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Forums - General Discussion - More Drilling in America Issue is Silly

largedarryl on 20 October 2008
NJ5 said:
largedarryl said:

I have one question about this post, have you ever considered what would happen if all the human required power was generated by your mentioned means?

Solar - currently this would require large amounts of usable energy for growing foods. Your answer will be in the deserts, but what would be the effect of removing all the heat from the desert?

Wind - no way this is even possible as power generation is so inconsistent. There have also been some very serious environmental problems caused by large scale wind farms

Geothermal - may not be a big issue, but I am not too sure I would want to know the effects of rapid cooling of the inner planet. Although that is unlikely to be a concern I don't know how large scale this would need to be to power a single US state.

Tidal/wave - see the same problems caused by the wind power problem

 

As it stands right now, there is very little in the near future that will offer full scale energy production. Since we are capable of using electricity to do everything, we will eventually need something that can do this with minimal resources. The most likely things to replace coal/oil is going to be nuclear fission, then most likely fussion power. The only problem right now is are we going to be able to transition from the fossil fuels to the next step without a world war.

 


I don't think many people advocate putting all the eggs in the same basket. Good energy infrastructure means combining different power sources for reliability. Look at Denmark where 20% of power comes from wind on average, but during high-wind periods this can go up to 80% if I recall correctly.

I have to ask though, what are those very serious environmental problems caused by large scale wind farms that you mentioned?

PS: Obviously any power source (or any big construction in general) will have an environmental impact. I don't see many people claiming renewable energy sources are worse than non-renewable ones though.

 

Without going into any studies, but basically the most ideal places for deployment of wind farms (with the exception of desert areas) are areas that are likely inhabited by significant amounts of wildlife.  Because of this, the only places that North American governments recommend placing wind farms is on farmland (where there isn't a lot of natural wildlife already).  I've also heard of the problems with the direct pollution from the wind turbines into the environments, since wind turbines require large amounts of lubricant and coolant to work.  I don't really think any solution is going to be a single solution, but to get any significant amount of wind power there need to be relatively large scale wind farm deployment in the most ideal locations. 

 

Of course any type of solution we come up will have an environmental impact, but the problem with a lot of the people that tout Wind/solar/tidal/geothermal talk like these power generation methods are as clean as they come (as I used to think that way), and when I was in post secondary doing plenty of research on nuclear power generation, I gained a slightly more realistic view of these "clean" power generations.

 

P.S. I don't know if any of my explanation of wind power environmental effects makes any sense, but I would be happy to try to make my jumbled thoughts in my head clearer.