Super eco friendly?
All the propaganda about electricity being super eco friendly etc is just bull, Writes Keith Gudgin.
These hypocrites just don't look any further than their mobile phone screen. Where do they think the energy comes from to make their damn phones, where do they think all the rare and precious materials in their phones comes from and do they know how much energy is used in mining and refining it? Most of this energy comes from coal, gas and oil fired power stations around the world!
An oil-based product
Also, if they stopped all oil based products, where will they get their fantastic plastic to throw away all over the place? Has nobody told them that plastic is an oil based product? How many of them refuse to use anything made of plastic because of it's association with oil?
Would any of these so called eco warriors give up their mobile phone for their cause and save the environment from all the nasty materials included and processing involved in them. No, not on your life they wouldn't! They just want everyone else to stop using what they consider are nasty materials like diesel and petrol. Hypocrites hardly covers it I feel.
Most inefficient means
As for coal, gas or oil fired mains electric to fuel transport, it's one of the most inefficient means of energy production and distribution? The electricity has to be generated in a very wasteful generation plant, and transported in a very inefficient and 'lossy' network before being put into batteries that take far more energy to charge than they give out, hence them getting warm when being charged! Also the weight of the batteries means they need considerable amounts of energy to transport them around all the time!
Petrol and diesel may be just as inefficient but at least you don't have to stop and plug in for hours every couple of hundred miles? Also shifting the production of CO2 etc away from the consumer to the producer does not make it go away.
Renewable energy is not proving to be the panacea it's been made out to be. Wind farms are very highly subsidised as they are nowhere near as efficient as we have been told they would be? They have a major problem with the fact that if there's no wind blowing, then they are effectively just tons of useless expensive metal and concrete!
Boat wind turbines
If wind turbines were really efficient then you would see them on as many boats as you see solar panels. I researched them and for about 95% of the time they wouldn't even keep my phone battery charged up.
A popular model needs just over 11mph of wind to give just three watts of output rising to just over 33mph for 50 watts. How often do we get that sort of wind? Also 50 watts is approx 2.1 amps, so just a trickle charge and is just a small fraction of the capacity of my two solar panels at 350 watts or nearly 26 amps.
Boat dwellers are already very environmentally friendly. All my domestic electricity is from solar panels. I use about a litre and a half of diesel a week on average for propulsion and last year used just under 5 litres of petrol in my generator when the sun didn't shine on my panels enough in the short winter days! How many car owners can beat that?
Not connected
I am not connected to any of the wasteful national grids. I use 1x13kg bottle of gas a year on average. (No, it's not a typo either!). I burn approx 750kg of smokeless fuel a year, no alternative available!. It's certainly a dual fuel for me as well, it's used for both heating and cooking. I do not burn wood, it's too dirty and energy inefficient.
I do not have a car and use buses when needed for shopping.
I really get fed up with these so-called do gooder eco warriors who think they know it all but in reality know bugger all because being just out of nappies and/or never left school/university they've no experience of real life at all.
Can you really see CaRT (or our government) paying what would amount to millions of pounds to festoon the 2,000 plus miles of waterway with electric hook-ups to charge boats batteries with? Hire boats would need one every night for a start. They would need plenty at each lock to cater for the boats stuck behind the multitude of stoppages? Also could you see boaters paying for what would become a very expensive commodity? Just look at how much some marinas charge per kWh for a hook-up now?
Not properly researched
It is apparent to me that this has not been thought out, nor researched properly by these so called knee-jerking experts hurrying to jump on the bandwagon for their fifteen minutes of fame?
As the saying goes, you can fool all the people some of the time...but on some things, some of us have real experience and can see through all bull!