On Jul 27, 6:54 am, " wrote:

...

I recently heard a fellow touting the glories of solar & wind over the
horrors of those terrible old tea-kettles. It took only a moment to
figure out his numbers were based on a photo-voltaic array that was
100% efficient. ( His wind turbines were equally efficient. And the
wind apparently blew all the time :-) Trying to interject a whiff of
reality into such discussions is treated with polite condescension at
best. After all, everyone knows wind & solar is good, whereas nukes
are evil.


I've read that a similar approach is used to 'prove' that ethanol
production consumes more energy than is recovered by burning
it. Sunlight is included in the input side of the budget.

Of course that's perfectly correct, but don't forget to do the
same for fossil fuels...

--

FF