Posted on 11/22/2014 1:18:08 PM PST by PROCON
Some people call it "renewable energy" but I prefer to call it "alternative energy" because that's what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)
Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google's research department have reached the same conclusion.
Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Something us "deniers" have been saying for years..
only thing “green” are the dollars they suck off from the tax payers.
part of those “green” dollars are recycled back to our elected official who vote for the support.
His spot on analysis produced the following conclusions -
The only three that had any chance of producing more energy than it took to build them and which were suitable for industrial grade power plant type service were geo thermal, hydroelectric and wind turbine power generation.
Geothermal works great where there is geothermal activity but it's very rare to find a good commercial grade geothermal energy source, especially near populated areas where you need power and geothermal is very hard on the power generation equipment which means lots of maintenance .
Wind works when the wind is blowing but we are learning the downsides of wind turbines, not the least of which is avian mortality issues - these things kill birds, especially raptors, on a regular basis. Many of the California Condors and Eagles that they are trying to re introduce to the wild have biten the dust due to wind turbines.
Photovoltaic cells work great for small, isolated installations in remote areas where you need stand alone power but it takes far more barrels of oil to manufacture solar cells than the cells actually produce over a 20 year life span and very few solar cells last for 20 years before failure.
Large scale power generation from solar is simply impractical due to hardware costs and the fact that 1000 mega watt natural gas fueled power plant takes up about 10 -20 acres of land and a 1000 mega watt plant Solar power takes up around 5000 acres of land.
The only thing that has changed is that very efficient thin film organic solar cells are being developed that require very little energy to manufacture, are potentially low in cost and are well suited for distributed solar - ie where you have a roofing membrane or awning integrated with embedded solar cells .
This sort of Distributed Solar is the future of the alternative energy industry.
Unfortunately, Obama’s big push to force a trillion dollars worth of crappy old technology and even more crappy immature new technology on America as “shovel ready” “green energy” projects into the market kick start some ill conceived, impossible to implement , doomed to failure from the start utopian Green Energy Revolution to kick start a “Green Economy” has been a disaster and almost a TOTAL WASTE OF TAXPAYER MONEY.
Roughly a trillion dollars was pounded down the Green Obama rat hole and three fourths of the Green Energy power generation capacity it installed by be broken, non functional and non repairable by the time Obama leaves office in 2017. His only accomplishment will have been to make a lot of Obama and Democrat cronies rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Obama’s Green Energy Program has also been a disaster for the innovative alternative energy companies themselves and the collapse of the Obama Green Energy Fraud has put most of them out of business.
It has been a moral disaster as well, especially for the desperately poor living in remote , unimproved areas of the world.
Alternative energy is really the savior of these poor people in the Third World as it is a way to get power tot them in remote areas with and primitive conditions to allow them leave the world of dirt floors, no electricity, no ability to pump massive ground water resources they are standing on for agricultural development and basic daily survival needs , and a basic subsistence existence where the pressure from living hand to mouth leaves no time for education or modern economic development.
Obama and his Green morons have killed off much of the alternative energy capacity that was being developed for installation into the Third World and it is the people in these poverty and misery stricken regions that will suffer the most because projects never will be built that otherwise would have been were it not for Obama’s crony green energy fraud.
Obama’s “Kick Starting A Green Economy” plan is analgoues to Jimmy Carter in 1979 forcing through a “Digital Personal Computer” revolution with a goal to kick start a computer revolution by using a Trillion dollars of borrowed taxpayer money to purchase every American family a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer.
Such an act in 1979 would have saturated computer market with obsolete, comparatively worthless computers, killed off the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh and killed off the technological developments of the Silicone Valley that have driven our economy for the last 30 years.
With the death of innovation due to the government spending a trillion dollars on TRS-80s in Silicone Valley and the bankrupting of young start up computer companies , including Apple by killing mass market demand for innovative products (I mean, who really need more computer power than a TRS-80 provides ) we would be using Radio Shack TRS - 100s with 20 mega hz 16 bit processors and 10 megabytes of memory and 100 mega byte hard drives, using VisiCalc 2014 for our spread sheet needs and playing Pong v86.02 for video games.
Obama has imposed the alternative energy equivalent of this Alternate Universe scenario effectively destroying the alternative energy industry and his central planning energy fiat has especially destroyed the amazing progress that was being made in organic thin film, nano solar technology for highly efficient, low cost and low energy to manufacture thin film photovoltaic cell technology .
Obama is an incompetent leader and everything he touches falls to ruin and his “ Green Energy Economy’ initiative is the poster child and fitting long term monument for the incompetent hubris and corruption of the Obama Commissars central planning.
Obama’s Green Energy Economy initiative will go down in history as the largest waste of American taxpayer money in history and would have went down in in history as the largest misallocation of assets of any type in the history of the world were it not for the fact that ObamaCare is almost certain to eclipse Green Energy in fraud, waste and misallocation of funds unless it bankrupts the country before it reaches those goals .
Since the facts disagree with the left’s preconceived notions they will ignore this.
Green Scam Pingy.
Awesomest post of the day....
“Renewable” is a misnomer. Petroleum is actually renewable since the earth keeps manufacturing more and more of it. Every proclamation of its exhaustion is met with another massive find, and played out fields keep refilling. If you drill deep enough or can extract it from various formations, petroleum is almost everywhere. It is one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind.
Not only that, but tried to an extent. Battery packs charged by solar are good. But for the whole power grid, not neccessarily.
Doesn’t the name mean fuel from rock.
Exactly. All we ask is that it produce more energy than it consumes. A lot more if it is supposed to power a whole city.
And that it be easily accessible and reliable.
“Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
Why is it assumed we have to combat ‘climate change’? What would be achieved? How many other countries would join in? Is ‘climate change’ colder? hotter? stormier? more snow? less snow? etc.
Which is exactly why the Marxists love it. You can hide lots of laundered money in boondoggles.
Pray America is waking
The energy balance numbers for Photovoltaic look a bit optimistic to me but could be valid for the latest generations of high efficiency photovoltaic cells and Nuclear seems a bit low for current generation plants and substantially lower for next generation nuclear plants.
The ulstimate goal is population control.
I dunno...it's shocking how well hydro-electric works.
All are directly attributed to man made global warming whenever required.
Being Liberal means you never have to say you were wrong.
Barry and his team of Ivy League economists are not going to put up with this. He’s going to shovel billions of more taxpayer dollars into bird-killing windmill farms and grandstand about the evil flatulent cattle who are incinerating the planet with global warming.
Believe you are correct. Fossil fuel is a nonsensecal term. A Ruskie Phd wrote a book about it some time ago though I don’t recall his name.
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