Ken Nelson

I want politicians to get us more energy not less, and that means nuclear to me. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in, or in support of, other ways of making energy.

I’m intrigued, for instance, by the Honeywell Wind Turbine:

That’s it up on the roof. Cool!

The marketing for it says it will provide up to 18% of the typical home’s energy use and is designed to be put in where the power is needed:

The turbine’s installed cost is approximately 1/2 of the cost of traditional turbines with a lower installed cost per kWh (in class and size) than any turbine on the market. Adding to the value are federal and state rebates covering anywhere from 30% to 100% of the overall cost.

The Honeywell Wind Turbine comes complete with a computerized smart box, inverter and inter connect switch to wire the system into a household panel. The Honeywell Wind Turbine is designed to be installed where the power is being consumed and can produce 2000 kWh/yr in class 3, 2752 kWh/yr in class 4 winds at 33′ (height of 33’). The system has a MSRP of $5,995.

You can buy them for $4,500 + installation costs from an electrician. It then sits between you and the utility electricity. It does what it can and merges in utility provided electricity as needed. Clever…

Because our town discriminates against businesses, I pay about $800 a month for electricity for my office building.  Saving 18% of that would pay for the wind device pretty quickly…

So I’m intrigued and will investigate this a bit more.  I bet the city would bitch about it.

But we will see. I’ll report later.

If equalizing, which direction would you prefer to equalize in?

The headline:

Poor women ‘bear climate burden’

followed by urgent text:

The agency said there was a disproportionate burden on those women and called for greater equality.

I would put it this way:

Poor women bear burden of attempts to stupidly fix climate

The best thing we could do for poor women is to setup governmental systems that do not keep them poor. This means less corrupt governments, capitalism and economic/political liberty.

Unfortunately, the “equality” the report wishes for may happen… by our women becoming poorer and poorer.  Obama is busy “equalizing” us with the 3rd world now, isn’t he?

New, power saving, California cord.

Our political class won’t give us more power, electoral or electrical. Instead of building nuclear plants to multiply the power available to improve our lifestyles, they instead go for our televisions:

Power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators adopted a first-in-the nation mandate to lower electricity demand.

TVs are just a start.

The government is in control of power generation in this country. And what do we get? Rationing.

Just wait for it in healthcare.

“Consensus is not science”, says John Christy. By quoting Michael Crichton he highlights that the science points not to eco-disaster but social, political and economic disaster caused by attempts to react to false science.

Mr. Christy, Alabama state climatologist and Professor at UoA Huntsville, pokes holes in the global warming “consensus” including pointing out that:

* Temperatures in the Arctic have increased over the last 100 years, he agreed, but that’s only because 100 years ago “was the coldest it’s been in a long time.”

* Arctic ice has melted, but ice has grown in Anartica. Between the two, there’s about as much ice as always.

* There are more polar bears now, not fewer. Canada issues 800 bear-hunting permits each year, he pointed out.

* Temperatures may be warmer in Greenland, but scientific experiments with ice fields show “that 4,000 years ago, it was warmer in Greenland than it is today.

Why the consensus of environmental catastrophe?  Attention and money.

Invest in something that returns better than union payouts and helping your political cronies:

One estimate is that 500 nuclear power plants would make America energy independent. I think that is optimistic in that an abundance of electricity doesn’t mean we won’t need to import oil for transportation needs, but it would certainly take us a long way toward independence. The cost would be in the order of 2 billion per plant (I would think less; that is the first one might be 4 billion, but the 400th would be considerably less than a billion; but call it 2 billion). That is one trillion dollars, comparable to the TARP or stimulus — and for once a deficit would be financing something real.

It is less than the cost of the war, and less than the war is going to cost if we continue. Cheap reliable energy would be one major step toward economic recovery. Low cost energy plus freedom will bring prosperity. If we have the energy we can work on the freedom. The whole thing could be accomplished in four years. Of course the ravening wolves in the Congress won’t do it — but then it’s not likely that this is the kind of hope and change we can believe in from the current White House.

If only one governor would do this, it would start a tidle wave of the RIGHT direction. Utah would be perfect.

Alas, they would have to be unionized plants and thus would be much more expensive and much more prone to meltdown.

For economic growth, life styple improvement, national security and to insulate us from whatever the weather may do we need MORE energy not less.

A volcano never reported probably made 1810 to 1819 so stinking cold.

Cole-Dai said climate records show that not only were 1816 — the so-called “year without a summer”— and the following years very cold, the entire decade from 1810 to 1819 was probably the coldest for at least the past 500 years.

That volcanoes could erupt at any time, even this week perhaps,  adds even more uncertainty into climate modeling, except that it logically means that cold is more likely than warm.

The best defense against a volcano is a modern, technical society,  with massive energy generation capacity and even more massive freedom.    That defense also works wonders against colder or warmer weather.

Yet the “green” crowd persists in pushing us down a path that makes us vulnerable to climate change.  I’d rather be ready for whatever happens.

Where it lands, nobody knows

So will it get warmer?  Or will it get colder? Historically, the earth is much more likely to get cold than warm.

We are in-betweeners, and just barely — we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.

I lean towards “colder” because as shown above, it happens more often. But also because of warmer or colder – colder is worse for human life. I like to plan for the worst.

Since we don’t know, and probably can’t know, what the climate will do,  how do we plan for change?

How about we do things that help no matter what happens?  How about we look at who is most affected by change of either kind and make them less affected? How about we look at this practically rather than emotionally or driven by ulterior political agendas?

Because their lives are already at the edge, poor sustenance farmers seem most at risk from climate changes in both directions.    What would help them?  Not being sustenance farmers anymore.  So what would do that?  Massive aid hasn’t done it.   They have cultural and political reasons they remain so poor. Will current “green” policies help any of these obstacles?

What about for us “rich” folk?   My thoughts turn to energy. If it is cold, I want to turn up the heat. If warm, turn up the A/C. If we have less farm land, energy can make what we have more productive.  So a reasonable policy to address any version of climate change is “MAKE MORE ENERGY”.

Practical, pragmatic, “what if” thinking leads directly opposite from what most people concerned about climate change want to do.   Windmills won’t grow our energy supply dramatically. Nor will solar. Alternative energy techniques, while useful in some situations, do not cut the mustard to grow to meet our lifestyle maintenance (or improvement) should the climate turn unfavorable.

Climate change worriers would get my full cooperation if they recognized the uncertainties of the science and approached the dilemma posed by climate change more pragmatically.

E=MC^2 is more than just a way to make cool explosions. Manipulating it a bit also explains why “alternative” energy isn’t dense enough to grow and continue to improve our human lifestyle.

Actually E=MC^2 is a substitution of the basic energy equation:

Energy = mass * velocity squared.

Using the nuclear equation, with the FASTEST thing in the Universe providing the velocity, means that a little more mass gets you a LOT more energy.

Back in the real world, lets take for instance, hydro-electric. Speed is limited by gravity pulling water down. And Mass is very difficult to get bigger.  Attempts are made, like with “wave generation”, but again just because a small site sites in a big ocean doesn’t make it “big mass”.

William Tucker covers all this in his excellent article “Understanding E=MC^2 “.  He shows that energy density makes alternative energy forms really silly and in-efficient – even ones we use a lot now, like gasoline just aren’t that dense:

When we burn a gallon of gasoline, one-billionth of the mass of the gasoline is completely transformed into energy. This transformation occurs in the electron shells. The amount is so small that nobody has ever been able to measure it. Yet the energy release is large enough to propel a 2000-pound automobile for 30 miles – a remarkable feat when you think of it.

But gas burning makes energy by getting rid of electrons. What about the other 99.99 % of what gas is made of?

That requires splitting the nucleus – and welcome back into Einstein’s equation.

Read the article… when I’ve said “the math doesn’t work” for wind power, hydro-electric, solar, and related “cool” alternative energy ideas, this is the what I meant.  Basically you have to get a lot of mass moving if you want to make energy with non-nuclear kinetics, or you have to cover a lot of mass with panels if you wish to use solar, or you have to capture thousands of years of solar energy in a gallon of oil.   All with big environmental and cost issues.

The ONLY means of making energy that can keep improving our lifestyle is nuclear. Safe, clean, fission can readily be done. And we should invest heavily in many different related studies, fusion for instance.

The “alternative” energy math just doesn’t work as the main infrastructure for my goal of constantly improving our human condition.

Molten Salt Gen IV reactor

I get tired of reading about this cool thing or that nifty idea and then reading “it will be ready for production in 10 to 15 years”.  That means “never” in my book.

I don’t buy fears of global warming. But I do know that our world needs more energy. Driving to work this morning I used more energy than most villages had available to them in a year back in the pre-engine era.  Improving our life for us, and for our progeny, means making more energy.

Charles Barton proposes to go full tilt on Generation 4 nuclear technology:

The long gestation period view assumes that the development of Generation IV technology would be conducted with business as usual approaches. But if we think that the fate of human society would rest on the pace of a Generation IV development project, would a business as usual approach make sense? Alternatives would be a simi-Manhatten project model and a mini-Manhattan project approach. The difference would have to do with time scale, with the Simi-Manhattan project approach trying to bring in everything in a two to three year time range, while the mini approach might take 5 years. The mini approach might cost $20 billion, perhaps twice the cost of the business as usual approach, but at the end of the five years a saleable product, and a factory to build it would be ready.

He maintains that we can make a LOT more energy with superior flexibility for about the cost we are spending on windmills. I say “do it!”.

That we aren’t says a lot about the real goals of the politicians over blowing the threat of global warming to further their political goals. They seen to simply want less humans, not more and happy ones.  The ugly details of death aren’t their concern. Whether by health care “reform” or by bottling energy production, they want less of us – and it seems likely their death wishes for us come true.

Like computers getting faster each year we’ve gotten used to engineers sorting out how to squeeze more oil out of existing wells. Longer drilling, angled drilling, better seismic analysis, all sorts of techniques keep adding to oil production.

The same has happened in natural gas production, where new extraction techniques opened up vast reserves in shale coal

Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years’ supply – and rising fast.

"There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources," he said.

So smart people keep saving the world.

But the question is…  when will some smart person figure out how to extract stupidity from this mindless source?

I can’t help but wonder if, or when,  stupid people will eventually overcome the efforts of the smart.

Pebble Bed Nuclear Plant

Each passing day marks an extra day in the future we will be short of energy.  Our government should focus on giving us MORE energy, not making it expensive or forcing us to conserve. Lifestyle = energy!

Consider global warming… or global cooling. Do you know which will happen?  I guarantee you one will.

What helps global warming?  MORE ENERGY.

What helps global cooling?  MORE ENERGY.

The time for stupidity passed long ago, Government, get smart – get us MORE ENERGY.

This doesn’t have to be a Federal thing. For instance, if I were Governor of Utah we would ring the west side of the Salt Lake with nuclear plants.  Wires would head west to make Utahans rich selling juice to California. Wires would head east with free power for Utah. The result? Economic boom.

Instead our Governors muck around with futile wind and solar that won’t even keep up with population growth much less lifestyle advancement.

They try to solve the problem of getting elected, not the real problems our society faces.

Sun Dumb?

The Utah town I live in, St. George, has a program where you can buy solar panels in their solar farm and receive credits on your electricity bill.

The details are available at http://www.sgsunsmart.com

The way it works is you pay $3000 for 1/2 a panel or $8000 for a full panel. You then get credit for 400 kWh or 800 kWh per year.

Currently St. George utility rates are $.0681 per kWh.

So with a 400 kWh “credit” for your $3,000 you can save $27.24 dollars annually.

Leaving you with a payback period of just 110 years (if you discount any opportunity cost on the $3 grand).

They answer this basic economic question in their FAQ:

• Why should people participate if there is not a good return on investment?
  There is a return on investment, but not a financial one. By participating in this program you are investing in your community.

So, really, SunSmart just seems like a voluntary tax on dumb people.

My concern for the program is that once in place, how long will it be till my $3K is forcibly taken from me?  I suspect that is what they want in the end.

Left off the chart… hot air

Where do Barack Obama and Bill O’Reilly agree?  Other than each is god’s gift to the world?

They both blame speculators for rapidly changing oil prices.

However, as it so often does, data says another picture from what those two say:

New quarterly data also released by the CFTC show that money flows to exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in commodities failed to correlate strongly with last year’s price surge.

In other words, the people supposedly raising the price weren’t spending money when it was going up.

The more likely culprits… the US restricting supply, international demand and wars in oil producing regions.

Oh… and what is the different between O’Reilly and Obama on this topic?  O’Reilly believes what he said.  Obama just says it.

More juice please!

Coal electric plants burn coal to make steam to turn turbines to make electricity.

But what if you used solar to make steam and fed it into the same system?  The result is a converted coal plant that costs 1/2 of what a new solar plant would have cost because you don’t have to buy the turbines and it is already connected to the grid. Plus at night you can fire up the coal part.

Slick. And I like it, sort of.  But it has one big drawback.

At the cost of 1/2 a coal plant, I lose a full coal plant, and get back a full solar plant. So in other words, it costs money and it adds NO NEW ELECTRICITY to the grid.

Recall from my previous post that more energy is a GOOD THING.

The net effect of this is same energy, more money. That isn’t what I want. I want MORE ENERGY, LESS MONEY.

Got that geeky guys?

Now if there is a coal plant that is at its end of life, or that has a costly source of coal and you can save money doing this, fine. But since I’m a skeptic about C02 and the climate, costing me more money to solve a non-problem impresses me little.

Turn your geeky brains on to something that makes MORE juice.

 
Earth is not a pot pie!

New models come out all the time predicting future global temperatures. But all recent models prove, says Anthony Watts, is that we don’t have a clue what the temperature will be:

Natural variations dominate any supposed AGW component over timescales of 3 – 4 decades. If that is so then how should be regard 18 years of warming and decades of standstills or cooling in an AGW context? At what point do we question the hypothesis of CO2 induced warming?

…

Given the IPCC’s estimate of the strength of the postulated AGW warming, it is clear that those uncertainties are larger than the AGW effect that may have been observed.

The above quotation is fancy talk meaning that the error KNOWN to be in the data produced by natural causes is bigger than the predicted change in temperature in the models. 

In other words, WE DON”T KNOW what, if any, the effect of man is on global temperatures.

But it really isn’t about science. It is about using the scare to get the dough.