Green energy has overtaken total Nuclear energy productionFollow

I thought the other thing holding back wind and solar is that it's way too variable of a source of power to make up much of a % of the capacity of a grid. Puts extra stress on an outdated grid, needing excess capacity, no efficient way to store excess energy, etc.

Also living in a rain forest means lots of hydro power. Who's got green energy?

Das right.

Right, but I thought all that was the crux of the problem as well. Not that it's not solvable.. There are places in the world that are getting up there in renewable percentages, but the outdated US Power grid isn't really set up to handle a large amount of variable power.

So even as wind/solar gets better, you're still talking about infrastructure replacement regardless. Albeit replacement that is overdue anyway.

It's not really about technological advancement, but basic physics. We've known for decades that solar energy had great potential. What was blocking us was sufficient technology to tap into it efficiently. Thus, as we've advanced the technology, we've advanced our ability to use solar power. This is just not the case with wind though. There's a physical hard limit to the amount of energy the wind has at any given location. Building a more efficient turbine can't increase the energy that's physically present. And in the vast majority of locations that potential value of wind energy is pretty small.

There are also some pretty severe ecological effects from large scale wind farms. This is why I mentioned the whole ideological thing. Sometimes people seem to favor one energy technology over another seemingly purely because someone else labeled it "green". When you start digging into the actual environmental impact of the various technologies though, the green ones often aren't a whole lot less damaging than the non-green ones. It really is sometimes just about an arbitrary label.

As Joph points out, hydro power causes extreme environmental impact. Same deal with tidal/wave power. Wind farms are directly harmful. Solar panels are quite clean at the generation point, but are quite "dirty" at the location where you're building the panels themselves and the landfills the panels ultimately will end up in. The whole "electric versus gas car" issue raises this problem as well btw. Large scale solar power plants are amazingly efficient, however they also cause amazing ecological harm in the immediate area as well. Nuclear is the only power source with nearly zero impact at the generation point (barring an accident of course!), but is dirty at the source and endpoint of the raw material used (and isn't renewable). Coal, of course, is dirty all the way around (relatively speaking), but is incredibly cheap and plentiful here in the US.


There's no magic bullet here. I just think that some people use the phrase "alternative energy" as though the fact that one is an alternative automatically makes it "better". In most cases and in most ways, they aren't though.

I make assumptions you disagree with. I certainly have a right to make them though.



Only if the energy sources are competing on an even footing. And yes, I'm aware that we subsidize energy all the way around and in every direction. My point is that I don't think anyone can look at our current energy market and call it either "healthy" or "competitive".



Absolutely true!



Yup. But this is the area where I really do believe that the cart sometimes strays well ahead of the horse. People assume that because something is labeled "green", that it must be better. But in most cases, we're trading one form of environmental impact for another. I just believe that it's important to point this out.



But this is also where the "perception is reality" bit comes in. Because some energy sources are labeled as clean/green/whatever, people perceive them as better, and thus they actually work to make one cleaner than another. You're correct that we should do this, I just think that quite often we don't do a good job fully considering the costs and benefits of each power source.



I think that this is feared more than it happens. We always hear about how the electric car was killed by oil interests. I just don't buy it though. It's not like there's one company selling oil, or one company making cars. There fact that one energy source may dominate a given area doesn't really have anything to do with monopolies and doesn't have the same anti-competitive aspects of a monopoly. It's really a very different thing.

The companies who sell power don't really care how the power is generated. If they can make more money generating power by having people run on giant hamster wheels, that's how they'll do it. There are some inter-industry interactions which may act as blocks for newer sources entering the market, but those factors really don't have nefarious purposes. If an energy source really is cheaper and/or more abundant, companies will fall over themselves to develop it and make a buck off it.

Yeah, I'm going to take that with all the credentials it deserves, Mr. Oil Subsidies & Off Shore Drilling/Production Expert

I thought you could do traditional farming around wind turbines?

Lord knows when you've insisted these things are obvious in the past, you've never failed to make hilarious errors so, again, I'll take your proclamations with all past credibility they deserve.

Nice narrow thinking though

Not "disagreed". Because you have consistently made up "facts" wholesale when discussing energy policy (things that you states are "absolute!" and "certain!") which were then easily disproven time and time and time again removes any credibility from your comments when discussing energy policy today.

By your reasoning, Norm should have run to the encyclopedia to investigate every claim Cliff ever made or else Norm is at fault for laughing off Cliff's remarks.


Your sad attempts to shame me are laughably ironic when one considers how rarely you've checked your own facts or enagaged your own brain when making piles of erroneous claims in previous threads. The lack of which on your part is the entire reason for this posting.

The turbine in that first link is clearly in the midst of a wheat field. I suppose wheat and turbine bases can't occupy the same space simultaneously though.

Edit: My error; my work monitor kind of sucks. From the home computer I can see the color difference better. That said, the clearing seems to differ from turbine to turbine.

Edited, Sep 1st 2011 5:27pm by Jophiel

The second picture is labeled as a "rendering". No caption on the first, but you can see that the area around the windmills themselves is cleared quite a distance. It's not just the cement base. You may also not realize the scale. Those things are very tall. That's not a tiny area around them that's cleared.

Also, as I've said before we don't know the full effects of windfarms on the surrounding area because large scale use in less remote areas is relatively new. My point is that because it's labeled as "green" a whole lot of people blithely look the other way and don't ask the same questions they'd ask if these were oil wells for example. Perception becomes reality for many people.

Giant wind turbines are only one form that wind power comes in, though. There are smaller, even "micro" wind turbines that can be used. I've seen them on several buildings in the nearest city, and can envision them whirring happily away mounted to buildings in the canyons of, say, NYC or Chicago.

Ugh sorry, I thought I cleared out that one. Google images was giving me a hard time with links, was just pulling them from here. Also I'm assuming it's about 1/4 acre per turbine?

Edit: I should actually read the link from that page... all sorts of juicy number it seems.

Edit2: The wind farm in the pictures had 400MW of capacity and resulted in 71.7 hectares of permanent D.I. area apparently, which includes the roads and such.

I can read.

I'm also learning you can get up to 2MW from one ton of coal, and you can get up to 1,000 tons of coal per acre from a strip mine back east...
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Edited, Sep 1st 2011 4:32pm by someproteinguy

More, and clean, energy for the masses, cheap low cost food for the impoverish, and pest control.