Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

Energy is simply energy – it is no colour. The green and alternative relate to how they are produced. So usually they will end up either as motive power for a vehicle or in the national grid along with all the non-green electricity made from coal. So what is it used for? The same as any other energy is used for.

The Expert answers:

It is a political term to describe power sources that don’t emit much CO2 but which can’t actually provide the power our civilisation needs (so far no country has managed to get much more than 20% of their power from wind or solar and even then they had to rely on their neighbours’ hydro and nuclear as well as their own coal to prevent the grid from collapsing). Hydro is the main renewable energy source for electricity production right now but is opposed by most of the people who claim we need renewable energy (and unlike their opposition to nuclear power they actually have good reasons to oppose hydro).

They are used mainly to delay the switch to nuclear power (which despite being not renewable should be good for millions of years at higher than current energy use) that would allow us to actually solve the global warming problem and thus contribute to global warming by keeping the fossil fuel industry in business.

Basically the way it does that is that a bunch of windmills get built and start supplying power to the grid but because of natural variability in the wind they don’t provide that power all the time (20% of rated capacity is considered pretty good for wind) nor can we control when they provide their power so to use wind power you need a source of backup power that is reliable and usually that means fossil fuels (nuclear could be used but if you use nuclear for that then you may as well not bother with the windmills because the windmills would not reduce CO2 emissions or save money). Solar is less variable but PV cells cost a lot more and it still needs backup at night and partial backup on cloudy days. The need for backup means that the fossil fuel industry still gets to exist (and continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere) if the way to address (if very badly) climate change is to use wind and solar.

Hydro and geothermal have the reliability to be used for baseload although they only work in some locations and hydro power probably won’t be used where it can be because of the massive environmental damage building a dam causes.

Wave and Tidal power when you calculate how much energy there is turn out to be way too diffuse to be useful. Biofuels show promise but not much because you need land to grow them on and that land could be better used growing food or even being turned back into forest.

The Expert answers:

Wow – i’ve already done my college work… Sorry – i don’t feel like doing yours.

The Expert answers:

We are getting closer to such equipment but you will have to go to Europe for the technology. The States are 5 years behind when it comes to anaerobic digesters and fermenters.

Small farms are using them now but they haven’t worked all the bugs out yet to make it really efficient. Still you can only create so much energy from such little waste.

The Expert answers:

We do support renewable energy. The sources of renewable energy are just not reliable and we do not have enough of any of them right now. What most republicans want is for there to be a comprehensive energy package with nothing off the table. That means drilling, solar, nuclear, wind and whatever other sources can be invented or created. We are not slaves to the environmentalists who want only so-called clean energy. Democrats seem to be in the environmentalists pockets and are not willing to discuss anything except what the environmentalists will accept.