[Editor note: The post is a slightly revised version of what was posted at the Institute for Energy Research website on September 17. The primary author was Daniel R. Simmons, director of state energy affairs. Next week, Michael Giberson will evaluate IER’s defense of the Danish study at MasterResource in light of his own first impressions.]
Energy is critical for our economy and our future, and the real issues deserve to be debated. That is why we appreciated the initial response on the American Wind Energy Association’s website to the recent study, Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark. It appears that AWEA actually read the study and raised some questions related to energy.
The same cannot be said of other responses, such as this blog post from NRDC.…
We are used to hearing about how far behind the curve the United States is on energy. Just today, we were reminded that Germany and China will gobble up our future since we have failed to invest in solar and wind technologies, in particular, photovoltaic fabrication plants.
Actually, that’s not quite true. There are quite a number of PV plants in the U.S., just not any using the technology touted by the New York Times reporter.
And as for wind: did you know that “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy.” That is not true either. Current wind generating capacity in the U.S. is just shy of 30,000 MW, larger than any other country, including Germany (24,000 MW) and China (13,000 MW).…
As an old-fashioned scientist, I prefer hard engineering realities to all those interminably vacuous and poorly informed policy “debates” that feature energy self-sufficiency (even Saudis import!), sustainability (at what spatial and temporal scales?), stakeholders (are not we all, in a global economy?) and green economy (but are not we still burning some 9 billion tonnes of carbon annually?).
High regard for facts and low regard for wishful thinking has forced me to deal repeatedly with many energy illusions–if not outright delusions–and to point out many complications and difficulties to be encountered during an inevitably lengthy transition from an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled world to economies drawing a substantial share of their primary energies from renewable sources.
Steel & Coal-Derived Coke
Here is another challenge for the energy transformationists, one that is both inexplicably neglected and extraordinarily important: steel’s fundamental dependence on coal-derived coke with no practical substitutes on any rational technical horizon.…