Wind, Solar, & Algae Are Not The Answer

Thanks to Mother Nature, our coal, gas, and oil reserves are neatly packed away, underground. Not so when it comes to wind, solar, and, even, algae. These technologies require massive amounts of above-ground acreages to achieve -- comparatively speaking -- small amounts of energy.

Take, for example, algae biofuel production -- the President's latest anything-but-oil fuel. First off, you need a lot of land, water and sunlight to efficiently produce algae. A typical algae plant produces about 6,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year; and, that's only enough fuel to power 12 cars over a period of a year. To power our nation's fleet of 240 million automobiles, it would take the amount of land equivalent to the entire state of South Carolina. But, that land can't just be anywhere. Typically, you need a lot of consistent sunlight to make algae bio-fuel production reliable. For that reason, most of the algae start-up farms are being built in the deserts of Mexico and the U.S. But, then, that creates another problem: enough available water. And, our deserts aren't exactly bubbling over with good old H2O.

Then, there's wind. We all have seen pictures or driven by one of our country's wind farms. They have hundreds of turbines spread out over acres and acres of land. Usually, one acre of wind farm will produce about 13 kilowatts of power per hour at optimal wind speeds. By comparison, a typical coal-fired power plant produces about 500 megawatts of electricity per hour and does this with a relatively small footprint. To replace just one average coal plant, it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 38,000 acres of land. That's almost 60 square miles. But, the problem with wind doesn't just sit with the amount of land it uses up for the production of electricity. It's unreliable. Electricity is only produced when the wind blows. Light winds produce very little energy and conventional gas/coal power plants must be fired back up to pickup the slack. That's why we will never be able to really eliminate any of our existing fossil-fueled power plants. Its this redundancy that makes wind power so impractical and expensive.

For solar, the problems are even worse than with wind. Solar is only effective during the day and when "our skies are not cloudy all day". At least, wind turbines are able to produce some energy during the night. Like wind, concentrating solar power systems require massive amounts of space to produce a limited amount of power. At night, and at times with limited sun, solar, like wind, must be supported by fossil-fuel power plants. Like algae, solar plants are best suited in desert locations to achieve consistent power output. Again, don't expect solar to replace conventional power plants.

What our environmentalist friends don't seem to understand is that fossil-fueled power plants are extremely reliable in comparison to wind and solar. They produce consistent electricity; with or without wind and with or without sunshine. And fossil fuels don't need acres of above ground defacement. Increasing our dependence on wind and solar while, at the same time, we try to eliminate coal/gas power plants will only result in rolling blackouts. To me, our use of wind and solar to directly produce electricity is all wrong. We need to be able to store wind/solar energy and call it into use as needed and without any dependence on the wind blowing or the sun shining. That's why I think we should be using wind/solar electricity to produce a store-able, reliable, and "green" fuel like hydrogen. Hydrogen that can then be used as fuel for our fleet of cars and trucks or in the secondary production of electricity. Hydrogen is renewable and, when consumed as energy, it simply produces water as its single byproduct. What could be more environmentally friendly!