As a business owner, I define high-efficiency as the ability to get things done with either the highest operating margin or the lowest operating loss. With this in mind, and considering the amount of philanthropic hubbub surrounding wind power and the equal-in-volume guilt talk surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I decided to get to the bottom of the efficiency question.
Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:
- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply. According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.
- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage. Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.
- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed. The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement. I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth. These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.
