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Solar power. While sunlight is renewable -- for at least another four billion years -- photovoltaic panels are not. Nor is desert groundwater, used in steam turbines at some solar-thermal installations. Even after being redesigned to use air-cooled condensers that will reduce its water consumption by 90 percent, California's Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world's largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment.

Geothermal power. These projects also depend on groundwater -- replenished by rain, yes, but not as quickly as it boils off in turbines. At the world's largest geothermal power plant, the Geysers in California, for example, production peaked in the late 1980s and then the project literally began running out of steam.

Wind power. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the 5,700 turbines installed in the United States in 2009 required approximately 36,000 miles of steel rebar and 1.7 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to pave a four-foot-wide, 7,630-mile-long sidewalk). The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium -- rare earth metals that are rare because they're found in scattered deposits, rather than in concentrated ores, and are difficult to extract.

Biomass.

t expanding energy crops will mean less land for food production, recreation, and wildlife habitat. In many parts of the world where biomass is already used extensively to heat homes and cook meals, this renewable energy is responsible for severe deforestation and air pollution

Hydropower.

hydroelectric power from dams is a proved technology. It already supplies about 16 percent of the world's electricity, far more than all other renewable sources combined.

The amount of concrete and steel in a wind-tower foundation is nothing compared with Grand Coulee or Three Gorges, and dams have an unfortunate habit of hoarding sediment and making fish, well, non-renewable.

All of these technologies also require electricity transmission from rural areas to population centers. Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it

the life expectancy of a solar panel or wind turbine is actually shorter than that of a conventional power plant.

meeting the world's total energy demands in 2030 with renewable energy alone would take an estimated 3.8 million wind turbines (each with twice the capacity of today's largest machines), 720,000 wave devices, 5,350 geothermal plants, 900 hydroelectric plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 1.7 billion rooftop photovoltaic systems, 40,000 solar photovoltaic plants, and 49,000 concentrated solar power systems. That's a heckuva lot of neodymium.

"renewable energy" is a meaningless term with no established standards.

None of our current energy technologies are truly renewable, at least not in the way they are currently being deployed. We haven't discovered any form of energy that is completely clean and recyclable, and the notion that such an energy source can ever be found is a mirage.

Long did the math for California and discovered that even if the state replaced or retrofitted every building to very high efficiency standards, ran almost all of its cars on electricity, and doubled its electricity-generation capacity while simultaneously replacing it with emissions-free energy sources, California could only reduce emissions by perhaps 60 percent below 1990 levels -- far less than its 80 percent target. Long says reaching that target "will take new technology."

it will also take a new honesty about the limitations of technology

"According to our calculations, the cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity will go up by only one cent," says Economics Minister Philipp Rösler, head of Merkel's junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP). For an average household, this would correspond to the price of only one latte a month, says Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, of Merkel's Christian Democrats. Germany is rapidly switching to green energy and at almost no additional cost to consumers. What conservative politician would have thought such a thing possible just a few months ago?

In reality, though, the official calculations have little connection to reality. According to an assessment by the Rhenish-Westphalian Institute for Economic Research (RWI), the politicians' estimate of the costs of expanding renewable sources of energy is far too low, while the environmental benefits have been systematically overstated.

RWI experts estimate that the cost of electricity could increase by as much as five times the government's estimate of one cent per kilowatt hour. In an internal prognosis, the semi-governmental German Energy Agency anticipates an increase of four to five cents. According to the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, the additional cost could easily amount to "five cents or more per kilowatt hour."

An internal estimate making the rounds at the Economics Ministry also exceeds the official announcements. It concludes that an average three-person household will pay an additional 0.5 to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour, and up to five cents more in the mid-term. This would come to an additional cost of €175 ($250) a year. "Not exactly the price of a latte," says Manuel Frondel of the RWI.

The problem is the federal government's outlandish subsidies policy. Electricity customers are already paying more than €13 billion this year to subsidize renewable energy. The largest subsidies go to solar plants, which contribute relatively little to overall power generation, as well as offshore wind farms in the north, which are far away from the countries largest electricity consumers in Germany's deep south.

Photovoltaics, in particular, is now seen as an enormous waste of money. The technology receives almost half all renewable energy subsidies, even though it makes up less than one 10th of total green electricity production. And it is unreliable -- one never knows if and when the sun will be shining

For economic and environmental reasons, therefore, it would be best to drastically reduce solar subsidies and spend the money elsewhere, such as for a subsidy system that is not tied to any given technology. For example, wind turbines built on land are significantly more effective than solar power. They receive about the same amount of subsidy money, and yet they are already feeding about five times as much electricity into the grid. In the case of hydroelectric power plants, the relationship between subsidies and electricity generation is six times better. Biomass provides a return on subsidies that is three times as high as solar.

"We are dumping billions into the least effective technology," says Fritz Vahrenholt, the former environment minister for the city-state of Hamburg and now the head of utility RWE's renewable electricity subsidy Innogy.

"From the standpoint of the climate, every solar plant is a bad investment," says Joachim Weimann, an environmental economist at the University of Magdeburg. He has calculated that it costs about €500 to save a ton of CO2 emissions with solar power. In the case of wind energy, it costs only €150. In combination with building upgrades, the cost plummets to only €15 per ton of CO2 emissions savings.

German citizens will be able to see the consequences of solar subsidization on their next electricity bill. Since the beginning of the year, consumers have been assessed a renewable energy surcharge of 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity, up from about 2 cents last year. And the cost is only going up. Since the first nuclear power plant was shut down, the price of electricity on the European Energy Exchange in Leipzig has increased by about 12 percent. Germany has gone from being a net exporter to a net importer of electricity.

According to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSOE) in Brussels, Germany now imports several million kilowatt hours of electricity from abroad every day.

In displays on ENTSOE computers in Brussels, countries that produce slightly more electricity than they consume are identified in yellow on the monitors, while countries dependent on imports are blue. Germany used to be one of the yellow countries, but now that seven nuclear reactors have been shut down, blue is the dominant color. The electricity that was once generated by those German nuclear power plants now comes primarily from the Czech Republic and France -- and is, of course, more expensive. The demand for electricity is expected to increase in the coming years, particularly with growing numbers of electric cars being connected to the grid as they charge their batteries.

Solar panels only achieve their maximum capacity in the laboratory and at optimal exposure to the sun (1,000 watts per square meter), an ideal angle of incidence (48.2 degrees) and a standardized module temperature (25 degrees Celsius, or 77 degrees Fahrenheit). Such values are rare outside the laboratory. All photovoltaic systems are inactive at night, and they also generate little electricity on winter days

Examples include the University of San Diego, where 5,000 solar panels have been installed on 11 campus buildings to provide as much as 15% of the campus’s electricity. The university took advantage of federal and state incentives, negotiating a solar power purchase agreement that has resulted in a below-market cost of electricity obtained at a small upfront cost.

Some 80 percent of homes have solar panels that heat water. It is “the first” in the world with solar power, says Shoshana Dann, an associate at the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. That’s where extraordinary work is going on near the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion and a few miles from their humble home at Kibbutz Sde Boker, where hangs a 1955 statement of Ben-Gurion: “In the Negev the creative ingenuity and pioneering vitality of Israel will be tested. Scientists must develop... applied solar energy [and] wind-power for producing energy.”

Dr. David Faiman is director of the center where this dream is being realized. His main project is using sunlight to produce electricity. There’s a huge parabolic plate that focuses 1,000 times more sunlight on a photovoltaic panel than what usually powers a panel. This provides enormous efficiency in harvesting solar energy. Faiman’s rotating solar collector converts more than 70% of incoming solar energy into electricity, compared to industry norms of 10-25%. The center is collaborating with the Israeli company ZenithSolar in marketing solar collectors based on Faiman’s design. Faiman, who made aliya from the UK in 1973, says the way is now clear to manufacture solar energy systems that will compete with conventional technologies. His work in using concentrated sunlight more efficiently constitutes a great boost to solar photovoltaic power.

Forty years ago, nuclear energy was actually regarded as something of a savior for our environmental dilemmas because it didn’t pollute.  And this was well before we were even thinking about global warming or climate change.  It also didn’t take up a great deal of space.  You didn’t have to drown all of Glen Canyon to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity.  Four reactors would equal a row of wind turbines, each one three times as tall as Neyland Stadium skyboxes, strung along the entire length of the 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail.   One reactor would produce the same amount of electricity that can be produced by continuously foresting an area one-and-a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in order to create biomass.  Producing electricity with a relatively small number of new reactors, many at the same sites where reactors are already located, would avoid the need to build thousands and thousands of miles of new transmission lines through scenic areas and suburban backyards. 

While nuclear lost its green credentials with environmentalists somewhere along the way, some are re-thinking nuclear energy because of our new environmental paradigm – global climate change.  Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity today.  President Obama has endorsed it, proposing an expansion of the loan guarantee program from $18 billion to $54 billion and making the first award to the Vogtle Plant in Georgia.  Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal about developing a generation of mini-reactors that I believe we can use to repower coal boilers, or more locally, to power the Department of Energy’s site over in Oak Ridge.  The president, his secretary of energy, and many environmentalists may be embracing nuclear because of the potential climate change benefits, but they are now also remembering the other positive benefits of nuclear power that made it an environmental savior some 40 years ago

The Nature Conservancy took note of nuclear power’s tremendous energy density last August when it put out a paper on “Energy Sprawl.”  The authors compared the amount of space you need to produce energy from different technologies – something no one had ever done before – and what they came up with was remarkable.  Nuclear turns out to be the gold standard.  You can produce a million megawatts of electricity a year from a nuclear reactor sitting on one square mile.  That’s enough electricity to power 90,000 homes.  They even included uranium mining and the 230 square miles surrounding Yucca Mountain in this calculation and it still comes to only one square mile per million megawatt hours

Coal-fired electricity needs four square miles, because you have to consider all the land required for mining and extraction.  Solar thermal, where they use the big mirrors to heat a fluid, takes six square miles.  Natural gas takes eight square miles and petroleum takes 18 square miles – once again, including all the land needed for drilling and refining and storing and sending it through pipelines.  Solar photovoltaic cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity take 15 square miles and wind is even more dilute, taking 30 square miles to produce that same amount of electricity.

When people say “we want to get our energy from wind,” they tend to think of a nice windmill or two on the horizon, waving gently – maybe I’ll put one in my back yard.   They don’t realize those nice, friendly windmills are now 50 stories high and have blades the length of football fields.  We see awful pictures today of birds killed by the Gulf oil spill.  But one wind farm in California killed 79 golden eagles in one year. The American Bird Conservancy says existing turbines can kill up to 275,000 birds a year.

And for all that, each turbine has the capacity to produce about one-and-a-half megawatts.  You need three thousand of these 50-story structures to equal the output of one nuclear reactor

, wind power can be counted on to be there 10 to 15 percent of the time when you need it.  TVA can count on nuclear power 91 percent of the time, coal, 60 percent of the time and natural gas about 50 percent of the time.  This is why I believe it is a taxpayer rip-off for wind power to be subsidized per unit of electricity at a rate of 25 times the subsidy for all other forms of electricity combined. 

the “problem of nuclear waste” has been overstated because people just don’t understand the scale or the risk.  All the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been produced in this country would fit on a football field to a height of ten feet.  That’s everything.  Compare that to the billion gallons of coal ash that slid out of the coal ash impoundment at the Kingston plant and into the Emory River a year and a half ago, just west of here.  Or try the industrial wastes that would be produced if we try to build thousands of square miles of solar collectors or 50-story windmills.  All technologies produce some kind of waste.  What’s unique about nuclear power is that there’s so little of it.

Now this waste is highly radioactive, there’s no doubt about that.  But once again, we have to keep things in perspective.  It’s perfectly acceptable to isolate radioactive waste through storage.  Three feet of water blocks all radiation.  So does a couple of inches of lead and stainless steel or a foot of concrete.  That’s why we use dry cask storage, where you can load five years’ worth of fuel rods into a single container and store them right on site.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Energy Secretary Steven Chu both say we can store spent fuel on site for 60 or 80 years before we have to worry about a permanent repository like Yucca Mountain

then there’s reprocessing.  Remember, we’re now the only major nuclear power nation in the world that is not reprocessing its fuel.  While we gave up reprocessing in the 1970s, the French have all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 80 percent of their electricity stored beneath the floor of one room at their recycling center in La Hague.  That’s right; it all fits into one room.  And we don’t have to copy the French.  Just a few miles away at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory they’re working to develop advanced reprocessing technologies that go well beyond what the French are doing, to produce a waste that’s both smaller in volume and with a shorter radioactive life.  Regardless of what technology we ultimately choose, the amount of material will be astonishingly small.  And it’s because of the amazing density of nuclear technology – something we can’t even approach with any other form of energy

That will be a major transition, but another one took place already this past year: more financing went to utility-scale projects in the developing economies than in the industrialized ones. That change is driven by China, where investments were up by about 30 percent, reaching $49 billion.

The US, despite seeing a jump of 60 percent, still trailed far behind, with only about $25 billion in these investments.

Renewables are also becoming a major factor outside of the BrIC countries (Brazil, India, China). Latin American investments tripled to clear $6 billion, and other Asian nations saw 30 percent growth to $4 billion. But the big story is Africa, led by Egypt and Kenya, where investments were up nearly five-fold, reaching $3.6 billion.

Electricity generated by nuclear plants has held steady at about 8,400 quadrillion BTUs for the last several years, while renewables have experienced strong growth, reaching just over 8,000 Quads last year.