Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

I’m just finishing a physics masters in CdTe solar cells. If I wanted to I could go into solar research from here, or get a job with a renewable energy company. A first class (or in some cases upper second) physics degree is sufficient in the UK.

Particularly well paid jobs will generally require a degree. Physics for research and possibly for planning, engineering for designing installations and possibly planning. Mathematicians or other physical scientists may be able to get involved in the actual planning. Non-scientists may be able to get jobs in solar companies in marketing, human resources etc. Physics or electrical engineering would be my recommendation.

If you don’t particularly want to go to university and/or you don’t particularly like maths, then many countries now run practical courses which teach you how to install solar systems in houses and you can get on one of those and be fully qualified to work in installing solar panels.

The Expert answers:

Several jobs are created from the use of geothermal energy. Among them include: geologists, geographers, engineers, electricians, land surveyors, GIS specialists, lawyers, and even several commercial jobs as there will be lots of small retail businesses along the way. There will be no jobs lost when geothermal energy comes to fruition.

The Expert answers:

The best major would be Environmental Engineering, which deals with the environment, natural resources, consumerism, etc. Your second bet is Chemical Engineering, which has to do with detailed analysis of harmful chemicals, how to get rid of them, etc.

The Expert answers:

Chemical Engineering or Environmental Science

The Expert answers:

Alternative energy is much like alternative medicine in that it isn’t really any good (you’re assuming it has a lot of benefits when it turns out that it doesn’t (unless you’re a coal miner whose job would go were a switch to nuclear power to occur)).

Hydro and geothermal work OK but only for limited areas (and high levels of hydro are one of the things that countries with low CO2 emissions tend to have along with high levels of nuclear) and we’re probably not going to be able to build much new hydro in the developed world due to environmental reasons.

Wind turns out to be almost useless due to the low reliability (and people are starting to realise that it is useless) since it requires either energy storage technology (pumped hydro which is all we have isn’t really good enough) or fossil fuel backup (which means you still have to emit CO2 when the wind isn’t blowing) and that fossil fuel backup is usually simple cycle gas turbines (converting them to combined cycle and removing the wind turbines would probably reduce CO2 emissions).

Of course there are times when wind power is built without sufficient spinning reserve, such as in Texas which has been having to do load shedding of big industrial customers when the wind stops (that’s a pretty big deal) due to their 3% wind power suddenly going off-line. Wind doesn’t look like it’s capable of even 5% of a grid without energy storage technology.

Solar is less unreliable than wind but if your solar panels are on Earth they only work less than half the time (though there is a bit more predictability in terms of when the clouds are going to role in and when it’ll be night than there is with wind), of course PV happens to be about the most expensive way to generate electricity on Earth (only Pu238 RTGs cost more and those things are pretty much restricted to the space program (and used where solar can’t work)).

Biofuels really screw up food prices and when deforestation is taken into account turn out to emit more CO2 than oil. A lot of them (e.g. Wood) are very polluting (enough to justify a ban on wood fired heaters).

Other reasons to be against alternative energy are NIMBY issues like hydroelectric dams requires flooding people’s homes (and risk to those who live downstream), wind turbines producing a lot of noise (and possible negative health effects from infrasonics (more study is needed though)) along with a strobe light effect to those who live near them (an exclusion zone would probably work though) as well as opposition to the transmission lines used to get the power from the remote environmental sources of energy to the grid (the health effects from power lines have been investigated and found to not exist but that doesn’t stop people from fearing them). Those issues would be minor issues if the alternative energy sources actually were useful (i.e. We could deal with them) but with useless energy sources that’s too big a price to pay.

The large scale of most alternative energy projects also causes significant environmental problems, wind turbines are stealing energy from the wind and solar power plants often require trees to be cut down (then there are the bird and bat death issues with wind power and the waste issues of solar panel production (a solar panel is a big silicon chip)) whereas we should be using an energy source that is concentrated enough for mining and waste disposal to be of minimal impact.

“Wouldn’t it create more jobs”
So what? Doing pretty much anything can create jobs.

Personally I’d rather have as few people as possible work in the energy industry, that way we could have more people doing other jobs. You basically just want to waste human resources.

Besides, wind turbines are actually a lot more dangerous than most people realise, quite a few people have died installing and maintaining them.

“and be better for the environment,”
All that alternative energy does is distract people from nuclear fission which is a proven technology that actually can provide the energy we need, where we need it, when we need it. If not for the belief that wind and solar were viable we’d have probably replaced most of the fossil fuel burning power plants on the planet with nuclear by now (and therefore have already largely solved the global warming problem).

“and also reduce dependency on foreign oil?”
Pretty much no electricity is actually generated from oil (which is primarily a transportation fuel) so that leaves biofuels which create new problems with the food supply, dependence on foreign oil is quite a bit better than causing famines in the third world.