By matt

The latest trend in so called “Green” energy is to stick turbine powered generators in the water and let the tides move the blades too and fro. For those of you that haven’t heard of this technology yet, think wind farm with giant propellers and all, under many feet of water that are about 40 times more efficient than their dry counterparts.

Now I have no problems with people attempting to investigate clean and enviromentally safe energy, in truth it’s a very good idea. But that said our concept of this “Green” energy is incredibly skewed, and I’ll tell you why.

Let’s start with the basics, all systems require energy to run, right? Whether it be your car, bike, plane, furnace, hot water heater, or toilet something is providing the energy so that that particular system can complete it’s purpose.

Without that energy, those objects are completely useless, what good is a bike if you aren’t pedaling it? What good is a car with no fuel? You get the drift.

Now say we have a working system like your car, and that particular car burns 12 L of gas per 100 KM of travel. Now lets say that we take away 3 L of gas but expect you to travel the same distance that you travelled the last time, no exceptions. There is a chance that you could make it by driving slower, more gently, or travelling down hill only with a 100km/h tailwind, but that is likely not going to happen. What are you going to see? You’re going to see a drop in efficiency of the system because we’ve removed energy, yet expected the system to function the same.

How does this apply to this “Green” energy that I’m ranting about? Well, the tidal system that they are planning on leveraging to provide us with all of this wonderful “green” power is driven by the same concept right? They are going to be taking energy out of a system that is fundamental to the process by which our earth functions. They will tell you that this energy is simply unharnessed, but how is that true? What happens when you take energy out of waves, tidal systems, currents and other such natural systems? One has to expect a similar effect when we took gas out of your car and expected you to do the same thing with less energy.

Why is this something that is being missed in this “green” energy push? We’re removing energy from a system, by doing so you cannot expect it to function in the same manner that it did before. Does this mean catastrophic earth changing destruction? Likely not, but I bet it comes out somewhere in the wash that our “green” efforts have actually destroyed all kinds of wonderful things. Microclimates and dead birds/bats anyone?

So the next time someone tells you about how wonderful this new green energy is going to be and how it’s going to change the world in all kinds of fantastic ways, remember that nothing is free.