Looking at the state of our planet no one can deny that the self proclaimed social engineers in our midst have made a mess of it. And as if this were not enough, the same clowns are now trying to peddle the idea that the calamities they created have so far been a great achievement. And it is on top of this achievement that they want to stand and to further engineer, as they say, the technologies of the future in order to improve on the planet even more. And they call their effort "being green" as in natural green, the color of clean living on this planet of ours.
And the clowns, together with those who cheer them in the Congress and in the media, want to accomplish all this not by adapting technology to make it work in harmony with the laws of nature but by doing things the other way around. They want to convert the products that nature has created through its own processes into products that will live in harmony with their own twisted fantasies. To illustrate how they want to do this, I pick and bring into contrast two projects -- one good and one bad – from among those that are being considered for future implementation or future expansion.
The bad project is the electric car which represents the saddest chapter in this whole saga because it was put together under a pressure brought about by the unholy marriage between the mighty and the mightily ignorant. As for the good project, it is the one proposed by T. Boone Pickens, a well thought out plan that is based on a genuine understanding of the laws of nature and a healthy respect for them.
The lesson that will come out of this discussion will be to the effect that if you can accomplish something using a form of energy in its natural state, you must not convert the natural resource you have into another form of energy or else nature will punish you by exacting a percentage of that energy. Therefore, you must adapt technology to work with nature rather than bend nature to make it work for your vision. But this is what you will be doing if you attempt to convert the natural resource you have and try to harmonize it with the fantasy that is bubbling inside your head.
To see and to grasp the background that is necessary to assimilate all this, let us look at the following example. The kitchen of an Italian restaurant runs on natural gas where the chef uses 7 cubic feet of it to cook his daily pot of pasta. One day, the owner of the enterprise decides to modernize the place so he renovates the kitchen and makes it run on electricity. The chef now uses 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity to cook the same pot of pasta; and this raises the question: Which method is better for the economy and by extension for the planet?
Ignore how much money 7 cubic feet of gas cost today or how much 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity cost because several extraneous factors determine these prices; and they change from place to place and from time to time. What is of interest to us is which of the two methods uses less units of energy as this must be the ultimate determining factor.
The conversion table says that the natural gas utilized to cook this much pasta amounts (in round figures) to about 7,000 British Thermal Units (BTU) and we do not question that. But when it comes to electricity, the conversion table which says that a kilowatt-hour is worth a little under 3,500 BTUs does not tell the whole story as demonstrated by the efficiency measurements taken and published all the time. And so we look for an explanation as to how and why the discrepancy occurs.
As it happens, the power plant supplying the restaurant with electricity runs on natural gas so we pay the folks down there a visit to see how the gas is converted into electricity. To our surprise we learn that water is brought to a boil by a hellish fire - not to cook pasta like at the restaurant - but to make steam and to maintain it under pressure. A conduit channels that steam to a turbine which is attached to a generator of electricity.
The steam is unleashed with ferocity at the turbine causing it to rotate which is what drags the core of the generator; and this is how electricity is produced. The juice, as electricity is now called, goes into a step-up transformer to the high voltage power grid; and from there to several step-down transformers distributed one each in the districts of the city. And out of the transformers comes the electricity that is delivered to the end users - the restaurant being one of them.
So we ask: If it takes 7 cubic feet of natural gas to boil enough water to cook the chef’s pot of pasta, and if it takes 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity to cook that same amount of pasta, how much natural gas is used at the power station to produce 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity? Is it the 7 cubic feet that the conversion tables say it must be or is it more or is it less?
Fortunately for us, the power plant has a resident scientist who studied a subject called thermodynamics. He explains that every time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some of it because you can never be 100% efficient. Thus when the natural gas is converted into a flame which boils the water which becomes steam which converts into the rotational motion of the turbine which produces electricity, you are down to a third the quantity of energy you started with. Thus 7,000 BTUs of natural gas will convert into about 2,350 BTUs of electricity.
This means you must begin with a quantity of natural gas containing 3 times the energy you intend to produce as electricity. In our case, we would need 3 times 7 or 21 cubic feet of gas to produce the 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity at the output of the generator. This is bad but is this the end of the story? No it isn’t because you still have to step up the voltage, transmit the electricity and step down the voltage before you can feed the electricity to the restaurant. And each one of these steps will waste still more of the energy which means that you must start with more than 21 cubic feet of gas at the power station to deliver the 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity that will cook that same pot of pasta at the restaurant.
It is to be noted that the transmission of electricity from the station to the end user wastes another 15% of the juice approximately. Therefore, when all is taken into account, you will need to convert about 24 cubic feet of natural gas into electricity to do the job with an electric stove that 7 cubic feet of the same gas will do when fed directly to the restaurant and utilized with a gas stove. And this is because whichever way the chef is asked to cook the pasta, he will need those 7,000 BTUs under the pot to boil the same quantity of water and do the same work as before.
You conclude that converting energy from one form to another is a waste that must be avoided whenever possible. And this is something you can do by converting the existing technology to run on the available energy in its natural state rather than do something foolish. And this would be to convert the energy to suit the technology that someone has drummed into your head as being cool or hot or the in-thing or sexy or whatever as you listen to the social engineering clowns talk about that which they know little or nothing at all.
And so, it shall remain a truism that no matter what is said or done, the worst example of a project now considered to render the planet green is that of the electric car which has been called cool, hot, the in-thing, sexy and what have you but not the useless thing which is what it deserves to be called. It is extremely inefficient to drive a car powered by an electric motor than to drive a car powered by an internal combustion engine using gasoline, natural gas or diesel fuel and no clown will ever change this.
Standing in contrast to the uselessness of the electric car is the example proposed by T. Boone Pickens which would convert the engine of trucks to run on natural gas instead of running on diesel fuel. Since the intent here is to reduce the reliance on imported liquid fuel, and rely instead on domestically produced natural gas, the right approach was taken. Nothing cool or hot or in-thing or sexy in this case, but the plan is intelligent, useful and workable because it adapts technology to nature and not the other way around. This is how people with an elevated IQ define "being green".
But are they listening in the Congress and in the media or are they too dumb to hear a simple message? There is a difference between being green because you’re following the dictates of the latest fad, and being green because you know what you’re talking about. Indeed, there is a time for the clowns and a time for seriousness. Give the clowns time off and let them study the subject before returning to the stage. And no matter what their point of view will then be, let them show they have learned enough to contribute to the debate, not learned so little as to mess up the planet more than they already have.