While it is correct that wind, wave and other renewable energy can save on CO2 emissions synchronizing demand and output to protect the grid comes at a heavy price. In a report by David White, Reduction in Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Estimating the Potential Contribution from Wind-Power, commissioned by the Renewable Energy Foundation, December 2004, White found that, "Fossil-fuelled capacity operating as reserve and backup is required to accompany wind generation and stabilize supplies to the consumer. That capacity is placed under particular strains when working in this supporting role because it is being used to balance a reasonably predictable but fluctuating demand with a variable and largely unpredictable output from wind turbines. "Consequently, operating fossil capacity in this mode generates more CO2 per kWh generated than if operating normally."

Any approach to determining economic policy for climate change should take into account the possibility that the current understanding of the atmosphere may not be translatable into reliable forecasts with a precision that allows the design of an economic response. Further, any economic forecasts that are used to construct models of future carbon use and carbon dioxide emissions will be unable to deal with technical innovations. Their success cannot be predicted. This impacts on policy in two ways, first the obvious uncertainty in estimating economic development but more immediately the desire of governments to stimulate technical solutions. The need to be seen to be taking action frequently descends to picking winners and creating classes of rent seekers. ...As an example the present subsidies for wind farms are a response to demands for action from Green groups and green politicians. The result is a new rent seeking group. There is little cost benefit analysis to guide policy development. Rather policy is set to subsidise non-competitive technologies that may produce unquantified benefits. A simple comparison with the more conventional alternative of natural gas shows the use of gas to be more cost effective and useful as gas turbine generators produce electricity on demand. General encouragement of innovation should be the limit of government policy. It is hard enough in business to develop innovations and well beyond the reach of general government.

Green is the new black--from Washington, D.C., to Silicon Valley. But the lovefest with clean technology still has plenty of detractors who say that it's all just posturing, wishful thinking, or, worse, misguided. Let's pull together a few threads from Friday morning's river of green tech news and see whether it adds up to anything. For those of you in a hurry, here's my bottom line: No, America will not "get off oil" anytime soon as President Bush urged us this week, but yes, green tech matters a lot for the economy and the environment.

A 1 GW coal or nuclear base load plant needs less than 500 acres. An equivalent 1 GW base load wind power at U.S. average capacity of about 22 percent would require 45,000 acres, plus another 5,000 acres for transmission corridors. Wind turbines the size of the LDS Church Office Building would be required every 240 feet along I-15 and I-80, spanning the entire state. Unfortunately at this spacing, the 250-foot-diameter blades of each turbine would intersect each other.

[P]urchasers of green energy will find that wind energy produced in Pennsylvania is much more expensive than wind produced in, say, Montana. This mainly has to do with the location of wind resources. Montana has more areas with a higher sustained four wind than Pennsylvania. Also, since Montana is less densely populated, there are fewer troubles in siting the windfarms. The drawback, obviously, is that Montana is very far away, and electricity grids lose power over long distances. However, some researchers in Europe claim to have found a solution: DC current.

More than half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36 percent of our electricity. Barely 1 percent comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt-hour than alternatives - leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and health care. By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity according to forecasts from the Energy Information Administration, and industry and utility company analysts. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these demands. ...We cannot afford to trash the energy we have, and substitute energy that exists only in campaign speeches and legislative decrees. Doing so would leave a huge Energy Gap between what we need and what we have. Poor and minority families can least afford such "energy policies."

The utilities of the US, if not those in many other parts of the world, have pressing needs not just to supply power to energy-hungry consumers. But more than that they must meet both public and political pressures for using renewable energy sources. Apparently heedless of the impact to the environment of the Middle Kingdom and abroad, China commissions a new coal-fired plant every 5 days. Yet in the US there has not been a new coal-fired power plant permitted in about a year. So over time in North America, the older systems are passing away. The question is, what will take their place? To the extent that the public envisions renewable energy systems, the image it holds is of tall poles with windmill systems on top with blades turning. Or there is an expectation of solar systems mounted on rooftops, facing the sun. But these are intermittent sources of energy production. Some of the time - most of the time, really - the wind does not blow. And at least in the nighttime, the sun does not shine. So for each Megawatt of power that moves through the grid, down to meet the load, the requirement is for three megawatts of installed capacity of wind and solar. Build three, get one. In the big picture, this is not a good use of resources.

Wind power is not the answer to global warming. Do we have alternatives? We certainly do have alternatives to windmills but they would disrupt the lifestyle of electors and consumers. In Paris, an article in the September 2007 issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, shows with supporting calculations that it would be better to minimize human consumption of meat, for 80% of agriculturally produced methane comes from farm animals. Wind turbines won't even alter the greenhouse gas equation but by a mere .03%, as mentioned above. The way to reduce CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases is to use less energy. Governments must massively invest in energy conservation measures rather than in these wind machines. According to another research, if every English household switched for one single low energy light bulb, a fossil fuel-burning electrical plant could be shut down! Wind power would only be interesting if energy produced can be stored. It has been proposed to fill reservoirs of large hydroelectric dams, for example. An Australian method has just offered in September 2007 to store electricity in liquid accumulators. Quebec would thus be able to utilize wind energy because the major part of our electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, which is not the case for Ontario or New York where, as almost everywhere else in the world, wind power must be backed up by carbon-based generating stations.

The latest example of innumeracy comes from Shawn Frayne, an independent inventor here in Silicon Valley. Frayne's Windbelt is a low-cost wind-power generator that uses a fluttering membrane instead of rotating blades to convert wind power into mechanical motion; a simple linear generator turns the motion into electricity. The Windbelt idea won a "Breakthrough Award" in the November issue of Popular Mechanics, but not because Windbelt is actually useful or innovative. It looks like the magazine was a little too eager to jump on the alternative-energy bandwagon, so nobody bothered to run through the numbers.

Sunday is National Children's Day - and what better gift to our local heirs than to assure they have plenty of clean power, undiminished shorelines and fresh air 35 years from now. ...Speaking of clean power, this column recently favored stalling the proposed wind farm on Horseshoe Shoals and sliding it to the back burner to await signs of new interest on the nuclear side of the wind/nuclear power equation. Wind turbines and nuclear reactors produce clean power, but there is a wide disparity in the amount each can produce, nuclear reactors achieving the significantly higher and consistent output.

"Sustainable" refers to energy sources that create no pollution in the conventional sense but may have other undesirable environmental consequences and hence are not green. Wind power is one example, given environmentalists' concerns about migrating birds being struck and killed by rotating turbine blades. Hydroelectric energy is another example. Damning rivers provides a continuous flow of energy but destroys natural habitats and dramatically upsets the surrounding environment.

... the primary reason that wind and solar energies have not made inroads in the past, and will never supply more than a few percentage points of the world's electrical energy, is their unpredictable variations in time and their constant need for back-ups. They only generate energy when the wind blows and the sun shines. We are so dependent on electricity for work and recreation that we don't permit even occasional outages of a few minutes. Perfect weather predictions are impossible, and no successful method has been discovered to store the electrical energy for the hours, days or weeks required. At the best sites, the wind blows only about 40% of the time. Because the wind times are not predictable, the wind turbines must be backed up 60% of the time, with dependable generators available 100% of the time. Because of the Earth's rotation and latitude effects, the solar back-up energy must be constantly changed. The only non-carbon-dioxide-emitting generator capable of backing up wind and solar energy and replacing coal and gas generators is nuclear fission.

In imagining the behavior of electricity, I like to use water as an analogy: Voltage is like the pressure in your pipes, in psi or Pascals or however you choose to measure it. Current is like the flow rate, in gallons or liters per minute, of water physically flowing through the pipe, and resistance is like friction, which slows the water down, so you have to work harder to push it through. A pipe can take only so much pressure or flow rate before it bursts, and a stream of water can take only so much friction before it stops flowing. So, to avoid the widespread chaos that a brownout would cause, our grid is designed the same way as the wiring in your house: with large numbers of fuses and circuit breakers, which cut off the flow of power when the current increases beyond a certain threshold.

Today, the United States imports oil at a rate of $400,000 a minute. It is estimated that by 2030, U.S. energy demands will increase by nearly two-thirds, and that by 2050, global energy demand will more than double. Americans must realize the necessity of finding a reliable energy supply in order to sustain economic growth and prosperity in the 21st century and to reduce the security, economic and political risks of our dependence on foreign oil...... Nuclear energy is the most promising source of power, and it is making a comeback. In recent months, Washington has been buzzing with talk about this subject.

Just about everyone in the Northwest should be concerned about the potentially devastating effects of climate change. And just about everyone should realize that there is only one way to head off the environmental disaster looming ahead -- an aggressive combination of improvements in energy efficiency and a major increase in the use of energy sources that do not release global-warming gases. With no possibility of increases in our large-scale hydropower projects and now talk of removing some existing dams, that means an increasing use of the only other large-scale, emissions-free source: Nuclear power.

California's power shortage confirms that all of the hoopla over wind energy's credentials as a clean and renewable source of electricity is undercut by the reality of its unreliability. During an extremely hot week in August, when air conditioners were cranked up and the state was on the brink of rolling blackouts, how much help did the state get from its beloved 2,500 megawatts of wind power? Only 4 percent of its capacity, according to the California Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the state's electricity grid. Southern California Edison's 2,200 megawatts of wind capacity generated only 45 megawatts. In other words, wind energy works great — except when you need air conditioning.

...coal power plants provide over a quarter of our energy in Massachusetts (and over half of our energy nationwide). So while researching alternative energy sources is important, cleaning up our existing plants will have a much bigger and more immediate effect on the environment.

...nuclear power emits no carbon dioxide and causes no air pollution. It can be argued that because of the large amount of base-load electricity it produces from a small amount of fuel, nuclear power is the only energy source that can make a real difference in the battle against global warming.

The debate was put into a proper perspective by the Times-Tribune newspaper in Scranton., which wrote: “America’s future as a world power and leading economy will be determined largely by its ability to meet the increasing demand for energy, while weaning itself from foreign oil and protecting the environment.

Recycling waste energy is cleaner than nuclear or clean coal, and more cost-effective than wind or solar.