My friend Clyde is a marketing genius. He used the proceeds from his sweepstakes game and bought the building next door where he installed a laundromat. Then he knocked out a big hole in the adjoining wall giving the laundry patrons access to his pub. (I’m being generous, it’s really just a joint, but he’s working on it.) Single guys gotta do laundry, and they hate it. You have to sit completely idle while the clothes make their little sudsy orbits. And then again when they do somersaults in hot air. A cold mug or two sure beats staring straight up and watching the ceiling fans.
Single women hate laundromats for the same reasons, but big hunky guys hanging out beats the hell out of reading old US and People magazines left behind by others.
Clyde says his daytime and weekend business has doubled. I suspect he’s using all those quarters to balance out his actual food sales numbers with the Commonwealth’s minimum. (Quarters are cash, you know.)
Anyway, I like to go there on a quiet Saturday morning, toss in a load or two and join Clyde for a cup of coffee while I read his Roanoke Times.
Last Saturday The Professor stopped by. Not to do laundry, just to sit and converse. And drink a mid-morning beer. Now Dave’s not really a professor, he’s the local high school science teacher. Being a science teacher with an uncanny resemblance to Professor Roy Hinkley means he’ll never shake the nickname.
Dave came over, asked Clyde for a draft, and sat at our table. He said, “G’morning Alton, glad to see you here. I’m working on my syllabus for next year and I want to cover America’s energy usage and its sources. I’m puzzled by solar. What are your thoughts?”
“What exactly do you want to know, Professor?
“People tell us that solar power is completely carbon free. Is that true?”
“Clyde, Bring The Professor one of your free lunches. And then explain it to him.”
Clyde went into the back and in less than a minute brought out a plate with a cold raw egg and two slices of bread and some parsley on it. The Professor looked at it and said, “I can’t eat that.” So Clyde wordlessly took the plate away.
A few minutes later Clyde presented The Professor with a simple egg salad sandwich. “The sandwich is free, Professor. But you’ll have to pay for the energy required to make it. An energy for energy swap. A half hour of pushing broom oughta do it.”
“What do you mean?” Dave asked.
Clyde answered, “The two slices of loaf bread, that’s only a couple cents. That little sprig of parsley and the cucumber slice, I really don’t know, I just do that to make the plate pretty. The egg an’ a bit of mayo and chopped pickles, just a few cents more. All totaled, maybe a dime or two. I can give all that away, even the beer.
“But the energy, that’s altogether another thing. I had to use some gas to boil the egg, some electricity to keep the beer cold and the mayo from turning green. A few cents more of electricity to toast the bread and turn on the lights so you can see what you’re eating. Add in a few cents for my mortgage, my salary, my waitress, (who ain’t even here right now, dang her, she’s late again). A penny or two to cover the telephone bill and a few other odds and ends. Like the man once said, a cent or two here and there and soon you’re talking real money.” Then he returned to the half of his newspaper that I had let him keep.
“I think I understand”, The Professor said, “So you are saying there’s an overhead cost that everyone is ignoring?”
“Exactly,” I replied. “Just like your sandwich, when Clyde brought you your first plate, the free one with just the raw ingredients, it was inedible. But he then used energy to convert it into something useful.
“Long before a solar cell becomes a piece of magic it’s a big hunk of quartz in the ground somewhere. It has to be mined. And we all know, from a “progressive” viewpoint mining is bad. Then it has to be processed into pure silicon. That requires a high enough temperature to melt it. Remember, it’s a rock. I’m talking high temperature. In a furnace. Temperatures only attainable by using fossil fuels.
“OK, once you’ve got it all melted, you can begin the process of turning it into something usable. It’s too complicated to explain, but after several steps you’ve got a “log” of pure silicon. It is then sliced into wafers. With each slice you lose an amount equal to the saw blade’s width.”
I got up and refilled my coffee cup. Where’s that damned waitress?
When I came back I resumed, “Several other energy intensive steps later, you got yourself a square or hexagonal piece of genuine silicon wafer.
“Then it becomes labor intensive. You modify these wafers and assemble them onto a panel. Then add a rigid frame and a special glass overlay. You’ve used an awful lot of energy doing all this to get “free energy” from the sun.
“The information on this sporadic, and contradictory. But the best sources I can find claims a solar cell will pay for its initial energy investment in about 3 to 6 years. But then you gotta consider the energy required to deliver and install it. It’s hard to nail down tight. I won’t even get into the energy required to build, deliver, and install the batteries, inverters, relays and such to make the “free energy” compatible with the rest of the grid.”
The Professor finished his sandwich, took a long swallow of cold draft beer, nodded and said, “So the energy produced is free, but it comes at a carbon cost on the front end, the manufacturing end, and the back end, the installation end?”
“Yes,” I replied. “But that’s not all. During that 3 to 6 years, you’ll be creating more panels. Panels that cannot be produced by using this “free energy”.
“We’ll be using coal fired energy for several more generations, regardless of what our political leaders tell us. There are places on this earth where buffalo dung and wood, long considered to be replaced by fossil fuels, are still the only sources of energy. Sub-Saharan Africa maybe, campers in Wyoming, probably others. Maybe, when George Jetson is an old man we’ll be there. But not yet.
“Whether we use Wind Energy, Solar Energy, or Pixie Dust, it will have to be kick-started by coal or other fossil fuels for a long time.
“Even if we succeed in eliminating coal use in the US, the coal will come out of the ground and go to China and India. On a fossil fuel powered boat.
“Now, tell me. What do we have in common with China and India?”
“Nothing that I know of .” The Professor replied.
I answered, “Not much. But we do share an atmosphere. The very one these idiots think they are saving.
“As Clyde just showed you, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”
Clyde looked up from his paper, “When you finish your beer, you’ll find your broom right over there.”
