Alternative Energy Not Cost or Maintenance Free

Developing cost-effective alternative energy is a national goal, as it should be.  Technology will continue to develop new ways of harnessing the wind, sun, earth and water to produce power.  However, some seem to have an idealistic view of what can be done with wind and solar, which at this time are too intermittent, and provide too little electricity, to power the grid of a modern economy.  Such alternative energy systems do not provide free power once they are installed.  There is maintenance of the system, and degradation of the components over time.

I thought this picture of a solar facility that is only a year or so old was illustrative of the ongoing costs associated with alternative energy sources. It's not enough to simply build the system and reap free power.

You can see a longer explanation at Watts Up With That website, here.  This is how the blog entry starts:

German solar skeptic website SOLARKRITIK.DE here provides the background on the rundown, weed-covered solar facility in former communist (and now “green”) East Germany, which I presented in my last post here.


It’s much worse than we thought. The story behind the above photo and the project itself appears here at the online Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper. The facility is sprawled over an area of 20 acres. The Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper wrote just before the facility went into operation:
More here