Why does alternative energy suck? Or is very expensive?

Question

Wind farms kinda suck, geothermal kind of is dangerous to get it up, solar definately sucks, tidal power sucks, hydro electric is decent but the cost to make it and contructing + stopping the flow of a river to make a dam sucks.....

The only alternative is dreams that seem to distant into the future its either that or the best of them all COAL! glorious glorious coal! go nuclear and use oil and COAL the cheap and very efficiant energy producing source! .... Why must we use more expensive/inconvinient sources? AGW if proven wrong will justify the right to use cheaper and efficiant means of producing energy

Answer 1

Hmmm... "suck"; that's a technical or scientific term, right?

You ask "Why must we use more expensive/inconvinient sources?"

The problem is you are only looking at half of the equation. It's kind of like asking "why do I need to work when I can just use my credit card to buy things?".

If we look at the entire picture - e.g. financial cost of reacting to climate change or inconvenience of millions dying from hunger - then coal (or oil or nuclear) are not cheaper or more convenient.

As any business manager or financial expert or even politicians can tell you, present cost is a very unreliable way to measure total cost. You need to include past costs (much higher for 'standard energy' as we haven't invested in 'alternatives' to the same degree), future costs (cleaning up waste from wind power is very low - well zero - whereas coal is huge) and non-tangible costs ("wind miners" don't get killed on a regular basis by cave-ins, methane explosions and black-lung disease).

It is precisely this sort of short-sightedness, of having a party and letting the next generations clean up the following morning ( and somehow having our hangovers for us!) that is causing the problem.

I don't know why I bother sometimes - I'm older than you are Michael  by quite a bit - it would be easy for me to sit back and enjoy it knowing that you're the one who's going to pay!

Lucky for you I'm a nice guy with a conscience...

Answer 2

Coal is cheap but terrible for our environment, for example it is the biggest emitter of mercury into the atmosphere and one of the largest contributors to acid rain.  Nuclear isn't going to be cheap since opening Yucca Mountain Waste Repository is going to cost at minimum $80 billion dollars.  Yucca needs to be opened because nuclear power plants are keeping their spent fuel in 'temporary' storage that has been filling up since the 1970s.  They were promised a site for long term storage but since Nevada keeps sueing the federal government and not allowing Yucca to open there have been problems.

Wind and solar are still new technologies but have huge potential for us in the future.  They are getting cheaper by the day since scientists and engineers are coming up with more efficient and cheaper products.  If you think it will be cheap and easy to go to nuclear power then you are fooling yourself.  What if you took the 80 billion dollars its going to take to open Yucca and invest it in solar energy?  That doesn't even include the cost of building each Nuclear plant and getting the nuclear fuel.  

I think we need to use every energy source available to us along with conserving.  To rule out something just because you think it 'sucks' doesn't make too much sense.  

Answer 3

Because coal and natural gas and nuclear are the cheapest forms of energy --- only hydro and geothermal are as cheap to produce-------- it's that simple..... and we have a 300 year supply of coal and a 1500-2500 year supply of fissionable material IF we reprocess spent fuel.

AND--- the coal and gas reserves are right here in the USA.

Answer 4

The question is whether it is still cheap if you start assessing the cost of environmental damage into its price.  If it's still cheap, fine, use it.  If not, then alternatives should be considered.  

Answer 5

If wind power was cheap, environmentalists would hate it like they hate hydroelectric systems. If utility companies build wind turbines everywhere then environmentalists would be livid with the noise and bird strikes destroying native habitats.

Answer 6

Whoever told you that coal was cheap?  We use it as an altenative heat source and it is not a cheap fuel any more.  It's right up there with oil and propane.  

Answer 7

well it is expensive since the infrastructure is not there but once its developed cost wise it will become very cheap  

Answer 8

yes it is expensive

Answer 9

Geothermal actually has a pretty good safety record, it just can't be used everywhere (which means it can only play a minor role in our energy supply).

Coal even if global warming isn't an issue (and the denialists like yourself are wrong but that's a separate issue) is still environmentally unacceptable because of all the c**p that comes up the smokestack, things like Mercury, Cadmium, Uranium, Thorium (yes, coal power plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants are *allowed* to release), particulates, sulphur dioxide (cause of acid rain) along with the deaths that come from coal mining (about one mine collapse a week in China) and the massive environmental devastation caused by coal mining.

Coal gasification can help with the air pollution (but not global warming) although you then get more solid wastes to store (and since most of the waste from coal isn't radioactive it won't go away on its own) and you still have the coal miner deaths and devastation caused by coal mining to deal with.  Full clean coal with carbon sequestration whilst theoretically possible (though the energetics need to be fully worked out just to make sure it doesn't take more energy than you generate to pump the coal underground) does not look like it'll be very competitive (though if it could work then it would be possible to rely on it to power a country, unlike wind).  The extra energy needed to pump the CO2 underground also means more coal mining and thus more coal mine deaths and more environmental devastation.

Ben O also raises a good point in that Greens (not environmentalists, be careful about confusing the two) would oppose wind if it were useful (he used the term cheap but I prefer useful which doesn't necessarily require cheap).  Environmentalists oppose wind power now because it isn't really useful while Greens support for exactly that reason.  The Green movement is less about protecting the environment than about going "back to nature" and "having things small" and other such personal aesthetic judgements confused with objective truth and so they aren't very happy with modern technological civilisation (despite the fact that they probably wouldn't be alive without it), it also appears that fossil fuel groups may have been supporting them in promoting useless power sources like wind and ground based solar since building wind farms tended to prevent people from moving away from fossil fuels.

As for why alternative energy is useless, there are three types of alternative energy:

1. the ones that are useful everywhere and on their way to becoming non-alternative, nuclear could be here (although it's probably better categorised outside of alternative energy since it has already proven itself capable of running a country) and fusion and space solar will probably end up here for a time and maybe clean coal if it turns out to be workable and not merely PR nonsense (though I do suspect it is mostly PR nonsense).

2. the ones that are useful only for certain limited geographies because they capture a reliable natural power source that isn't everywhere, this includes hydro and geothermal both of which work pretty well but only under limited conditions, where they can be used they are a workable option (and hyrdo is a pretty significant power source, for most countries that don't have nuclear as the dominant carbon-neutral power source hydro fills the role and it's often in second place to nuclear as well)

3. the ones that just aren't useful anywhere, these capture an unreliable natural force like the wind or to a lesser extent the sun (which is still unreliable due to night time and clouds although ground based solar might make a decent intermediate source if it weren't so d**n expensive).

You are probably mostly referring to type 3 alternatives.

The unreliability is unacceptable if you are running an electricity grid (customers do NOT like rolling blackouts) so you have to have some spinning reserve to cover for the wind suddenly dying out and that means that you must have online at all times enough reliable power to substitute for all of the wind capacity you are using (and then you've got to provide even more backup to that backup just in case the spinning reserve fails), this means that wind power as it is usually done is really more like 80% natural gas (and not efficient combined cycle plants either).  Some say that spreading out wind farms and having a lot of grid interconnection will work to solve the reliable problem but that ignores the fact that it is quite possible for wind to die down over quite large areas (large enough that even continent wide interconnection and wind farms probably wouldn't be reliable).

Using wind means that you pay for your power twice, once for the wind turbine and again for the backup (and natural gas tends to be very volatile in pricing) and maybe you'll then pay again when sanity prevails and a nuclear power plant is built to replace the wind + gas combination

Answer 10

Bestonne has given a very good and mostly accurate summation of real life facts while as usual Adam has stated the articles of faith that support the new left “green” movement of back to the past except for the true believers. For the next 50 years nuclear has to be our major source for electricity in this country until we can get space based solar on line. It really does gripe me that if Jimmy Carter had not been elected president our nation would already be fully energy independent and the supplier of cheap electricity to most if not all nations of the world.

Answer 11

They suck because you have to compare them with what we have been using. Alternative forms are "Alternatives" to what has proven to be the best options to date. Alternatives are not new. Billions, if not trillions has been spent researching alternatives. They have been studied and tested for many, many  years by scientist and engineers, and up to now they have not been cost-effective or practicle with the exception of Nuclear, which was killed by "Environmentalists" and the news media based on feelings and not facts.

I blame the uneducated and ill-informed "Environmentalists" , our ignorant Congress, and our wonderful news media for the mess we are in. It is very difficult for the avg person to get factual informatoin because it is used as a political tool. The oil companies and car companies had little to do with it.