Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11847.html#more-11847 ^ | Shannon Love

[SteamShovel]

Texas has built a parallel system for our wind power.

The Texas grid has been separate from the rest of the country for years if not always. Unless you are saying there is another Texas grid just for windmills...

[jwparkerjr]

I try to at least book mark them. It drives me crazy to read something and then days or weeks later find I would like to refer to that article again! Goodness knows how many hours I’ve spent looking, frequently in vain, for some article I know full well I’ve seen recently.

[alloysteel]

One anagram of “nuclear” is “unclear”.

The same people who endlessly tout “alternative” energy (solar, geothermal, wind, magic pixie dust, etc.) are dead set against the development of nuclear power as a means to provide the vast amounts of energy that will be needed to power the late 21st Century and 22nd Century industrial base.

Part of this fear is superstition, that some evil genie lurks within the radioactive isotopes, just waiting for the opportunity to break out and devastate the countryside, and any big concentrations of human beings that get in the way.

Well, DUH. Nuclear power plants are NOT atomic weapons. They are designed for the controlled release of energy as heat, which is used to make steam, which is used to drive steam turbines connected to alternating-current dynamos. This is all engineering that was worked out over half a century ago.

The energy contained in the “fuel rods” used in the atomic piles is released at a limited rate, and they are extracted and replaced while they still have something like 97% of the original amount of energy, because they are “depleted”.

Through re-refining the material in the “depleted” rods, almost all of this energy may be recovered. But because of hysteria prevalent in the Carter era, any number of regulations flatly prohibit this reclamation of the “depleted” fuel rods, thus requiring the storage of the rods at some remote location. For some thousands of years, until they are “safe”. Meanwhile, all the power they once may have had, leaks away through radiation.

One of the side products of this fuel rod usage is plutonium, which gram for gram, is one of the most deadly substances in the universe. But only if you are so foolish as to handle it or swallow it, for which the universe has no pity or mercy. In itself, plutonium is a very potent energy source, acting as a trigger to make OTHER elements into radioactive isotopes, and thus multiplying its energy as a “breeder”.

There is another way of using radioactive decay to produce energy, not just uranium series. There is also something called thorium series, which is slower and more easily controlled, but has never been as fully developed. Click on this link for further technical discussion:

http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/

While some plutonium is used in and produced by this process, it is FAR less than produced in the uranium series. And the thorium is used up almost 100%, leaving very little “depleted” material.

We can do this. But only if we put our minds to it.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Wind power is a complete disaster

"Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone)."

[Conservative Vermont Vet]

Simply fantastic!

Thanks!

Now comes a simple, easy to understand and fairly simple reason to be able to explain why alternative energy is not feasible.

I for one will be passing it around, although up here in the the MOST Lib State in the Union (The People's Socialist Republic of Vermont, where the Senate has just voted to shut down our only Nuclear Plant) the number of like minded individuals, makes for a short list. lol

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Electricity in the US is generated primarily using coal(and some nuclear) for baseload and natural gas for peaking. Alternative energy cannot replace any of these. All it can do is provide small amounts of unreliable electricity that at best offsets a small amount of the incremental cost of coal fired generation.

---

Small quibble. The WSJ ran an article this week reporting on the Texas experience. Surprisingly, or not, as wind in TX grew from something like 1 to 3% of Texas’s total, coal and nuclear stayed the same and it was Natural gas that went down.

You’d think that the wind would be used to replace coal but this was decidedly not the case - it was natural gas that went down. I think this may be related to possibly two factors.

- As mentioned before coal plants exist to provide the base load and Natural gas tends to provide the fluctuations. Adding wind into the mix, is treated by the grid perhaps as less demand and therefore NG goes down.
- It may be related to marginal costs and perhaps the marginal cost of gas is more.

But whatever the reasons coal didn’t decline one iota, it was NG that went down as wind ramped up.

[ConservativeHideout]

Great post. I’ll be saving this for future reference.

[detective]

“as wind in TX grew from something like 1 to 3% of Texas’s total, coal and nuclear stayed the same and it was Natural gas that went down.”

Texas is different from most areas in the US because a much greater percent of there power generation is fueled by natural gas rather than coal. See page 5 in the linked article.

http://www.unt.edu/cedr/PowerDiversification.pdf

The WSJ article makes clear that the wind energy is only displacing incremental natural gas. The wind farms are unreliable and are not required to actually provide the power that they contract to supply. If coal or natural gas plants fail to perform and provide the dispatched electricity they are subject to substantial penalties. The wind producers only provide electricity if the wind blows and other producers are required to backstop them.

In addition to being heavily subsidized by tax payers wind producers are required to be constantly backstopped by other generating capacity.

[PA Engineer]

[wolf78]

An obsolete coal plant using 80-year-old technology can provide power where and when you need it. It can be positioned almost anywhere from the equator to the tundra. (It will even work aboard ships.)

Sorry, but that is bullsh*t. Maybe not in the US, but in 3rd world socialist countries where coal plants are about as reliable as wind turbines. You need a functioning railroad network also to deliver the coal in time.

Let me emphasize this: In order to replace the functionality of a single 80-year-old coal plant anywhere in North America, you have to build a continent-spanning power grid that can efficiently and reliably transfer power from any single location in North America to any other location. The entire grid has to extend everywhere and work all of the time or it has no hope of providing power where and when you need it.

The point is: In the US this railroad network exists, but if you start from scratch, the economies look different.

I'm not saying that alternative energy is cost-competitive and a useful one-for-one replacement for conventional power plants. Certainly not.

What I'm saying is that the author of the article doesn't understand economics. Everything can be done. At a price. Of course you can couple a wind turbine to an electrolyzer and a couple of fuel cells and back it up with biogas. That works 24/7. But it's stunningly expensive.

Also a statement like The honest answer will always be no is pseudo-religious. It's an article of faith and not an analysis of economics.

[WOBBLY BOB]

President Obama's Clean Energy Renewable Power Turkey

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/president-obamas-clean-energy-renewable-power-turkey/

Renewable power, be it wind power or the two versions of solar power have this same reliability: 20%. Twenty Percent !

All that aside, that power delivery rate of only 20% at the absolute best should be enough to convince you that these things are next to useless. The only way they can even get off the ground is with the injection of huge amounts of money in the form of Government subsidies. The only thing that they can absolutely ensure is that the cost of electricity to the end consumer will be much more expensive.