To: Brumar89 who wrote (930218 ) 4/12/2016 10:00:03 PM From: Wharf Rat Read Replies (3) | Respond to "Still skeptical."Fact Check Politics Wind Is 'Idiot Power'? FACT CHECK: Did Thomas Homer-Dixon argue that windmills never recoup the energy it takes to build them?Claim MIXTURE Example: [Collected via Imgur, August 2015] Origins: group "The Secret Society of Anti-AGW-ACC Cultism," an organization that claims climate change is a hoax, started circulating online. While that meme (shown above) does reproduce the words of Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Associate Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, it elides a crucial section of the passage to significantly change its meaning.book "Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives)," Dixon wrote that some windmills might not recoup their energy construction costs, a windmill at a good location could pay back the energy costs of creating it in under three years. That section was omitted from the above-displayed version of the quote:The concept of net energy must be applied to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and photovoltaics. A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it? At a good wind site, the energy payback day could be in three years or less; in a poor location, energy payback may be never. That is, a windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it. snopes.com
