What do all of these have in common? Didn't get it? Few voters understand the "true cost" of the first three. I have been researching on the Internet what the "true cost" is of solar power, wind power and electric cars and have found it very difficult. There is so much Green bull shit out there that you have to dig thru that you end up with very dirty hands when you are all done. I was thinking today about a different way to analyse the cost and here it is.
For the 90% of our population who very little about technology, every time they hear about a technology that "can do" something, they respond with, "Well let's do it". They have zero idea about if the idea is going to be worth it or not. Most of this 90% know just enough about efficiency to think that by improving the efficiency of some idea that it will be worth while. They have no idea how easy or difficult that improvement will be or how much it will cost. For that reason, Obama and the people who voted for him barge off spending other peoples money on ideas that have zero chance of every paying back. These are "not" investments, they are just blatant wastes of our counties wealth. If this keeps up we will go broke, pure and simple.
What I propose for the 10% who can understand technology is that we first figure out how much we will have to improve efficiency or reduce cost for an idea to be competitive or worth doing. Easy concept, but so far this idea has fallen on deaf ears. Take the wind mill. This is a simple device that was invented about 1,000 years ago. The technology associated with it is very mature, which means that there is not much "fat" left in the concept. It is a structural tower with a simple fan on top turning and electric generator. The chances of improving the efficiency of any of these more than about 5% or 10% is almost zero. The question is how much improvement do we need in these three areas to make power from a wind mill competitive with other alternatives? Right now the fan collects about 45% of the wind power that passes thru the fan. It is impossible to collect more than about 60% or you slow the wind down too much thru the fan and thus start losing power. If the cost of power from the wind mill is now 10 times that from coal, there is "no" way that wind power will ever be competitive. This point alone should be enough to cause Obama and his green friends to cancel all government wind power programs. The only reason that wind mill continue to be built is that it is now against the law "not" to build them, There is a government mandate that a certain % of our power much come from wind and that electric power companies have to pay the wind mill builders the "retail" price for that power. The power companies could buy that same power on the open market for as little as 10% of what the law says they have to pay the wind mill owners. is this sick or what?
Electric cars are exactly the same. Auto makers are subject to mandate laws too that require them to build a certain minimum percent of their cars as electric or hybrid. They would not do it if it were not for the law. The government even went so far as to provide a $7,500 tax rebate to the buyer of the car. I have no problem with a few very rich Green nuts buying electric cars with their own money, but not with my tax money. Just take the battery as one component. After working on the improvement of batteries for over 100 years, we now have a battery that can store 1kwh for a sale price of about $750 and can be charged and discharge "up to" 1,000 times. The battery starts to do down hill right from the start and by the time it has been charged and recharge 1,000 times, it will take less than 33% of its original charge. This is left out of the numbers published in most news papers. Now the question is, "How cheap does the battery have to get to be competitive?" A rough estimate is that we have to get the cost of the battery down to about $150 to store 1kwh or electricity and be able to hold that charge for at least 1,000 charges and recharges. The chances of that happening in the next 500 years is "zero". It is not possible, so why do we keep trying? That is because 90% of our population have almost zero knowledge about technology or the history of technology.
You could heat your home by just rubbing your hands together if you had enough people doing it. If that is the case, "Should we do it?" I don't think so. Just because some thing is possible does not mean that we should spend other people's tax money to try to do it. You can spend you own money any way that you want, but public tax money need to be controlled to a higher standard and that is, "Is it worth it."
