How Efficient is "Green" Energy? 
By Robert Maynard

The August 26^th edition of the Caledonia Record contained an article entitled: Green Energy Depends On Subsidies For Fuel. The article detailed how:

"Vermont's Clean Energy Development Fund Board recently considered how to hand out $7.5 million worth of solar tax credits to developers proposing solar energy projects." Apparently, that did not satisfy on such developer: "Chief among the unhappy participants was David Blittersdorf, founder of NRG Systems and the owner of All Earth Renewables. Blittersdorf previously served as a board member of the Clean Energy Development Fund. He resigned in July after sponsoring more than half of all the tax credit requests submitted to the board. As soon as Blittersdorf realized his ship might not come in, he promptly announced he would be thinking hard about taking all his business out of state." …

"Blittersdorf submitted 130 out of the 208 proposals presented to the board. He'd receive $8.6 million in tax credits if all his requests were approved. Because the total awarded was only $7.5 million for all project submissions, Blittersdorf must have been sad indeed."

The quest for government subsidized "green" energy is not new, nor is the fact that such energy sources can not get by without such subsidies. A similar story can be found in"The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy" by Peter W. Huber, a former mechanical engineering instructor at MIT and a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and Mark P. Mills, a physicist, and founding partner of a venture fund, Digital Power Capital. In the beginning of their book, Huber and Mills tell about the nation’s attempt to find alternative energy and power sources after the 1970’s oil crisis and the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. As they pointed out; "There were subsidies, tax breaks, and government funded research, but most of the private capital supported conventional fuel." 

In the next couple of decades from 1979 to about 2002, our reliance on oil dropped, while our reliance on coal, nuclear and natural gas increased. What was the result of the government push for renewables? According to Mills and Huber:

"Renewable fuels, by contrast made not visible dent energy supplies during this period. About half a billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity were produced by solar power in 2002, or about 0.013 percent on the U.S. total. Wind Power contributed another 0.27 percent."

I have heard people attribute the failure of such "green" energy sources to gain any traction in the market without government support as the result of some conspiracy on the part of big oil. The truth of the matter is more a matter of basic science.

In order for energy and power to be used, it must be converted from potential energy stored in the fuel of choice into usable energy. Much of the cost and impact on the environment associated with energy production is associated more with the energy conversion process than the choice of the fuel used. The higher the energy density of the fuel used, the cheaper it is to extract usable energy out of it. Oil, uranium and coal have high energy density, while many renewable sources have low energy density. The lower energy density not only makes it more expensive to extract usable energy out of such sources, but it can also mean that the use of such sources actually have a bigger impact on the environment than their less "green" alternatives.

Perhaps it is time that we left the choice of which energy source to use up to engineers and the market, rather than politicians and political activists.
 

Robert Maynard is the Editor of the True North website