Green Energy is a giant crock of sh...

[Access_guy49]

Firstly, people may want to read this article to know where i'm going with this.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/04/08/ontario-renewable-energy-duguid.html

As a quick overview, the government plans on spending 8 BILLION dollars to generate 2,500 megawatts of green power which will create enough energy to power 600,000 homes.

Now as a little example of your hard earned Tax dollars at work...

Government = 8 Billion for 2,500 megawatts.

If they invested that Same 8 billion into buying everyone energy efficient light bulbs to replace existing "old" light bulbs...
They could purchase 2,830,188,679 bulbs at a price of $2.83 per bulb. (Taken from the price for a 6 pack of GE bulbs at walmart being $16.96 so this doesn't even factor in bulk pricing.)

The energy saved using these bulbs if they were to replace incandecent bulbs would be 133,018 MEGAWATTS!!!!

And people say Green energy is green....

 

[chergh]

Why even bother buying the new lightbulbs for people. Just change the law so that it is illegal to sell the old filament style light bulbs.

Green accounting is a pile of horse shit.

 

[Access_guy49]

I agree with you on that.. but it seems that they have 8 billion to burn on the energy sector in one way or another...

 

[chergh]

They should have built a nuclear power station.

 

[Rabbie]

Just how green are "Green" lo-energy bulbs anyway? They contain mercury and other non-green chemicals and use more energy when they are being made.

If an old-fashioned filament bulb is used in a properly insulated house then the extra energy used is given off as heat which will warm the building.

IMHO this particular issue is not as clear as some would suggest

 

[chergh]

Yeah CFL bulbs are nasty but LED bulbs I think actually pass the "green" test.

 

[ajetrumpet]

Why even bother buying the new lightbulbs for people. Just change the law so that it is illegal to sell the old filament style light bulbs.

Green accounting is a pile of horse shit.

because that creates friction with large corporations. u should be old enuf to figure this out by now

 

[chergh]

because that creates friction with large corporations. u should be old enuf to figure this out by now

Even ignoring the text speak spelling I cannot decipher the meaning of your post.

 

[Rich]

because that creates friction with large corporations. u should be old enuf to figure this out by now

Try posting in plain English as per your own rules for posting here

 

[GaryPanic]

WEll some of it is bullsh*t and some of it does make senes

If you need that extra power full stop then using the green method does make sense

let me explain
if you had to build a new powerstation (coal, Nuke - whatever) the same grant would still be used -

Now if you make it "green" you remove the independance on Coal and Nuclear (with its long term waste problems) and use effectively nothing as a resource (Wind is always there - water again always there it just moves from the top of a hill to the bottom of a hill via a turbine- nothing is "used /destroyed"

so their is no added cost -

what does make sense is to bad the old lightbulbs (as has been mentioned) and only allow the new LED ones -
again energy saving and also it would improve the standard of led lightbulbs
the same with solar panels - if more people bought them the cost would go down and also the effectiveness(?) would improve as hte market would demand it -

currently solar panels are lagging behind - you can buy them off the shelf but they are not the most efficent - if you want pucker ones you really have to pay for it (2 or 3 time the price of the off the shelf ones)
from momory the off the shelf solar panels work at 17.5-205 effeciencey - this really needs to be up in the 30's if not the 40's (there are panels out there that can do this) then having solar panels on a roof might make more sense .

I love the idea of being green - but at the right time and with the right tools

Not to bragg but we have super insoluated the roof of our house and it made a big difference to the heating bill
I am looking at somehow insulating the front house as i am sure that heat escapes through the wall at the front

we have replaced old lightbulbs with the nerw eco ones and I will repalce with LEd once LEd are up to scratch and the eco ones die out

we compost just about everything - try to grow as much veg in our own garden (more for the sake of my little one shes 4 and she knows that carrots grow in the ground and not in the shop)
Its not a lot but these are the things we can see and do that make some difference - once technology catches up - we will do more
I ramble....

 

[Rich]

I'm afraid wind is not always there, none of green alternatives are available 24hrs a day

 

[Rich]

I am looking at somehow insulating the front house as i am sure that heat escapes through the wall at the front

.

If it's not a cavity wall then just dry line it inside, it's a much cheaper option than the external options

 

[GaryPanic]

If it's not a cavity wall then just dry line it inside, it's a much cheaper option than the external options

might not be that easy - kitchens at the front ... I am looking at the outside ..to sse if I can do something that is also easy on the eye.

none of the green available 24hours - yes this is correct - when you have a surplus you store the energy and then release when you need it

but you are right you always need a back up - Nuke seems the most reasonable to me -(see I am not a tree hugging hippie) - but if Green works then lets use it

 

[chergh]

if you had to build a new powerstation (coal, Nuke - whatever) the same grant would still be used -

Now if you make it "green" you remove the independance on Coal and Nuclear (with its long term waste problems) and use effectively nothing as a resource (Wind is always there - water again always there it just moves from the top of a hill to the bottom of a hill via a turbine- nothing is "used /destroyed"

Being "green" is a good thing I agree. However there are other issues.

Wind speed and volume/speed of rivers are highly variable and are likely to become more variable as a result of climate change. Both these sources transform kinetic energy to electrical. Kinetic energy is given by the equation:

Ek = 1/2 m.v^2

When river flows are lower then you will lose both mass and velocity which results in less electrical energy. Similarly with wind when the velocity drops less electrical energy is produced. Given a large number of these schemes over a large area then you can be reasonably sure that X% will be generating at a given amount but there will be times when you are below X% so you need to build even more of these to ensure you will always be able to meet your peak energy demand.

there is also a question over the effects that very large scale, >10% of worlds electricity demand, wind farm generation would have on the environment but this isn't even near to be relevant at the moment.

With conventional electricity generation you can be more confident in how much electricity will be produced and therefore need less resources to ensure you can meet peak demand.

At the end of the day a cost per watt, and this cost can include things like the "social cost of carbon", will be associated with each method and I would be suprised if the lowest cost solution wasn't nuclear. I don't see the waste produced by nuclear as a big deal either as it's only a few cubic metres of high level radioactive waste and most of the low level nuclear waste isn't radioactive and is only considered so because it was used within a nuclear power plant.

 

[GaryPanic]

or we could dump on your common - I mean its already radioactive (greenham) only kidding

 

[Rich]

might not be that easy - kitchens at the front ... I am looking at the outside ..to sse if I can do something that is also easy on the eye.

I'm certain altering the kitchen would be far cheaper than the outside options

 

[Access_guy49]

I agree that nuclear is definatly the way to go. It is always there.. it's cheap, and if the government supported it a little more by education, and research of proper storage.. it probably wouldn't be a problem at all. Everything that radiates heat causes some form of radiation.. people just get to freaked out by the word. I do understand that radiation from a plant is so much stronger that yes it can kill, but there is good there too.. look at Chalk river, they make power as well as medical isotopes.. We just need politicians to make decisions that are driven by facts and numbers and not by people who are uneducated and complain loudly.

As for Mecury in the bulbs of CF bulbs.. well ya.. but what about the process of making turbines, does anyone know what's involved there? Solar panels? incandecent light bulbs? shouldn't we compare apples to apples..

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Going "green" blindly is always a mistake.

For instance, even with modern solar electrical generators, you can never get more out of them than something like 6 watts per square meter, which is the AVERAGE rate in incident solar radiation on the earth. When you go away from the tropics, your incident radiation diminshes as the Cosine of the latitude from the ecliptic (not from the equator...)

To get one kilowatt from solar-electric panels you need a square 4 meters on a side = 16 sq.m at 100% efficiency. At the more typical 20% efficiency that is 80 sq.m to get 1 kw. A city needs MEGAwatts. OK, 1 Mw = 1000 kw so you need 80,000 sq.m to get 1 Mw = 282.8 meters in a square. Big cities need 1/2 Gigawatt (0.5 Gw) or more, which takes a square 6.3 km on a side. But you really should try to charge the batteries for your nightly power usage, so double that. Whoops, that becomes a square 8.94 km on a side.

Anything that sits underneath those panels is of course cut off from sunlight. Which means unless you are growing a dark-thriving fungus, nothing will grow under the panels that has anything to do with the chlorophyll cycle.

We can't forget the weather, either. If your average cloud cover in an area is 50%, you just doubled the area again, to a square 12.65 km on a side. Look really hard at maps to see how big that is compared to your average city. 12.65 km is about 7.8 miles. A square solar-electric panel at 20% efficiency and 50% cloud coverage 7.8 miles on a side would produce 24 Gw hours if you ran it 24 hours a day, at the sacrifice of 61.776 square miles of unusable land.

Shall we discuss the engineering issues of making and building those solar cells? First, Eastern Europe would love us, since they are the primary source of the transition metal chemicals needed to make those cells. But the cells would be covered with either plastic or glass. How much would it take to make 61.776 square miles of the cover material? We would have a rare-earth cartel that would make the oil cartels look like amateurs. How much copper would it take to string the panels together? How many man-years would it take to build the panels? And that means mining copper, silicon, and/or oil to make the connectors and cases for the solar electric panels. Not to mention that you need substrates for the active electric arrays and a frame strong enough to hold them. What shall we use? Aluminum? (We'll be using copper for something else...) All the mines would be going crazy to keep up with the demand for those two metals.

So-called "green" energy isn't so green when you consider the "real" cost for just one part of it..., solar electricity.

I'll post again on the issue of wind and water energy as a separate topic.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The problem with tapping into wind or water energy is very simple. While some folks think it is there forever, it isn't. The laws of thermodynamics make that clear.

When you take energy out of flowing water, for example, you use gravity to provide the energy to pull water through generators. That potential energy due to the height of the water is what actually drives the generators. But in every dam site I've heard about, the moment you dam up that water, folks downstream demand you send them the water. As communities grow near your aqueducts, there is less water to go around. That water sent via the aqueducts also "bleeds off" some of the potential energy. Our USA southwest is predicted to have trouble regarding the Colorado River - specifically how it will be unable to provide power AND drinking water at the same time for the concentration of people in So. California and Nevada. The lake behind the dam is dropping in level fast enough that hydroelectric power will be reduced very severely in the next couple of decades.

What about wind power? Well, you'd think the wind always blows. But we are taking energy out of the wind. That energy results in slower movement of that wind after we take power out of it. The fan blades act as big baffles to diffuse the power of the wind. Wind energy again depends on solar power as a motive force but is less efficient than solar electricity. While the effect might be minimal at first, we must remember that weather is a "chaos theory" phenomenon, one of the characteristics of which is "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." I.e. a small change in one place can make a huge difference in other places.

The wind is a thermal distribution system. If we slow down the wind, are we going to cause "hot spots" in places where the convective power of the air is reduced by the energy we took out of it? On the other hand, that energy can be related to heat. Would making MORE wind turbines have the effect of global COOLING?

Right now, there are already lawsuits against buildings being built where they cut off sunlight from existing buildings that had gone solar-powered. Will there be lawsuits for people who build wind turbines a few miles up the road from other wind turbines, thus reducing the amount of surface wind available for the down-wind turbines to operate?

If we build solar energy panels up the road from the wind turbines, will that have the effect of diminishing the wind's intensity in proportion to the amount of energy taken up by those panes? Remember, in my other post, I said the most efficiency I'd ever seen was on the order of 20%. Will the wind blow at 80% of its former speed when it originates over a set of solar panels? The thermodynamics says there would be some effect, though the amount is hard to judge.

Rather obviously, I'm in one of my rumination moods, but I've got to get back to work so I'll just leave you folks with some things to think about. Enjoy!

 

[Kryst51]

Wow! Thanks! I know nothing about this stuff, and your explanations are awesome.