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At any rate, I sure hope all of this comes to fruition. I welcome lower electricity prices, which should be the ultimate result if all of these claims are true.
See, that's kind of the problem. What if it doesn't lower rates? Then you're not interested? What if it's good for the planet instead?? What good does it do you to save some money on electricity but you lose your house to a wildfire? All around me $500K houses (with some of the lowest electric rates in the nation) are being evacuated and lost in 100,000 acre conflagrations that are 0% contained and burn at 2500F, almost twice as hot as wildfires burned a decade ago. It's Climate Change. Want cheaper electricity move to Oregon. I think I'm paying $0.08/kwh. You need cheaper than that?
Put in the coordinates below into Google earth and see how much natural beauty is left in a Industrial Windmill Area.
The problem is birds plus so many other issues.
Here are the google earth co-ordinates: 35.056141 -118.319762
Copy and paste into Google Earth.
Take a look at the devastation by the road construction, the pads for the turbines, the rock pits to surface the roads, and then look at the density of windmills. The ENTIRE area is devasted.
How attractive is a Drilling Rig? A Refinery? How lovely is an open pit Coal Mine? We have Landfills, Sewage Treatment Plants, Quarries, Feedlots and a hundred other necessary accoutrements of civilization that are UGLY, smelly, and hazardous but ultimately necessary. I've never heard anyone complain about what offshore installations do to the natural beauty of the Louisiana coastline. Let's get a grip! A wind farm is a small price to pay for what it represents: progress in the migration away from Fossil Fuel dependence.
Given that energy is neither created nor destroyed, the short answer is "nothing." Without a solar cell to get in its way, a photon of light would hit the ground (or what ever) and bounce back out as one photon of heat energy. If that same photon were to strike the solar cell and get turned into electricity, that electricity would get used and eventually be dissipated back out as one photon of heat energy.
While that photovoltaic capture of energy is being used as electricity, one might argue that it's been taken out of circulation temporarily, so maybe the air temp is affected temporarily. But in practice, I bet no one can feel the difference in the temperature around a PV installation.
For wind, OTOH, it's the same argument about no net change over the long haul in photons in, photons out, but with enough large wind mills in a large enough area, could they effectively change wind speeds & patterns enough to alter weather??? I dunno. Mountain ranges popping up slowly over 10s of 1000s of years alter climates.
First thank you for not calling me a nut right off the bat. It sounds like you have some knowledge about light and heat so I would like to ask a few questions that your response has raised for me.
When light hits the ground unencumbered, the ground gets warm and also reflects light. I know this because I can see it and feel it's warmth. How is the ground warmed if one photon of light is reflected back as one photon of heat energy? We see the ground but that is not energy. The energy, heat, is absorbed by the ground as well as the atmosphere. No? Then with the absence of sunlight some of that heat energy absorbed by the ground is transferred back to the atmosphere when air temp is less than ground temp.
Solar panels and wind turbines both interfere with the back and forth transfer of heat energy created by the sunlight that is absorbed by the earth. Moving the sun's energy through an electrical grid means that the heat energy transfer back to the atmosphere will happen somewhere far from the original conversion of sunlight to energy. I see this resulting in climate change for sure but to what degree is a question only scientists and mathematicians can answer.
Mother Nature always sends us a bill. It's a question of how high it will be.
$15 GRAND (I typed that slowly to help you understand) put into a mortgage @~4% will wind up costing ~$30Gs over the life of the mortgage. Your mortgage tax deduction on $15Gs will save you ~$3000 over its life. (Your $500/yr interest deduction @ 20% tax bracket is only a savings of $100/yr.) So your PV cost you $27,000 AND you've missed out on a Dow account worth $85,000 after 25 yrs. You're 112 Grand behind.
And you've again admitted there needs to be conventional back-up power. That's got to be paid for-- twice the expense of conventional alone.
Guido, I don't think I can educate you. The mortgage payments on the pv system will cost less than the payments one would otherwise make to the utility company for electricity. Every year you are money ahead with the pv system.
Because one financed the purchase there was no out of pocket costs, so any money you want to put in the market is still available.
These ideas of yours are probably the reason for you impecunity.
When light hits the ground unencumbered, the ground gets warm and also reflects light. I know this because I can see it and feel it's warmth. How is the ground warmed if one photon of light is reflected back as one photon of heat energy? We see the ground but that is not energy. The energy, heat, is absorbed by the ground as well as the atmosphere.
What you are looking for is called albedo. It's the ratio of solar radiation reflected by a surface. For example, clean snow has an albedo of around 0.9 (reflects 90% and absorbs 10%), while asphalt is around 0.1 (opposite of snow).
So when you are putting up a PV panel you intercept the sunlight that would otherwise be hitting the surface below it... the ground, a rooftop, etc. If the albedo of the PV panel is higher than the surface under it, you'll be sending more solar radiation back into the sky than previously. Some of that will be absorbed in the atmosphere and converted to heat, and some will escape back into space. If the albedo of the PV panel is lower than the surface below it then the opposite will happen.
Keep in mind, homo sapiens has already made alterations to the earth's albedo that likely far exceed any change that might happen due to installing PV panels. Building highways and cities, tilling the earth, draining swampland, etc... all change the earth's albedo.
Simple answer: the amount of sunlight energy hitting the Earth's surface each day is on the order of 300x more than the electrical energy used, and of that energy, only about 1% is produced by PV or wind mills-- so right now we're only using 1/30,000th of the sun's earth bound energy to produce juice. Doubling or tripling that won't alter temps discernibly.
Any energy diverted to making electricity will be returned to the atmosphere: you burn gas to move your car and the car's kinetic energy is eventually returned to the atmosphere as heat from the brake disks when you stop. Same dif.
Because one financed the purchase there was no out of pocket costs, so any money you want to put in the market is still available.
Reread my post: if you take out a loan, you still have to pay it back PLUS interest. To pay back the principle, you have to take it out of the investment account, so you're still earning less.
And after 20 years, YOU HAVE TO REPLACE THE WHOLE $%#@* SYSTEM and incur the expense ALL OVER AGAIN.
Reread my post: if you take out a loan, you still have to pay it back PLUS interest. To pay back the principle, you have to take it out of the investment account, so you're still earning less.
And after 20 years, YOU HAVE TO REPLACE THE WHOLE $%#@* SYSTEM and incur the expense ALL OVER AGAIN.
Those payment are less than what your utility bill would be. Think this through.
What you are looking for is called albedo. It's the ratio of solar radiation reflected by a surface. For example, clean snow has an albedo of around 0.9 (reflects 90% and absorbs 10%), while asphalt is around 0.1 (opposite of snow).
So when you are putting up a PV panel you intercept the sunlight that would otherwise be hitting the surface below it... the ground, a rooftop, etc. If the albedo of the PV panel is higher than the surface under it, you'll be sending more solar radiation back into the sky than previously. Some of that will be absorbed in the atmosphere and converted to heat, and some will escape back into space. If the albedo of the PV panel is lower than the surface below it then the opposite will happen.
Keep in mind, homo sapiens has already made alterations to the earth's albedo that likely far exceed any change that might happen due to installing PV panels. Building highways and cities, tilling the earth, draining swampland, etc... all change the earth's albedo.
Thank you for the explanation. That is what I was trying to say exactly.
Of course now that leads me to more questions. I would assume that the albedo of solar panels is something that is factored into their construction and that the lower the albedo the more efficient the solar panel. Assuming that efficiency will be improved through time, more energy will be extracted from sunlight meaning more heat will be removed for the general location of the solar panels. This means more atmospheric and geological changes in that location. To what degree is debatable but isn't that the same debate as fossil fuels and greenhouse gases?
At this point it would make more sense to extract the sun's energy from the places humans have already impacted albedo like on rooftops and roadways. I guess my point is solar and wind are arrows in the quiver not the total answer and need to be implemented so they will cause the least amount of interference with nature.
Simple answer: the amount of sunlight energy hitting the Earth's surface each day is on the order of 300x more than the electrical energy used, and of that energy, only about 1% is produced by PV or wind mills-- so right now we're only using 1/30,000th of the sun's earth bound energy to produce juice. Doubling or tripling that won't alter temps discernibly.
Any energy diverted to making electricity will be returned to the atmosphere: you burn gas to move your car and the car's kinetic energy is eventually returned to the atmosphere as heat from the brake disks when you stop. Same dif.
Thank you for the link and the data.
I don't believe anyone really knows the tipping point of how much change the earth can withstand. We've already manipulated nature by changing the atmosphere with carbon emissions and moving all this energy around. I'm not suggesting we go back to living in caves but I do think we have a responsibility to progress in a way that has the least amount of impact.
Unfortunately we don't know what impact we are really having on the earth because we don't control everything in nature. But lately it seems that Mother Nature is sending the people who can least afford it the bill. Why not do whatever we can to support our progress with the least amount of stress on the planet as we can because outside of a mass extinction we end up paying for it anyway.
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