World's Greenest Houses - self-indulgent hobbies for rich people

Saw my first episode tonight, and it was pretty much as I expected, that is, fantastically expensive homes of very well-off people with a lot of greendressing thrown in.

I'm going to focus of the house in San Francisco.

First thing I'd say about it is - it was wonderful!

I'd seriously consider killing someone for that place.

Now I realise that it is the wealthy who often blaze the trail when it comes to innovative new ways of doing things, and that for many of these the real costs come down over time if they are more generally adopted.

So some of what the series showcases may very well prove to have long term and wider applicability to housing and help to make houses that are more energy and resource efficient.

But dear oh dear, the program has middle-class posturing and moral smugness to burn.

I'd be very interested in the results of real cost accounting for many of these places and to see just how money saving they really are.

As an example of the often naive assumptions and refusal to properly account for real through life costs, there is the wind turbine attached to this particular home.

The first we lay eyes on it reveals the conundrum of these things. It was still.

So no wind means it is producing no power.

This means it is not producing savings in electricity consumption to help pay for its cost.

And what a cost! Between $20,000 and $30,000 just for one domestic grade windmill. (How much did the entire house cost? Most of the homes I saw tonight would easily have cost much more than an average family home.)

The rather annoying host of the program happily informs us that it will eventually pay for itself.

However, the operative word here is eventually.

I seriously doubt this figure would be recouped by the time the owner had grown old and died.

This of course points to the general problem with wind power. It is not as the compare said "free energy" at all. Compared the conventionally generated electricity, the power produced by wind turbines is actually very expensive. Once you factor in all the actual costs.

That's because they are very expensive to make, install and maintain and all for intermittent electricity generation totally dependent on the wind blowing.

Oh, and dependent on the wind not blowing too hard, when turbines have to be turned off so they don't suffer any damage and don't produce too much electricity that may overload the system.

(On a large scale, this is why Great Britain has spent over 2 billion pounds on wind farms that produce little more than 1% of the country's net energy needs.)

I also suspect that the turbine would have to be replaced or have a major overhall long before it started to produce any net savings to the home owner, and thus set her back to pretty much where she was originally.

But such is green economics within what is still essentially a religious movement for wealthy dilettantes.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

Urgent action needed before the lights go out in Britain

Wind farms will be a monument to an age when our leaders collectively went off their heads

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity.

 

And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines as a way of plugging this forthcoming shortfall and instead urgently focus on far more efficient ways to meet the threat of a permanent, nationwide black-out.

 

There are a few contenders for the title of the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime. 

 

But a front-runner must be the way in which politicians of all parties have been seduced by the La-La Land promises of the wind power lobby.

 

If you still haven't made your mind up about wind power, just consider some of the inescapable facts - facts which the Government and the wind industry do their best to hide from us all.

So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need.

 

The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

 

The rest here.

 

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The horses have ulcers, the ducks have gone and the dogs...

What could be more peaceful than a solar panel plant? All those happy planet-rescuing workers gently assembling little Gaia plates to harvest the sun’s love. Living near one of these rainbow factories must be a daily delight. Or maybe not:

A Devens solar panel plant near several Harvard farms is so noisy the horses have ulcers, the ducks have disappeared and a dog has started gnawing off doorknobs, angry neighbors say.

 

The nonstop noise from Evergreen Solar Inc.’s highly touted plant, which Gov. Deval Patrick has praised as “the leading edge of our clean energy economy,” is driving neighbors crazy and making their animals sick.

 

Don’t forget all the silicon tetrachloride.

 

Tim Blair

 

---

 

Ah yes, silicon tetrachloride. One of the dirty little secrets of clean and green energy.

 

Okay, to be fair, it isn't that much of a problem here in Oz and elsewhere in the West.

 

Environmental regulations require it to be recycled into the manufacturing process for polysilicon.

 

But there is a cost.

 

It takes a lot of energy to do this.

 

It's one of the reasons why solar panels made here are so damn expensive. Even with the government foolishly giving an $8,000 subsidy towards their cost, they are still expensive.

 

And guess where that energy comes from?

 

No, not wind power or solar power.

 

You can't manufacture anything using these useless forms of green vanity window dressing because, simply put, you can't rely on them.

 

You can't be caught in the middle of a manufacturing process and have it shut down because it has become cloudy or the sun has gone down or because the wind has stopped blowing.

 

(That's why the Water Corporation here in Western Australia was forced to withdraw ads that falsely claimed that its desalination plant was run by power produced by wind farms.)

 

So what do the makers of solar panels use? Electricity generated by burning coal or gas.

 

That's right, the very same "dirty" fossil fuels they falsely claim in their ads they are an alternative to.

 

And it takes quite a lot of electricity to make a solar panel, even without having to recycle silicon tetrachloride.

 

Indeed, so much so that some panels will never generate as much electricity as was used to make them in the first place.

 

But that's green economics for you. In this lah-lah land it makes sense to use more energy to produce less!

 

But hey, if you use those "cheaper" Chinese solar panels, that at least helps make it a more sensible proposition doesn't it?

 

Alright, the last I heard, those "cheap" Chinese panels were still costing $14,000. And yes, for the end consumer, given the government subsidy, it probably does make sense because you are being artificially shielded from the real cost of these things.

 

Here's something to think about though. If you follow the link above about silicon tetrachloride, you'll discover one of the reasons why Chinese panels are cheaper than those made in the West.

 

Their solution to the problem of what to do with the toxic silicon tetrachloride is to just take it into surrounding villages and dump it on the ground.

 

How green is that?

 

Posted via email from Garth's posterous