cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies

March 19th, 2007

Let’s look at another bitter Red Pill lesson on the opportunity cost of the war in Iraq.

While this solar hydrogen system doesn’t seem like a good idea for mainstream deployment, Mike Strizki, the man behind the project accurately notes, “No one has said what I’m doing doesn’t work.”

So, why isn’t this a good idea?

Well, the cost! It’s too expensive. Right?

Yeah. All beancounters are great at explaining to newspaper reporters how expensive clean energy technologies are, but I don’t see anyone comparing the cost of these technologies to the stupid and illegal war in Iraq. Except me.

So, how many $500,000 solar hydrogen systems (like the one described below) could be built with the funds currently being allocated to the sinkhole war in Iraq?

Remember, the Iraq war is costing $208,333 per minute.

So, for every 2.4 minutes that the U.S. spends in Iraq, one of these emission free solar hydrogen systems could be built. That’s 25 per hour. That’s 600 per day. That’s 4200 per week. That’s 16,800 per month.

Of course, this is retail pricing. What would the cost be if the the buildouts were done on a massive scale? An order of magnitude less probably isn’t out of the question.

I’m not advocating the system described in this article. (Watch, someone will accuse me of falling for the hydrogen scam in comments.) The point is that we don’t have a clean-energy-technology-is-expensive problem. We have a diabolical-misappropriation-of-public-funds problem.

Some combination of large scale wave, solar and wind (in that order) power generation, plus simple conservation technologies, plus individuals feeding the grid with their excess wind and solar power would be the way to go. How close to that goal could we get if $208,333 per minute was spent trying to reach it?

We’ll never know because, “They hate us for our freedom.”

Via: Christian Science Monitor:

Mike Strizki lives in the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together â€“ solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer â€“ provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days.

Mr. Strizki’s monthly utility bill is zero â€“ he’s off the power grid â€“ and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.

It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But does Strizki’s method â€“ converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen â€“ make sense for widespread adoption?

According to some renewable-energy experts, the answer is “no,” at least not anytime soon. The system is too expensive, they say, and the process of creating hydrogen from clean sources is itself laced with inefficiency â€“ the numbers just don’t add up.

Strizki’s response: “Nothing is as wildly expensive as destroying the whole planet.”