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 .
Awesomest post of the day....
Great analogy. I bought a trash 80 back then and I bought solar panels over the last 10 years. I have not taken a dime in tax rebates, nor do I feed any of my unreliable energy to the grid for more than it is worth. I simply like to experiment and learn.
Very powerful essay, rdcbn.
I think you should post it as a new thread so it will gain more attention and appreciation on FR.
Yes, a total waste of taxpayer money, but it DID enrich his cronies. Not a total waste, in his eyes.