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homestead - Re: [Homestead] The answer, my friend, may not be blowing in the wind.

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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The answer, my friend, may not be blowing in the wind.
  • Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:46:07 EDT

> In my part of the country many of these proposed industrial-scale
developments are a scam to grab generous subsidy money

Tom, it appears to me that you have the straight of it.

It is not a matter of there being viable alternate energies an the oil
companies are spreading disinformation to keep the competition at bay, but
rather
there are no vialbe alternate energies and disinformation about their
viability
is spread by the grant-mongers and subsidy-mongers who want to cash in on it.

Ethanol is a good case in point. A few years ago corn ethanol was the
panacea and inexhaustable wellspring of our energy needs. It would be a boon
to the
farmers and drive the price of oil to five dollars a barrel. Those who did
the math pointed out then, to the jeers that they were propogating
misinformation from the frightened oil companies, that corn ethanol has a
"negative" EROEI
and could cause a serious food shortages.

They were right and are generally accepted as right.

The same is true for switch grass ethanol, stover ethanol, biodiesel, wind,
solar, hydrogen etc. All have serious and fundamental drawbacks when applied
to any scale that would significantly reduce oil consumption.

For example, the idea that we could use wind energy to generate hydrogen gas
(by generating electricity and hydrolyzing water in situ) then use the
hydrogen to run our cars .... crunching the numbers shows that the number of
miles
that could be driven is so low .... so very low ...that if we only limited
ourselves to driving that much now, we have enough demestic oil to last for
hundreds of years and be an net oil exporter.

So the real key here is not replacing oil with wind generated hydrogen gas,
but rather driving so little that said gas would meet our transportation
needs.
If we did that, limited ourselves to that little driving, we woudln't need
the wind generators in the first place.

Each of the proffered alternate energies falls short just like that, so short
that even combining them all does not make a significant difference. </HTML>




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