The Down Side of Alternative Energy

[Daveparts still]

The Down Side of Alternative Energy
By David Glenn Cox

On April 15, 1912, the Cunard liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. The following month Cunard had a 100 percent improvement in their safety record; they didn’t lose a single vessel! Why, that is an astounding fact, a 100 percent improvement in just thirty days.

April 23 (Bloomberg) -- New home sales increased 27 percent in March from the previous month to an annual pace of 411,000.

September 26, 2009 (LA Times) -- Last year ended with 485,000 new homes sold, the worst year for new-home sales since 1982 and the third-worst year since the federal government began tracking the data in 1963. New-home sales peaked in 2005 at 1.23 million units.

November, December and January were the worst months ever on record for new-home sales. The news media trumpets a 27 percent increase as good news and buries the bad.

CNN -- New-home sales rise fastest in 47 years.

With tax deductions and builder discounts, 2010 is on track to be the worst year on record for new-home sales. Or look at it this way, for every new home sold almost ten existing homes will be foreclosed upon.

It is all about spin and misdirection; watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! When stories of Iraqi torture prisons hit the press, suddenly comes the story of top Al-Queada leaders killed in Iraq. Buried in the text of the story was the loss of a six million-dollar Blackhawk helicopter. How do you surround a house with troops and then fire missiles at it and lose a six million-dollar helicopter? More importantly, in this raid, proclaimed as Iraqi-led, was the death of one more American and the injury of three others. Sorry, fellas, that’s not progress.

I know, I know, alternative energy. I ain’t the kind of fella to lead you on so I’ll get to it.

Ok, sure, wind power is great and it’s safe and it’s clean and terrorists can’t make a bomb out of it. But now from Germany comes shocking new evidence that wind power can actually cause energy problems! It’s true! I wouldn’t lie to you!

Since 2002 the German government has subsidized the builders of wind turbines with tax credits. This has led to an increase in wind power to 7.5 percent of all electricity generated in Germany with over 21,000 wind turbines. Germany leads all of Europe in wind turbines while the rest of the European Union gets 5 percent of its electricity from wind. The US gets 1 percent of its electricity from wind power and 48 percent from good old coal.

All these wind turbines are creating a nightmare for German electrical producers because on windy nights there is just too dang much electricity coming into the substations. Anyone who has ever overcharged a battery knows what that means, too much electricity is just as bad as not enough electricity. So German utilities are asking customers to please leave their lights on when it’s a windy night and paying them to do it. Not only that, all that excess electricity is causing lower prices for consumers.

“We’re seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers,” Christian Kjaer head of the European Wind Energy Association said at his group’s conference in Warsaw this week. “We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors,” and profit.

It has gotten so bad that wind turbine producers have been asked twice this year to turn off many of their wind turbines due to excess electricity. Producers claim that it is the utility companies falling down on the job; that what is needed are new transmission lines to carry the excess electricity away to where it is needed. These wind producers are beginning to haul in the big euros and an envious eye is upon them.

Nord Pool, the Nasdaq OMX Group-owned Scandinavian power bourse, last year took steps to encourage generators to limit production by implementing a minimum price. The most generators would pay users to take their power is 200 euros per megawatt hour when there is excess electricity from too much wind. The measures are meant to “increase the effectiveness of the market forcing power generators to consider reducing their electricity generation or having to pay for delivering electricity.”

You see, these crazy environmentalists and wind power activists just aren’t playing fair!

“Wind’s impact on prices results from its low marginal costs, which pushes more expensive technologies including natural gas and coal out of the market," a Helsinki-based industry consultant said. "Fossil-fuel burning relies on fuel, which can boost the price of electricity from those sources.”

Britain introduced a plan early in the last decade to build ten thousand wind turbines by 2020; so far they produce enough electricity for over 650,000 homes. An American company, Clipper International, will begin manufacturing giant turbine blades over two hundred feet tall. The company hopes that by 2020 it will be manufacturing both blades and advanced gearbox technology in their new factory and hopes to employ 500 full-time workers. The new plant will be located in Walker, England, near the river Tyne.

Clipper chairman, James Dehlsen said, "The offshore wind market in the UK is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting sectors in the global renewable-energy industry." Clipper is being subsidized by the UK government to the tune of almost $7 million, mere peanuts when compared with the Obama administration’s $8.3 billion bet on nuclear power. A bet the Congressional Budget Office says has a 50% chance of failure. The point, however, is that American companies must go overseas to generate green jobs. In Spain energy prices have fallen 26 percent this year on the success of wind and hydroelectric power.

We’ve got something here in America that those European countries don’t have. We’ve got a large coal industry and a large coal lobby in Congress. We also have a strong oil industry and congressional lobby and they don’t want to see natural gas, which accounts for 20 percent of the market, impeded. It is, after all, the most expensive fuel in the world used to generate electricity. We also have a nuclear lobby and they have a friend in the White House who thinks that even though nuclear power is almost as expensive as natural gas, and is much more dangerous, that it is the best way forward in this challenging energy market.

The only downside of alternative energy is that it doesn’t have a powerful congressional lobby. With the recent coal mine disaster in West Virginia and now the hundred mile-wide oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico it only adds emphasis that this country needs to reevaluate its energy policy. A little more than a year ago I suggested a WPA-style works project to build wind turbines across America and I made the point that a government-sponsored program would force coal, natural gas and nuclear into the background if they were forced to compete against clean energy. The effect of wind power in Germany proves that to be true.

Mr. Obama’s $8.3 billion bet on two nuclear reactors could be better spent on almost 9,000 large wind turbines, creating more jobs and more energy for a more sane future. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of potential wind power and already in Texas wind power is cheaper than coal. Electric cars are on their way and the cost of motor fuel will only increase. The German experience shows us that it needn’t be a problem if we legislate with our heads and not with our lobbyists.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Daveparts/344

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. The massive energy companies know the score

They have very smart analysts and such that have no doubt considered the future ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred years out. They know that the only way they can keep raking in trillions of dollars is to wage a no holds barred fight to make nuclear power the standard. Without it, they are doomed eventually.

[flying rabbit]

2. K&R

[WhiteTara]

3. the storage problem is being considered and has been

around for a long time.
http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies_pumpedhydro.htm
Description:
Conventional pumped hydro uses two water reservoirs, separated vertically. During off peak hours water is pumped from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir. When required, the water flow is reversed to generate electricity. Some high dam hydro plants have a storage capability and can be dispatched as a pumped hydro. Underground pumped storage, using flooded mine shafts or other cavities, are also technically possible. Open sea can also be used as the lower reservoir. A seawater pumped hydro plant was first built in Japan in 1999 (Yanbaru, 30 MW).

Pumped hydro was first used in Italy and Switzerland in the 1890's. By 1933 reversible pump-turbines with motor-generators were available. Adjustable speed machines are now being used to improve efficiency. Pumped hydro is available at almost any scale with discharge times ranging from several hours to a few days. Their efficiency is in the 70% to 85% range.

There is over 90 GW of pumped storage in operation world wide, which is about 3 % of global generation capacity. Pumped storage plants are characterized by long construction times and high capital expenditure.

Pumped storage is the most widespread energy storage system in use on power networks. Its main applications are for energy management, frequency control and provision of reserve.

I don't advocate caves because of possible harm to the ecosystem; but old coal mines are a great way to store excess electricity.

[Number_Six]

4. Um, one picky detail....

Nat gas is not the most expensive way to create power, nuke is. The overall efficiency of a reactor, plus safety costs, plus fuel costs, etc...makes for the single most expensive Kw(hr) there is.

And as for too much power, there is something called a switch.....!

[Peace Patriot]

5. It's kind of like why we have insurance dragon-run health care and no public option.

A public option would drive health insurance prices down. It would be good for everybody--but especially for the poor and middle class majority. It's not the best program, true, just a compromise, allowing some profit-taking from illness, but a public option would have, by itself, put a lid on insurance prices and would have helped to drive down medical costs. Single-payer health insurance is, of course, the best solution. NO profiteering from illness.

Wind turbines may not be the best solution or the only solution. Reducing consumption and waste should be primary. It could even prompt development of OTHER enterprises that DO pollute, and that do great environmental destruction, by providing TOO MUCH low cost energy. We need to curtail consumption and waste, on all fronts. (For instance, low cost wind energy might inspire a plastics company or a pesticide producer or military equipment corporations to locate where the energy for manufacture is cheap, and would encourage those industries, and/or housing developments eating up more green spaces, and/or more shopping malls to service them--the problem is not just coal; the problem of environmental damage and global climate change is much bigger than that).

BUT, at least as to the cost of energy for most people--the disregarded poor and middle class--and as a clean alternative to the dangerous and polluting energy sources, it is an excellent idea, and should be funded and implemented (along with other measures).

And Daveparts is exactly right as to why it isn't being funded and implemented. In a true democracy, the best ideas rise to the top and are implemented. Facts, logic, reason prevail--as Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders hoped would occur and tried to design into our system. When multinational corporations and war profiteers and their lobbyists get their vulture talons on a country, they strangle democracy and dictate policy for their own profit. That is what has occurred.

I don't think that this humungous problem--corporate rule--can even begin to be solved until we rid ourselves of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, now controlled mainly by one, far rightwing corporation (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold) with virtually no audit/recount controls. It is the ultimate "privatization" and was and is intended as the final blockade to desperately needed reform, especially as to our throwing off corporate rule. There has never been anything more anti-democratic in our entire history, with perhaps the exceptions of slavery and the decimation of the Indian tribes. 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting is so anti-democratic as to be mind-boggling and unthinkable. Imagine someone proposing to re-introduce slavery. That's how bad it is. Yet that is what we have--a complete loss of control over the counting of our votes. The elections in half the states in this country CANNOT be verified, and in the other half (which have a paper ballot) they are NOT verified (only 1% of ballots are counted against machine totals--a miserably inadequate audit). We are now dependent on ONE corporation--a corporation with hair-raising, rightwing connections, which has acquired an 80% monopoly over the U.S. voting machine "market"--to tell us who won.

Voting is our most fundamental democratic power. Voting is what gives us sovereignty, as a people, It IS power--which WE delegate to our representatives by majority vote. It is no wonder that the corporates took it over. Their lobbying and other corruption, and control of the media, were not sufficient to keep the American people disempowered and stupid. And we now MUST undo this horror to even get reform started. It is still a doable thing. Control over voting systems still resides at the state/local level, but it will take a big citizen movement--a genuine "Boston Tea Party" movement--to accomplish it.

[Uncle Joe]

6. Kicked and recommended

Thanks for the thread, Daveparts.

[proudohioan]

7. Well hell, Dave, there's the solution to our unemployment problems...

right there! We just assemble a whole bunch of us jobless folks and start our own damn lobbying firm! If we can't beat 'em, might as well join 'em! Ha Ha Ha!

Anyhow, great OP as usual!