Naturally, all the party representatives supported renewable energy (since it's one of the hip new things to do) and agreed that more needs to be done to improve the efficiency of households etc. Then the topic came to "Well where/how do we get the electricity we need?". And that's where the renewable energy wank started.
Gems like "The most efficient solution for electricity generation is more efficiency at the consumer end and renewable energy."
Gee whiz, last time I checked renewables were the most inefficient compared to fossil fuels or gasp, nuclear power.
Naturally the Greenies proclaimed that all the electricity could be provided by renewables. Time for a reality check courtesy of the Ministry of Energy. Their representative stated that if the current power plants were kept in operation, by 2018 they wouldn't be able to satisfy the demand and the windfall could only be made up with large power plants, not some dinky ass (he didn't say this) renewable power projects.
Then the SVP representative (SVP is far right) stated that Switzerland could massively reduce the CO2 emissions, while generating enough electricity and being independant from other nations is to use nuclear power.
Cue the Greenies "Hur hur, we would still be dependant on the outside for the uranium, if we switched to renewables that wouldn't be the case"
Appearantly it didn't fucking occur to her that you can buy uranium from places like Canada, or Australia (better than buying oil and gas from the Middle Eastern countries, or Russia) and the uranium has a very fucking high energy density (didn't Sikon once post that a couple hundred kilograms of uranium (can't remember if it was enriched or not) would be equivalent to a few thousand tonnes of coal). Lastly, I doubt that Switzerland has the industrial capacity to manufacture shit like solar panels, hydroelectric dams, geothermal power plants, or wind turbines...which would make us dependant on the outside anyways.
Another gem was "Renewable is efficiency"
Yeah, right. Thanks for lying, try again. Most sources of renewable energy are intermittent (except hydro dams and geothermal), how are they going to make up for the windfall when it's intermittent? Install fossil fuel power plants, oh wait, biogass or biomass power plants? The efficiency of the average Danish wind turbine is 20%, in Germany the average 5MW turbine only produces 1.7 MV (34% efficiency). Wind for sure isn't going to cut it, it's intermittent and low efficiency (theoretical max is <60% due to the Betz law). Perfect Turbine According to this page, it's not terribly likely to have turbines above 35% efficiency.
According to this article Boeing Spectrolab Achieves 40% Solar Cell Efficiency They achieved 40.7% solar cell efficiency, however that was usingI've compared my GOOD wind turbine columns with production data from 4 reputable manufacturers' turbines, using their data. NONE of them are as good as my GOOD turbine columns. Those are based on an average efficiency of 35%. It is not terribly likely that you'll find a machine that is more efficient than suggested by this column.
and it wasUsing concentrated sunlight
From this site Photovoltaic Cells The maximum recorded module efficiency for Single crystalline silicon was 22.7% while the maximum recorded laboratory efficiency was 24.7%using a new class of metamorphic semiconductor materials
I don't have any comments on hydroelectric dams other than that they change the ecology up and downstream, which kind of defeats the point of using renewable energy to minimize changing the Earth's ecology.
Naturally the subject of waste came up and the Greenies said "It's bad when you produce electricity with waste problems". It's a problem because ignorant people don't know how dangerous the waste really is and have been feed deceitful information about the dangers (or lack thereof) of nuclear power. But of course no-one mentionned what kind of chemicals are used in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells of course.
Then came the Greenpeace twat who ranted about how great renewable energy is.
Then came the token bit from a representative of the Evangelical People's Party, jammering about zero energy homes
(Note, there was more to the debate than this, I just wrote down all the juicy bits I heard.)
So there you have it, Greenies are renewable wanking fools everywhere.
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