mtpolitics.net

The Left on Energy? Clueless.

There’s an old saw about American politics: Keep Democrats out of the boardroom and Republicans out of the bedroom.

I’d like to add a third option to that one. “Keep Liberal Arts majors out of energy policy.”

No, really. Leave it to people who actually understand it, can do the math, and understand what’s involved.

The left seems to believe in some sort of fantasy that an artificial shortage of petroleum will drive us to use alternatives. They love, love, love the high gas prices, though you’d never hear them admit it. (Except for the Sierra Club. Kudos to them for admitting it. Would that their fellow travelers be as honest.)

They look at some guy who builds an off-grid house and say, “See. It can be done,” but they never seem to think about the problem of scale. Our nation uses a lot of energy. A lot.

Some of you may remember Steven Den Beste from his old blog, USS Clueless. He recently made a brief return to his engineering-oriented writing, and talked a little bit about some of the alternatives, and where they stand today.

He writes:

I don’t blog about that kind of thing anymore. I never enjoyed blogging about energy, anyway, because for too many people “alternate energy” is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations — and it’s not that easy.

In order for “alternate energy” to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can’t scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

That post is worth a read, as are two of his earlier pieces on alternative energy.

• More Practical Problems
• Obscure Energy Sources

For the record, and for what it’s worth, I think we do need to develop alternatives, but until we find something that can actually scale enough to make a difference, we need to use what’s available. Doing otherwise is cutting off our nose to spite our face.

[UPDATE]: I guess liberal arts majors fail at reading comprehension, too. Either that, or he’s deliberately misrepresenting my position. How can someone read this as a “silver bullet against alternative energy,” when you need only read the paragraph above to see the words, “I think we do need to develop alternatives?” And further, how does a degree in engineering followed long career in engineering make someone a “self-proclaimed” engineer?

Oh, and a note for the president of the Craig Sprout Fan Club (really, this man crush you have on me is kind of embarrassing), if there were only some way to respond to a post, other than in the comments, that would show up underneath the main post, then people could see that link and click on it and read a response at another site. Maybe someone should get to work on that, huh? They could call it . . . trackback . . . or maybe pingback . . .

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Someone should do that.