Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The foolishness of wind dependency

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=483403

...legislators are promoting "green" energy and jobs, via new mandates, standards, tax breaks and subsidies. However, the U.S. would need 180,000 1.5-megawatt wind turbines by 2020, just to generate the 600 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity needed to comply with the Waxman-Markey global warming bill, retired energy and nuclear engineering professor James Rust calculates.

Erecting these forests of concrete and steel would require millions of acres of scenic, habitat and agricultural lands, and 126 million tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass and "rare earth" minerals for the turbines (700 tons per turbine); prodigious quantities of concrete, steel, copper and land for new transmission lines; and still more land, fuel and raw materials for backup gas-fired generators.

I don't think our legislators have a feakin' clue.

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