Some news and research on "green" energy

I stumble across those articles and blogs about "green" energy you may find interesting. In the end, you cannot hide the truth. If the Energy density is lower than the best technologies we have, like nuclear, it is not worth pursuing.

Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: the German experience

In the end, Germany’s PV promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per-worker subsidies as high as 175,000 € (US $ 240,000).
Although Germany’s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a “shining example in providing a harvest for the world” (The Guardian 2007), we would instead regard the country’s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits.

Wind Tax Windfalls, Nuclear Tax Burdens

How favorably short depreciation schedules for wind have created a “gold mine” for investors, virtually independent of how much electricity the wind turbines produce.

Listen to the podcast here:


Michael Trebilcock - "Wind power is a complete disaster"

Industrial wind power is not a viable economic alternative to other energy conservation options. Again, the Danish experience is instructive. Its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe (15¢/kwh compared to Ontario's current rate of about 6¢).

How much CO2 we produce contribute to "Climate Change"?

This web site did the calculation and the answer is a mere 0.117%. So any cut we will do by a small percentage, will have no measurable effect on the temperature over hundreds of years.

This is on top of the fact that the link between CO2 and temperature is not proven. There are other factors that influence more the climate than CO2.

So I ask again, why are we still talking about CO2 as the big crisis?

Résumé de ma saison de triathlon et course 2009

Simon Filiatrault Saison 2009 - triatlons, courses

New study shows nuclear has the less impact on land use of all energy sources

Another study shows the benefits of nuclear power compared to other energy sources. This is on top of no CO2 or atmospheric pollutant, high energy density and reserve for millions of years.

Thanks to John Wheeler for finding this source.

Click on graph for a high resolution version.

Value shown is for 2030, as measured in km² of impacted area in 2030 per terawatt-hour produced/conserved in that year. Error bars show the most-compact and least-compact estimates of plausible current and future levels of land-use intensity. Numbers provided are the midpoint between the high and low estimates for different techniques. For liquid fuels, energy loss from internal combustion engines is not included in this calculation.

John Wheeler from this week in nuclear, also makes those points clear on nuclear power:

• Radiation, is there a problem?
• Nuclear waste, what waste?
• Is nuclear energy renewable?
  

Excellent article by Lawrence Salomon - Enjoy the warmth while it lasts

According to this graph, we are enjoying a warm period that will last for another 50-100 years, after that, little ice age weather will kick in. It is fairly easy to adapt to a bit of warm, but a long cold ice age is another matter . Source and discussion

By Lawrence Solomon

Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.

We are in-betweeners, and just barely — we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.

Our luck is even better than that. Those 10,000-year warm spells aren’t all cosy-warm. They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren’t around during its fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable — even the Inuit fled. While the cold spells within the 10,000 year warm spells aren’t as brutal as a Little Ice Age, they can nevertheless make us huddle in gloom, such as the period in history from about 400 AD to 900 AD, which we know as the Dark Ages. We’ve lucked out twice, escaping the cold spells within the warm spells, making us inbetweeners within the inbetween periods. How good is that?