“So whenever you hear a politician talk about energy independence and then rattle off the usual litany of solar, wind, tidal, or even nuclear and coal, realize that that politico doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Usually, the politician is engaging in deliberate obfuscation. America doesn’t have an “energy problem”. America has a PETROLEUM problem. The politicians know completely what they’re talking about. They’re talking about confusing the matter so we don’t focus on their OPEC trading partners and political sponsors.

I think Dr. Zubrin pretty much makes that case in his book ENERGY VICTORY which you seem to have read.

In this election season, I don’t feel like letting our elected leaders off the hook by saying that they don’t know what they’re talking about. They DO know what they’re talking about. They’re talking about deflecting our concerns for gasoline and petroleum prices and obfuscating it by talking about “energy”.

We should find out to what degree this is the case when the Open Fuels Standard Act comes to a vote in both houses of the Congress. My congressman is already waffling about “the cost of food”. As I’m sure you know, that arguement is bunk.

On the down-side, simpler alcohols (ethanol and methanol) will give you less MPG (miles per gallon) than gasoline (you said mph instead by mistake).

However, there are OTHER alcohol fuels as well that get you very close to, as good as, or better energy content than gasoline. (Propanol, butenol, many others).

A flex fuel car that can run on methanol (the simplest alcohol) can run ANY alcohol fuel, including the better MPG ones.

And of course there are other aspects to performance beyond mere MPG. For one thing, there’s miles per DOLLAR. If we opened ourselves up to imported ethanol, its price would be below gasoline’s with no need for a subsidy. Methanol already sells well below gasoline’s price right now.

Horsepower! That’s what most people think of when they hear “performance”. And alcohol fuel is higher octane, 100, 120 even. Gives you a LOT more pep and zoom. Think SUPER duper premium gasoline. That’s one reason why racing leagues from the Indy 500 to Formula One to midget cars use alcohol fuel, and have since the 60s.

Another big onese is that alcohol fuels are also safer in crashes, less likely to explode.

Of course, on-road performance isn’t the only reason to favor alcohol.

Alcohol fuels are biodegradable and break down readily in case of spills, including from underground gas station tanks, or from big tankers. The Exxon Valdez is still killing wildlife; if it has been carrying ethanol or methanol, the problem would have been over in days.

They burn much more cleanly, making them a clean way to burn fossil fuels for transportation (remember you can make methanol from coal and natural gas). They also are much cleaner to “make” – that is, grow.

Finally of course weaning us from oil would drastically help our economy (which has suffered the equivalent of a 40% income tax hike) and national security (hundreds of billions going to Iran, Saudi, Venezuela, Russia even if we don’t directly buy their oil, because it’s traded worldwide and wherever we buy it from helps prop up the price).

WRONG. If we drop our tarriffs on Brazilian ethanol, the price will drop sharply. Also, methanol is currently selling, without subsidy, for a small fraction of gasoline’s price (about $1.37 a gallon, and $2.04 will get you enough methanol to take you the same distance as a gallon of gas). Methanol is inherently going to be cheap because it can be made from sewage, garbage, unused stalks/leaves/stems/roots of plants (including the corn for ethanol), etc.

So whenever you hear a politician talk about energy independence and then rattle off the usual litany of solar, wind, tidal, or even nuclear and coal, realize that that politico doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Power generation is not the place to free us from foreign oil, we’re pretty much there already.

The real target is transportation, where more than 90% of cars on the road are gasoline-only.

Hybrids aren’t the answer, because they only reduce the rate of our growth of gasoline use, are at the highly improbably best, reduce it somewhat. But OPEC can just cut production further to match, and keep prices up (and fueling world mischief).

Flex fuel vehicles are the ONLY serious solution. And they have to a MANDATE. Get over it, conservatives and libertarians. The market would probably get us there in a few decades, but we don’t have the time or the money to wait. OPEC is a consortium of government-forced monopolies, socialist state-run firms, that are looting the productive sectors of the world.

Refusing to break out of this straitjacket with a minimally intrusive mandate (like seatbelts) is suicidally stupid, like objecting to the feds telling Ford to make tanks instead of cars during WW2.

We can have a net wash or reduction of big government if you want by also eliminating the boondoggle of gov’t hydrogen fuel cell research.

The best and fastest CHANGE FOR THE BETTER we can do is

1.METHANOL industry for transportation fuel agent

2.coal electric stations for the time needed to build nuclear stations for electricity in the number of hundreds

3.we should do everything possible to stop consuming oil and n-gas because more we burn it-
we create more ADDED value to oil and natural gas reserves at our enemy disposal(OPEC, RUSSIA)

Your overlooking the economics. It will take a lot of concrete, copper and land to rigup that kind of power not to mention getting rite of way. The life span of those wind turbines is 20 years. The average yield has been a measly 20% and the windmill farms will be located far from the locations that need it most.

Then there’s the facts of the wind country of Denmark, king of windmills. It’s true windpower in Denmark accounts for 20% of Danish electrical production. However, Denmark does not ‘get’ 20% of it’s electricity form wind power. The windpower electricity is all exported to Sweden and Germany. It is not used because…it is unreliable. So when the Danes get some juice it is exported, unused and at a economic loss, to Sweden where it is used to pump water up into damns, in a way a battery bank. In Germany, it is dumped into the German power grid because Germany is so large, so electrical consuming that the half of Danish wind power it gets isn’t hardly notable. In a phrase, it is dumped, again at a loss to the Danes into the German grid.

The Danes get their electricity like the rest of us, by powerplants. That is what they keep and use. So to be more accurate, the 20% generated in Denmark is folded into the Danish/Swedish/German grid where that amount looks large in little Denmark but is tiny in Sweden and Germany. It’s like under 1%. All this is done at a loss.

Also, Denmark is the most perfect place in the world to put turbines. Again a unique environment. And the Danes themselves do not use this electricity. It is too costly, too unreliable so they pay the Swedes and Germans to take the electricity that they ‘dump’ into their electrical generation schemes. The Danes do not and can not use windpower in a modern economy. Neither can we. We can build it. We can do it, but we will have to pay to dump it. So, what is the point of this other than feeling good and burning money?

And much of Europe is building coal plants, not solar of wind farms as their consumers can’t subsidize all their power needs. Go to windaction-dot-org to read all the articles and letters against windfarms from everywhere. You talk more like an investor than an engineer. Wind is subsidized 14x+ the subsidy paid for nuclear and a whopping 53x that of coal. The same goes for solar, it can’t stand on it own.

Subsidies Paid
Coal $.44 per MWh
Nat. Gas $.25 per MWh
Nuclear $1.59 per MWh
Biomass $.89 per MWh
Geothermal $.92 MWh
Hydro $.67 per MWh
Solar $24.34 per MWh
Landfill gas $1.37 per MWh
Wind $23.37 per MWh

Wind energy would be better implemented on a smaller, local scale without heavy subsidization. Same with solar. Wind and solar farms would be best implemented on a research, prototype level till they become viable. Right now it’s and investors scam, like corn ethanol. Pickens already admitted that it was profit motivated and without government subsidization, with tax breaks, his proposal is ‘blowen in the wind’. So much for his pea pickens heart.