Monday, June 7, 2010

That's some "Green" power

Shannon Love looks at "Swarm Power" (the use of lots of local generators to feed the power grid) and finds it wanting:

This isn’t advancement.

It’s an explicit statement that a lot of people think the German power grid won’t be able to keep the lights on in a few years.

The giveaway:

Thanks to intelligent controls and network connections, large quantities of electricity could be fed into the public grid, thereby offsetting fluctuating energy volumes from renewable energy sources such as wind and sun.

Translation: Alternative energy is too unreliable to actually provide baseline power, so we’re going to need millions of fossil-fuel backup generators scattered everywhere to take up the slack. We’re going to use millions of relatively inefficient petroleum-burning generators so that we don’t have to build nuclear plants.

The idea of tying all the backup generators together in a network so that the generators can kick on before the grid goes down is a good idea but its just an evolution of the current system. The system is still just a bunch of fossil-fuel backup generators.

The end result of this system will be an increased consumption of liquid and gas fossil fuels as well as increased consumption of fossil fuels per watt produced. It will produce significantly more CO2 per watt than do large-scale fossil fuel plants and way, way more than nukes.

Huh. Sounds just like Massachusetts' experiment in wind power:
Welcome to the alternative energy future: unreliable, intermittent power at more than twice the price of traditional generation.
When you dress the "Progressive" agenda up in the white lab coats of the scientists, it's still agenda. Badly designed, poorly thought out, unreliable and expensive, and which generates more pollution than how things are done today. But it advances the control of the Progressives over society. It's about power all right, just not the sort that comes out of the outlet.

Can all the lefties please just shut up about the "Republican War on Science" now?

3 comments:

Matt said...

Or at the very least, scream just as loud about the Democrat/Progressive assault on the self-same institution.

If you want sustainable, renewable energy, build nukes.

If you want a secure energy supply, not dependent on foreign producers, expand the generation of energy reliant on ALL available local sources. This means coal, and this means oil.

And before anyone screams about Deepwater Horizon and BP, take a look at the first part of the well name. Huh. Yeah. That's "deep water" isn't it?

If drilling were allowed closer in to shore, in shallower waters, it necessarily follows that it would be a technical simpler and less error prone process. How many times have we heard "never done in 5,000 feet of water before" in relation to the current oil well blowout?

WV: comeurry - What Dems/Progs want you to do with "green" energy, health care, or any other pet project of theirs. Come, urry, do it before we lose our majority.

Anonymous said...

...and they don't want to drill in ANWR, the boneheads. Oh no, lets take our chances drilling in a mile of water in the Gulf, where getting at the leak to fix it is rather more difficult than it is was on land.

Fusion is the future if they can make it work sooner rather than later: Abundant, eventually cheap, essentially clean power. Maybe.

Jim

Kristophr said...

Jim: we already have a "future" power source.

Nuclear. Use thorium reactors to burn heat producing waste as well.

Use reactors to pump superheated water into oil-shale formations in the Dakotas.

Hell, I'd even support nuclear batteries in SUVs ... that will make the hippies heads explode ...