In the 1960s, when legendary environmentalist David Brower expressed his opposition to nuclear power, he exposed a rift among his Sierra Club colleagues, many of whom saw “too cheap to meter” nuclear power as the solution to air pollution problems.  Brower and others focused on the danger of nuclear accidents, security issues, and the difficulty of securing high-level radioactive waste for long-term storage.  The surge in nuclear power development in the 60s and 70s died under its own weight in the 1980s.  Plants took too long to build and cost far too much when compared to other options.  A catastrophic accident at Chernobyl and a near-miss at Three Mile Island seemed to seal the deal.

Through the next two decades, most environmentalists followed Brower’s lead.  Of late, however, the old environmental rift has resurfaced.  Many now feel that nuclear power’s potential to provide that old familiar base load electricity supply without much in terms of greenhouse gas emissions makes the downsides of the nuclear option look tolerable.  Congress has continuously supported nuclear power, and provided strong incentives in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to support next-generation nuclear technology.

One has to wonder, however, whether the new openness to nuclear reflects, more than anything else, the passage of time since we last tried to build these things.  Enter the New York Times and its article, yesterday, about a flagship new project in Finland that has begun to falter.  Read more

photo: David Blaikie via flickr.

Solar power and geothermal power have finally gotten their portion of money allocated in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, to the tune of $467 million. President Obama announced this by touting the usual rhetoric of decreasing dependency on foreign oil and putting people back to work in through green energy jobs. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu too talked up green jobs, plus the role renewable energy can play in combatting climate change Frankly, absolutely nothing new or novel was said, but it is great that solar and geothermal have finally been shown some federal stimulus love. This is how all that money is being divided up:

Geothermal to Get Most of the Funding
All told geothermal is getting $350 million: $140 million is going toward Geothermal Demonstration Projects; $80 million towards Enhanced Geothermal Systems Technology Research and Development; $100 million towards Innovative Exploration Techniques; $30 million towards a National Geothermal Data System, Resource Assessment, and Classification System.

Solar Power Gets One-Third of Geothermal
Solar power has been allocated $117.6 million: $51.5 million for Photovoltaic Technology Development; $40.5 for Solar Energy Deployment (”Projects in this area will focus on non-technical barriers to solar energy deployment, including grid connection, market barriers to solar energy adoption in cities, and the shortage of trained solar energy installers.”); Concentrating Solar Power Research and Development brings up the rear with $25.6 million.

More: Department of Energy

Solar Power For Homes Could Save You
By: Sam Deane

Have you heard how some people are saving an absolute fortune by installing solar power for homes right now? Seriously, some people are saving as much as $50,000 simply by installing solar power for homes.

Also, once the solar power for homes systems has been onstalled, many homeowners people are saving as much as $2,500 per year and beyond on their electrics bills. Meanwhile, in some countries, utility companies are actually rewarding people by buying back any unused solar power their solar power for homes systems have generated. Read more

It was though a million bloggers stopped typing and the Internet fell silent.

The question has been asked, what happens if we convert to wind power and the wind stops blowing?   That question has been answered:  We freeze.  We bake.  Our computers stop and our mass transit will not run.  The dirty little secret about the current way the Greening of the West  is being implemented  is that it will not work.  Look at the Science

It’s not that it can’t work.  Rather it is as though the folks driving this green train are either ignorant or they deliberately want us to fail.  Since many in the Green movement are Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the Inside), I think they draining our bank accounts and then setting us up to fail is deliberately.  Communists have been trying to destroy capitalism for years.  Looks like they have found away.  I will believe differently  when there is a large and rapid increase in the building of nuclear power plants and the bad mouthing of clean coal stops.  This is not to say that clean coal exists, but what you will notice if you watch the Watermelons who run those clean coal commercials is:  they wouldn’t want it if it did exist.  It will not help them destroy capitalism so they do not want it.

Again, if you want to know why should have doubts about the Greening of the West, read this carefully.  In particular, pay attention to the Danish experience.  What happen to a real world example of a western nation when it went hog wild for Windmills.

The problems, for those who need it bottom lined is that wind power is intermittent.   In Denmark the wind power stations may spend as much as one third of the time operating at less than 10% capacity.  If you look seriously at what it might take to store the power from the good times in hydrogen or batteries and then to find practical ways to to use say the stored, hydrogen safely on a nation scale, the problems are staggering.  Not insurmountable but certainly a problem that may take decades to solve on a national scale.  What some fail to realize is this:  It’s one thing to have an experimental plant make a few bubble of hydrogen in a laboratory, it’s a whole other thing to replace every power line in this country.  I say “replace every power line in this country” as a way getting handle of what putting in a nationwide hydrogen infrastructure would require.  It would be on the order of replacing every power line in the country.  I believe it would actually be more expensive and time consuming than that since every nut and bolt of a new infrastructure must be built first.  You have use electricity to split the water (that plant that makes H2 bubbles is not yet ready for prime time), you have to store and transport the H2.  Compressing, liquefying, storing and transporting H2 are non trivial task.   Understand, no one is saying it can’t be done.  All we are saying is there are no magic wands to make it happen quickly, and we need to be doing something in the mean time–something like nuclear power and clean coal.  The electricity to split the water into O2 and H2 will not come out of thin air–yet.   Again, a nation wide infrastructure of solar energy will also take time and energy.  Also, solar is under 25% conversion efficiency.  Until we get those magic plants out of the laboratory, the conversion efficiency of hydrogen is even worse.

The myth of the Danish green energy ‘miracle’

I have doubtless offended some religious sensibilities.  I can tell that Climate Change  is just religion with some of you when I bring up the subject of Al Gore.  If you truly believed that we are killing ourselves and destroying the planet through global warming, and you were a millionaire, wouldn’t you have the smallest carbon foot print of all the millionaires in the world?  You are a millionaire.  You can afford it!  But Al Gore has one of the largest carbon foot prints on the planet.   Do the rules only apply to us but not to him?  Is he a God who walks the earth and are we merely serfs?    If there is a green way to live, shouldn’t millionaires be the first to live that way?  Again, they can afford it.   If  one green technology doesn’t work or doesn’t well, they can keep swapping thing out and trying different configurations until they hit upon one that works.  The average person needs technology that works correctly the first time.  The millionaires and limousine liberals who talk the green talk have an moral an ethical obligation to walk the green walk if for no other reason than to work the bugs out so that the rest of us can follow.

A similar argument could be made for the trillion dollar government that the Democrats have set up.  Rather than trying to force the rest of us to go green, Let’s see the government go first.  Government runs everything that the private sector runs and more.  Most of us don’t have our own private military after all.  So government has a huge playing field in which to establish which are the best green technologies.  Let private industry compete for contracts to turn the government green.  Let the best contractor win.   Then the populace can follow the the practices that work best.

RP Washington D.C. May 19,2009  In a new symbiotic relationship between government-owned General Motors and the EPA, a new type of on-road land vehicle powered by the wind has been proposed. While the coasts have off shore wind potential, the Red States, especially Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas would use the wind power to deliver new performance in a new three-passenger car outfitted with sails and turbines.

The vehicle will use technology yet to be invented. On board sensors and wireless-network-delivered information combining detection of car speed, power requirements, wind velocity along with GPS coordinates can be used to automatically deploy a sail fin in the proper orientation and direction.  The wheels used are similar to roller blades which use silicone instead of rubber.

The idea of wind vehicles is not new. Crosswinds in Kansas and other Plains states blow unloaded trailers and VW Microbuses into other lanes and even completely on their sides. Taking advantage of wind, trucks would carry sensors to keep them constantly on the point of tipping in order to extract the maximum amount of power from the wind. Height restrictions supplied over the air would avoid striking overpasses.

Hollywood has also chimed in with Actor/Abuser Alec Baldwin thinking that stunt men could “do something with the sail.”

Additional uses of the technology fitted to all new cars, State troopers will also be able to locate speeders by GPS. Driver and vehicle data would be collected remotely to issue new federal speeding tickets. Fines for drivers detected using the system would be suspended if more than 2.6% of forward motion is extracted from the wind. Normal vehicles will be issued tickets based on network delivered by the device with fines doubling if the fuel consumption decreases below 27.8mpg for distances of 6 miles or more. Both numbers were arbitrarily chosen.

Yan Sung of the EPA, the new GM Vice President of Wind Alternatives, who now goes by the handle of VicePOWA stated, “the fine doubling came out of an idea of how to pay for the new technology and increase the benefit cost ratio to greater than 0.55.”

Cars with electric assist or hybrid designs will have pinwheels that deploy in parking lots to a small energy storage device, nicknamed “Battery” . The Battery is expected to light a single pulsing white LED that looks “really kewl” says VicePOWA. The Wind Assisted  Special Project or WASP has been code named VESPA, the italian word for wasp. Because the government ownership, some experts  have determined that no violation of trademark with the scooter market champion exists.