Comments by "Tony L" (@tlangdon12) on "DW Documentary" channel.

  1. TheRoidemortetfleur I agree coal power has the potential to be cleaner, but when you burn coal you get CO2. No amount of cleaning is going change this. We have to stop polluting the atmosphere with CO2 that should not be there.
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  2. Deserts are better suited to solar pv and solar furnace technology for exactly the reason you point out.
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  3. Germany is capable of being self-sufficient regarding energy. Why it would want to become reliant on another country is beyond me.
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  4. If you ask a member of the public a question like that, without providing them with all the available knowledge of the impact of noise that you can’t actually hear, what do you expect their answer to be?
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  5. David Wright And who will ensure that the nuclear waste that remains dangerous for 1000+ years will remain safe in that time? I don’t trust my government to be able to look after something for so long; do you?
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  6. And while the transport of hydrogen does have some risks, pollution from the hydrogen fuel is not one of them. If a ship blows up, the result is fresh water! I would expect that a well engineered system could minimise the risks involved in hydrogen transport, but humans have proven somewhat inept at imagining the different ways in which systems can fail, and with any new system one or two disasters might be expected.
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  7. There is no harsh reality to green energy.
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  8. Roger Onslow It’s not more expensive. The cost of building a fossil fuel power station and running it is very similar to the cost of building the same output using renewables. The laws of physics mean that you need the same amount of copper winding around a generator to produce 1kw of power regardless of whether the generator is turned by wind or steam. The cost of the plant that goes in front of the generators is very similar, e.g similar amounts of concrete and similar lifespans. Wind turbine blades wear out, but so do steam turbine blades. It’s all much of a much. Even the labour costs are similar. Your point about the base load is valid, but is it harsh? Harsh, to me, would mean something that did harm. We can’t do as much good until we can solve the base load problem, but we are not actually doing any harm. The base load issue will be solved by a combination of diversity of supply, over-capacity and storage. Over capacity is not a bad thing because it provides security of supply and allows for maintenance.
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  9. If developed countries adopt clean energy, the Chinese will realise that they are losing competitive advantage and will change. Clean energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and will continue to get cheaper whereas fossil fuels can only get more expensive as we have already removed the most accessible deposits. The Chinese know they need to change but they can’t change overnight.
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  10. David Wright Not according to Wikipedia. The state isn’t broke, wind power didn’t breaks the state, locals are paying higher prices because there are higher transmission costs and possibly some profiteering by SA energy suppliers.
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  11. I like the idea of blimps! I could see a giant ski-lift affair being used to tow the blimps from the Middle East to Germany in a continuous circuit, all powered by hydrogen.
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  12. Battery storage. Coal-fired power stations also have to store their fuel to cope with intermittent deliveries. Have a look at the Redflow battery to get an idea of one clean, cheap battery technology that is available. There are some good videos on YouTube about this.
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  13. It may not be the only thing ruining the climate, but using this as an argument not to stop polluting the atmosphere is daft.
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  14. If you read the science you would realise that 1.5C is a calamity. Don’t be fooled by the small percentage rise that this represents - the climate is not a linear system. There are factors that work to stabilise the climate but also some that only need a small nudge to make a massive difference. Do you really want to take the chance of global catastrophe when the fix is easy to implement? No one is being crippled by the expense of the change. My family’s energy bill is about a quarter of what we spend on food.
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  15. And yet the statistics show that more replanting does occur.
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