Arkansas Blog

I hate to rain on your hate parde but how exactly do you propose to get energy needs taken care of in Arkansas ?

The Sierra Club seems to think we can get 520 MW worth of power by wind farms and solar energy.

Thats simply not viable.

Solar energy is only reliably available from 9 am to 3 pm then you need massive battery storage (which has lead acid environmental concerns of its own) to take care of the rest of the day, that is if it's not raining or cloudy.

Wind farms need prevailing winds to be effective. We simply don't have those resources for wind fams to work reliably. Even if we did considering that wind turbines only produce anywhere from .5 to 1.5 MW a turbine you would have to have at least 350 wind turbines, wouldn't that look good scattered all over Arkansas ?

Environkooks complain about energy costs, yet if you look at the costs most of them are due to taxes and environmental restrictions.

On the west and east coasts where wind farms are viable, the same lefties who complain about coal, gas and nuclear energy have kept wind farms off their coast lines because it looks "unsightly."

You guys have painted us into a box on energy. The sooner you realize the limitations of these technologies the better.

Seems to me part of the box we're being painted into is our collective insistence on bigger and bigger houses, McMansions being the term most often used. A two person family does not need a 5000 square foot house with all the bells and whistles. For that matter, neither does a family with two or three kiddies.
You don't need to move to the country, build on a postage stamp size lot and then install a "nightwatcher" every 100 feet. What are you expecting -- terrorists clothed all in black to come out of the woods behind your house?
And plant a few trees on that bulldozed to the subsoil lot. You'd be surprised how much that can lower AC costs.
Don't let that boy camp in front of the open fridge. Slap him upside the head if that's the only way you can get his attention. And no washing and drying by itself that one pair of jeans that's the only thing he'll wear. He can find something else to wear, or better still, stay home and clean the garage.
And think about your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart. Look up. See all those steel girders up there, the only thing filling all that empty space above about eight feet or so? How much do you think it takes to heat and cool that dead space? And that's repeated in virtually every new large commercial building going up now.
Every one of us, from me to Wal-Mart, can do a lot to conserve energy. One problem though. Conservation doesn't put money into utility company coffers.
WAKE UP, PEOPLE! (And yes, I'm yelling.)

Sure, wind and solar are not a total solution. They are part of a healthy mix of energy. Coal is no answer at all. Coal spews mercury, sulfur and lots and lots of carbon dioxide into our air 24/7. Can coal be cleaned up? Yes, it looks like that may be possible, but nobody is talking about cleaning up this brand new plant. They merely tell us it's not as dirty as some old ones. Boy, that's a relief.

Of course, you flat earthers think CO2 is just fine and dandy.

"Environkooks complain about energy costs, yet if you look at the costs most of them are due to taxes and environmental restrictions."

The only thing that keeps you criminals in business is the protection racket run exclusively by the Federal Gubbermint.

A product was patented in France last year, jumping thru some hurdles there and will be marketed soon.
The patent was denied in U.S. at the demand of utility criminals for 52 years.

Now, see how many labels you can stick on.

Well I guess if you could tie
this in with some Yankee's
people would rise up. Anyone
remember the mass hysteria, and state action, after a landfill
was proposed in the Delta? It
was going to bury out-of-state
(that'd be YANKEE) garbage.
Due to thick layers of clay, the
landfills would have been safe.
This is clearly something that
would lead to polution and those
same people will remain silent.

Find a Yankee angle if you want
to stop it.

That's not all thats wrong with Wind and Solar.

To get the equivilant MW output of that plant with solar panels you'd need a million of them, and it would take about a thousand acres of Arkansas land to hiold all of them. And that would still only produce the power at 26 volts. Your air conditioning kicking on would trip the breaker.

The wind farms would need 2.5 acres per wind turbine. That means to get enough MW to cover what the coal burner would produce means we'd need about a thousand acres. Plus the wind turbines are only about 30 percent duty, which means they would only work thirty percent of the time. And that's if we had at least 27 mph winds.

That's allot of ifs. Wind and solar look great on paper but they just don't produce reliable, useable power. Most people don't know these things about wind and solar and go spouting them off as solutions to a problem we dont even know we have.

What a shame. Once this mercury plant comes on line any chance to utilize and adapt to alternative energy will be lost. If your only plan for increased electricity is a coal plant what is the incentive to do anything else? Even when you know in your heart something else needs to be done and what is being done is wrong there is no incentive to do anything different.

How many of the new housing and commercial buildings will be more energy efficient. Each building top can be made to have solar cells thereby each building contributes to the energy grid.

Also, I personally think a landscape of windmills will look a whole lot more attractive than a barren, nasty coal plant any day evidenced by the picture above.