By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

Next week is Green Week on NBC, the GE network. GE has created a cleantech empire, having bought its way into wind, solar, and water in a big way with a belief that global warming offered a huge opportunity”.  Don’t expect objective reporting from NBC or the GE owned Weather Channel on either climate change or energy. Their CEO Jeff Immelt is a member of the Obama administration as an advisor, a fact which will ensure the erroneous claim that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant despite all the evidence emerging to the contrary. It will likely be worse than the ethanol debacle under Bush.

Though there is a place for renewables like solar and wind and geothermal, except for a few special places globally (like Iceland and maybe Yellowstone for geothermal, and the desert southwest for solar and wind), they are no more than supplemental sources.

I have for decades been a strong believer in conserving energy. I am all for innovation and cleaner burning fuels. I am old enough to recall the soot from burning coal in the big cities and the morning mixing down of sooty pollution from incinerators when the first mixing of the new day took place. We often had to brush the soot and particulates off windshields. I remember when cars gave off choking levels of hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and carbon monoxide as well as particulates and we yearned for the day the internal combustion engine would burn clean and only gave off harmless water vapor and carbon dioxide. We got there. Then suddenly carbon dioxide was demonized thanks in part thanks to the efforts of ENRON looking for the next big opportunity after in the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, a story for another day.

The quest to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and greater efficiency led us to the ethanol debacle. California is now stopping the use of ethanol in their gasoline and that will gradually spread. It turns out, in addition to driving up the prices of food, it actually nets out less efficient than plain gasoline when considering the entire end to end processing and total emissions are up not down. 

I support solar and understand the technology has improved to provide more energy from the sun even on partly cloudy days but it is expensive and though it makes a lot of sense in the desert, can be nothing more than a part-time supplemental energy source in the north where there is little sunshine in fall and winter and of course, the sun doesn’t shine at night.

Today we are going to compile recent findings about another of the renewables - wind power, potentially another very expensive boondoggle, despite the T. Boone Pickens and GE hype.

Read more on the experiences of Spain, Denmark, Great Britain the Czech Republic and some early issues here in the U.S. in this PDF.