It is tragic that neither Chris Dudley nor John Kitzhaber are informed enough and/or honest enough to admit the truth about the renewable energy fad, which has now become an insane national hysteria. Dudley has a windmill icon on his web site, and Kitzhaber has solar panels and windmills showcased on his television commercials. The national average cost for producing energy with solar panels is 40 cents per kilowatt hour, and because of Eugene’s high latitude and cloudy weather, the cost of solar cell-generated electricity in Eugene is about 60 cents per kwh. Look at your current electric bill and figure out how much you would have to pay each month if we used solar energy as anything more than just dishonest political hype. The real cost of wind and solar power is even higher than the simple kwh cost figures indicate, because both wind and solar are intermittent energy sources that require costly redundant back-up power systems to operate when the wind in not blowing and the sun is not shinning.
The only useful clean energy sources for large scale energy production are nuclear power, hydroelectric power, geothermal power and clean-burning natural gas. Of that list, only hydroelectric power is renewable, but we have enough nuclear fuel in the form of thorium to last for many thousands of years and probably for millions of years. Food equals energy and energy equals food. The higher we push up the cost of energy with absurd energy schemes that can never work due to the unchangeable laws of physics, the higher the cost of the food we eat.
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