The following is from: David Pristash  

If you are here on this forum, then you are probably an engineer or technical person like me and are interested in technical issues. Over the past six years or more I have worked exclusively on energy related projects. But I got into energy seriously after CWRU sponsored the National Energy Seminar in June 2005 at Severance Hall here in Cleveland. That was an eye opening event as I came away from it seeing that there was no US Energy Policy despite the fact a panel of "experts" knew then  an Energy crisis was coming.

Since then I have devoted as much time as I could to see from a technical point of view what would make the most sense. What I found was confusion on terms, what energy and storage are, where the energy is and how to get clean energy. For example, how can E85 be considered clean when it emits more CO2 then gasoline on a per mile basis? But then the DOE is driven by politics more then science and so its no surprise we get E85 and there is a big push for wind turbines.

What I would like to do is show why "wind turbines" are a bad idea. But before I do that, I'm going to need to set the stage. So the first thing I'm going to do is show how energy should be classified and what it costs to produce.This is an important issue as the US Congress is going to be voting on a bill  -- H.R. 2454, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act 2009."  But this bill will not achieve any of it primary objectives. Instead, it will seriously reduce economic growth and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The following Table shows the source of energy (in quadrillion watts) on the left and where it was used. What you will not see is that electric power generation is the only a way to take fuel and deliver it to the users in a suitable formr. The upper part of the table shows fuels that are carbon based and which therefore emit CO2 including E85. The bottom half of the table shows fuels or sources which do not emit CO2. Clearly this country runs on carbon, almost 90%.

The next table shows what the Energy Information Agency (EIA) thinks that energy costs. (I did the best I could at getting this information properly classified.  And I'm confident that any errors of classification are not material).

Now since we have the units and the cots of energy in the same format we can determine unit costs and so  the next table shows what it costs to produce a Quad of energy (in billions of dollars per Quad).

What stands out is the very high cost of wind, solar PV ,and geothermal. But since the real focus today is "wind" power and that is the majority in that category, we'll assume that that row represents Wind Energy. 
The purpose of the House bill called Cap And Trade is to raise the price of carbon energy in the hopes of driving down the costs of wind generated power. That is not likely for a number of reasons,  so the net result will be a significant increase in the cost of energy. Remember, 90% of our energy is carbon based.  

Over the next few posts that I intend to place here, I will try to show that the move to wind is environmentally risky, will do little to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, and it will do nothing to improve our energy independence.

This is not a discussion on Global Warming it is a discussion on how to produce clean energy.

I'll give a clue as to why wind is risky. In 2050, the US Census bureau predicts there will be almost 420 million people in the US. And since we are planning a major overhaul of the energy sector, we must think in decades  and 2050 is therefore not all that far off.  So if nothing changes we will need at least another 40 Quad just to handle the extra 100 million people.  So assuming we can convert 17.7 Quad of electric power to wind and 9.9 Quad of the personal transportation fleet to an all or partial electric, we will need 27.67 Quad from wind power.

What would that, what would it cost, and what are thee hidden and serious environmental risk associated with it?. I've work it out already and I'll take you though the steps over the next couple of weeks.   

Clearly the potential for TREMENDOUS job destruction exists if green or clean energy is mandated. In Missouri, green energy is mandated at 15% by some date in the future. No one seems to even care that we need electricity at the flip of the switch, not just when the wind blows, or the sun shines. Maybe scientists will develop better electricity storage devices, given enough need, I don't know. OK, assume that they do develop cheap and efficient electricity storage, it seems obvious that companies that need a lot of electricity will move to states that don't have clean energy mandates, given that clean energy is always much more expensive than our currently most used sources, coal, nuke, etc. If companies start moving out of Missouri, then the tiny number of jobs that are created by clean energy initiatives will be swamped by the job losses caused by companies fleeing to states with cheaper energy.

I found a number (don't we always like a number in our pocket?)...2.2 jobs lost per clean job created. A study from King Juan Carlos University in Spain looked at gov't clean energy initiatives and job creation, and discovered, for various reasons, 2.2 jobs were lost for every 1 clean job created. The name of the report is: "Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources" Gabriel Alvarez, et al, March 2009. I found a few counterarguments to some of their conclusions, which of course are based on the assumptions they made. For instance, Spain uses one method to finance the green subsidies, the US has used another--the difference in the methods would substantially change the job creation vs. job loss numbers. BUT, who is to say we won't uses Spain's method, just because we use another financing method in the past? Anything is possible--if you would have told me the taxpayers would be buying GM and handing it over to the unions, or sticking it to the secured creditors of Chrysler and completely destroying their stake in that company, all by gov't fiat, I would have thought you were crazy! I don't think it's beyond the realm of comprehension that a bunch of politicians in a room will hammer out a financing approach that would benefit THEIR campaign contributors, to the detriment of their constituents.

It's obvious I am nitpicking, I suppose, but you'd expect better from an engineering site--Watts is a unit of power, not a unit of energy. Power is energy per time, of course, not energy itself. It would be like saying the distance between A and B is 25 miles per hour. While the distinction between power and energy may not be important for sources like nuke and coal, which can produce energy 24/7, the distinction is very important when looking at intermittent sources such as wind and solar, don't you think?

 On the other hand, perhaps the unit Quad to which the author refers is not Quadrillion watts, but is a unit of energy equal to 10¹⁵ (a short-scale quadrillion) BTU,^[1] or 1.055 × 10¹⁸ joules (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in SI units. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(energy)

I am a little confused by the cost numbers--I had read not too long ago that coal produced electricity cost about 5 cents per kilowatt hour, and 'green' energy like wind closer to 15 cents per kilowatt-hr, yet you are showing something closer to 1/2 rather than 1/3 the costs of coal, relative to wind.

I agree with your conclusions on all of these so called alternative enrgy solution, perhaps not for the reasons you may have concluded, but I'm sure we do have some commonality. To me these are all expensive ideas that are driven primarily by politics and ideology, without regard as to whether all parties involved get real benefits, ie can the supplier or provider make a profit and can the consumer see lower costs and also reliable service. With these energy sources, probably only the supplier side sees any real benefits. So lets stck it to the consumer, once again.

I am not one that believes in all the global warming bull, Earth is a complex system with innumerable redundencies that always tend to bring the environment back too some stae of equilibrium. However, I do see a real problem for all of us, and that is the accumulation of waste, which can only increase as the population increases. I have found, what I think is a viable solution ie. turn the waste into energy. I know there are many gasification and waste recovery ideas out there, but many are only targeted to specific segments of the waste collected. The process that I have researched is called the Biosphere system. This system provides both profits and savings as well as reclamation of waste sites and consumption of collected waste of any kind. Continuous electrical energy is produced, along with potable water and the reclamation of valuable metals and the production of pozzolanic ash. I have seen this as a viable and effective Green technology and have already invested in the company.

There are problems out there to solve, but these should be ones that pass the test of reality and should not be based on politics but on whether all parties involved benefit, not just some preferred individuals or entities.