Your Questions About Green Living

The Expert answers:

Vanguard sells only one alternative energy mutual fund. It is Guiness Atkinson Alternative Energy Fund (GAAEX).

They have a high expense ratio of 1.98%.

While I respect your desire to invest in alternative energy, I don’t think it will be a big money maker for you. The analogy is bowling alley stocks in the 1950s and dot-coms in the 1990s. Back then, everone loved bowling and things that were online. The problem was that the fundamentals underlying both industries was all wrong and both sectors did not live up to the hype. Such is the same with alternative energy. The issue is that coal is by far the cheapest form of energy out there, followed by nuclear, then natural gas and crude oil. Meanwhile, most green fuels are double and triple the cost of traditional fuels.

Hooray for ethanol, but it’s pretty screwed. First, it takes almost as much hydrocarbons to fertilize, sow, maintain and then harvest corn (the main feedstock for US-based ethanol). Now gasoline made from crude oil costs about $1.70/gallon wholesale. It costs about $1.50 to refine corn into ethanol. There is about $0.51/gallon is corn subsidies per gallon of ethanol. And ethanol has only 67% of the energy capacity as gasoline. So ethanol costs about double the price of gasoline before you’ve even bought the corn. In theory, we can create ethanol from cellulosic sources (i.e. Think grasses and trees), but we haven’t come up with the right enzymes to break down the cellulose into alcohol. Fuel cells? Billions upon billions upon billions went into VC funds to fund hydrogen fuel cells. Bottom line… Still more far, far more expensive than gas. More nuclear power? More natural gas plants (with their highly explosive regassification plants). NIMBY is far too powerful in a democracy for people to vote to have a power plant near their home. They always want it near someone else’s home. Wind power has promises because it can compete against hydrocarbon based power on a price basis (after including long-term operation, fuel stock and capital expenditures). However, really windy place out in the middle of nowhere where people want them are in only a few places. Furthermore, we still haven’t invented a superconductor that works without having to freeze the thing. So we use copper and its highyl inefficient transmission methods as ohms suck away all the energy.

No, my friend, people will always choose powerplants to be built in someone else’s back yard, give lip service to green energy but won’t actually buy it when it costs triple what gasoline costs. The solution is taxing oil with a huge tax to fully cost in the crude (e.g. Polution), but no politician is going to touch that with a ten foot pole until it is too late.

The world is going to consume more oil like it has for the last century and an unstoppable 2% march, like’s its done for decades and decades. More wars will be fought. When oil reach really, really high prices – where alternative energy can compete on cost as opposed to just environmentalism at a massive cost to the consumer – will alternative energy thrive. That’s when we reach the tipping point.

The Expert answers:

Wikipedia could do this better than I can, but here’s a short list

nuclear
pro-clean, fairly abundant fuel(expensive but there is a large supply), efficient
con-what to do with the waste fuel (a problem mostly sovled with breeder reactors and such) they are a potential terrorist target, verly low possiblility of a meltdown
hydro
pro-clean, sustainable
con-building dams can damage the enviroment, difficult to expand projects as many rivers are already dammed
wind
pro-clean, sustaible
con-needs windy area, expensive, can damage wildlife/ruin the view
solar
-pro-clean, sustainible
-con- expensive, need a sunny area
coal
pros-cheap, supplies should last another 200 years or so
cons-very polluting, coal mining damages the environment

The Expert answers:

Alternative energy is a term that refers to methods of generating energy that are not the usual method (i.e. Fossil fuels). There are many forms of alternative energy, but, as energy is conserved, you have to ask yourself where the energy comes from (and the answer is always “the sun”). You should always be careful when you look at energy forms, because some of them just won’t work – like the idea of putting water in your gas tank that another user has suggested (thermodynamics shows that these ideas won’t work).

The sun undergoes nuclear reactions which result in the release of photons (beams of light that have energy associated with them). Alternative energy forms just capture the energy from the sun in different ways (actually, fossil fuels also got their energy from the sun a long time ago).

Here are a few alternative energy sources and how they relate to the sun:

Bio-fuels: We can grow plants (such as algae, corn, sugar cane) which collect the photons from the sun and use the energy in the photons to create sugars. We can harvest those sugars and and turn them into liquid fuels such as ethanol.

Solar Energy: This technology directly harnesses the energy of the sun by absorbing photons through photovoltaic solar cells and which create an electrical current when they absorb a photon. Additionally, you can use the energy of the sun to thermally heat an object, which is referred to as solar-thermal energy.

Wind Energy: When the photons from the sun hit the air in the atmosphere, that energy can cause the generation of wind. We can harvest the wind energy by using turbines which spin when the wind hits them. The spinning motion is used to turn a generator which produces electricity.

Hydro-electric: When the sun hits water, it can cause the water to turn into a gas and later that gas can result in rain. If the rain occurs at a high enough elevation and gets held behind a dam, the water now possesses a high potential energy due to the energy from the sun. That energy can be turned into electrical energy by converting the potential energy of the water into kinetic energy which is then used to turn a turbine in a hydroelectric dam.

I came accross a new, proven and tested home made wind power system and solar power system which eliminates our electricity bills. It was written by a Renewable energy enthusiasts Michael Harvey the diy called Earth4energy. You can get your copy to save energy and help environment while eliminating your power bills. Get it from here: http://homemadeenergyreviews.blogspot.com/

The Expert answers:

Solar(sun)
Windmill(wind)
Hydroelectric(water)
Biofuel(Growing plants and burining them for energy)
Geothermal
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Nuclear

They’re all alternative,but nuclear isn’t renewable.

The Expert answers:

Engineering and then there are several areas you can specialize in