1 — Fossil Fuels are less efficient forms of solar energy.
We all know fossil fuels are the remains of decayed plants, or animals that ate the plants, or animals that ate the animals; and the plants got their energy from the sun. Well consider that the efficiency of photosynthesis is only about 1 - 4% at the cellular level and probably never more than 10% (more) and solar panels or photovoltaic can be 24% (even more). This makes fossil fuels not only less efficient but a less efficient form of the same energy, solar.
Now add to that the business of finding them, digging them, transporting them, etc. Now add the cost of damage from pollution and the health risks involved. You don’t even need to bring up climate change, energy independence, the finite nature of fossil fuels, or the renewable aspect of...well, renewables to see the benefits.
2 — Jimmy Carter’s Whitehouse solar water heaters were the tip of the melting iceberg.
On June 20, 1979, the Carter administration installed 32 solar water heaters for $28,000. This was just the start of his proposed energy policy.
Carter outlined a solar- powered future. He would ask Congress to approve a $100 million "solar energy bank" with the goal of generating 20 percent of U.S. power from alternative energy sources (i.e., not Middle East oil) by 2000. To fund this ambitious plan, Carter said, he would urge Congress to pass a "windfall profits" tax on the domestic oil industry and approve subsidies to encourage contractors to install solar panels on new and existing buildings.
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By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for
renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. "The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion," Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. "It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy."
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And the fate of the panels?
More than a dozen Carter solar panels now remain over Unity’s cafeteria, all of them defunct. Others are also stowed in a garage, trapped in what must be the ninth concentric circle of green hell. In 2006, one panel made it down to the Carter Library in Atlanta, delivered there, fittingly, by two students in a vegetable oil-powered vehicle.
The Carter library gladly took them, perhaps sensing the deepening “I-told-you-so” irony of our moment. (Between 1973 and 2003, for example, America’s oil importing had gone up sharply, from 35 to 60 percent of its total oil.)
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3 — There’s no such thing as free energy.
So there are about 115,227,000 households in the US. What would it take to turn them all into little power plants?Lets say for ease of brain wrapage you add solar and wind to each one so that wind production offsets solar when the sun isn’t shining and vice versa. Lets also say the systems you add are about in the middle of the average ranges (more, more, MORE, EVEN MORE) of installation costs for solar and wind which puts us at about $50,000 per household. Simple math and zero counting tells us that it would take $5.8 trillion to make every household in America powered by renewable energy. Sounds like a lot but consider this…
Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
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4 — Islands are unique testing grounds for going 100% renewable.
In 1997, Samsø won a government competition to become a model renewable energycommunity. Since then, 21 wind turbines have been built on Samsø – an island 48 km long and 24 km wide with a population of approximately 4000. Ten were built on a sandbank off the island’s south coast and another 11 dotted all over the island, and the island has long been considered one of the most successful green energy projects to have launched since environmentalists started raising the alarm about climate change around thirty years ago. Alongside the turbines, the houses in Samsø’s 22 villages are heated by power plants powered by furnaces fired by wood chips and straw and farms of man-sized solar panels in fields kept trim by herds of sheep.
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El Hierro now has five wind turbines with a combined installed capacity of 11.5 megawatts soon to provide the majority of the electricity for the island. When wind production exceeds demand, excess energy will pump water from a reservoir at the bottom of a volcanic cone to another reservoir at the top of the volcano 700 meters above sea level. The upper reservoir stores more than 132 million gallons of water. The stored water acts as a battery. When demand rises and there is not enough wind power, the water will be released to four hydroelectric turbines with a total capacity of 11 MW.
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Prior to 2012, Tokelau’s residents relied on three diesel-driven power stations, burning 200 liters per day at a cost of nearly $800,000 per year. Tokelauans only had electricity 15 to 18 hours per day.
They now have three solar photovoltaic systems, one on each atoll. The 4,032 solar panels (with a capacity of around one megawatt), 392 inverters, and 1,344 batteries provide 150 percent of their current electricity demand, allowing the Tokelauans to eventually expand their electricity use. In overcast weather, the generators run on local coconut oil, providing power while recharging the battery bank. The only fossil fuels used in Tokelau now are for the island nation’s three cars.
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Of course not everything always goes as planned. But keep the future goal in mind and keep moving forward.
El Hierro’s next goal is to replace all 4,500 of El Hierro’s cars with electric vehicles. According to Javier Morales, El Hierro’s councilman for sustainability, if they sell electricity at the same price as gas, they can recoup the necessary $90 million in infrastructure costs in 10 years. The EV batteries will be charged with excess energy from the hydro-wind plant. “The whole system will be integrated,” Morales told TIME magazine. “It’s beyond green. When the power plant and the car system interact, it will be like galaxies colliding.”
The island has also embarked on a solar thermal program to replace electric water heaters and a PV rooftop program. Future plans include having all the island’s agricultural cooperatives convert their fields to organic production (they have already signed on to the plan), with each farm having a biodigester that converts waste into methane for fuel and fertilizer.
“At first, it was simply an issue of becoming more self-sufficient,” Padrón told TIME. “We were completely dependent on outside deliveries and could be cut off at a moment’s notice. But then with the global energy crisis, and climate change, and everything else that’s happened, we’ve realized it has a lot more value.”
5 — You can do things right now.
Open thread for night owls: Community-owned renewable power could be a game-changer in California
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