"Why should I save energy?"




Note: Emails are organized in the order received, with first received at the top.

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Jim:

I enjoyed your column about the "why" of energy savings. To illustrate just how silly the mantra of energy savings has become, Florida Power and Light recently built a "25 megawatt" plant that actually produces 4.8 megawatts. That means it has 4.8/25=0.19 or 19% efficiency. Solar cells manufactured from coal fired power stations in China make up its massive array. The plant cost $150 million and will produce $4.2 million worth of electricity per year.

$150 million/$4.2 million = 36 year payback.

However, solar cells only last for 30 years (at best). This means that the solar array requires replacement before its capital cost can be recovered. As the electrical grid in the United States becomes progressively less efficient from projects such as this, and with the resulting squandering of capital, it is very reasonable to expect that the replacement cells will again be manufactured using electricity from coal fired power stations located elsewhere in the world.

Extrapolate this out to the many wind farms and solar farms littering the countryside and it is not hard to imagine a day when financial capital will be so depleted by the losses and limitations inherent in solar and wind power that nothing of significance will be built anywhere.

The wealth of the nation will be depleted on negative-return energy projects. Raising the sales price of the electricity won't help as that will lead to a general increase in the cost of all other products and services. There is simply no way around the efficiency problem created when the power grid's prime movers require more energy to fabricate than can be made available by operating them over their entire life.

More than half the cost of a solar cell array is for the electricity used to smelt the silicon to make the cells. So, $75 million worth of electricity from coal-fired power stations in China was used to build a solar station in Florida yielding $4.2 million per year worth of electricity. That means 7,440,476 tons of coal was consumed in China to fabricate the solar array assuming 42% efficiency and $2 per million BTU, and the array will never yield more than was required to build it. This is madness.

At some point we crossed the line from benign feel-good political projects and cutie-pie windmills and we moved to outright economic warfare being waged against humanity. This won't end well.

Mike Ryan
Chillicothe, Ohio
USA

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Mike,

Your comments are always breath-taking.

Jim

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Jim wrote:

"Why can't we directly turn a fuel into electricity without all the mechanical rotating parts?"

These folks claim to have done this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/business/
energy-environment/24bloom.html

Larry Wells
Atlanta, Georgia
USA

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Jim,

In "Why should we save energy" I'm surprised you never questioned the three-year payback rule. What is it about three years, or any other time period, that leads to such a hard-and-fast rule? We had similar payback rules, down to 1.5-2 years at one of my mills.

They also questioned the payback in updating the pulp mill to produce chlorine-free pulp. That mill is now a pasture by the Mobile River, along with another 1800 T/D mill beside it. What ever happened to long-term thinking/planning?

Making economic sense is a good rule, and we need to include the long-term cost of producing energy out of difficult sources such as oil sands and oil shale in the economics. The easy sources have become scarcer, and some are in unfriendly territory. This all needs to be included in order to make economic sense.

Bill LaVallee
San Jose, California
USA

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