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Re: Fuel Cells and "green" energy



On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Dr. Tom Wayburn wrote:


P.S. This type of thinking completely eludes the Green Party, for example,
which hung up the phone in my ear whilst I was explaining this spot of
bother. Hang-the-messenger still applies.

I just recently got hung out to dry by a student group and some faculty
after they announced they had convinced our Board to pay 20% more on our
electric costs for 30% of our electric needs by buying the electrons from
a so-called "green" coop. This coop supposedly supplies the elctricity
from only hydro, solar, and wind. I asked the question as to whether the
college had really researched the environmental costs of each of these
so-called green sources; citing the impossibility of skirting around the
Second Law. The geophysicist in our department, whose specialty is
hydrology, also complained bitterly about the consequences of
hydroelectric. We were chastised quite a bit for pointing out such
issues. There's a lot of physics education to be done with the public in
the energy arena.

Michael Monce
Connecticut College