I thought of something when I thought of this general thing. A wind powered car. Think about it. I thought about how you could simply raise up the car a bit and make the bottom hollow and fill it with turbines and when the car drives down the road, it spins the turbines, stores the energy in batteries and then the car could run solely on batteries.
I'm sure it's already been explained a hundred times in the thread already, but I'd like to provide my own explenation here.
Basically, you can't get more energy out then you put in. In a perfect universe the energy produced by the windmill would be exactly equal to the energy required to accelerate the air to turn the windmill. So you're converting the chemical energy stored in the gasoline into the kinetic energy of the vehicle. The kinetic energy of the vehicle is equal to the kinetic energy of the wind. This is then converted into electrical energy by the wind generator. The net effect is that you have just constructed a gasoline powered electric generator! When you factor in things like drag and friction it is actually less efficient then just hooking up a gasoline generator to an electric car.
Wind generators work on the principle that we don't need to accelerate the wind in order for it to work - this is already done by natural processes like the rotation of the earth and the uneven heating of the surface of the earth by the sun. The energy is coming from somewhere - in this case the earth to a small degree and primarily the sun - so it's not just magic. But it's energy that we wouldn't have otherwise used. If you put a windmill on a car we have to create the energy ourselves.
There are plenty of ways to reclaim wasted energy on cars though.
Regenerative braking is the technique used by electric cars to convert energy produced by braking into electric energy that can be reused. When the vehicle is in motion, the electric motor turns the wheels. When the vehicle is breaking, the
wheels turn the motor and it produces more electricity. It works the same way as exercise bikes which require you to pedal in order for them to turn on, which use the energy produced by you biking to turn an electric motor which powers the display.
Quite obviously you don't quite understand how earthly processes work and how solar and wind energy works. I suggest educating yourself before acting like you know something.
He does ask very good questions, and fortunately there are also answers! Alternative energy is not solution to the problem, it is part of the solution to the problem. Alternative energy is just one small part of the energy strategy, which should also include energy conservation, energy reclamation/recycling, increased efficiency on existing appliances, and cleaner energy sources. So wind and solar power is one part of the solution, but so are more efficient air conditioners, better coal smoke stack scrubbers, natural gas power plants, landfill gas reclamation, etc. Even oil, gas, and coal, which are part of the problem, are also part of the solution.
Regarding your question about solar energy, you are right, there isn't always sunlight, there's days when it's overcast and you won't be able to get everyone energy, there's days when there's just no wind. What do you do to satisfy demand on these days? The goal here is pollution minimization, down to levels we can manage. No pollution would be nice but it's not really feasible. We can deal with some pollution, and we could make up for say paving over some forest for a coal plant by just planting another forest somewhere else. So to answer your question, when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing we can burn gas in an oxygen rich environment. Cleanly burning fossil fuels with no impurities produces two products: water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is a far cry from the sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and coal ash produced by coal plants.
There's also technological solutions to deal with non-continuous power generation. One example is using the solar energy to melt salt, which can then be converted into heat or electric energy as needed, even in the middle of the night.
Nuclear power is definitely a part of the solution and we've come a long way since the old plants. The US nuclear program was pretty much frozen because of political and public outrage over Three Mile Island. I wouldn't be opposed to restarting development in that industry, although the question of what to do with all the waste seriously needs to be worked out.
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