Maggie's Farm

The irony of most/all of the alternative energy models is that they require more energy into the process then they produce. A classic example is a very large photo voltaic plant in China that was built with it's own dedicated coal fired power plant. Why wouldn't they have used a PV powered energy source instead? If there was ever a perfect place and reason to use PV this would have been it. But of course the simple answer is that energy from a coal fired plant costs about $.02 per kWh while energy from a PV plant varies from about $.32-.64 per kWh. The variance is a result of the amount of solar irradiation available in various locations. The simple fact is it takes so much energy to create a PV system from raw materials to finished product that it will never produce as much energy in it's lifetime. To put that another way a 200 watt PV panel placed in an optimal location will produce about 5 hours of energy a day or 1000 watts. In it's servicable lifetime of about 30 years (actually less since it's efficiency drops by 1%-3% a year) it produces 10,000 kwh of power (minus about 20%-40% due to inefficiences and decreasing output over it's lifetime). But it takes more then 10,000 kwh of energy to mine, refine, manufacture, deliver and maintain that panel over it's lifetime. Everyone in the industry and the government knows this. Arguably many in the environmental community know it as well but it is likely most are clueless and simply parrot the mantra they are given. So why do we continue to build these plants and subsidize them if they are in fact so inefficient? The simple answer is that while they are very inefficient in generating energy they are incredibly efficient in creating piles of money from government subsidies. A simple payola of $100,000 to a congressman can yield a loan/profit of $100,000,000 from the department of energy. Now that is a ROI that any businessman and politician can understand.

Statistical fraud is easy, there are so many ways to prove or disprove something through statistics. Picking the starting and ending points of a statistical analysis is one of the simplest tricks to deceive. If they had choosen 1934 instead of 1979 the world today would be considerably cooler. If they had choosen 1850 which would have been a very reasonable and honest starting point it would have destroyed the meme that SUV's destroyed the environment and would have at the same time made it fairly obvious that we were in a mild warming cycle that inevitaby followed a cooling cycle. In truth there was no "good" starting point but 1979 was good enough if they could just get the MSM to go along with the scam. And they did, and it worked pretty well for awhle but now seems to have fallen apart. What we are witnessing now is the last throes of the AGW scam and the degree to which the MSM has been part of the scheme is being exposed. But no worries the grifters will regroup and come up with another great con to sell to the ignorant and naive.