Solar energy is very dilute, so solar collectors usually cover huge areas of flat arable land, stealing farmland, starving wild herbs and grasses of life-giving sunlight thus creating “Solar Deserts”.
Wind turbines steal energy from winds which often bring moisture from the ocean. These walls of turbines then create rain shadows, producing more rain near the turbines and more droughts down-wind. Turbines work best along ridge lines where eagles also seek thermals, so birds and bats get chopped up by these wicked whirling scythes. They also annoy neighbours with noise and increase bushfire risk.
They even spread their wall of wind towers offshore, so that less wind and rain even reaches the shore. Not green at all.
Now green dreamers want to use our precious water to manufacture hydrogen in a round-robin electrolytic process that consumes far more energy than it can ever produce.
Electrolysis consumes nine tonnes of water plus heaps of electricity to make one tonne of hydrogen. This processed water is not recovered until the hydrogen is burned (unlike water in steam turbines where most water is reused and any that escapes is recycled back to the atmosphere.)
"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." -- Terry Pratchett
Hydrogen is a low-energy explosive gas. Collecting, storing and exporting it will be a hazardous business and producing it will consume scads of Australian water and electricity to generate the latest trendy “green” fuel for Asia. Burning this fuel will release pure Australian water into polluted Asian skies. But the Australian tax payer is funding this hydrogen speculation with $70 million.
Green Energy isn’t green. It has a huge cost in rare metals; it creates toxic waste problems; solar panels create solar deserts; turbines chop birds and steal wind and rain from inland areas; and now they want to steal fresh water and energy to export low-energy explosive hydrogen.
In contrast, coal is stored solar energy extracted from sunshine by ancient plants. Burning it releases its stockpile of energy for industry and its combustion products bring great benefits for the green world - water vapour, carbon dioxide plant food, and valuable plant micro-nutrients.
Why export our sunshine, wind and fresh water via hydrogen while leaving our abundant fossil sunshine locked underground as “politically stranded assets”?
All that is not green – it’s green stupidity.
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
