Couple of comments. First of all, my main concerns are national and economic security. Environmental benefits are great, but I think the more immediate problem is our addiction to energy sources in the Middle East and Venezuela, both of which hate our guts, and our economy's vulnerability to supply disruptions as a result. So for me, I want to solve the problem so that we, as a country, can control our destiny again.
Having said that, sure there are some environmental concerns with both wind and solar, but they are an order of magnitude easier on the environment than coal and oil. Alternatives win that contest hands down. Any remaining problems they have, we can deal with more easily than cleaning up the environmental mess left behind by coal and oil.
Second, a more serious problem is power supply disruptions that come with the territory with solar and wind farms. In Texas, they had blackouts when the wind died down during peak demand. This is a genuine concern, but we already have the technology and viable solutions that can be implemented. First, we need a more reliable, more distributed, and efficient national electric grid. Second, utilities need to invest in backup power storage mechanisms, whether it's supercapacitors or lithium ion batter banks, or heat storage in molten sand, or a highly distributed storage system such as drawing power from homes and electric cars with excess power stored. All of that needs to be built and all of it is doable.
I don't mean to minimize the challenges, but this national challenge is actually easier to solve than landing a man on the moon. And we can easily afford it. In fact, if we had taken the $1 trillion we've spent on Iraq, we could have afforded to build our national infrastructure twice over to rely mostly on alternatives.
It's all a matter of priorities. Where do you want to spend your tax dollars...in the Middle East to get us more dependent on all the countries that hate us or right here in the USA to cut the cord to all those countries that hate us. To me, this is the biggest no brainer of our generation. |
