Bryan Leyland at The Telegraph UK explains why renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are never going to achieve "net zero". I missed this column when it appeared a few weeks ago, but it's still current. And it's still a pipe dream:
Many governments in the Western
world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The
US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It's widely believed that wind
and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the
US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind
and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal
flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to
store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s
output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a
time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or
more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a
wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is
needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over
time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something
very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are
online.
The governments of countries with a
considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation
that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them
have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup
for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime
where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow
unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and
maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.
In fact it's already common to see
efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they
can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of
wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas
as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part
of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
Much more at the link here.
But try sharing any of these facts with a green zealot. It may be that only after unimaginable damage
and suffering resulting from reducing access to energy that the greenies will wake
up. Maybe not even then . . .
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