frflyer

Black Swans and Greenwashing Solar and Wind

This is the most falacious thing I've read in a long time.

Subsidies for fossil fuels are about 5 to 10 times as much as for renewable energy.

As this link shows:
on oil subsidies
www.heatisonline.org/c...

"subsidy programmes from 1918 are still in place"
"I'm not aware of any oil and gas subsidy that has ever been phased out," said Koplow, the leading expert on U.S. energy subsidies"
"in a time of skyrocketing oil prices and profits, why did the George W. Bush administration in 2005 authorise an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies over a five-year period?"

"Koplow's 2007 report to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development puts the annual U.S. subsidy at an average of 39 billion dollars a year."
Another estimate puts oil and gas subsidies and tax credits at $84 billion a year.
www.setamericafree.org...

"Estimating U.S. oil and gas subsidies is very challenging. Subsidies rarely involve cash payments. Instead scores of U.S. government agencies and departments create hundreds of programmes to support the U.S. energy sector. And there is no requirement for the federal government to keep track of all this."

"Energy subsidies are often simply hidden from public scrutiny. It's only recently been revealed that 40 companies granted leases between 1996 and 2000 for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico do not have to pay royalties for the publicly-owned resource. This is worth nearly a billion dollars a year in lost revenue to the federal government."

"This massive government intervention distorts energy markets, making it very difficult for alternative energy sources to compete without similarly massive subsidies. "And it promotes America's addiction to oil," Larsen added."

The average effective tax rate on integrated
oil operations has fallen from 21.5 percent in
the early 1980s to only 8.7 percent in the 1990s (both
figures are significantly below the statutory rate of 35
Coal and nuclear are also heavily subsidized.

Anyone who makes statements about solar and wind needing to be subsidized shouldn't be listened to becuase it is sheer nonsense.
Fledgling industries are what should be subsidized, not mature industries making the biggest profits in American business history.

McCain wants to build 45 nuclear plants by 2020
The American Wind Energy Association forecasts that installed capacity could grow from 11,603 MW today to around 100,000 MW by 2020. That's 100 gigawatts, or a nearly 90 gigawatt increase. 90 gigawatts is the same or more than you would get from 45 nuclear plants. The windfarms estimate is probably way too conservative. We can build them faster with a little political will to do so. Wind cost about a third of what nuclear does to build.

and that's just wind. Solar can do much more.

Denmark already has 20% wind power. Parts of Germany and Denmark have 40% wind power. We are told that wind and solar are too intermittent. Why isn't that a problem in Denmark. Could it be because they have no oil company lobby?

Pickens' plan has two good ideas, wind power and HVDC transmission lines to distribute power from windfarms in Texas and the midwest, and from solar plants in the southwest.
Trading wind for gas makes no sense because it is much more efficient to burn the gas in a power plant than in a car. And wind is too intermittant to operate as base load as gas can.

Solar thermal plants with heat storage,in the southwest, can replace coal plants with the ability to put out base load power. These plants can be built in 2 to 3 years. They can put out steady power day and night. They will provide power at 5 to 8 cents a kilowatt within five years.
Solar thermal power plants in the southwest, at rates competitive with coal and gas, could power the whole country, using less land than we now use for coal plants and mining. and the tax dollars spent over 35 years or so would be about what we now give oil companies in the form of tax credits and subsidies every 5 to 10 years.
Joseph Romm in this great article says:
"It would be straightforward to build CSP systems at whatever rate industry and governments needed, ultimately 50 to 100 gigawatts a year growth or more."
www.salon.com/news/fea...

100 gigawatts equivalant in nuclear would mean building 50 or more nukes a year. That my friend will never happen.
and
"The key attribute of CSP is that it generates primary energy in the form of heat, which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity -- and with far greater efficiency"

Add photovoltaics all over the country to the solar plants in the southwest and you have solar energy on a vast scale.

The remarks about hybrids are false. Plug in hybrids would give the average driver 100 miles to the gallon overall. The higher initial cost would pay for itself in 5 years if gasoline is $1.75 a gallon. Think you'll see gas that cheap in the future?

Sensible plans are at.

www.setamericafree.org...
A Blueprint for U.S. Energy Security

www.repoweramerica.org

climateprogress.org

www.sciam.com/article....
Solar thermal a better choice than the concentrating PV emphasized here, but shows what we can do and what it will cost.

more info on solar thermal at:
solarsouthwest.org/ Solar Soutwest Initiative

All in all this article is complete rubbish