Monday, April 20, 2015

Gone With The Wind

It's like a BP oil spill every year.

A 2013 study found that 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed every year by wind turbines — a figure 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009. These deaths have likely increased as wind power capacity increases across the country.

What I want to know is, where PETA is on this?  They are worried about people wearing fur coats and about polar bears, but I haven't heard anything about the bald eagles killed by windmills.


That's not even counting the ones that get fried.


There's actually not much to like about green energy.  For one thing, there is nothing green about it except the vast number of tax-payer dollars that get poured into the crony, phony capitalism schemes -- e.g.:

Since then, U.S. companies have only installed more wind power thanks to a now-expired tax credit for wind energy. The American Wind Energy Association said there was nearly 66 gigawatts of installed wind capacity in the U.S. as of 2014 — 17 times higher than wind capacity in 2001.

Solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce enough energy to build solar panels and wind turbines.  It's like people who buy plug-in electric vehicles to save "gas" only to use electricity produced by coal-fired power plants, or the fact that battery production is likely a net loss in the long-run, not to mention the toxic chemical by-products and (tax-payer funded) subsidies.   

Wind and solar are good at charging battery banks for conversion of DC to AC for individual homes and business.  They are not good at feeding into the grid for distributed systems.  The only reason utilities have built these white elephants is that they got tax credits and subsidies, thereby increasing the federal deficit and costing me more in terms of taxes, loss of purchasing power, and higher prices for electricity. 

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mush, yeah, the bird kill is horrible and yet, little, heck, nothing will be done to stop it. Just sickening.

    I like to think about energy balance equations so I did a little searching and found a Popular Science article that says that all the solar panels produced so far will break even on power production in 2020. I'm too tired to embed the link.

    http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/solar-panels-now-make-more-electricity-they-use

    So, that was interesting. Not as bad as I had originally thought. I too was wondering if they ever produced more energy than they took to make.

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  2. That is good. I don't know. I think solar panels on homes are an excellent idea and as their efficiency improves that only makes them a better idea.

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