Jeff Id at The Air Vent posted this excellent summary about energy sources and why the fossil and nuclear fuels work and the so-called renewables are too limited to support our modern society. Jeff brings to the debate an understanding of the general physics behind energy use, that is important in understanding why liberal fantasies about energy are based mostly in ignorance (if not, misinformation). Let me just touch on some of the high points and emphasize why they are critical to discerning a good idea from naive wishful thinking.

First, energy is either being emitted/transferred (e.g., wind turbine, solar cells, hydraulic) or it has been captured and stored (e.g., fossil, nuclear sources):

First there is no such thing as renewable energy, it’s kind of fitting that the very word greenies have coined is itself a lie. I say that because there are so many lies and exaggerations in the world of green energy that it makes ‘renewable’ a perfectly fitting term.  The second law of thermodynamics makes sure that the energy we convert is extremely difficult to recover, in a perfectly efficient system you could convert your CO2 back into gasoline but of course it would take as much ‘work’ as you just got out of it.

Physics talks of ‘work’ & ‘energy’ and that can be a real eye glazer. The concept of work is best known to bicyclists, who coast down a hill only to have to work to get back up the next hill.

Another important distinction is the concept of storing energy and tapping it. We all know you cannot store the energy in a sail to use later, so even if you are not familiar with ‘storing’ verses ‘transfer’ details you understand holding energy to use later is not easy, cheap or safe.  Jeff also notes this key distinction:

Green energies such as wind, wave, solar electric, hydroelectric, and solar thermal, biofuel, etc. all have one thing in common.  They are all forms of solar power.  It takes energy from the sun to drive wind, wave and create plant fuels.

Interestingly all but one of these green energies is like the sail in a wind. Solar electric and hydroelectric trap the energy and turn it immediately into electricity. Stop the wind and your boat stops moving. Lose the sun and the solar cells stop producing. All these are transient sources without storage for later use. The one exception is biofuels, which are a low grade version of fossil fuels. Jeff notes how these transient sources actually do not have a lot of energy output when averaged over the day, week or year.

The reason is that if we were to use ‘corn’ to power our cars in the US, even basic calculations show that we would need more than all the land mass of the North American continent to be a producing viable corn field, and more sophisticated calculations show that we may be net loosing energy by corn ethanol. Basic calculations on algae biofuel produce equally ridiculous results like two land masses the size of Texas to drive all the US cars — only.  Again more sophisticated calculations will produce even worse results.

The fact is biofuels are a very low energy source when you compare pound of biological source required to generate a unit of power. Pathetic really. Not much better is solar electric and wind, as Jeff notes. So how do these wimpy green energy sources differ from fossil fuels and nuclear? Jeff is spot on with his observations:

Another form of solar power is oil and coal, they are a form of very inefficiently stored solar energy from millions of years ago. Nuclear fission is also a form of solar if you take it back to the stars believed to have created the heavy elements used in the fission process.  However, both fossil fuels and Nuclear used energy from stars which has been stored in relatively convenient packages for release by the right equipment at a moments notice.

Biofuels are a poor-man’s fossil fuel.  While the energy is inefficiently stored in minute quantities in both cases, the packaging of the energy is very different. Fossil fuels are natural. They are the byproduct of life that existed for 100’s millions of years before us. It is nature’s version of biofuels. It is why most of us with science backgrounds sort of snicker at the idea oil from corn fields today is somehow better than oil from algae that covered an inland ocean millions ago. Green does sometimes also mean naive.

Fossil fuels are biofuel sources that have been packed the energy into a dense and mobile package. Crude oil can be pulled from the Earth and then shipped to refineries where different forms of energy can be produced (gas, diesel, etc) and other important chemical resources can be derived. We recycle just about everything from these ancient biofuel sources in the refining process (remember, we call them ‘fossil’ fuels for a reason).

The one and only extremely clean and power packed energy source is nuclear. As Jeff notes it also a form of ‘solar’ energy because the energy contained in the nuclear bonds of source material was created inside stars. Stars produce all the larger elements either during their normal life burning or during the end of life explosions. They too are an elemental part of nature.

Harnessing nature is what all life forms do. The tap into the energy dissipating from the Sun to create a flow of life billions of years old. The algae, and later plants, began the process by collecting the energy of the Sun through photosynthesis. Later came mobile life, which lived off the plants (plankton through animals). If you have a broad scientific grounding, as apparently Jeff does, then you can just begin to see the uncountable interconnections and complexity of the machine of life. Life is not just one circle, but combination of interwoven gears and behaviors which have evolved over time and are still evolving to this day. It does have a spiritual balance to it, but it is a pattern that does not repeat for long. In the long view, it does not repeat at all. So while there is a harmonious balance, it is also resilient enough to adjust to a new balance in response to events large and small.

What Jeff is demonstrating is how knowledge is important in making global decisions. The liberals in DC and who push Green ideas are many times acting out of naive emotion. I stand with them in protecting the whales, but wind farms are an insane destruction of our planet and a threat to life. I stand with them in keeping our waters clean, animal habitats protected (to a point) and air clean. But solar power will not run a locomotive fool of goods. Sails cannot move container ships over the ocean. Airlines cannot fly on wind power alone. While electricity sources can be static, transportation requires the fuel to move to be brought along. Electricity cannot be provided by biofuels, wind or solar – we require too much now for basic living conditions.

These are all stubborn facts. Just like it would be nice to be able to fly like a bird, but physics shows humans will never to do so naturally. It is OK to dream or have good intentions, but to impose them on others by confiscating their hard earned money requires much more than a fictional vision of a more perfect reality.