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Don't let Poland become like my country, France. [630]
Don't think so...we are concentrating more and more on renewable/green energies and our engineers will lead the field in that technology too in the future, even more so as they do so already.
There are some problems with the 3 main renewable energy sources already surfacing. This is how it looks in US/Canada:
- biofuels are basically busted. In the US 12% of agricultural land devoted to biofuels replaced 1% of conventional oil. If the US stopped food production completely it would still be 88% short of the need. Not to mention the inconvenient details that it would have to import all its food
- photovoltaics (solar panel) the technology has moved ahead quite a bit in the last decade but it is still short of optimal. The Sun throws about 1.3 KWh per square meter on a sunny day. An average household in the US/Canada uses over 30KWh of energy per day. The number of panels and thus the area required to satisfy the need would require 23sq/meters per household if the Sun was up 24/7. It's not. Where I live we have about 220 (from memory) sunny days per year. Generously, I will use 12 hour days, even though they are much shorter in Winter. That means that to power my house I would need about 60 sq/meter of solar panels.
There is another trick. The most efficient panels are rated at about 20%. That means I would need 300 square meters of panels to supply my house with energy. That's lot. A city of 40,000 households would require 12 square kilometers for solar panels, which would cause huge environmental impact on plants, animals and micro-climate affecting both. Not a very green idea.
A installation of solar panels to yield 10KWh costs $40,000 ( had a quote from a few companies). My current cost is about $1100 per year, so I would break even a few years after I die (based on life expectancy for males in Canada) and that using only 1/3 of the energy I need. That's if the photocells survive that long. Currently their life is estimated at 20 years, i.e. I would have to replace them before I die, which would push my break-even date to about 20 to 30 years after I die.
A 25 year old who just bought a house would break even at the age of 60.
Still, there are some additional practical problems. do I have enough space on my property. I do, but there are trees around. A shadow cast one one single element of the solar panel bank causes ALL panels to work at decreased (as low as 30%) capacity. I could cut the trees but this throws out of the window the idea of "green" energy.
The roof of the house is an option, but I need to get a permit for that, and I need an engineer's opinion that the roof will carry the weight, which is an additional $1000 plus $5000 for roof installation. If the roof is too weak then it means yet more money ($5000 to $20000) and all that pushes the return of investment to about the 100th anniversary of my death.
There are many more issues and associated costs, but this is just to give you an idea that "solar" ain't as green or as cheap as you may think.
- Wind energy is particularly close to what I know about green energy as there is plenty of wind power turbines around here (the lakes, open spaces and all). There is not a week that I can just keep driving on the highway without having to stop to yield to a column of police escorted vehicles carrying huge tower elements for those wind turbines. The fukcers are huge.
There is a significant resistance to wind turbines here. Not by the kumbaya types of course. They live far away from the turbines. The opposition comes from those who have to live close to and under the turbines. The requirements are that turbines must be 500 meters or more from the nearest house. A lot of people say it's not enough. Recently municipal governments were voted out because they supported wind power. Things are being reversed now, and our provincial elections this year are already promising the scrapping of wind towers, specifically Ontario's contract with Samsung.
Oh, and those birds do bump against the propellers. Thousands. People are pissed off finding dead geese around their backyards.
I'm all for renewable energy sources and, as I mentioned above, I investigated the option for myself. It just doesn't add up at this point. I'm sure German engineers will be able to increase the efficiencies of green energy and to lower their costs. I just hope that the break even points won't be made attractive by crazy increases of energy prices. For now it is simply not affordable.
