As my Governor might say, “Windpower is free no matter what it costs”
Here’s my top pick for educating yourself about commercial windpower. Remember this site is for DIYers, we have different learning styles, and it’s best we find articles and information tuned for us. You’ll find John Droz Starts out with a message about KISS principles. It’s very likely he owns a few hand tools, unlike most in Media, he could likely change his own oil, replace a bad breaker in the fuse panel, AND he actually knows the difference between a BTU and an IOU.
In nearly every technical conversation there’s a duty bound effort to discuss meaningful numbers. Business people discuss numbers of fish caught, the price per pound, logs, board feet of lumber, tons of bricks produced, units of energy. There are summaries of labor hours invested, and more. As I look over the Puget Sound Business Journal, I have no trouble finding the articles that embrace the fact that Washington is the Evergreen State, the mention of our elected officials that invest in Green every chance they get, but never a mention of any measurement or benefit regarding the investment. Perhaps they only call it a Business Journal?
Business Journals normally cater to Businessmen who are interested in these basic numbers. It seems the most basic of all questions is whether the effort is returning any meaningful return on investment, does the effort benefit humanity in anyway?
Here’s a very basic premise, money represents life’s energy, it was often created by burning tons of coal, cutting down forests, fishing species of fish to near extinction, and in some cases it cost a lot of lives to create it. When we take millions of dollars from the public purse and invest it in wind power, we transfer a huge pile of emissions to that project.
In nearly every conversation EXCEPT green commercial energy, productivity and the return on investment are at the heart of the conversation. In this arena, the conversation is quickly shifted to measurements of ‘feeling good’ about being green. You’ll have to do your own thinking about whether people in the Media are just inept, or if they feel some allegiance to those who fleece the public purse.
I have been using Amonix as an example of how successful Companies are at shifting the conversation, it seems the infromation is tuned to the audiance that gets the bulk of their technical info from ‘The View’. Look at the Amonix ‘Facts’ page, they readily shift the conversation from cost per KWH, to the efficiency of their concentrated solar PV array. Thoughtful people understand that cell efficiency pays dividends when square feet of installation space are expensive, like a space craft, but just what is the benefit in their claimed specialty, the desert floor, where land is normally as cheap as dirt itself? Why is it we don’t see the energy production figures at the top of the conversation? Where do we go to see the figures for the latest install at Alamosa? Why isn’t there a public portal into Wild Horse wind farm where we can see the KWHs sold into the grid? We the public were principle investors, shouldn’t we have ready access to these figures?
http://amonix.com/content/fast-facts Just an example, but all too typical “Where are the facts?”
GB
