I’ve been meaning to write this post … actually I’m sure it will turn into a series of posts .. for along time now.  A week or so ago I noticed a comment on Bob Martin’s Philippine Living blog where Bob mentioned the high cost of electricity here (we currently pay more for electricity than any other country except Japan) and ask the innocent question … why can’t you just use solar?

Well, you can’t buy practical solar energy in a box at SM.  But the suggestion is very valid and I want to spend some time with it.  Let me warn you from the git-go that the more education you have, especially in engineering, and the more uber-right-wing George Bushie you are the less you are going to like this post … but it’s all true … even if you don’t believe me.  You’ve been warned.

The US economy runs on oil.  especially for the last 6 or 7 years since the son of a rich oilman has been president.  Bush the junior has never held a job that produced anything except words, but he managed to lose a fortune drilling dry holes and getting tax credits from you and I for doing so .. and he want to Harvard …so therefore, he “knows” that “big oil” is the answer to everything.

On CNN International, shown here and in the rest of the world except the US, one of the major oil companies is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in an anti-alternative campaign that has really “informative” commercials like their most current one that states … if you tried to power a city the size of Paris with wind energy you’d need 20,000 windmills … spoken as a voice-over behind a graphic of the Eiffel Tower defiled with a gigantic wind turbine blade.  Why is this bullshit?

Let’s change the premise.Let’s make some other specious “if you tried to..” statement and say, if the people of Washington DC would use the Metro we could replace 20,000 automobiles.”  What’s the chances the average American would even think about it?  In the US we have been bred to consume, and even at one person per car and $3 per gallon, consume we will.  Of course 20,000 wind machines would not even produce the pollution of one automobile, but just the idea of 20,00 of something unfamiliar sounds bad (unless you’re a wind turbine manufacturer and set to employ a couple thousand people) sounds bad.  But my point is, how many of you can see through the oil company smokescreen?  Wh6 would 20,000 windmills, non-polluting, non-fossil fueled and not contributing to global warming necessarily be a poorer idea than another super-tanker or two and a few million more dollars a month in the bin laden family bank accounts?

If you have an open mind, join me in the journey and evaluate my ideas on your own … if you don’t, sit back, turn your thermostat to a really comfortable level and watch sports on TV … you aren’t convincible anyway.

Food for thought before the next lesson:

• Virtually all alternative energy research is funded by big oil directly, by government grants often “tainted” with big oil dollars, or by other interested parties like Babcock and Wilcox … the folks who gave us Three Mile island and many other scary nuclear curses and are currently very active (he means spending money) here in the Philippines attempting to dupe the government about the economics of 11 … count them 11 new nuclear power stations.  Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there trying to get me!
• 90+% of the current research on alternative power, especially solar, is produced in the US and other “temperate zone” countries with cold winters and an average of 1/5th the “solar flux” … raw power available from the sun … on an annual basis.  Remember the old computer programmer’s truism?  Garbage in = garbage out”  research done to test the economics of generating alternative power in, say, Massachusetts has little or no validity for the serious reduction of energy use in the Philippines.
• Attitudes toward power consumption and the use of the power is different in virtually every country of the world except the US.  US research is often flawed from the start because the assumptions made at the beginning as to the amount of power needed annularly are vastly overstated in terms of the power one needs to ;live well elsewhere.

next episode I’ll tell you about real people living real … and full lives “off grid” in the good old US of A and you can see a little more about where I am coming from on this.

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