It is. And I believe that Arizona was making a serious attempt to make a dent in the problem.
And there were no brown skinned Americans arrested there solely based on the color of their skin.
The Arizona law said that law enforcement had the right to check the immigration status of anyone they believed to be here illegally. Unfortunately there were LEGAL citizens stopped and were required to PROVE they were citizens. And it had EVERYTHING to do with their national heritage (i.e. being Mexican).
Not quite.
Back to the wind farms. The large turbine that are being built today do not kill birds. The turbine turn very slowly. Its the older, smaller windmills that spin at high speeds that kill the birds. Those smaller windmills should be dismantled, but they probably won’t be until they stop working altogether.
As for the cost of energy, those values given are not accurate. The cost per MWH depends on the time horizon that the cost of construction is amortized over. Because wind farms are owned by investors and not by utilities in most cases, they use a much shorter horizon. Investors look at 7 years when 30 years is typical for utilities, even though most wind turbines are expected to last about 50 years.
@keith - the latest report I’ve seen (see link) says the big wind farms kill hundreds of thousands of birds yearly. Upon what do you base your claims?
If you read the whole article, the numbers just don’t add up. It starts off with a claim of 83,000 raptors each year, but when it starts talking about actual numbers at the wind farms with the large turbines, its about a dozen or so a year.
Be careful to not confuse large wind farm with wind farms with large turbines. There are a lot of large wind farms with the smaller old fashioned turbines.
I worked at a large wind farm for a month inspecting transformers. Some of the oldest wind farms in the country are located their. On the same patch of ground, you can see several generations of turbines. As each succeeding generation of turbines got taller, they would build new turbines next to old ones, sort of stacking them up. The area I worked in had very few of the older small turbines and they had only one dead bird in the first year, and they weren’t sure that it was from a turbine.
the oil companies do the counting of course.
@keith The “costs” are what the owners get from the utilities (government subsidized) as a “feed in tariff” (FIT), whch is about 50 cents per KWH, depending on where you are. California and Ontario, Canada have these FITs as do many European countries.
Based on these FITs the investors make a handsome profit which is paid for by the public at large. The European green prgram is in deep trouble because of rising power costs as they try to reach 20% renewable by 2020. This now appears impossible, and with nuclear being phased out, Germany is now building new COAL fired plants to make up the shortfall, since gas is expensive there. So much for greening.
We have now concluded that the only way to reduce CO2 emissions significantly is by using more nuclear and large scale hydro-electric and replacing coal fired plants with gas buring units.
The wonders of tax incentives should never, ever be underestimated.
Think, Wind Energy-Washington DC.
Good links, Whitey. Thank you.
Enforcing immigration law never was and never will be “cut & dry” when we have the conflicting goals of being politically correct and enforcing immigration law. However, when the U.S. Attorney General sued Arizona it made the issue political rather than one of enforcing federal laws. Arizona has a serious border problem that would not be anywhere near the magnitude it is if the federal agencies actively enforced the immigration laws currently on the books and the Arizona law was designed to fill the enforcement void, at least to help the border towns.
Doc, regarding the CO2, I’m absolutely an advocate of hydroelectric generation. I suspect (but have no evidence) that this source has far greater potential than we currently exploit. I suspect that the technology in existing hydro facilities could generate more power with upgraded technology, and I suspect that were potential hydro sites capable of generating power not so thoroughly tied up in red tape there’d be far more generating sites.
Nuclear power I’m against. The potential for disaster (ref: Chernoble and the Japanese Nuclear Plant), the problem with disposing of the spent fuel, the potential for attack-induced disaster, and the cost of decommissioning and maintaining in perpetuity the site all add up to nuclear power being a really bad idea IMHO. Compared to these issues, CO2 emissions are a nonissue.
@TSM: Yeah, but hydro has some pretty bad side-effects associated with its use, too. Just read any Ed Abbey book for a better summation than I can give. (Granted, the guy was a bit of a wing nut, but he makes legitimate points about the negative effects hydro has on the ecology of the desert SW: heck, the Colorado doesn’t even make it to sea all the time anymore!)
Remember that the birth of the environmental movement was to PREVENT the damming of the Grand Canyon.
Gotta disagree with you here, at least when the river in question is in the arid SW, or the salmon-run NW.
Hydro is facing a similar future as nuclear - folks want dams taken down, not put up. Near term it’s gas replacing coal that has, and will continue, to yield huge drops in CO2, much more than wind/solar.
Arizona has a serious border problem that would not be anywhere near the magnitude it is if the federal agencies actively enforced the immigration laws currently on the books and the Arizona law was designed to fill the enforcement void, at least to help the border towns.
I agree that there MIGHT be a problem and it needs to be addressed. But I think going after individuals is the WRONG way. The real immigration problem is the companies that HIRE them. Go after these companies. And when they are found guilty…very very very heavy fines. These companies are getting a slap on the wrist.
“Near term it’s gas replacing coal that has, and will continue, to yield huge drops in CO2, much more than wind/solar”.
@texases–I thought that the bi-products of burning natural gas, CH4, which is the combining of CH4 with oxygen, O2, was CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2O (water). Now I realize that natural gas burns cleaner than coal, where one bi-product is SO2 (sulfur dioxide), but the CO2 in burning natural gas still contributes to the greenhouse effect.
Mike, I’d argue that both approaches need to be used concurrently. The problem is serious, and it’s unnecessary to choose approaches.
Re: the hydro power, you guys from the plains states have made some good points. I’ve never seen a man made ecological disaster here in NH, but you guys have a whole history that enters into your view of water as a resource. I respect your views and perhaps hydro isn’t appropriate everywhere.
573,000 birds killed each year by wind mills ? Where we’re these wind mills when you needed them ? Alfred Hitchcock could have used them.
@Triedaq - you’re correct, you get CO2 from natural gas, just quite a bit less (per BTU) than you get from burning coal. With natural gas you also get BTUs from turning the H4 part of CH4 into 2 X H2O. That coal vs. natural gas difference is much of what’s caused the huge recent drop in US CO2 emissions:
"Based on these FITs the investors make a handsome profit which is paid for by the public at large."
Doc, you hit the nail on the head. I misspoke a little earlier when I talked about the horizon for amortizing the cost of the turbines. The utilities are now looking for the 7 year payback, it used to be 30 years. Private investors are looking for a one year payback. If you divide the cost of the equipment and construction by the MVA (MW) capacity over one year, the cost per MVA is very high. But its almost free after that.
If hydroelectric is accounted for in the same way, it won’t be cheap either. I’m pretty sure the cost of building a dam is a tad bit higher than a wind turbine. And look what that does to migrating fish along with a number of other environmental issues. They are looking into placing underwater turbines in the Mississippi river that will be powered by the normal flow of the river, no damming necessary. Unfortunately the output for a given size field is pretty low.
Nuclear can be made safer. Every technology has started off dangerous and gotten safer over time. Nuclear can be the same. In a way the NRC is one of the biggest obstacles to Nuclear safety. They are so intrenched in the current safety devices, it is hard to get them to see something new that is potentially a lot safer. They fear the unknown.
Natural gas, cleaner, yes except when you consider that more of it is coming from fracking. Hopefully they will figure out how to do fracking without damaging the ground water so badly.
Solar is also very expensive, even when amortized over a 20 year horizon, but with newer technology in solar cells, that could come down. The rooftops of most buildings could become part of a giant, distributed solar farm instead of tying up land for this purpose.
Wind is not likely to be able to provide more that 20% of our electric power needs, I think that 10% is more realistic. I think we are going to have to eventually embrace nuclear power or go without. Maybe there will be a breakthrough in fusion power that will make that more practical and safer.
" Hopefully they will figure out how to do fracking without damaging the ground water so badly."
Ah, my favorite subject. NO GROUNDWATER IS BEING DAMAGED BY FRACKING. It’s that simple. Are there impacts to roads, traffic, noise? Sure. But the fracking process itself isn’t getting pollutants into the ground water. Those ‘burning faucet’ demonstrations are from shallow gas that existed in the area prior to the fracked shale wells. In one case from a shallow gas field drilled many years ago.
But it makes for a good (well, bad and misleading, actually) demonstration.