years. Coal and gas, after having been exploited for over a century, just aren't going to see significant advances in technology. If, however, we commit to serious investments in solar, wind, hydro and nuclear, we could see massive, rapid and exponential improvements within a decade, that we look back on the "oil years" with humor and irony. When I hear Republicans chant "Drill, baby, drill," I can't help think two things: 1. Is the "baby" they are really talking to their own children? How sickening is that? 2. I wonder if back in 1980 there were corners of IBM where leaders chanted "Typewriter, baby, typewriter!". Because the typewriter back then seem a lot like the oil industry right now to me. Thoroughly dominant, yet antiquated.
Solar's a joke. A scam. Carbon emissions taxes are a scam, too. One that guys like Al Gore make money off of fools by putting up a simple WWW site and guilting people into sending in money.
Ban Di Hydrogen Monoxide! (Warning, contains the word bullshit) [video=youtube;yi3erdgVVTw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw[/video]
NSFW [video=youtube;JAu68OsFggw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAu68OsFggw&NR=1[/video] [video=youtube;5weG9IllCpo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5weG9IllCpo&feature=related[/video] [video=youtube;ictpPrle3EQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ictpPrle3EQ&feature=related[/video]
It uses way more upstream kinds of energy to produce a solar cell and batteries than they'll ever produce in their lifetime. This is true for all of the alternate energy sources; they're only viable at all if the govt. subisidizes them. The exception is nuclear, which doesn't pollute and the radioactive waste is not particularly hard to deal with safely. EDIT: Yucca Mountain is about 80 miles from my house, bring it all there and bury it. I feel 100% safe with that plan.
That's not it. The sun simply doesn't shine enough light on the earth. Maybe when it turns into a red giant, tho... The more solar panels are produced, the less a % of all energy produced is from solar. Think about that. The science isn't that difficult to understand. The first law of thermodynamics states you can't get more energy out of something than you put in. And in practice/reality, some energy is lost along the way (friction, etc.).
I agree with mook...why? i have a couple of friends who are getting their PHD's in chemical engineering and one of the few things we all agree on is that Solar Power is by far the most feasible of all the renewable energy sources. Ethanol is a joke, Hydrogen Fuel Cell based cars have been going nowhere fast almost since the initial prototypes, non-ethanol bio fuels are very difficult to produce a large scale and faces issues with mainstream acceptance, wind power is useful as secondary source of power but not something on which you can base an entire power grid. I think there was a good article in the last month from the Economist that discusses a lot of this.
Not all solar energy involves batteries. Check out solar thermal plants. You are the only person I've ever heard say that all alternative energies are inherently wasteful. I'd love to see you link to some mainstream science magazines to support your claim. Or are all of them "in the bag" for Big Solar? (Break out tinfoil hats!) I've seen numerous articles in Scientific American remarking about the future of green technology. Never once have I read an article about it being a "scam." Is this just a big conspiracy on their part? Even if you are right (I sincerely doubt it), you don't seem to take into account the rapid pace of growth in technologies like solar thermal plants and photovoltaics. 30 years ago it would've been a massive waste of our intellectual resources to put a 20 megahertz computer in everybody's house. There were far better things we could have been engineering. Now most houses have a 2 gigaherz computer, and nobody thinks it's even remarkable. Similarly, it's ludicrous to say any alternative energy aside from nuclear now and forever will always be more expensive and wasteful than the 100 year old technologies of coal and oil. It demonstrates a pathetic amount of imagination. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/<wbr>06/03/science/03tier.html?scp=<wbr>1&sq=Ray%20Kurzweil&st=cse What form of energy is currently not subsidized by the government? (Hint: none.)
I explained about the first law of thermodynamics. It's that stupid simple... I agree about the other sources for the reasons you specify, tho fuel cells could be the battery solution that's really needed. The problem is it's a Hindenburg type of thing if you put it in a car and get in an accident. The sun doesn't shine at night. Electricity has to be produced 24/7/365, or stored in batteries (there's energy loss in that, too). This guy has it right, mostly. Everyone's banking on some sort of breakthrough, but I'm dubious that it's still a scam. http://renewenergy.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/report-current-solar-technology-a-loser/ Severin Borenstein, director of the U.C. Energy Institute and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s business school, called existing technology “a loser” in a research paper. “We are throwing money away by installing the current solar PV technology,” he said. Borenstein calls for more state and federal money to be spent on research into better technology, rather than on subsidies for residential solar power systems. “We need a major scientific breakthrough, and we won’t get it by putting panels up on houses,” he said.
True enough. If you read much about where the new "hot" fields are that all the engineering and chemistry students want to go into, it's energy. Companies around the world are dumping billions of dollars into solar every year. If you think they are all either being scammed, or are the result of citizens being scammed by their government, I'd say you're pretty arrogant for thinking yourself so much wiser than all these citizens, governments and investors.
There is plenty of sunlight, that is a non issue. The probably is bumping up the efficiency for capturing the light and making solar cheap enough to be available to general public. Currently solar panels can only capture certain light wavelengths, meaning a lot of the suns rays go wasted. A lot of work is being done to expand the wavelengths being captured and should see results in the near future. The other interesting development is organic based solar panels that can just be rolled out anywhere but will be dirt cheap (like picking it up in the home and garden section of your local store cheap).
Germany reduced their consumption of foreign oil by a ridiculous percentage as a result of major government subsidy program. A significant side result of these subsidies is the Germany is the current world leader in solar technology and has created thousands of jobs in a booming industry that is going to expand even more in the coming years
For starters: http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Fraud-E...=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207454048&sr=1-3 And: http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results.html?artId=21823 Solar Power Presents Many Hurdles to Consumers "In this article and next month's installment we'll discuss the off-the-grid and on-the-grid [solar power] scenarios in order." Written By: Howard C. Hayden Published In: Environment & Climate News > September 2007 Publication date: 09/01/2007 Publisher: The Heartland Institute <hr> This article is the first in a series outlining the technological and economic obstacles to the widespread use of solar power. It all sounds so simple. Buy a solar gadget for your roof, tie it into the household electric system, get all the electricity you want, buy a rustic place in the mountains, live "off the grid," and congratulate yourself for being independent. Like most dreams, this one is based on delusion. Alternatively, you might dream of having the solar gadget produce enough extra electricity that you could tie it to the grid and sell the excess to the utility company. This "on-the-grid" dream involves somewhat different delusions. There is nothing as devastating to a beautiful dream as waking up to a brutal gang of facts. In this article and next month's installment we'll discuss the off-the-grid and on-the-grid scenarios in order. In subsequent issues, we'll look at the solar gadgets variously called photocells, photovoltaic (PV) cells, or solar batteries. Then we'll discuss the ancillary systems required for any solar installation. Off-the-Grid Storage Let's pretend, just for fun, that you could just buy the solar gadget--we'll discuss that device in a future installment--and tie it into your wiring. OK, now how do you get electricity on a long, cold winter night? Clearly, the matter of storage rears its ugly head. Sure, you can buy storage batteries, but something as small as the 30 pound lead-acid beast in your car is nowhere near adequate to produce your electricity for even one short night, let alone several nights and several cloudy days. The batteries are neither small, nor free, nor everlasting. They are similar to car batteries, but different in manufacture and use. A car battery is rarely discharged more than a percent or so, unless somebody has left the lights on or the engine is balky about starting. Storage Issues A battery used for backing up a PV system would be charged during sunny days but would be discharged during nighttime and cloudy days whenever somebody turned on a light or other electrical device. This battery would often be discharged to the point where it was almost dead. On the other hand, while the starting current drawn from a car battery is often very high, the current drawn from the PV backup system battery would typically be much less. For this purpose, there are "deep-discharge" batteries that are deliberately made to withstand such hard usage. The ones designed for PV systems are considerably larger than car batteries, both in physical size and in the amount of electrical energy they can store. How many batteries to buy is a question with no easy answer, but the simple answer is "more is better." Suppose your solar gadget can charge any number of batteries during one sunny day; it is still true that the number of sequential nights and cloudy days your system can handle is just a matter of how many batteries you have. But don't despair. Your PV system will be limited in how many batteries it can charge during a day, so it would be pointless to have a hundred batteries in the basement anyway. To quote an aphorism from E.F. Schumacher: Small is beautiful. Economies of Scale That brings us to a problem called "economies of scale." Occasionally, you use a great deal of power, especially when the electric dryer and the oven are running while lights, the freezer, the refrigerator, the TV, and the computers are running simultaneously. At other times, you use very little power, as everything is turned off. Measurements show a house will occasionally use as much as 15 kilowatts for short intervals, but in a neighborhood of eight to 10 non-air-conditioned houses supplied by a transformer, the power demand will not exceed about 3.5 kilowatts per house. A substation handles the power for many distribution lines. The utility usually allocates about 2 kilowatts per household at this level. From the standpoint of the power station, the utility needs to produce less than about 1.5 kilowatts per household. In other words, the local system of the off-grid user has to be designed to handle 10 times as much power as the power station would allocate to a single house. Better Deal for Consumers That is, the power station can take advantage of the diversity of demand, providing enough capacity to allocate each house about 1.5 kW. An off-grid system cannot do so--it must be ready to handle the maximum demand, which can easily be 10 times as high as the citywide average demand. Hence, even if the per-kilowatt cost were the same for the off-grid homeowner and the utility, the homeowner's equipment cost is guaranteed to be much higher than the utility's equipment cost for the same household. <hr> Howard C. Hayden, Ph.D. (corkhayden@comcast.net) is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Connecticut and adjunct professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo. He writes a monthly energy newsletter available for a $35 annual subscription at The Energy Advocate, PO Box 7595, Pueblo West, CO 81007.
An even better article. A 2nd scientist with a PhD. http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?title=The False Promises of Solar Energy The False Promises of Solar Energy By Michael R. Fox Ph.D., 11/30/2005 8:56:14 AM Someone once said that "Anything is possible if you don’t know what you are talking about". Discussions of energy in general and several types of "alternative energy" in particular are filled with the lack of the basics of energy. Throw in concepts of energy density and "dispatchability" and its get more complicated. The Laws of Thermodynamics, of Heat Transfer, and the equations for both kinetic and potential energy apply to most discussions of energy and impose immutable constraints on all energy supply systems. These laws are typically studied in physics, chemistry, chemical engineering and other demanding classes in undergraduate and graduate schools. Entire textbooks and college curricula are written and conducted on various forms of energy. Those who have not endured such disciplines may not appreciate the properties of energy and how it is generated, transferred, and used. One of many units of energy is the "kilowatt-hr". Although all energy units can be converted to any other, the kilowatt-hr is most often used to describe electrical energy. To get a feel for how much energy is in a kilowatt-hr, consider one of those bicycle generators used to power a light bulb (often found in museums). A very fit cyclist can keep a 100 watt light bulb lighted for an hour. If he can do this for 10 hours he will deliver 1000 watt-hrs, or 1.0 kilowatt-hr (kw-hr). This is in human terms a lot of effort. Now consider a 1000 megawatt (MW) power plant (the megawatt is a unit of power, not energy). In the same 10 hours for the cyclist above, this power plant can deliver 10 x 1000 x 1,000,000 = 10 billion watt-hrs or 10 million kilowatt-hrs. In other words this single power plant can deliver the same amount of electrical energy as 10,000,000 cyclists. The owner of the power plant will sell each kw-hr for about 8 cents. Would those cyclists work for 8 cents for a 10 hr workday??? Not likely. The waste disposal costs would be significant!! Ever since the Carter Administration the US government has spent billions on solar energy research, development, and demonstrations. Thousands of demonstrations have been constructed across the United States. Whether it’s the Solar One Power Tower in the California desert or the Luz project there also, or the hundreds across the US, I am not aware of any successes. The exceptions might be for water heating (not electricity) in the southern latitudes. Most have been dismal engineering failures. Before spending billions more, this nation would do well to revisit these past projects to learn what went wrong. Such learning is precisely why we built these projects in the first place, so lets learn!! We learned for example that the heavily subsidized Solar Power Tower in Southern Cal. before it caught fire could not provide on an annual basis enough electricity for its own on-site use, lights, air conditioning, computers, etc. On an annual basis it was a net energy consumer, not a true source!!! In Eastern Washington as in other states there were many such lesser projects. A Washington congressman in the early 80s was Mike McCormick who was among the first to sponsor legislation for these solar projects. There were a number of such projects built there. Across the nation many billions of government funds were passed out for the demonstrations. So far as can be determined none were successful from either a performance or cost perspective. A radically designed bank building in Richland, Washington still exists where one of the projects was undertaking in the 80s. The intentions were to provide solar energy to heat the building with heated circulating water. The maintenance costs were prohibitive and the engineering performance was a failure. The system has been closed down for years. Today one can still see the burst circulation lines, the corrosion, not to mention bird droppings and dust deposits on the collectors. Such maintenance costs are routinely overlooked in cost analyses and projections. Another half-million dollar project was installed on the top of a one-story office building. It too was a stunning failure because of high maintenance requirements, but nevertheless cost the taxpayers more than $500,000. The working fluid was ethylene glycol (antifreeze). When the system sprang a leak many cars in the parking lot were sprayed with the chemical ruining the paint jobs of many of them. Such building owners are eager to accept such massive funds, the public relations coup, as well as the politically correct accolades for "alternative energy" efforts. The romance disappears when the maintenance and repairs costs roll in year after year. It too was shut down because of these unrelenting costs. As with bad marriages these projects became eyesores and never worked. Removal of the failed solar collectors was a requirement for the sale of the property. The history of the US solar energy program over the past 30 years has been a long string of broken promises and the waste of billions. The simplistic assertions and empty promises continue today as if we haven’t learned a thing from the billions spent already. I can provide a tour of failed NW solar projects if desired, which litter the area as well as failed windmills added as a bonus. The costs and performance of solar electric projects are even worse. The amount of solar energy striking a collector depends upon several factors including the distance from the sun and the latitude north or south of the equator. According to retired physicist Howard Hayden, at the latitude of Hartford, Connecticut the incoming solar energy (called insolation) averages 160 watts/sq meter. This is a fixed upper value for this latitude. If one thinks about it, we would never want it to be higher, or lower for that matter!! In fact the average insolation in 2/3 of the United States is within 20% of this value (See The Solar Fraud by Howard C. Hayden, 2001, for a great summary of the physics and engineering factors---see p. 75-76 for a good discussion of insolation). Although this an upper limit, there is a huge daily drop-off in this value which includes zero power every night!! The need for an equally sized non-solar backup system for night time and cloudy days electrical energy are obvious. An engineering friend in Sacramento was researching solar photovoltaic electricity for installation on his home there. He contacted Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) to discuss the design and costs. He was told that for a 1500 watt photovoltaic (PV) system placed on his roof would cost $14,000 to $16,000 dollars!! Being surprised at this huge cost he asked the intelligent question, "Does that include a storage system (batteries, controls, and distribution systems to supply electrical energy at night)" He was told that it didn’t and that the storage system would cost an additional $30,000 dollars!! The 160 w/sq m value is only the thermal (heat) energy flux at noon on a sunny day. To convert this to electrical energy photovoltaic (PV) cells are required. This gets very expensive. The cells are typically 10% efficient. In other words from that 160 watt/sq meter thermal power, we can expect about 16 watts/sq meter of electric power!! This is not enough to operate a single refrigerator light!! Furthermore, the electricity from the PV cells are direct current and low voltage. To make this electricity useful in needs more electrical equipment to convert it to alternating current at higher voltages such as 110 volts AC. This also adds to the costs. Too often alternative energy advocates throw solar and wind energy into the discussions as if these were the sources of all our future energy needs. Nothing could be further from the truth and it’s dangerous for our leaders to believe so. The American Physical Society concluded in 1979 that even if the PV cells were FREE the other costs would still make solar electricity cost prohibitive. University of Arizona physicists and solar energy experts Drs. Aden and Marjorie Meinel said essentially the same thing in their Congressional testimony in the early 80s. Their testimony addressed solar space heating, water pumping, and solar voltaics. Hot water heating may be near-economical at the lower latitudes but not in the upper 2/3 of the US. The Meinels pointed out these hidden costs to include financing, installation, repair, maintenance, and replacement. In the planning for their future energy choices Japan and Switzerland performed energy cost comparisons. Both nations found nominally the same cost disparities in wind, solar, and nuclear. In comparing costs of nuclear energy with both solar and wind energy costs, these nations independently found that solar electricity was a nominal 30 times more costly and wind energy 3 times the costs of nuclear energy. This helps explain why so many nations are building large nuclear programs and not wind or solar facilities. China for example is currently building 8 reactors and has 20 more in the design stages. They are also building huge hydro facilities and a large number of coal plants. It hasn’t been widely noticed but the same movement which opposes serious oil exploration and drilling, coal burning, nuclear energy, natural gas in places, are also involved with the promotion of the failed solar and wind technologies. Those former sources collectively produce more than 98% of the nation’s electricity. Electrical energy is essential to any advanced nation. Destroying 98% of the electrical energy generating systems would turn the United States into another Third World Country. Their actions do not match their words on many levels. The promise of solar energy has been shown to fail. It is simply to weak a source and far too intermittent and unreliable to be useful. Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is retired and living in Kaneohe. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:foxm011@hawaii.rr.com
