Generating Clean Power
Whether its the ridiculous notion of "beautiful clean coal" and it's toxic smog or "safe fracking" that results in contamination of freshwater, our modern society, for better or worse, is utterly reliant on electrical power. When air and water pollution becomes unbearable due to health concerns, the responsible thing is to look to other forms of energy to power everyday needs. Having clean air and water is near and dear to me, as it is to any sane person out there.
Understandably, the natural tendency is to seek "green energy" as the alternative. After all, humans are not the only ones impacted by pollution. We share the planet with all manner of flora and fauna—a fact that should be self-evident.
The map above does not have the typical "green energy" solutions we hear about ad nauseam from politicians and the media. Instead, I've deliberately chosen to display nuclear, geothermal, and two forms of hydroelectric power plants. Why not "green solutions" such as solar, wind, and biomass? That's a great question!
It's green until it isn't
The political rhetoric of environmental conservation and care of natural wildlife habitats is misaligned and often contrary. Michael Moore's documentary Planet of the Humans reveals that "green energy" is a contradiction in terms regarding conservation. However, it is quite "green" in terms of money. The government subsidises green energy industries with tens of billions of dollars every year over any other power generation.
The materials required to manufacture "green" wind turbines requires quite a bit of mineral extraction and mining. Furthermore, these industrial and disposable eyesores kill over a million birds each year in the United States alone! Should we advocate for more turbines to increase this death toll in more locations than we already do today? It is irresponsible to wait until extinctions happen before collectively saying, "oh, my bad!"
What about solar power? One has to bulldoze large swaths of land to build them. Solar power farms have failed and resulted in a post-industrial wasteland littered with derelict and broken panels in places such as Hawai`i and California. Perhaps we can keep trying? Well, the folks in California have subsidised exactly that and cleared massive swaths of nature to create mega solar power plants that creates focused solar beams of death that incinerate birds mid-flight and send their smoking corpses plummeting to the ground. Destruction of habitat and burning birds alive isn't exactly "green" or living in harmony with nature. When will we say enough is enough?
As far biomass power plants, the idea of burning waste to generate power instead of filling landfills is a noble one. Since burning garbage isn't as efficient as burning trees, and since trees are "renewable", biomass power plants are labelled as "green." Unfortunately, there isn't enough waste to burn, and the clear-cutting of large swaths of forests is required to provide enough fuel to generate power. The argument favouring this practice is that proper forest management will enable a "crop rotation" of sorts. However, it is not only trees that are impacted by this. Wildlife of all kinds call these places home, and habitat destruction through deforestation causes the death of many species within interlinked ecosystems. Deforestation is directly responsible for koalas being "declared ‘Functionally Extinct’ with too few left to support the next generation."
The lights are always on
Nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power can efficiently and reliably produce a sizable portion of energy to meet the needs of modern society. Nuclear power accounts for roughly 20% of total energy production, and hydroelectric accounts for approximately 7%. Unfortunately, as clean as it is, geothermal power only accounts for 0.4% of the overall power produced. On a positive note, these three technologies are capable of running 24/7/365 and allow us to "always keep the lights on."
The most significant contributor is natural gas, which produces 40% of the total energy, but has the downside of extraction and transportation. Coal accounts for 19%, and renewables account for 20% of energy production—a large chunk of which is hydroelectric. The remaining 13% comes from biomass, wind, and solar—with the latter two requiring special environmental conditions to function at all.
None of these technologies is perfect. But we can readily see that even at 13% of the energy production coming from biomass, wind, and solar, the collateral damage to the environment is too much to bear as it is. Increasing the number of power plants of these three types is not an environmentally friendly solution. Until we come up with an efficient way to harness lightning from thunderstorms or find a way to generate power with dilithium crystals or gravimetric engines, to avoid destroying the environment, we need to take a closer look at nuclear and hydroelectric as the juice is not worth the squeeze if we attempt to increase the "green" 13% mentioned earlier. Just ask the birds.
Project Notes:
- This webpage was built to meet requirements for Module 7 of the MAP 672: Programming For Web Mapping course at the University of Kentucky.
Tools, citations, and methodology used in this project:
- All software tools used in this project were ran on the FreeBSD 13-RELEASE-p7 Operating System.
- Visual Studio Code - Open Source ("Code - OSS") 1.64.2 was used for all coding with the following plugins installed: Beautify, Code Runner, and Live Server.
- Code from Leaflet 1.7.1 using map tiles by Thunderforest Transport Dark and map data and map data from ©OpenStreetMap contributors.
- Images pulled from DuckDuckGo and StartPage image queries and belong to their respective owners.
- Data accessed 6 March 2022.
About the author:
An artist, scientist, bibliophile, and autodidact at heart, Sirius enjoys applying these
facets in his role of dad and husband first and foremost. He also finds happiness with
spending time with Shin'yū the Maltipoo
(Shin'yū or 親友 is the Japanese term for "best friend"). Sirius also enjoys calligraphy,
metacognition, philosophy, and the pursuit of arcane knowledge regardless of the path it
puts him on. He generally prefers Open Source Software solutions such as FreeBSD for daily
computing, QGIS for cartography and geospatial analysis, GIMP and Inkscape for image
manipulation. However, he is no stranger to proprietary solutions such as ArcGIS Pro, Adobe
Photoshop and Illustrator.
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