Green energy has overtaken total Nuclear energy productionFollow

That's not entirely accurate. On a typical hot summer day, it's not uncommon for a solar cell to reach a temperature of 70 °C (158 °F). A general rule of thumb is that the efficiency of a solar cell decreases with 0.5% for every 1 °C (1.8 °F) above 25 °C (77 °F). This means that on a hot summer day, the efficiency of a solar cell could drop as much as 25%.

Sure, you're going to see a lot more sunlight in Phoenix, but it's also a lot hotter there. Even the diffuse sunlight from a cloudy day can produce a fair amount of energy. The amount of energy produced will obviously vary based on setup, but just because one part of the country sees more sunlight doesn't necessarily mean that solar power is more efficient there.

Okay I give up.

I can find how much MW/acre you can get from putting a wind farm there, and how much yield you can get from a good coal mine in WV, and how that changes into MW.

The frustrating thing is that we have to frequently import coal from the midwest to get our coal plants up to temperature as the stuff we have here doesn't burn hot enough. We also don't have oil here either really, or natural gas. There's really not a whole lot of geothermal either. Plus I don't know about transport costs, etc. So I'm left thinking that there isn't really any other way to get power from that land, unless we compared it to the cost of building a dam or something nearby. Which I don't really have numbers for either, and there's not so much water on that side of the hills.

Anyway, numbers...

Edited, Sep 1st 2011 5:08pm by someproteinguy

So... A handy converter tells me that the total land usage of the wind farm is 177 acres. 1 acre of strip mine produces 1,000 tons of coal, which produces 2,000MW. 177 acres of strip mine would therefore produce 354000MW. Which is 885 times as much as the wind farm produces on the same acreage.

Now, obviously, there's a time component and we're comparing renewable to non-renewable sources. But once the land is used for strip mining, the topsoil is replaced, plants and trees are replanted, and it can be used for something else while we move to some other patch of land for mining. We could look at things like total return on energy investment for coal compared to wind if you want, but coal wins that one hands down as well (by around 4 to 1 IIRC).


Hopefully, the point is made in terms of total power generation compared to total land impact. Wind is not the magic bullet some seem to think it is. It cost us more energy to gain the same amount back, doesn't scale as large, and uses more land to do it. It's cleaner, to be sure, but those other factors need to be considered as well when assessing its viability as an alternative energy source.

I'm tickled that after mountain top removal and valley fill mining, you apparently just throw down some topsoil and acorns and it's good as new.

I'm for anything that limits squirrel breeding.

To be fair, the ambient sound could cause livestock to go mad and stampede.

Edited, Sep 1st 2011 11:44pm by Debalic

Well before the wider community was concerned with Anthropogenic Climate Change, They were concerned about coal power stations. The towns around coal power stations are the sickest in Victoria. Coal emissions are toxic, they reduce the healthy lifespan of the general population, they highly increase cancer and athsma.

There's still a long span of coal deposits, but Oil has all of the above problems, whilst being a finite source. It's an insidious, invidious killer and poison, riding below people's conscious worry because the effect of Oil produced illness is so invisibly linked to the cause.

Back to the finite source problem. Peak Oil was always coming, and we've known that for a century. Transport has always needed an alternative energy source. With Oil having such an extraordinary array of chemicals within it, it is the most wanton waste to burn it up for energy.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2011 5:48am by Aripyanfar

I can only imagine what affect this would have on the previously mentioned squirrel breeding problem.

Magical Squirrels?