Too Pessimistic about Renewable Energy
Solar powered biodiesel operation for Clean Energy Biofuels.
Recently, Michael Noble of Fresh Energy offered a terrific post out about how renewable energy growth has far outpaced what everyone thought possible over the past decade or so. He’s writing from a Minnesota perspective:
How wrong we were to think that a $2 billion renewable energy investment would be ambitious. Today, the region supports more than $20 billion.
But we weren’t the only ones that were timid in our predictions of renewable electricity’s potential … many experts were way off on how wind and solar electricity would grow over the last decade.
Across the Southeast, utility staff and other energy experts regularly downplay the scale of the renewable energy opportunity. We all need to remind ourselves that with intent, ambition and effort, we can exceed predictions and, perhaps, meet public expectations!
One survey response from a March 2012 report by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications.
Tags: biofuel, Clean Energy Biofuels, Fresh Energy, Minnesota, Renewable Energy, solar, solar energy, wind, wind energy
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Renewable generators do not return the energy used to manufacture them. They are waste of precious fossil fuel energy. The law of diminishing energy returns.
Comment by Harquebus on September 11, 2012 9:54 pm
@Harquebus Your comment is unsubstantiated and just plain wrong. The only law that applies here is free speech.
For anyone who is interested, see Table 8 of Sovacool, BK. “Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey,” Energy Policy 36 (8) (August, 2008), pp. 2940-2953. That’s the fastest reference I could find to refute such nonsense, although it is expressed in terms of CO2 and not fossil fuel energy.
Comment by John D. Wilson on September 12, 2012 2:50 pm