Renewable Energy Hoax
Maybe it just comes with the territory, but I run across a couple of people per week who rattle off calculations that suggest that renewable energy makes no sense in terms of its basic physics and mathematics. The website http://renewable.50webs.com/ and its owner Christopher Calder who claim that “Renewable energy is a disaster, not a solution!” seem to be an example:
It is a mathematically provable fact that you cannot replace oil, coal, and natural gas with windmills, solar panels, and biofuels. Renewable energy schemes other than traditional hydroelectric power are resource hogs that take up huge amounts of space while providing very little usable energy in return. Contrary to popular belief, solar, wind, wave energy, and biofuel schemes are not “energy efficient,” and their ultra-high cost is an accurate measurement of that inherent inefficiency. Solar photovoltaic cells are so inefficient that it would take about 60 square miles of expensive solar panels to generate just one gigawatt of electricity.
The guy goes on for pages like this, and seems not to be at all mollified by my comments that the cost of PV continues to fall and will be equivalent to coal by sometime between 2014 and 2018, or by the concept that IBM, GE, Siemens, and the world’s most successful investors are pouring billions of dollars into this “hoax.”
Who is this guy? Better question: For whom does he work?
