Excerpts from

The Solar Fraud

Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World

High Priests

But for the topic, there is little to distinguish the high priests of energy telling us it is sinful to use energy from the Taliban telling the beleaguered Afghanis that it is sinful for women to show their faces in public. 

 Citing the wisdom of Amory Lovins, Berman and O’Connor tell us that using energy is morally wrong.

[Amory Lovins’s wisdom]: “For over 90 percent of energy uses, electricity is an indefensible luxury.”
Berman & O’Connor (1996)

Pollyannas

“… 50% solar by the end of the century”
Denis Hayes (1978)
“Solar.  Do you want me to give you a book that shows how realistic solar is?  We’ve got windpower, biomass, photovoltaics, tidal — all kinds of technology.”
Ralph Nader  (1997)

Puppeteers

Cheerleaders and Pollyannas are one thing; puppeteers are yet another.  Their incessant drumbeat tells us that the only obstacles to solar energy are political, and they seek to coerce and manipulate people by any and all means available to adopt solar energy.  Some prefer carrots.  Others prefer sticks.  All are manipulative. 

Here are several examples.

“Simply by creating the incentive of higher energy prices, perhaps through a higher gasoline tax, the government could encourage considerable movement toward efficiency…”
Paul & Anne Ehrlich (1991)

Statistical Smoke Generators

Bill Clinton developed a plan to use taxpayers’ money for a feel-good, do-nothing solar project (see Fig. 18).  This case is such an egregious example of lying with statistics that it deserves special mention.  The chart in Fig. 18 was trotted out to impress the audience.
“Speaking at the United Nations Thursday, Clinton called for photovoltaic panels to be installed on rooftops as part of his plan to reduce dependence on fossil fuels that are believed to cause global warming.  ‘By capturing the warmth, we can help turn down the Earth’s temperature,’ he said.”
Boston Globe (June 28, 1997)
Let us have a hard look at the data.  Carbon dioxide-induced global warming will raise the temperature of the Earth somewhere between zero and 5 ºC during the next century.  Choose a number.  Any number.  Call it , (“delta-T”), the increase in temperature.

According to the Kyoto Protocol, by 2010, the US is required to reduce its CO2 production to 7% below 1990 values, amounting to 30% of the otherwise expected 2010 CO2 production rate.  Therefore, Kyoto would be responsible for reducing  by 6% (i.e., 30% of 20%).  If your choice of  was 5 ºC, then the Kyoto accords would reduce the US’s contribution by 0.3 degrees.  Instead of a  being 5 ºC, it would be 4.7 ºC.   (See Fig. 19.)  If your choice for  was 0.5 ºC (just as that of the last century was), then the Kyoto accords would limit the US’s contribution to 0.03 ºC.

Trifling, you say!  Indeed, but what about solar roofs?  The amount of CO2 reduction [see Fig. 18] to occur as a result of the Million Solar Roofs Initiative is supposed to be 3.5 million tons, a mere 0.06 percent of the 6000 million-ton US CO2 production (Fig. 19).  Therefore, we can reduce the earth’s temperature by 0.0029 ºC if you chose the extreme 5 ºC for  and 0.000 29 ºC if you chose 0.5 ºC for 
 


 

The Underlying Simplicity

But the transcendent issue is sunlight itself, not the technology about how it is used.  Suppose that somebody invents a solar-powered device to do something we haven’t even imagined yet.  The device would be inherently limited by the energy it absorbed from the sun.  Solar energy devices do not create energy; they merely transform —some of — the sunlight into other forms.

With few exceptions, solar-energy manifestations can all be expressed in the same units as those for solar intensity.  For example, firewood production, often expressed in cords of wood per acre per year can be expressed in watts per square meter.  Food production is often expressed either as tons of product per acre per year or as food calories per acre per year; obviously they can be expressed in watts per square meter.  The advantage of doing so is that it allows us to compare — directly, without have to look things up in tables and do tedious calculations — the actual product with the solar cause. 
 

Translating

“The largest solar electric generating plant in the world is the 355-megawatt LUZ International ‘solar-thermal’ plant, located between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which delivers its power to Southern California Edison.  Not a photovoltaic plant, LUZ is a 100-acre field of parabolic [mirror] trough collectors in the Mojave Desert…”
Berman & O’Connor (1996)
The LUZ plant produces 355 MWe of electricity in full sunlight, as we will discuss more thoroughly on page 151.  Their implication is clear: 355 MWe of electricity is delivered to Southern California Edison.  However, the intensity — 355 MWe per 100 acres — amounts to 877 watts per square meter, just under the intensity of noontime sunlight falling on a surface that faces the sun.  For the plant to deliver all that electricity, it would have to be nearly 100% efficient, which it certainly is not.  Had the authors used SI units, they should have been able to spot the error in an instant.
 

What Conservation is NOT

“By ignoring efficiency, the Administration may be missing quickest, easiest energy source.” [emphasis added] 
Chemical & Engineering News

 Such nonsense is unfortunately rather widespread.  By being efficient, we can use less energy for project X, and have more available for project Y; however, to regard conservation as a source of energy is merely to play with words.  Paul and Anne Ehrlich are wise enough to recognize the word-play, and assiduously put the word “source” in quotes.
There are many good arguments to be made for conservation, but its being a source of energy is not one of them.
 

Case Studies of Wind Energy

Chanarambie Power Partners, LLC, has received permission to erect sixty-one 1.5-MWe wind turbines, for a total nameplate power of 91.5 MWe on a parcel of land consisting of 6,500 acres in Murray Counties, Minnesota.  This translates to a peak power density of 3.48 watts per square meter of land area. With a capacity factor of 35%, this would amount to an average of 1.22 watts per square meter of land area.

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