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Water, Electricity, Clean Air: Pick One: MY 2 CENTS The occasional musings of a political consultant with more friends than money. By Michael Lewis California Edison charges us about $.15 per kilowatt hour to generate that power. For solar, wind and geothermal to be cost effective, they need $.20 to $.25 per kilowatt hour to just break even. Add to that another dime for the cost of transmission since there aren’t any power lines in most of these places and the costs really escalate. But a potential doubling of power bills isn’t the only problem! Conventional solar plants require water for cooling and require 2 to 3 times as much water per kilowatt as a coal fired plant. The solar plants that don’t use water are not as efficient and require more land to produce the same amount of power. Currently there are proposals to cover tens of thousands of acres in the California desert with solar panels. But lack of water isn’t the only problem. The environmentalists for all their insistence on renewable power have lined up universally to oppose solar plants in the desert because of the impacts on the environment. They have also opposed wind turbines because birds fly into the propellers. I don’t doubt that they will find perfectly sound and heart wrenching reasons to oppose the other alternatives as well. Instead they propose that abandoned farm land should be used for the land gobbling solar arrays. So a lack of land may not be a problem. Unfortunately most of that abandoned farm land was created by farmers who cut down their orchards and didn’t plant their crops because they didn’t have any water to grow them. Where they are going to get the water to cool the solar I don’t know. And, we won’t talk about how much additional planet warming carbon dioxide went into the atmosphere because those crops were not around to absorb it. Which, by the way, is the reason to require 33% renewable power in the first place, to reduce global warming carbon dioxide. Then, there are other environmentalists who think we should use our crops for fuel rather than food. But one gallon of fuel from irrigated corn takes 650 gallons of water One gallon of gas from oil takes only one gallon of water. So if you connect the dots, we live in a state where we don’t want to develop any more land and we don’t have enough water. So we’ve decided that we need to develop alternative energy sources that consume enormous quantities of both. It’s going to double and triple our electric bills not to mention our water bills. It will drive more manufacturing jobs out of state due to the high cost of power than it will create in low wage solar installation jobs. But we will get the trophy for being the first in the nation to do it. Surprisingly, no one has actually demonstrated on paper that there will be a net reduction of even a single ounce of carbon dioxide from all this shuffling around. In the meantime, all the rest of the country will be enjoying cheap power from the 100+ years of shale oil and tar sands that are just now being extracted in North Dakota and Canada. So apparently it isn’t a lack of water, it isn’t a lack of land and it isn’t a lack of money or will. All we lack is a practical vision and some common sense. Welcome to California! Source: San Gabriel Valley Business
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