TANSTAAF vs. Win-Win by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Apr 28 2010)

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   Originally coined by Robert Heinlein and embraced by the economics crowd, TANSTAAFL --"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch -- is too often the winner in the battle to be green.  Very few times are we finding green energy choices where there is a true win-win situation.

   I bring this up because out this week is Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green Energy' and the Real Fuels of the Future, by Robert Bryce, along with a companion piece in the Washington Post, "Five myths about green energy,"

   Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, takes a blowtorch to warm-fuzzies around many green energy beliefs.  The twin darlings of wind and solar typically require lots of empty (i.e. pristine) real estate in lands far-far-away  to generate power in comparison to "energy dense" sources such as natural gas and nuclear power.  The demand for green power real estate has lead the Nature Conservancy to coin the term "energy sprawl" to describe wind and solar farms and the thousands of miles of power lines connecting them to urban areas. And he doesn't even get into NIMBY  (Not in MY back yard) problems where people don't want the wind turbines because it supposedly ruin their panoramic oceanfront views.

   Need an easy way to store wind and solar power? Well, that typically requires batteries, and batteries are the devil when it comes to green. You need acids and metals and mining rare earth metals is non-trivial, not to mention very un-green. 

   And for all that effort, wind energy doesn't seem to result in reducing carbon emissions, since utilities have to use other sources to fill in when the wind doesn't blow. According to the article, Denmark more than doubled its production of wind energy between 1999 and 2007, but carbon dioxide emissions from electrical generation are about the same level  as they were back in 1990 and are expected to remain flat through 2017 due to a combination of "near-zero" population growth and high energy taxes.

   Finding win-win happiness for a green energy solution is a lot of work.  The Bloom Energy server concept has the potential for being a win-win for everyone since -- if it scales according to the promises provided at the press conference -- will generate more energy from natural gas than other means of production while using common, cheap materials, all the while providing more efficient generation of energy through distribution -- and at a cheaper cost.  But it's not here yet, because TANSTAFFL; someone's going to have to provide the bucks to make it real.

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