Going Green

Yesterday afternoon a couple of hippie-types knocked on the door. As I was on the phone for work the wife talked to them. They were with the Citizens Action Coalition, an advocacy group that fights the Utilities. They asked the wife to sign a petition against Cap and Trade. Since she has heard me rant about that abortion of a bill, she readily signed and gave them five bucks to defray costs.

She handed me the literature they were handing out and it turns out they are against Cap and Trade, but only because it still allows coal plant to exist. They want the act defeated and rewritten to advocate only solar and wind power -- they are against nukes, coal gasification and natural gas power plants too.

Here is some of the idiocy that liberals cannot understand, taken directly from the broadside. According to the CAC, a coal fired plant costs 7 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour. Wind costs 4 to 9 cents per kilowatt hour. Let us leave aside the fact that the wind does not always blow, and we have yet to solve the storage issue of the power it does generate. According to the above numbers, wind will save 1 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour. The average savings is about 2 cents.

The CAC says windpower will create 4-5 times more jobs than fossil fuel plants. Of course we will have to lay off all of the workers at he fossil fuel plants, the coal mines, the transportation providers, etc. An estimated 81,000 are currently employed as coal miners, according to the US Dept of Energy, including nearly 3,000 in Indiana. Advocates for wind energy lay claim to many jobs, but most are in creating the components and construction of wind farms. A wind farm takes little or no employee monitoring after it is in operation. We will lose tens of thousands of permanent jobs to create short-term jobs, all to save two cents (at best.

Current wind farms have a 40% to 60% power loss when generating long distance. In addition, a windmill generates a mere fraction of the power generate by a coal or nuclear plant. Farmers are complaining now abut the loss of farmland, what will happen when the breadbasket states are covered with windfarms to provide power for the cities?

What will happen to the shaky power grid when we all plug in our cars every night? If these yahoos have their way, I guess we will have to add one more line to our prayers as we lay me down to sleep -- please God, make the wind blow hard...