PS To be honest I even had a bit of a rethink about solar power when NASA's Mars Explorer ran out of power due to wind/dust etc.
Most of those renewable options are toys. If we want current lifestyle and its power requirements, no choice but nuclear in the long term if not in the medium. (imo)
I think scale is the thing most people really don't get.
I once had a discussion with someone about water that went something like this. Whilst the topic was urban water supply, the point that people just don't comprehend the scale of energy / water industries stands.
Conversation went something like this:
Them: It's disgusting. People watering their lawns have managed to drain the council's tank, which holds 1 million litres, in a matter of days.
Me: Yes, that's a problem. We need to get the pumps working and fill the tank up again as soon as possible.
Them: Are you crazy? We just can't keep wasting water like that. It's going to run out you know if we keep watering lawns.
Me: You do realise that we're just re-using water released by the Hydro and they'll keep releasing it as long as we keep using power?
Them: Yeah maybe. But it's such a waste to be watering the lawn.
Me: Look, it's like this. Sprinkler uses 1000 litres an hour at most. You run it for, what, 2 hours a day for 100 days a year. I think that would be about the limit of what you could reasonably use on a suburban block without flooding the place. Simple math here, that's two hundered thousand litres a year whereas the Hydro's letting out 15 million.
Them: 15 million let out and you're saying use 200,000 in one garden? No wonder things are bad if that's your logic. Do the maths!
Me: No, no, no. You don't understand. That's 15 million litres a year just to run one house, not the whole state. And that's assuming the house has a wood fire for heating.
Them: Stunned silence.
One average house. 15 million litres of water a year. Most people just can't comprehend those sort of numbers. It's even worse when you try and explain that total system throughput is 42
trillion litres with 16
trillion litres actual discharge every year. Most can't even write those numbers down properly let alone come to terms with them.
OK, that example only applies in Tasmania but it's the same with coal. Take someone to the Latrobe Valley (Vic) and they can see some huge holes in the ground. Try and explain that we're burning 165,000 tonnes of the stuff not every year but every day and they struggle to come to terms with that. It's just too big a number for most.
This misunderstanding of scale is what leads people to think that a solar panel here and a miniature wind turbine there are going to fix everything. If only it was that simple.
All I'm really calling for in all my posts here is a sober look at reality. All these PV panels, LED lights and so on are all well and good and are a useful thing in themselves. But they're nowhere near being a silver bullet that fixes the energy problem.
Yes I could power my house with some PV panels. But what about the energy to build houses with in the first place? Or grow my food? Or make the metals that I use? Or run cars and aeroplanes? Or build the roads? Or...