To satisfy 100% of New York City's electricity needs with wind power would require impossible around-the-clock winds within a limited speed range, and a wind farm the size of the entire state of Connecticut.  Solar photovoltaic cells are so inefficient that even with recent improvements in solar panel design it would take about 30 square miles of expensive solar panels to generate just one gigawatt of electricity.  How much wind and solar energy can we collect on a still, windless night?  Solar and wind are inherently intermittent and unreliable energy sources.  Would you hire a drunken employee who only showed up for work part of the time, and on his own erratic schedule, not yours?  On top of that, the sloppy drunk demands a far higher salary than reliable workers. 

     Lawrence Solomon exposes the hype of the renewable energy faddists in his Financial Post article, Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels?  Not a chance.  Not a chance.  "Virtually every major German solar producer has gone under."  As both wind and solar subsidies are withdrawn, wind and solar projects become a financial burden rather than an economic asset.  "The cost to the German economy of its transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050."  "As Warren Buffett said, wind farms don’t make sense without the tax credit."

     Because of their extremely low power-to-weight ratio, windmills require the use of huge amounts of steel and other materials in their construction.  Wind turbines are being sold to the public as a carbon-neutral product, but manufacturing windmill components is not a carbon-neutral process.  Windmills are mainly made from power generated by burning coal and other fossil fuels.  Because of the enormous amount of resources required for windmill construction, and their intermittent and unreliable performance, windmills do not reduce CO2 emissions.  Building wind turbine farms covering vast areas of land will kill large numbers of birds and bats, and torture animals and humans living nearby with audible sounds as well as infrasound.  Infrasounds are very low frequencies below 20Hz that travel long distances and can cause headaches, insomnia, and other serious negative health effects.

     T. Boone Pickens said, "I've lost my ass in wind power." - "The jobs are in the oil and gas industry" - Pickens went on to say that "He (Obama) needs to explain to his people, ‘Hey, we can get on everything green.  We can get on everything renewable.  Then the cost of power will go up ten times.'  So be careful when you start fooling with it.”  According to The Wall Street Journal, "The states with (wind power/renewable energy) mandates paid 31.9% more for electricity than states without them.”

Germany’s green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle

Cash in the wind: New York’s wind-power giveaway

China Stops Building Wind Turbines Because Most Of The Energy Is Wasted

Wind power is an attack on rural America

How Wind Farms Destroy the Environment 2: Toxic Waste

The Solar Energy Fiasco - Simple passive solar design features for home construction and passive solar hot water heating are sound investments, but solar power is a wasteful and counterproductive investment for large-scale energy production.  You don't get any solar energy at night; you get less on cloudy days, less in the morning, and less in the late afternoon.  That makes large-scale solar power schemes horribly inefficient no matter how high we can pump up the output of solar panels.  The cost of energy storage systems, batteries, and other complex systems on top of high panel costs makes solar impossibly expensive for large-scale use.  We need synthetic liquid fuels to run farm equipment, cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, etc., and to make synthetic fertilizers.  We can manufacture these fuels with solar power but at many times the cost of using new, natural gas.  You have to run synthetic fuel plants 24 hours a day to be economically viable.  If you must use fossil fuel or nuclear energy backup power at night to keep a synthetic fuel plant running, then why bother to have solar power at all?  Duplication of energy resources is a needless expense.  Any power plant must output power 24-7 to be economically valuable for large-scale use.  When used for large-scale energy production, solar power schemes have an extremely large ecological footprint.

     Solar panels will always be exposed to the weather, and their lifespan is short; about 10 to 20 years depending on the brand.  Many cheaper brands have failed within 5 years or less.  Unlike other power systems, solar panels cannot be repaired and upgraded to extend their usefulness beyond their limited lifespan.  This fact dramatically increases their cost per kilowatt hour compared to other more affordable alternatives.  Solar power is great for running pocket calculators, remote vacation cabins, and other small-scale high-cost per-watt uses, but solar power is inherently the wrong choice for large-scale power grid use.  Solar power is an extraterrestrial nuclear power system where the nuclear reactor is located 93 million miles away from us in outer space, our Sun.  We need terrestrial nuclear reactors right here on Earth, so we can affordably capture their highly concentrated energy without taking up huge amounts of land space.  Our extraterrestrial nuclear power source is great for growing crops, but its output is far too diffuse and intermittent for practical large-scale electricity production.

“Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for photovoltaic solar systems in regions of moderate insolation” 

“Spain’s Renewable Energy Disaster Draws to a Close”

Another solar energy project a financial disaster for taxpayers

The Washington Post on the Solyndra solar scandal and other "green" boondoggles

Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar   Published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  21 scientists explain the real-world mathematics of why we can never replace fossil fuels with unreliable wind and solar power.

 
    The global biofuel disaster killed millions of innocent people worldwide through malnutrition and related illness.  Growing plants for biofuels increases the cost of fertilizer, farmland, and food all over the world.  By making energy production directly compete with food production, biofuel farming created the historic world food crisis during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.  To this day, despite all of the poor Third World families we starved to death, green politicians would still rather drill the human food supply for energy than Alaska.  Biofuel production continues to keep food prices artificially high because now we have to feed two races, the human race and a race of hungry man-made machines.

     Biofuel farming increases topsoil erosion, deforestation, water pollution, phosphate resource depletion, and the kill-off of bees due to increased insecticide use.  So, what group is more damaging to the environment and mankind, the oil industry, which is keeping us all alive, or decadent environmentalists who always put empty green symbolism before real-world consequences?


Lockheed Martin has a website and video describing their radically new compact high beta hot fusion reactor.




     Low Energy Nuclear Reaction is a relatively new and controversial field of physics that shows tremendous promise but has yet to prove itself, in the public arena.  There are between 200 and 300 public and private organizations around the world doing authentic research on LENR.  The first company that produces useful electricity-producing LENR products will become instantly wealthy to historic proportions, thus scientific corporate secrecy can be expected.  There may be hidden government projects that have achieved useful amounts of reliable energy from LENR or companies that are close to having a reliable product, but we do not know for sure.  Here is an interesting United States Department of Defense overview of LENR from May 4th, 2016 titled Briefing on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) Research. 

     If LENR does become available to the general public, it will redefine the human race, but it will also make the world more dangerous.  Think of what terrorist organizations could do by combining drone technology with a lightweight device that produces electricity for two or three years without refueling.  Humans need to learn to live together in peace before any such super technology becomes safe for our overpopulated planet.  I would say that given all of the available evidence, the safest energy sources we have today that actually work are fossil fuels and traditional hydroelectric power. 

     Television anchor Chris Wallace recently asked Al Gore, “You would agree that even if all 195 nations, now 194, met their targets, it still would not solve the problem (of global warming).”  Al Gore answered, “That is correct.  However, it sends a very powerful signal to business and industry and civil society, and countries around the world.”  In other words, Albert Gore publicly admitted that the Paris Climate Accord was just another costly but impotent act of government mandated symbolism.  We need huge amounts of energy to support the Earth's over 8 billion human inhabitants. Billions will starve if governments try to use wind, solar, and biofuels as a replacement for fossil fuels.  It takes so much energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, and transport crops, that any increase in the cost of energy will always result in higher food prices.  The human race cannot eat symbolism.

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See Climate Catholicism and Greenhouse Dreams.

See climate science links New Climate Discovery and The Political Hydrogen Bomb.

Christopher Calder    calderconnection@gmail.com     home page

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Christopher Calder is a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocate for world food supply security with no financial interest in any energy related business.