Category: Geeky Stuff

My brother sent me the link to this film.

Watch it soon, there’s no way of telling how long it will be up on YouTube especially since it blows the hell out of the New Green Energy deal.

I’m sure YouTube will find something in it that violates their terms of service, and take it down.

I watched it all. It’s an exposé about how so called green energy isn’t actually all that green. To make batteries, and solar panels, you have to mine and refine rare earth elements.

A lot of folks may not know that solar panels come in varying efficiencies. The most efficient (hence expensive) panels only convert about 20% of the light falling on them to useable electricity and that is at maximum. Add some clouds, haze, or if sun isn’t striking the panels dead on, and the efficiency drops. Solar panels also degrade over their life and have to be replaced.

Here’s a personal example, I have a portable 20W solar panel. It does indeed produce 20W in full direct sunlight if it is angled so that the sun is striking the panel at 90 degrees. But that requires realigning the panel about every 15 minutes or so.

Realistically my 20W panel in normal operation produces 7  to 12 watts. That’s enough to recharge my phone or iPad directly from the panel. It’s not enough to charge my computer. So I connect the panel to a battery pack. The panel charges the pack and the pack charges my other devices.

However, you’re almost always in a diminishing cycle. You’re pulling more power from the battery pack than you can replace.

One solution is to get bigger panels.

Yep, I can connect my 20W panel to a 30W panel and between the two I can charge my battery pack in a shorter amount of time, or if it’s overcast I can charge the pack in 6 – 12 hours. What I can’t do consistently is charge devices and the pack.

It’s a rare day indeed if I can stay on the positive side of the charge curve. It’s not that big a deal since this rig is for camping. I’ve not even talked about camp lights.

My point is this. It takes a large solar surface area to generate power. And that power generation is only working when the sun is out. At night or on a dark rainy day you’ve got no power generation.

In my case with proper energy management this solution works fine for camping. After all I’m camping to get away from technology right? The problem is, it’s not really all that scalable.

I can say this because I’ve actually experienced the process.

I’d guess that a large percentage of the population hasn’t actually worked with a solar panel and because of this, they simply believe that solar power is a 100% solution.

It’s not the average Joe’s fault that they don’t have experience.

I can hold the rabidly Green Deal people to account because they should have actual facts before preaching at the rest of us. (Greta, I’m looking at you.)

When you start doing the math, it becomes obvious quickly that you need a large array of solar panels in an area of the country where you get sun 99% of the time and you need some kind of very efficient storage medium (battery) to store what you don’t use so that you can use it later.

For instance, the roof of a house provides a large surface area and can give you a big array of panels. Without storage, at night you’re going to be dependent on the standard electrical grid.

That’s how most of the home solar installations work. In daytime the roof panels power most, if not all the house needs. At night the house switches over to the normal electrical grid. After all you don’t want your fridge, or heater not running at night or inoperative during the winter. 

The practical upshot of this is you’ll always need to have a big generator running at a public utility somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I think houses should all have solar, if for no other reason than it would allow the reduction of power demand on the power plant, meaning overall, less power demand would mean less pollution.

It should also be pointed out, research into solar panels is ongoing and at some point we might be able to get panels with much higher efficiencies.

However, this comes at a cost. Solar panels are made of some pretty exotic materials and creation of panels means mining and processing those exotic materials.

Guess what? There are some really nasty chemicals involved in solar panel, computer chip, and battery manufacture. Not to mention the strip mining, pollution, and deforestation required to obtain and process those raw materials.

Solar is not a complete solution and it may never be.

Wind turbines have essentially the same problems, they don’t produce power if the wind isn’t blowing. With turbines you also need a very large amount of space.

As an aside, I personally enjoy pissing off the smug, rabidly green electric car owners. I do it with a simple question, “How is the electricity you charge your car with being produced?”

The ensuing conversation is often a wonderful demonstration of faulty logic, and lack of understanding about science, or how things work.

Again don’t take this the wrong way, electric cars are great. They’re fast, zero emission, and quiet. In cities they’re probably the best way to reduce air pollution and contribute to the overall health of the folks living in the cities, especially, in the case of those folks with respiratory problems.

But the solution isn’t perfect. Somewhere, there is an electric plant burning something to spin generators to make the power to charge that car.

Somewhere there’s a strip mine that’s produced the lithium used in that car’s batteries. At the end of the batteries usable life, there’s going to be a toxic dump stacked high with battery packs that no-one wants.

Most of us notice our phone batteries start not lasting the whole day after a couple of years. Imagine that in your car. What happens when you can’t make it to the grocery store and back on a full charge? You either get a new car, or new batteries. Either way, something is going to end up in a dump someplace.

I’ve always asked, “Just how green is that?”

I tend to keep cars 10 or 20 years. I maintain them and drive ‘em until they fall apart or are totaled by some idiot driver hitting me. I tend to keep my cellphone for much longer than other people. Though not as long as some of my friends. 

For me it’s about cost versus return on investment, and factored into that is also responsibility. Do I need to have a new car, phone, computer, or TV, every 3 years? Do I want to add something substantial to the pile of waste?

Usually, I find myself saying nope, and I’m good with keeping my good old reliable stuff for another few years.

I’m not even particularly Green. I’m simply a guy who thinks we shouldn’t be wasteful. Call it a philosophy of trying to live my life like a backpacker. Pack out your trash… Leave it as you found it.

Many electric car owners are smug and often self righteous about “being green” until you point out where the components and power come from. They get really pissed off when you point out that all they’ve done is shifted the problem to another part of the country or world.

It’s not that these people are mean or stupid, they’ve just never connected the dots. They’ve bought into the illusion that green energy is reducing pollution. A lot of these folks are content to live in an “out of sight, out of mind” vision of the world.

When they do connect the dots, they’re usually pissed off and never look at their 65K electric car in quite the same way again.

That’s why I was pleased to see a movie like Planet of the Humans, it’s probably not all 100% accurate, but it points out that shifting the issue isn’t solving the issue.

I really enjoyed the part about biomass.

Somehow that group thinks that burning wood is better than burning oil.

On its face that makes no sense!

One need only look at the energy density of wood versus oil to see that we’ll deforest the planet in short order, maintaining our current energy output with wood. 

Ask yourself this question. What is oil?

Oil, in its purest sense is concentrated biomass. So theoretically burning oil efficiently is going to be better than burning wood to generate power.

I’ll admit that I thought the biomass generation plants were burning stuff from landfills. If that were true then every kilowatt from that source is a win. (Assuming there was no increase in toxic chemicals being released into the air.) But if you’re cutting down trees to fuel the biomass plants then you’ve lost your mind.

There was one glaring omission from this movie. Nuclear power.

I know that all the green activists, and even those who are not so green are opposed to nuclear power. There are indeed risks with nuclear.

That being said, I’d suggest that you watch Pandora’s Promise with an open mind before you categorically say no to nuclear power.

I saw this on Netflix a while ago, It’s currently available on YouTube for rent, and Amazon Prime.

Planet of the Humans, indirectly suggests that population control is the only way out of the climate problem. There is one person in the movie that mentions we think technology will save us. Then the movie kind of brushes past the technology issue.

Pandora’s Promise presents another option. It may not be the best option but it might be a viable one that could substantially reduce our consumption of, and reliance on fossil fuels.

There’s another type of reactor that essentially uses the waste materials from the reactors we’ve been using for decades. Guess what? They may have the potential to help solve the problem of spent fuel rods that are currently in storage around the world.

These spent rods are radioactive and hazardous. Wouldn’t it be better to get rid of them, generate power doing it, and not have to worry about leaking fuel rod storage? Just asking…

In a perfect world, we’d feed our nuclear warheads into these reactors and metaphorically beat our swords into plowshares. Again, just a thought…

I should mention I’m not convinced that Climate Change is anything under our control. For me, these issues are more about clean air, drinkable water, and living in a beautiful world.

Let’s face it we’ve been teenagers leaving our shit all over our room. I think it’s time that we grew up and recognized that a clean room, house, or planet, is simply a better way to live.

That belief doesn’t require you to agree with any political agenda or pick any sides. It’s a belief that probably most of the people on the planet can agree to without any coercion.

Give it a thought. You don’t have to agree…

Have a great day.