% The Flaming Right by paul murphy

Alternative energy issues

Imagine a child's wading pool, full of water. On one side there's a "replenishment device" that drops live minnows into the water, on the other side is you - with a tea strainer and an ironclad contract requiring delivery of exactly one minnow per minute in perpetuity.

In the very best case, there are lots of fish in the water, the replenishment device continuously adds new ones, and the tea strainer has a short handle so you can sit right beside the tub and efficiently scoop out as many as you need when you need them.

In the worst case the replenishment device only works part time and when it does work it often tosses in fish too big for your strainer; there are very few fish in the water; and the tub is so far away you have to clear a right of way across your neighbor's yard before flailing away to sieve many gallons of water for every minnow you land.

Think of energy density as the number of usable fish per gallon in the tank and you can see that this example illustrates the three biggest problems with green power:

1. first, there aren't many minnows in the green wading pool: windmills and solar panels have to process a lot of air, or a lot of sunlight, per megawatt produced. GE's latest S9G combined naval reactor and turbine plants produce, for example, about 200,000 times as much power per square foot as the typical wind farm - think of this ratio as comparing a factory employing every adult in New York State to one whose employees travel in a single bus.

2. second, the green wading pool tends to be in your neighbor's neighbor's yard. We can put a coal or nuclear plant where the customers are, but wind and solar plants go where nature puts the wind and the desert. Thus the right of way needed to move power from the wind farms planned for the west Texas panhandle to the I-35 corridor and along the coast will use at least 13,000 acres, convert up to a quarter of the generated power to transmission heat, and cost more than the wind farms themselves.

3. and, third, people don't want their air conditioners to fail when the wind fails - so most wind capacity is matched by standby, gas powered, generation - and because that standby capacity meets upwards of 80% of the actual customer load, wind farms tend to burn more hydrocarbons per watt output than coal plants.

Look at human history and every major step has been triggered by an increase in the energy density of the materials and processes available to us - and to see how specialization and technology drives this, consider which is really cheaper: a fish farm product costing $7.00 per pound at your local store, or fish you get for free by dangling a hook in the water and yanking it out?

The reason the expensive fish is cheaper for most of us is that the cost of going fishing is quite high, and the quantity of fish caught is quite small. If it costs you an average of $210 in time off, travel, equipment use, and licensing to catch a free five pound brown you're paying $70 per pound of friable fish - and that's really the bottom line on wind and solar energy too: they're free, but they cost about ten times what the store bought product does.

Paul Murphy, a Canadian, wrote and published The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Murphy is a 25-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues.