Pajamas Media » Renewable Energy: There Ain’t No Free Lunch

I always enjoy looking deeper.  I love details, perhaps that’s why I became an engineer.  “Green Energy” has been one of my pet peves since the use of Star War characters to promote the first earthday.  (yes, I’m that much of a geek)  This is an excellent article pointing out something our parents taught us in simple language:  “There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” – or free energy.

 

Pajamas Media » Renewable Energy: There Ain’t No Free Lunch

The public's notion of "green energy" — energy production with no pollution and no environmental impact — is a fairy tale, pushed by a legacy media that doesn't understand the underlying issues but knows which side it's on.

June 14, 2010

- by Chris J Kobus

Catch words these days for the favored form of energy include “green,” “clean,” “renewable,” and “sustainable” — among others. Yet nobody can quite quantify what exactly “green” means.

Examples pointed to by proponents include wind and solar, with a few pointing to hydroelectric power, biomass, and fuel cells. But those examples, and the logic behind them, fail the very definition of renewable (or clean, green, or sustainable for that matter). As the logic goes, there will always be wind, and the sun will always shine (I’ll ignore for now that wind, just like hydro power and biomass, is just another form of solar). That logic, however, is short sighted and inaccurate, because to harness that raw energy and convert it to a more useful form, we have to manufacture the means to do so, and that in and of itself is not renewable.