Clean Energy

I recently got into an argument with a conservative over clean energy and the different ways of producing it. The conservative sided with fossil fuels, as conservatives tend to do, while I, being the clean energy investor that I am, argued against the reasons not to switch to solar and wind power. The conservative, we’ll call him William or Bill for short, argued that there are too many areas that don’t receive enough sun to warrant the use of solar power. He also argued that the windmills used in wind power generation cause irreparable damage to the landscape, as erosion patterns are altered by the sea and trees must be cut down for windmills placed on land.

I will begin by talking about Bill’s solar power issue. It’s very true that certain areas will never receive enough sun to really make solar power viable. Seattle, for example, is the greyest city I’ve ever been to. The sun only comes out for four months of the year. There is no way you’re going to put a solar power plant down and hope to sustain the whole city indefinitely. In cases like those, there needs to be a combination of different clean energy generating technologies. Seattle is a great area of wind and hydro power because of the Puget Sound. I also propose another solution: Build a 30,000 foot tall solar generator that collects sun above the clouds. You’d never need to worry about weather conditions again.

Tackling Bill’s second argument of wind power ruining the landscape, I accept that it is a problem. But like many other problems, it can be solved. If we just gave up on something just because it has a problem, we wouldn’t have put a human on the moon. I admit that I don’t necessarily have a readily available solution to the problem, but I also am not a civil engineer. So, while it’s true that we shouldn’t ignore the drawbacks of wind power, we can’t simply drop the idea because of a few problems. In the spirit of this post though, I’d like to propose another solution: Build flying windmills that hover above the land and sea. This solves both needing to cut down trees and the erosion changes. This will also allow us to move the wind mills to higher wind concentrations.

In conclusion, I disagree with Bill saying that clean energy is not a valid solution. Bill also argued for the use of natural gas, since it is relatively cleaner than oil and coal. I won’t get into why continuing to use fossil fuels is silly, so I will leave it at that. What I will say though, is that there are better solutions to the energy problem and we have to trust our engineers to come up with them.