The Energy Equation
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Today, the Obama administration announced the plans to have offshore wind-powered electricity generators in place by 2013.
That paired in my brain with another piece of information posted at Al Fin. I love it when our government decides to lead the charge in efforts that have recently been shown to be the worst possible alternatives. You know, like dramatically reducing human produced global warming from our CO2 production... when it's based on hokey science.
2012 IS GETTING CLOSER..27 APRIL 2010
Wind Power Emerges as Scandalous Failure
Hundreds of European offshore wind turbines have a design flaw that causes them to slide on their bases . More, expensive gearbox failures are an industry-wide problem . Worst of all,wind energy is unpredictable and massively expensive for power utilities to integrate into a dynamic power gridPDF. Big wind turbines are gaining a well-deserved reputation as expensive failure-prone hobby-horses for incompetent green activists and politicians.
Now that we have discovered how deep and wide the problem of organised crime infiltration into the wind industry is becoming, it is long past time for taxpayers to begin to confront their elected officials with the massive waste and fraud that their tax dollars are being diverted to support.
Whenever klutzy monolithic governments are made to scramble to solve anonexistentmanufactured problem such as carbon climate catastrophe, waste and fraud are guaranteed to occur -- probably on a massive scale. Indeed, that is what we are seeing across a broad panorama of wind industry investment, lobbying, and media public relations. There are literally trillions of dollars to be made in the "clean energy industry", and political reputations to be made. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the juggernaut -- not even the stark cruel facts.
Wind power is expensive, unreliable, and prone to massive breakdown at any time.Siemens and General Electric are attempting to evade one massive problem of wind turbines -- ubiquitous gearbox failures -- but the new turbines have their own problems, and faulty gearboxes are just one piece of the ugly puzzle. Even if wind turbines could perform as specified for their full "20 year lifetime", they would not be close to competitive with nuclear, coal, or gas for electric power production.
The Obama - Pelosi regime is in too deeply to back out of the crime-ridden enterprise now. They have to "tough it out" and hope that they can keep the media under their thumb so that the masses of taxpayers never learn what they are doing.
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2 comments:
You can't have energy without scandalous failure. In just the past couple weeks we've got a scandalous failure in West Virginia that left us with a coal mine full of dead workers and a scandalous failure in the Gulf of Mexico that that left us with an oil slick the size of Jamaica. Wind has problems, sure, but our main sources of power ain't exactly trouble free.
That is true if you are considering the entire supply chain associated with an electric power generation system. Mining is alway more dangerous than manufacturing. Manufacturing is always more danger than passive acquisition. But generally, some form of mining/drilling/harvesting is always necessary for some form of manufacturing... regardless of the final product.
However, the point here was that, at the point of power generation, the wind turbines are far less durable and reliable... and far more expensive per kwh.
Actually, the idea of renewables is great and power generated by solar, wind, tidal and other "use the free sources" may be economically feasible in the long run. Look at how Iceland has taken advantage of its geothermal resources.
The marketplace for new technology always works best when the technology doesn't need perpetual props to make it "competitive"... and when the new technology actually delivers better results.
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