Power and fundamentalists

Steve #30 and later posters, (Comments, HERE)

Debating with alternative energy devotees is a lot like debating fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, so much of the arguments are ‘faith’ based.

Not wishing to offend anybody, I realize much of this drive comes from an earnest wish to ‘believe’ in something and this belief is often coupled with lack of technical education in many others.

In accord with Steve, I have solar pv as well as solar hot water installed and this has reduced my household electricity imports from the grid to about one third of what it was. If our society’s energy dilemma was just about providing households with their basic needs then the problem would be quite manageable.

Electricity is the easier bit and households are the easiest sector to provide for. The vast bulk of society’s energy is not generated for those purposes. We share an energy-intensive society that is built around a huge industrial infrastructure. Because each one of us shares that infrastructure each one of us has an energy imprint that is vastly bigger than our individual household footprints. Motive and industrial energy are the hard nuts to crack, and those nuts can’t be cracked with soft options like roof top windmills.

Hover over Sydney for a while (in your solar powered helicopter!) and imagine driving that complex of highways and freight hubs and fast food outlets and whatnot with wind turbines and solar panels.

Okay, some of you may think it is possible, good luck to you.

Getting back to basics, even my domestic solar system is not as clean as you would like to believe. What will happen to it in 40 years time? See here: HERE: Solar’s dirty little secret

Now this is not to decry alternative energy, it’s got its place for sure, but we should stop bowing down to it as if it were the embodiment of divine revelation or a magic cure-all.

Again…. talking energy supply in a vacuous context is nonsense. If such policy discussions are not explicitly pivoted around what we use energy for and what we need it for, then the product of all our efforts with be rather like those of the alchemists who lived in their dreamworld.

The problem as I see it is the relentless drive to feed industrial society with soft energy sources. As much as it may make us feel good, this notion perversely feeds the very momentum that accelerates energy demand. In the long run, solar and wind devotees (though they don’t know it) are championing the cause of nuclear energy. The world is on the brink of going nuclear in a big way. See: HERE

Whether we like nuclear power or not is immaterial. This outcome stems from a universally shared belief that life can go on more or less as it is if we just switch energy sources from coal & oil to ‘something else’. The cold hard physics behind this is that there is only one ‘something else’ that can deliver energy in such immense concentration – nuclear energy. Like it or not, that is the end product of our dreaming.

In the meantime, in a futile attempt to get dilute energy sources to deliver what they simply can’t do we will line all of our coastlines with wind machines, set up woodchip-burning power generators and starve the rest of the world as we convert productive foodlands to supply liquid fuel demand – so that we can keep freighting huge semi-trailers of coca cola around the country (by way of example).

Look to the tail end of the energy equation first. Then and only then can we possibly deliver anything like a sustainable society for our grandchildren to enjoy.