
The Green Energy Fantasy - gibsonf1
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22651&news_iv_ctrl=1021
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noonespecial
This kind of thing is really starting to irk me; and I'm a libertarian
(although, not a 'Randian' libertarian).

Summary: _Greentech sucks compared to the low low cost of wonderful coal._
Brilliant deduction. I've got a calculator too. The implicit (and never
stated) "solution" offered by articles like this is, "just keep on burning the
coal and don't think to much about it." Its just complaining without offering
up any ideas to fix things.

The whole point of _renewable_ energy is that its... (do I really have to say
it?). So Keith thinks green energy will wreck the economy? Wait till there's
no more coal. If the government is going to make-work, we might as well work
on saving our asses.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I'm actually a pretty big fan of Ayn Rand's works, so all that aside ...

How does it take "tens of thousands of acres" to house 1,000 wind turbines?
All the wind farms I've seen so far have a much higher turbine density than
that -- on the order of 1 / acre at least.

I also used to loathe wind farms as an example of a stupid resource sink,
since I so often saw them sitting idle, and since I considered all of the
energy required to manufacture and maintain the things versus their output.
Turns out, I was wrong. I finally found some data -- at
[http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(...](http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_\(EROI\)_for_wind_energy)
\-- and it turns out that wind kicks the pants off all the other energy
generating systems we have, even nuclear, in terms of energy-return-on-
investment.

I think this article is factually wrong.

