Wind supplies about 1% of our nations electricity, nuclear energy about 20%. Wind will never approach what nuclear energy can produce for a very simple reason, the reliability of the wind is not there. Sometimes, it refuses to blow, even at the most favorable sites. Nuclear energy is clean, efficient and reliable and doesn't require millions of unsightly noisy windmills dotting our landscape.

"Solar Energy: Since the deserts of the Western United States have 280 clear days per year and solar energy is there for the taking — as compared to some 120 such days in the Northeast United States — it seems like a no-brainer to build a power line from the sun-rich desert to the energy-starved states of the Northeast. (Twenty-five percent of U.S. electrical energy — 1,004 of 4,157 million megawatt-hours — is used in the industrial states of Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York.) Problem solved! Planet saved! Why then is solar only a tiny fraction of one percent of U.S. energy production — and losing ground?

Before America starts building a transmission network to transfer this energy (call it a Smart Grid since “smart” stuff is really in these days), we need to consider why private industry is not collecting all of this “free” power:

• While there are up to 280 clear days in the desert, that also means there are about 85 days that aren’t clear — in fact, they may be overcast and rainy. Even Death Valley has 18 days per year with measurable precipitation. Since electricity must be generated at the time it is used, what are we to do when the sun doesn’t shine?
• When the coffee pots and hair dryers are cranking up in the industrial Northeast, it is still dark in the desert. And it will be functionally “dark” until about 2 p.m. EST when the incidence of the sun’s ray allows the photovoltaics (or the mirrors in a thermal plant) to collect sufficient energy for electricity generation to commence. Perhaps the government could decree that the East Coast go on “Green Time,” where citizens would be required to stay in bed till 2 p.m. (Teenagers would certainly be for it.)
• If we are to supply even 10 percent of the aforementioned states’ electrical energy in the eight-hour period when there is sufficient sunlight, then we would need a transmission capacity of about 35,000 megawatts. A 345-kilovolt line with 1,000-amp conductors can carry about 500 megawatts, meaning it would take some 70 transmission lines crossing mountains, rivers, and the property of several hundred thousand possibly unimpressed landowners. (And for two-thirds of each day, these hundreds of thousands of 15-story towers would be nonfunctioning.)

As a matter of fact, tapping into solar power wouldn’t lead to the elimination of any conventional power plants, since the solar-generated electricity is not available on demand. Conventional power plants must always be on standby, powered up as “spinning reserves” available at a moment’s notice, just in case clouds or one of the frequent desert dust storms knocks out solar production. These reserves would have to come from natural-gas turbine generators or from coal or nuclear power plants that are running but are putting out less-than-maximum electricity so that they can come up to speed quickly when the solar generation drops off.

But what about periods such as the Northeast’s morning peak when no solar is available? Then we would need our full existing complement of coal and nuclear power plants to provide the required energy. Since these plants require hours, if not days, to come on line, they would need to stay in a full operational mode at all times.

Obviously, centralized solar generation won’t work; perhaps we should look to local solar electricity generation.

The Internet is full of schemes for local solar generation to augment utility power — we’ve all seen the ads about installing solar panels to not only save on electrical bills, but to make your meter run backwards.

Local photovoltaic generation of electricity can be useful. In fact, your correspondent is in the process of installing solar panels to provide electricity for a radio that will report the level in a water tank to control three duplex pumping stations sending water up a mountain in North Carolina. Running power lines to a remote site often costs many, many times the cost of solar panels. The power requirement in this case is minimal — only five watts to power the radio and control circuitry. But the cost for the solar panels and electricity storage — since it is expected that there will be periods up to two weeks without significant sunlight — is over $2,000, not including installation. Still, that is economical compared to the cost of stringing power lines.

The problem comes in trying to provide “usable” amounts of reliable electrical energy with solar panels without breaking the bank. Let us look at the cost of solar panels and how much electricity they produce.

A typical panel is about one square meter, or approximately 10 square feet. Though it is rated for 130 watts, it will never achieve that power production. The 130 watts of electricity is based on a radiant flux of 1,000 watts per square meter (meaning the panel converts 13 percent of solar energy to electricity), but even in the tropics at noon on a clear day, the solar radiation striking the Earth is only 950 watts per square meter.

So how much incoming solar radiation is the panel really expected to intercept for conversion to electricity? First we need to assume that the photovoltaic cells are clean because a thin coating of dust or grime can easily reduce the light energy reaching the cell by 10 to 20 percent. Then we must calculate the angle of the sun’s rays. Except for expensive, commercial solar plants that use servo motors to “track” the sun, there are only brief periods where the sunlight is perpendicular to the solar collection device. When the sunlight strikes at an angle, the solar energy is decreased by the cosine of the angle of incidence. With a fixed collector, the angle of incidence varies from 0 to 90 degrees and back to 0 degrees every day. Over the seasons it also varies because of the sun’s course over the seasons. If you’re set up for collecting in the winter, it could easily be off 45 degrees in the summer and vice versa. So when you combine vectorily the incidence angles, being off by 30 degrees is a pretty good average. When this angle is 30 degrees, a decrease of 13 percent occurs.

The around-the-clock average of solar radiance hitting the United States is approximately 200 watts/square meter, far from the 1,000 watts of irradiance the panel rating is based on. Deducting a conservative 10 percent for being off the perpendicular, we have 180 watts per square meter that we can possibly collect. With a conversion ratio of 13 percent, suddenly our 130-watt panel now becomes a 23.4-watt panel. With 8,760 hours in a year, one could expect to generate 205 kilowatt hours of electricity — which costs the average consumer about $20 from the utility company. The typical cost of the solar panel from online vendors: $550. This, of course, does not include installation.

But the problems for the solar enthusiast are just starting with the installation of the panels. One doesn’t just connect the output from the panels — which is low voltage direct current (DC) — to one’s breaker box that brings in alternating current (AC) from the utility company. While incandescent lights (but not the fluorescent bulbs being pushed by the Greens) can be operated on DC power, appliances cannot. To convert the DC power to AC requires an inverter, and then a transformer to bring the voltage to a level that is usable in your home or office. To make that meter run backward, you must synchronize the frequency of your system to the utility line — very carefully, or your system will become a puddle of copper and silicon.

Taking these numbers, let’s look at what a solar system would cost for the average homeowner who uses the national average of 12,000 kWh per year. First 58 panels plus installation: $42,000. Then add batteries, an inverter, and other controls at $20,000, giving a system cost of $62,000. Maintenance and replacement batteries represent an annual expense of at least $2,000. And for all this, the green homeowner saves $1,000 in utility costs — plus the satisfaction of thinking he’s “saving the planet.”

Wind Power: Logic would suggest that if wind power were a viable option to other forms of generation, the investor-owned power companies would be first in line to utilize this “fuel-free” source of energy. If they did not utilize it, competitors would gain an advantage and abscond with valuable commercial and industrial accounts. Obviously, there is no such rush for wind power, as utilities must deliver electricity, not rhetoric.

The employment of wind-power electrical generation requires a modification of the normal rules of mathematics. Take the following question:

Q. You have a 5,000-megawatt network of coal, nuclear, and natural-gas power plants, to which you add one hundred 1.5-megawatt wind turbines. What is your new capacity?

A. You still have a 5,000-megawatt network. The 150 megawatts of wind power don’t count — because they can’t be depended upon when electric energy is called for by the network.

An NPR (National Public Radio) interview of grid manager Bob Benbow made clear that he is worried that when wind power makes up a significant portion of his grid, managing it will cause him major problems because of grid instability, as happened to colleagues in Texas on February 29, 2008. The limit of wind power and/or solar power that can be added to a network is reported to be in the area of nine percent, after which there becomes a danger of losing control of the network. Benbow elaborated on his concern about the possibility of 20-percent wind power on his grid: “If the wind is not blowing, you just don’t have that resource available.” And even when the wind is blowing there are problems with wind turbines: “A lot of these plants are not manned — if we need to turn them off, we have to send a person out to actually do that.”

Other concerns frustrate Benbow and his fellows: wind blows hardest at night when electricity demand is lowest, and it can’t be counted on for hot summer days when it’s needed most: “You can put all that wind in, but I still need to have all this other generation that I need to have available — all my coal, nuclear, all the gas — for my peak load day.” It’s not easy being green.

European countries are far ahead of the United States in not only wind power, but in its unhappy consequences. At 9:15 a.m. on the day before Christmas in 2005, the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG) in the UK was almost overwhelmed by wind power; it reached a maximum of 6,024 megawatts. Yet the day after Christmas, the wind power complement fell to 40 megawatts. (In 10 hours the wind-power feed-in dropped 4,000 megawatts, comprising most of the wind energy potential and equivalent to four full-scale 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants or eight typical coal-fire generating facilities.)

One can visualize the EIUG grid managers shutting down power plants all over the UK on Christmas Eve, only to frantically attempt to bring them back online two days later.

The situation in the UK should be instructive. Forty-year-old nuclear plants are to be shut down in the next decade, along with many less-efficient coal plants. Environmentalists demand that this loss of electrical generation capacity be made up by on-shore and off-shore wind power, even though there is strong resistance in the engineering and economics communities that such a plan is even possible, much less economically feasible, a fact that the British government is apparently not overlooking altogether. The UK Telegraph reports: “Meanwhile the [English] government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the ‘great wind fantasy’ will soon be over.”

Of course, if solar and wind power aren’t viable, neither is the claim by Obama that his administration will “help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.”

Again, we look to what’s happening in Europe — as Obama did, after a fashion, in a speech in March given at the Southern California Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center. “Around the world nations are racing to lead these industries of the future” he said. “Spain,” the president reported, “generates almost 30 percent of its power by harnessing the wind, while we manage less than one percent.”

A recent study by researchers at Spain’s King Juan Carlos University looked closely at the idea that new green energy jobs will stimulate hiring across the economy:

We find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for each 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created....

The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent 571,138 Euros to create each “green job,” including subsidies of more than one million Euros per wind industry job. Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy; 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro. These costs do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources.

Why is the Obama administration overlooking the real European example? Because in the administration’s worldview, the only important factor is controlling how much “greenhouse gas” is produced. This makes sense when you put the administration’s energy puzzle together and look at the biggest the piece — cap and trade."

www.thenewamerican.com/index....45/1221