I'm baaaack!

It's been a while since I posted a blog because my laptop computer has been acting funny. For some reason it won't let me log into the blogger software.

Here are a few things I've wanted to share.

1. In the You just can't win department: This fellow and his wife installed a nice environmentally friendly windmill on their property, and now the neighbors are whining and the local government made them shut the thing down because it makes a bit of noise. I did find it suspicious that the couple located the windmill 230 feet from their own house, but only 164 feet from the neighbor's house. It's also interesting that the windmill cost them 20,000 pounds but it only saved them 500 pounds a year in energy cost - so it would take forty years to pay for itself, even leaving aside the interest they could have earned on the money they used to buy it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1187936/Green-homeowner-hit-noise-abatement-order-40ft-wind-turbine-driving-neighbours-mad.html

2. In the You can't win unless you're a government employee department: California has started to pay some of it's bills with IOUs because the state is running out of money due to a spending binge worthy of a sailor loose in Olongapo after 60 days at sea. But here's a funny thing - the state is not paying any of its hundreds of thousands of government workers and government pension benefit recipients with IOUs. The government folks get cash; all others get IOUs. You might be tempted to think that this is because the state is concerned about the government workers because they depend on their salaries to eat; but it turns out that the state is giving IOUs to a whole bunch of other folks who depend on their government check to eat. Fat cat college professors and judges get cash; the blind and the disabled get IOUs.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/01/california-the-haves-and-have-nots/

3. In the None of us humans can win in the long run department: It turns out that we're all doomed after these Argentinian ants consolidate their position globally. The Orkin man had better get ready for battle on a global basis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm

4. In the Even if you can't win you can live in a certain style before you are eaten by ants: Sometimes a house comes on the market that has an extra nice garden or a very nicely outfitted kitchen. And then sometimes a house comes on the market that has a really special feature. The owner of this house automatically becomes a Count, and his wife becomes a Countess. The house also comes with extra thick walls that won't let in the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound of any nearby windmills.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904574248540382556988.html

It's a pity we didn't bring my frog to Death Valley

The Devil's Hole Pupfish is holding up all sorts of solar and wind power projects.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124510519321116631.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Jas and I tried to visit the pupfish when we drove around the Southwest a few years back; but we never got to see the little fellow because the National Park Service has his hole fenced off like a maximum security prison and you can only get a glimpse of the water is way down in the crack in the rock.

If my frog had been with us he would have leaped right through that chain link fence. Then he would have done an octuple somersault with fifteen or twenty twists on the way down to the water for lunch. Survival of the fittest would have taken care of the rest. By now there wouldn't be any need for the environmentalists to worry about the cute little pupfish and his relatives.

Meanwhile, it appears we're not doomed to freeze in the dark

Quietly and stealthily the drilling companies have been finding ways to produce potentially enormous amounts of natural gas right here in the U.S. And the politicians have started to list natural gas along with wind and solar when they talk about "alternative" sources of energy.

Laissez les bon temps roulez.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html#mod%3Darticle-outset-box%26articleTabs%3Dcomments

As is usual on the Wall Street Journal site the comments on the article are well worth skimming if you're interested in the topic. The WSJ limits comments to subscribers who provide their full name with the comment so there are fewer annoying trolls, and the commenters generally know a bit about economics, unlike politicians and many so called environmentalists.

Nuclear or bust - I fear we will bust

The way to think about your fears of nuclear power is by asking, "Compared to what?"

Linda and I live about seven miles from the limerick nuclear power plant. As a result we get a scary evacuation mailer once a year so we're sure to be aware of how to escape in the event one of the engineers comes running out of the plant yelling "She's gonna blow." Well, the plant hasn't blown yet; and it's been producing 2,400 megawatts of electricity for twenty years.

If we lived seven miles from a coal powered plant producing the same amount of electricity we wouldn't get that scary mailer. That's because nobody is scared of coal plants even though a coal burning plant the size of Limerick would be getting and burning up a big trainload of coal every day. And there is no way you can burn that much coal without putting some serious crap into the air.

T. Boone Pickens says we should use windmills to make our electricity. Well, the biggest windmills around produce about 5 megawatts when the wind is blowing strongly. So even if the wind blew strongly all the time it would take about 500 windmills to generate as much power as the Limerick nuclear plant. Oh, and each of those windmills would be about 600 feet tall, almost as tall as the tall buildings down in Philadelphia. And, before I forget, the wind doesn't blow strongly all the time, so it would really take about 1,500 windmills to generate as much power as the Limerick nuclear plant.

Windmills as far as the eye can see, all of them droning and droning and droning. And did I mention that windmills kill bats even though the bats are smart and agile enough to avoid the spinning blades. That's because the lungs of the bats can't handle the pressure differential that they encounter when they fly near the blades. Not that I really give too much of a damn about bats - I don't even like bats. But that doesn't mean I want all the bats coughing their lungs out even though they're also smart enough not to smoke.

How about solar power, you're probably saying. Well, the biggest solar power plant produces about 50 megawatts when the sun is shining. That sounds pretty good because it would seem that you could replace the nuclear plant with only about 50 solar power plants. But alas, the sun is not always shining, so it would really take about about 250 solar power plants to replace the Limerick nuclear power plant. Each one of those 250 solar power plants would cover about about 450 acres of land.

There are other issues with nuclear power, like waste disposal; but I think the insane worry over nuclear waste disposal is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated. Yes, spent nuclear reactor fuel is very worthy of respectful and careful handling. But the French have been handling spent reactor fuel for decades while they have generated 80% of their electricity from nuclear. They reprocess the fuel so they can use most of it to fuel reactors again, and then they dispose of only a small portion of it.

And then there's the matter of relative risk. The folks who scream bloody murder about nuclear power don't tell you how many people are dying from steadily breathing the pollution that coal power plants put into the air. And if you're risk averse you had best stop driving your car. There is nothing in the energy field that comes near to the risk you will take tomorrow or next week or next year when you have a couple drinks and then pass a tractor trailer loaded with gasoline on the Schuylkill expressway going 70 miles an hour.

The link below leads to an article by a guy who seems to make sense to me. I think he minimizes the problems and issues a bit; but anyone who thinks we can continue living anything like our current lifestyles without nuclear power is fooling themselves. There simply is no alternative.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDIwMjVjMTIyZTQ1NTJhNjM1YzFmZmFmNWVkNDA4ZjE=

There's no need for me to joke about this

The green goofballs in Boston just installed a windmill on the roof of city hall. Even though they were given the windmill for free, it cost $13,000 to install. It provides enough electricity for 19 light bulbs - when the wind is blowing. I guess Boston city workers sit in the dark when the wind isn't blowing.

Perhaps they plan to use the windmill to power the light bulbs in the offices where the mayor's relatives and old buddies are supposed to be working. Since those "workers" hardly ever show up anyway it doesn't matter whether he wind blows or not.

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1118058&format=text

The boring nitty gritty of engineering

This video by a retired General Electric executive patiently takes you through the facts about wind energy. The most interesting thing about it is the insight it gives into the sheer scale of the national economy.

If you know me you know someone who personally knew someone (Grandpop L) who started his life in a world and time when less mechanical power was generated in the entire world than can today be generated by ten, or maybe twenty, of the wind generators this fellow talks about. Grandpop L was born at a time when for 99.9% of the world's population one horsepower was generated by one horse, or else it was generated by four humans busting their asses.

Jules Verne, who died in 1905, was probably the most outrageously visionary thinker alive when Grandpop L was born in the 1890's. Told on his deathbed that within a hundred and three years a rational person would envision the world producing and erecting a thousand, let alone nearly three hundred thousand, windmills of the size this fellow talks about, Jules Verne would have dismissed the idea as a fever dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_W4_bv4c9w

Hat tip to Mario Lewis who linked to this video on National Review's Planet Gore blog.

Give me green power, but don't give me power lines

Environmentalist say they want green power, but when someone actually tries to give them green power they make it impossible because they don't want anyone to build the power lines necessary to deliver the power. This is going to be a very big fight because if the country is going to go over to renewable power in a real way the little power line links talked about in the column below are tiny compared to what will be necessary. Going over completely to renewables as folks like Al Gore suggest would mean thousands of miles of big power corridors spreading out across the whole country to hold superconducting electric lines surrounded by liquid hydrogen pipelines to keep them cold.

This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal tells the story - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121901822110148233.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks - I've pasted a copy of the article below because the WSJ requires registration.

Wind JammersAugust 18, 2008

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.
To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy.

The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Turning perfectly good food into poor fuel has never made sense

Turning perfectly good food into poor fuel has never made sense to me. Now even the New York Times and other folks who consider themselves environmentally conscious are starting to wake up to that.

The mandates that motor fuel contain a certain percentage of ethanol, and the subsidies for ethanol production are causing a significant portion of U.S. and European food output to be diverted to production of ethanol (and other biofuels at much lower volumes) despite the fact that ethanol is both a poor fuel and more expensive to produce than gasoline.

That's not especially hurting most of us here in the U.S. and in Europe because the resulting rise in food cost is fairly trivial. So what if some food prices go up 70% (which is what the World Bank has estimated as the effect of the diversion of food crops to ethanol and other biofuel production). We're still going to buy the bread we need and the corn dogs we like.

Things are a bit different in the poorer countries of the world where a rise in the price of food can mean actually going to bed hungry or worse. So it's not surprising that there have been food riots in a lot of countries.

Similar problems will become apparent about wind power a few years down the road after there are a lot more windmills. Too lengthy to go into now but it comes down to the fact that the wind is variable and people want power continuously, so it's going to cost a lot (a very lot) of money to make wind power supply any substantial percentage of the national grid.

A smart fellow named T. Boone Pickens is now pushing wind power. Ten years of so from now they will be writing stories about how much money he (and others) made off the poorly thought out government programs and subsidies that are going to be rammed through. Other articles are going to be telling about how the wind farms are producing much less energy than was promised.
If wind power made economic sense T. Boone wouldn't have to sell it to us with slick advertisements - he would just build windmills with his own money and make a ton of profits. Instead he wants to build them with our money, but he will still be the one who makes a ton of profits.

Update 7/15: I see where Newsweek Magazine asked T. Boone Pickens why there are no windmills on his ranch. T. Boone said, "There are no turbines on my ranch, because I think they are ugly." You cannot make this stuff up.