Renewable Resources: Myth and Reality

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There are a few good things associated with growing older and one of them is gaining insight from life’s experiences. You don’t need the intellect of Albert Einstein to possess wisdom. Normal intelligence mixed with a dose of experience results in a powerful tool for recognizing silly behavior. When I see the promotion by the Obama Administration of renewable resources as our National Energy Policy I wonder where they’ve been the past forty years.

Fifty years ago I went to Penn State to play ball and got a good education by accident.

During the first twelve years out of undergraduate school I had the opportunity of working for several brilliant engineers who shared with me their past experience and included me in their ongoing mission of improving energy related technologies. We learned as much from our mistakes as we did from success in system development.

However, we never forgot that what was needed for success was abiding by the laws of physics and chemistry rather than wishful thinking. We also learned that prematurely bringing an unproven technology into the marketplace could, in the long run, retard the eventual acceptance of that concept.

When the oil embargo of 1972 changed the ground rules for our national energy policy I decided to place my career on hold and returned to graduate school to concentrate on the energy resource and environmental impact side of the equation. Several years and a masters degree later I returned to the private sector only to find wishful thinking was alive and well in Washington. Renewable resources were touted as the panacea to save the day. Alas, the only thing Washington managed to do with our tax dollars was fill the coffers of academia and government agencies who worked at a snail’s pace with a low
priority for practicality or market forces.

Today the Obama administration seems more determined than ever to double down on
an over dependence from renewable energy while discouraging the use of our four
traditional energy workhorses: Coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Renewable resources are more important than ever and could someday supply a
significant portion of our national needs but product development should not be based on wishful thinking especially when the taxpayer’s dime is providing the dream.

Wishful thinking coupled with the inadvertent loss of competitive market forces
through large government grants and subsidies, becomes the tail wagging the dog.
Thomas Edison and his staff, after hundreds of experimental failures, finally developed a practical tungsten filament for the incandescent light a century ago. It was free market incentives rather that taxpayer subsidies that drove Edison day and night toward a successful solution to a problem. Ironically that incandescent bulb has been targeted by our government whiz kids for legal extinction down the road because it’s relatively inefficient. We were taught at the Nela Park Lighting Institute many years ago that lumens per watt is only one of several reasons for selecting a particular light source but
today government knows best since Washington has become the center of the universe.

Maybe our current and future administrations should give themselves a self imposed time out like we do with preschoolers when they’re naughty. They could place themselves in a corner and objectively examine why those four energy work horses should be better utilized. While they’re in that corner maybe it would also occur to them that we’re financially broke at every level of government! Free market forces rather than government meddling has always solved technical problems. Would it be too much to ask our government leaders to learn from history?

Now I’m guilty of wishful thinking.
Stratton Schaeffer
Retired consulting Engineer and Farmer
July, 2012