Letter: Alternative energy not all it’s cracked up to be

Saturday, Aug. 26, 2006 | 7:29 a.m.

The Sun often publishes letters touting taxpayers' financing of alternative energies research - wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, biomass, ethanol. These have already received massive amounts of government subsidies and outright grants.

Wind and solar energies for electricity generation have been developed and tried - they cost about $2 per kilowatt-hour (compared with about 7 cents for coal, gas, oil or nuclear); they are also inherently unreliable (there are many windless and cloudy days, and there are also nights) and they are also very environmentally destructive.

Geothermal energy has many decades of performance; in addition to being expensive (plants are necessarily small), these plants produce terrific problems of disposing arsenic, mercury, radioactive cesium, etc. - a whole panoply of deadly poisons rising from the Earth's bowels.

Hydrogen production requires huge amounts of electricity for hydrolysis - about four times the energy contained in hydrogen. A fuel cell filled with this hydrogen under huge pressure would amount to each car being a moving bomb waiting for a collision to destroy whole city blocks.

Finally, there is ethanol. Its production requires about 40 percent more energy (for tilling, fertilizing, planting, harvesting, transportation, processing, distribution, mixing - all activities requiring energy from diesel fuel, petroleum-based fertilizers and electricity generated by coal, gas and oil) than it contains. Taxpayers' subsidies are about $1 a gallon, and at the pump the ethanol adds some 15 cents to the price of a gallon of gas.

And the letters you so gladly keep publishing are asking for more of the same nonsense and waste.

Marc Jeric, Las Vegas