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A category 5 hurricane creates a lot of jobs too. Clean up, re-building etc.
Thousands of new jobs.
Solar and wind are great but only if absorbed slowly into the economy.
Why? They cost much money. I really have no idea how much a state-of-the-
art wind turbine costs, but they don't give these things away. Also the
high tension power lines to get this electricity to where it needs to go
costs money.
Extracting oil, natural gas, coal from the earth creates wealth now.
Setting up solar and wind cost wealth now.
The debate on energy supply has since long become a debate, which is more guided by beliefs than reason.
-> nuclear power is rejected because of inherent risks and absence of convincing concepts for waste management
-> alternative energies are still expensive and not all of them will be competitive
-> fossil fuels are still abundant - although the peak oil debate suggests otherwise - but they do have a negative impact on the climate of the planet, scientific scenarios diverge on the impact, but only the ignorant pretend that there is no impact at all
The US for a long time followed a disastrous policy for energy supplies, which has cost a lot of jobs
-> The US trade balance would look a lot better, if prior US government had taken care of the problem.
-> US cars are not competitive worldwide, because they are not fuel efficient, how many jobs were lost by GM, Ford and Chrysler, because they did not build reliable and fuel-efficient cars
-> Jobs associated with the new technologies required to exploit alternative sources of energy will be created elsewhere
A question for a secondary school certificate
If you know just a little about physics, you can calculate yourself which of the alternatives are viable and cost-efficient. When my son was 15-years old, he prepared a homework to calculate how much energy you could generate from a 100 sq ft piece of land located north of Berlin. Wind was slightly beating solar cells, and the net energy yield generated by producing agrofuels, such as biodiesel from colza or ethanol from corn of wheat was only about 10% of the yield generated with wind or solar cells from the same surface.
Sun and wind are serious options, and the prices will come down. Agro-fuels is blatant nonsense, and will only survive in regions were population density is low and land abundant. I made a calculation myself: If you use 30% of arable land in Germany to produce biodiesel, you will be able to replace 4% of the consumption of oil products, LOL.
Wind Energy
By the end of 2009, 39% of the newly installed power capacity in the European Union was wind power, followed by gas with 25% and solar photovoltaics with 17%. All renewable energy installations accounted for 62%. The installed capacity is now 76,000 MW. The installed capacity in the US and Canada is about 38,000 MW, which is just 50%. But the US has been catching up since 2004, when there was virtually nothing.
Wind energy is already profitable, the only problem is that the windfarms are not near the urban agglomerations that use most of the electricity, and that the supply of electricity is not balanced or even demand-driven, but has peak and troughs. So investment is necessary to bridge the distance and to communicate the current supply situation to end users via a variable price.
Can be efficiently used for heating and elecitricity supply by integrating this into new buildings. Due to the meteorological situation on the Northern Hemisphere, it is less cost-efficient than wind energy and currently not competitive. A concept for the alternative energy supplies is shown here.
This is mainly interesting to use by-products and waste. As a standalone technology it will be limited to remote areas - islands that do not have a refinery, remote rural areas with a low population density and bad infrastructure, etc. Otherwise it is a dead end. It cannot even replace a small fraction of the supplies of conventional fuels and growing the raw materials for the fuels uses a high percentage of the energy yield, resulting in a poor net performance.
Summary
Interesting subject it is, but seen from Europe, the US public and US poiliticians are not grasping yet how important the issue really is. The US as a bad example also has long served all developping countries as an excuse not to deal with the question of the changing climate.
If the US continues with its excessive and relentless energy consumption, why should the poor countries of the world care about it?
after living many years in europe and the us, I would like to add a couple things.
the us is a wonderful and great country, and I'm very happy to live here. but like anywhere else there are a few things you don't like. one thing that comes to mind is how wasteful we are. few examples:
lots of people think I'm crazy (which of course is absolutely possible), because I walk to the post office and I walk to the bank or the local grocery store. most people here take the car. some even take the car to go from their house to the mail box at the end of the drive way.
in the winter they let the car run to keep it warm, in the summer they let the car run to keep it cool.
nobody turns the car off when the lights are red, most even let the car run when there's a train coming.
not complaining or criticizing, just believe if everybody would try not to be so wasteful, that could already make a big difference.
Maybe these graphs are inaccurate (seriously) {see attachments}.
One attachment, showing a single graph, shows global extreme long term temperatures
in a sideways pattern at their top.
Other attachment shows global temperatures in a much shorter time frame. The earth
is cooler now than several hundred years ago.
I just found this website. I don't know their bias or anything else about it. It does confirm what I've
seen before on what is commonly called 'global warming'. I don't want to be a jerk here. If you have
other graphs you've seen I'd really appreciate seeing them.
The U.S. could have begun a real energy policy when we got our
wake up call in the 70's. Too bad we didn't.
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The 1973 oil crisis started in October 1973, when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OAPEC (consisting of the Arab members of OPEC, plus Egypt, Syria and Tunisia) proclaimed an oil embargo "in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military" during the Yom Kippur war; it lasted until March 1974.
Found this stuff at wikipedia ( see below ). I am not an expert by any means
on energy and am not trying to make any point really.
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Algae fuel, also called oilgae or third generation biofuel, is a biofuel from algae.
The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require only 15,000 square miles (38,849 square kilometers), which is roughly the size of Maryland,[35] or less than one seventh the amount of land devoted to corn in 2000.[40]
Algae, such as Botryococcus braunii and Chlorella vulgaris are relatively easy to grow,[41] but the algal oil is hard to extract. There are several approaches, some of which work better than others.[42] Macroalgae (seaweed) also have a great potential for bioethanol and biogas production.[43]
While there is no one established definition of "fourth-generation biofuels,"
some have referred to it as the biofuels created from processes other than first generation ethanol and biodiesel, second generation cellulosic ethanol, and third generation algae biofuel. Some fourth generation technology pathways include: pyrolysis, gasification, upgrading, solar-to-fuel, and genetic manipulation of organisms to secrete hydrocarbons.[44]
GreenFuel Technologies Corporation developed a patented bioreactor system that uses nontoxic photosynthetic algae to take in smokestacks flue gases and produce biofuels such as biodiesel, biogas and a dry fuel comparable to coal.[45]
With thermal depolymerization of biological waste one can extract methane and other oils similar to petroleum.
Hydrocarbon plants or petroleum plants are plants which produce terpenoids as secondary metabolites that can be converted to gasoline-like fuels. Latex producing members of the Euphorbiaceae such as Euphorbia lathyris and E. tirucalli and members of Apocynaceae have been studied for their potential energy uses.[46][47]
Thanks for the serious reply. My comment on biofuels did not refer to algae. I just wanted to explain that landgrown biofuels are not a solution. Algae might well be.
