Wind & solar renewables: pointless

 

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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Wind, Solar, & Batteries: nope

Yesterday, we blogged on the Green Cult members, those environmental zealots who are actually up to something else.   As a follow-up, John Hinderaker at PowerLine explains why wind and solar power will “never work”:

Enormous amounts of money are being made by “green” fraudsters, utilities and politicians who tell us we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. In fact, no such transition is underway; fossil fuel consumption is higher than ever. And no such transition will take place, ever, either in America or anywhere else in the world.

Why? Because wind and solar are both obsolete technologies. They produce electricity less than one-half of the time, a fact that will never change. How can we run a modern economy on intermittent energy sources? We can’t.

If you ask a liberal that question, his answer will be “batteries.” He will admit that wind and solar work only occasionally, but that is no problem, he will tell you, because the electricity they generate can be stored in batteries for later use.

Power can be stored in batteries, of course. We all do this every day, storing tiny amounts on our laptops, smart phones and so on. But our energy demands are almost unfathomably large, and all of the batteries in the world don’t begin to meet those needs. My colleague Isaac Orr created this graphic, which compares energy consumption in just one state in one country, as of 2019, with projected battery storage in the entire world as of 2030. You might as well rely on pixie dust as on batteries:

Click to embiggen

Much more at PowerLine here.

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The Mask of The Green Cult

 

image credit: yuuuuup8000.blogspot

“The Mask of The Green Cult.”  Sounds like a science fiction movie.  Except that it’s all around us, for real.  Adam Vicari at American Thinker starts his essay:

For decades now, you have heard leftist ear sores bloviate endlessly about "climate change."  The world will end in a decade if we don't take action now! screams AOC.  However, the more skeptical and rational among us tend to question the true motivation of the environmentalist Green cult.

The best example of a real environmentalist was probably conservationist John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club.  Muir's work helped to establish a number of national parks throughout the country, an act that did not regress the progress of society for the sake of nature, but sought to preserve nature while simultaneously allowing industrial society to progress at a steady rate.  Thus, Muir sought to build something, while the modern environmentalist movement seeks only to destroy everything and anything that gets in the way of its climate crusade. 

Just take a look at the Sierra Club's website today, and see what its goals are for 2030.  Within the next seven years, the Sierra Club hopes to eliminate enough coal and gas in the energy sector to make for 80% carbon "pollution"–free electricity by that time, in addition to decreasing oil used in the transportation sector by 18%, ending the sale of gas appliances, and halting the fossil fuel market by banning oil and gas exports and petrochemical expansion at the same time.  This is an ambitious plan...and also a complete load of BS and magical thinking. 

Although it may not faze most people at first, notice how they call carbon a "pollutant" and claim they want to reduce it by 80% in electricity production.  Since when is carbon a pollutant?  Carbon is an element necessary to all life on earth. No organism can survive without it.  Indeed, the entire process on which all human life depends, photosynthesis, requires carbon dioxide.  In order for plants to produce oxygen for living beings to breathe, they must first collect carbon dioxide dispelled from the living being breathing the air they are producing.  Numerous studies have indicated that areas with higher carbon concentration are more green and more fertile, not less. 

So why would the Green cult want to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere? . . . .

Why indeed?  Mr. Vicari has some good guesses.  Read his column here.

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Mis-named "renewable" energy sources

 

At American Greatness, Edward Ring published a good article on mis-named “renewable” energy sources, and it will surely be useful in those unavoidable debates with your relatives and friends who are true believers in the climate change / environmental protection rackets. The piece includes an excellent graph/chart.  Mr. Ring begins:

Today in America, there are obvious disconnects between observable reality and the narratives we get from the corporate special interests controlling the news we consume, along with politicians who are supposedly elected to represent us.

This is nothing new. Elites have defined America’s destiny throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t any freer or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

What may be different today, however, is the misanthropic folly of America’s current energy policies. America’s ruling elites are not only imposing these policies on everyone living here, they are attempting to impose them everywhere on earth. 

By now it should be beyond serious debate that “renewable” energy cannot possibly scale adequately to replace fossil fuels. Worse still, renewable energy systems are even less sustainable than fossil fuels and cause more environmental destruction. Renewables also fail to offer significant reductions in carbon emissions, and in some cases actually cause more carbon emissions.

Why these facts are dismissed by America’s elites is a story of corruption, collusion, megalomania, greed, cowardice, intellectual negligence, and delusional mass psychosis. Modern political theory offers solace to cynics who believe all democracies are actually just “managed” shams by suggesting pluralism and representative government are nonetheless at least approximated if there is competition among the powerful elites running a nation. But what if there is no inter-elite competition in the realm of ideas? What happens when every one of these elites believes the same things? When it comes to “renewables” and “net zero by 2050,” that’s what we have in America today. . . .

Read the full article here.

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