What are your views on energy production and the environment?

Hi Rudydoo.

I worked for more 35yrs in the power generation industry, and know what most people don't know, and that is that electrical grids have to operate in very narrow ranges, output has to match demand, voltage and frequency must be maintained, to do this means constant adjustment of load output, a lot of which is done automatically by 'free govenor action' some is done by preplanned load changes (we approx know peak demand periods) and a lot of load alterations are done as and when needed.

Of the renewables, hydro is brilliant it is the most flexible of all power generation, it can start up or shut down in minutes and control anywhere in between, Geothermal well I don't know that much about it, but it seems okay, tidal not so flexible but at least we know in advance what the tides will do. However solar and wind are really useless, they can't change load and you never know whether they will produce zero or too much, they cause a burden on other generating systems which have to make up for their lack of flexibility.

You say your home is powered by wind and sun, do you have grid back up? or do you just put up with lack of power, when the wind does not blow and the sun shine, or do you live in a place with permanent sunny skies and constant wind?

My view is give up the back to nature approach, but move forward to better technology, improved generating means (probably some form of nuclear) more efficient and less polluting generation, we can do it, we have the knowledge, the ingenuity, the innovation, but it seems we are lacking motivation.

P.s.

Your second link, is about health, what about the many millions who do not have electricity and suffer respiratory diseases from burning wood and animal dung for fuel?

Neither the Environment nor Economic growth should be put in front of one another. We are not talking about oil and water, in the sense that they cannot mix. In fact, Sustainable Growth has been used by industry for decades. The proof is in the pudding, that sustainable growth works! Lumber companies now prefer to cut sensibly, instead of clear cutting an area. Selected trees are cut, while others are left to grow, new ones are planted in place of the felled trees. This way, the lumber companies will always have product to harvest. This also minimizes, but does not completely eliminate erosion of soil, or habitat loss. However, it is much better than the alternative... clear cutting. The fact is that Humans need to share this world, we are going to leave a footprint no matter what we do. However, minimizing that footprint will leave both us and the environment in a better condition. To think that economics should be put on the back burner is just naive. Without economic growth, how will you become educated? Travel? How will humans learn about our world, and become better stewards of the earth, if we are all out of a job and starving?? It is a give and take relationship that Humans have with the environment. We need to find the right balance between give and take.

Energy production causes lots of pollution. Damage to environment have it's cost even that cost is not easy to measure. Because of that we should look into reducing energy use and develop renewable energy sources.

If I have to choose between paying for someone to pollute or paying for someone to develop renewable energy sources. I'll chose the latter, the renewable energy with higher price. Support to renewable energy will always support development of new technology. That's where the future is.

Your question: "What are your views on energy production and the environment?"

There is no sense in answering your question since an unworthy hacker just made it impossible to post my answer to a related question about nuclear energy.

I do not know who it is but I can be relatively sure it is some person paid to edit or hack this site.

It is unlikely that some free-lance hacker is just selecting me personally to victimize.

But if that is the case, it is one more reason to not give much credence to wikileaks and their ilk, self-proclaimed activists whose only claim to fame is the ability to hack other people's sites.

In this world, all day every day, foreign counterintelligence services dump unending spam on the Internet.

The spam--propaganda--is usually designed to turn human beings in the target country against other human beings, or to convince readers to be favorably inclined to the sponsors of the spam including towards their business interests.

In this case, that would be the business interests of a foreign adversary of the United States and other NATO countries that is busy waging war in Eastern Europe and expected to continue along the same lines.

Or it could just be the nuclear industry, but that is unlikely given the content of my post.

It is probably simply a contrived selection the deranged hacker does not care about one way or the other.

Whoever it is or whatever their motivation, he or she gets paid no matter what he or she does.

He or she has proven beyond all reasonable doubt to be committed to a sociopathic paradigm.

There is no reason to attempt to reason along ethical and rational lines with such persons.

They are obviously way beyond reason; they are lost causes unworthy of my attention.

Even though this site has little to no impact on propaganda the hacker in question apparently favors, he or she has some cognitive and perceptual schema that compels antisocial behavior to drive some users away. Maybe that deranged hacker is just selecting one contrived cause--the nuclear industry in this case--and asserting himself or herself in the manner of a petty dictator, a sort of control freak. It is a function of personality.

And maybe they really are seriously defending industry propaganda in the worst possible, most ineffective way.

So too bad for you and anyone else who might have made a positive change in the world at large, something that would affect all of us living and future generations for the better, had you become better educated in the topic of which you inquire. Almost certainly you will not get well-researched unbiased answers here.

Few are the users who are prepared or willing to answer technical questions of that sort.

This one, me, was just forced out due to harassment. When this sort of thing has occurred in the past--always with some contrived motivation, no consistent association with a specific topic--it has only gotten worse over time. Consequently I quit.

Almost certainly the same freak is reading this now.

I have no idea who pays them if anyone.

It is unlikely that it is part of their job description.

It could even be from a Yahoo! employee who just wants to make the world a worse place.

So much for the quality of Yahoo! Answers.

Fossil fuels are cheaper and abundant. Yes, they are finite but I don't believe there is any reason panic yet. Nor is there any reason to move to wind or solar energy on a large scale. There is no proven benefit to the environment and there is certainly a cost involved.

In other words, the cost/benefit analysis (my opinion) does not favor wind or solar for large scales. It's great for cottages off the grid or for you for your own reasons. Same goes with electric cars and many other "feel good" green choices. As a matter of fact, I find most "green" choices to be based on feel good emotions rather than objective cost/benefit analysis.

Overall, I surely support research and implementation of cheaper, abundant and cleaner power. One of the most promising in this regard in my humble opinion is thorium: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Futu...

Fossil fuels are cheaper, and occupy less land. They generally run all the time, which is also the case for nuclear power plants. I don't consider fossil fuel plants as harmful to the environment.

From the first link:

<<<As consumers, we pay for electricity twice: once through our monthly electricity bill and a second time through taxes that finance massive subsidies for inefficient wind and other energy producers.>>>

And there is even more. We pay extra fees in electrical for all sorts of things that are hidden taxes and those taxes are paid all the way through product production as well as our food and everything we buy. Politicians are so busy hiding taxes that the cost of things gets muddled and markets are distorted.

As far as the second article is concerned, the "hidden" costs for fossil fuels are imaginary costs that dim-witted political hacks have arbitrarily assigned to them IMO.