Renewable Energy Sources

There are many renewable energy sources we hear about on a daily basis such as ethanol, hydrogen fuel, and wind power.  According to the government all three of these will be viable alternatives to fossil fuel in the near future.


I find that to be very misleading.


Ethanol is a net energy loser. Meaning the process of creating ethanol requires more energy than is obtain from actually burning it.  According to David Pimentel, "The total energy input to produce one gallon of ethanol is 129,600 BTU, however, one gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 76,000 BTU".

“To provide the equivalent of 520 gallons of gasoline per car, about 10.4 acres of corn must be grown to fuel one car with ethanol for one year” (Pimentel).  Consider that that in 2008 there were about 256 million registered cars in the United States (BTS), now 10.4 acres of corn for every car is an astronomical amount.  Using simple multiplication, it would take more than 2.5 billion acres of corn just to supply the United States with ethanol, let alone food.  In 2000 corn production required 72.7 million acres of land, so we would need 35 times that amount to fuel all U.S. cars. To say we can run all of our cars on ethanol is a pipe dream.


Hydrogen fuel also has problems. Joseph Romm states, "hydrogen is the simplest element, it will leak from any container, no matter how strong and no matter how well insulated. For this reason, hydrogen in storage tanks will always evaporate, at a rate of at least 1.7 percent per day". Since hydrogen is the smallest element, if used in liquid form, a car would need four times the amount of hydrogen as it would gasoline.  


Wind Turbines seem to be another dead end.  As Ted Trainer (lecturer and author regarding a sustainable society) states, “Windmills presently require winds around 7 meters/second (m/s) [18 - 20 mph] before they can operate efficiently.”  Trainer explains that, 7 m/s winds generate less than one-third of the maximum operating output which occurs at 13 m/s.  An average of 7 m/s winds occur in very few places and since those conditions can only produce one-third of maximum output, we would need more than 3 times the amount of wind turbines to meet our energy needs.