Please help FR keep the doors open
Posted on 11/22/2014 11:38:11 AM PST by Vince Ferrer
A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
“At the start of RE < C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
According to the IEEE article;
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
Solar collectors in orbit beaming energy down have been proposed.
Far more efficient than collectors on earth, but the beaming down microwaves bit has always struck me as potentially a problem.
Wah!!!
No!!!
At least they are honest in their assessment and were willing to publicly acknowldge RE is a not economically viable nor is its vaunted religion.
It simply cannot out produce the energy that goes into the technologies and mostly cannot break even with the power requirements in manufacturing and maintaining such tech.
So sad, too bad, buh bye....
Me Makee Sadee Face...
I give them this much credit - unlike most environazis they were honest enough to acknowledge the truth - even if it took 4 years.
Now I wonder how long it will take for them to realize that they were tackling a non-existing problem.
Perhaps Daniel Shipstone is hard at work somewhere even as we speak.
It seems to me the single family dwelling, or at least single location power generation is much more feasible. Even if you just cut your publicly supplied energy consumption in half, you’ve accomplished quite a bit.
I’ve seen others talk about the solar companies that are now installing solar panels for free, then charging an electrical bill each month, equivalent to about half the former bill.
That seems like a good way to go. If you add batteries in the mix, you can get by at night and on days when there is cloud cover.
To me, this seems like a step in the right direction.
That is how it has been done for fifty or more years. In the 60-70s back to earth group, many bought land and used Passive Solar with windows and facing south then added batteries, and the magazine Mother Earth showed them how to do it back then...it worked fine as individual homes.
Not only that, but as terrorism looms, making the system more resilient is a plus. If homes were all self-sustaining, it would be impossible to black out major regions.
Big business will probably always need to be tied to the grid, but at least homes would be better off.
I dunno. My wife says I generate enough methane (farts) to power a city.
Those companies are not profitable on an absolute basis, though. The reason they have that business model is so that they can collect the renewable energy subsidies from the government rather than the homeowner. If the subsidies get cut, the business dissappears overnight.
Funny, but animals get along fine using natural sources of renewable energy, as did Native Americans before the European invasion of North America.
The day will come when we will realize that modern technology is only the effort to make more of less, and the less being almost always of inferior quality.
And that there is a limit to how much can be made from a diminishing supply of resources.
No huge ugly panels on the roof, no crazy racks of batteries oozing acid in the basement . . . just sensible orientation, placement of windows, and LOTS of insulation!
Our power bill was crazy low. When we started having kids and moved to a larger conventional house, we were shocked at the size of our electric bill.
“Now, this was tried forty years ago and didn’t work either.” Now,didn’t I see where this is the definition of insanity....trying something over & over & expecting different results.
Thanks Vince. I was hoping some interesting comments would come along like that. I hadn’t given that aspect of it thought. Good point.
What’s your take on the individual homeowner? Since they didn’t sign a payment schedule, what happens to them?
Do they get the system outright, or do they then have to start paying a lender?
Most Native Americans had a standard of living not much better than stone age neanderthals. Thirty years old was old to them. Even the most advanced societies before modern power had 95% of their people doing subsistence farming, tied to a spot of land for their whole lives performing back breaking work until they couldn't do it any more and then died.
I'd still like to shoot for a higher standard of living. At least until I die. Then the rest of you can live like feudal peasants if you want.
I really don't know those details. I guess you would have to study a contract with one of the companies.
One of the good things that is happening right now is that PV systems are coming down drastically in price, and can be a good deal for the right situation. But I think it takes a lot of research for an individual buyer and the specific place they are going to be installed to be able to figure out if it is a good deal.
Absolutely. Nuclear, including breeder reactors which don’t generate plutonium, should be fully reexamined based on the transcendent difference in the availability of computation for simulation which can predict the results of whatever options are available in contingencies.Three Mile Island happened due to inadequate control due to inadequate situational awareness. That was in the computational Mesozoic Era. Japan’s experience proves that opening up a waste storage facility is mandatory right now, and would make more reactors safe.
But first we should resort to natural gas. And stop arbitrarily trashing coal-fired power plants.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. That is exactly what myself and legions of other engineers have been saying for years. Yes, I am a big fan of renewable energy sources (ie. the sun, since everything else on earth is finite). However, it really doesn't take too much skull sweat nor online research to figure out that renewable energy with existing technology is not a good idea for mass production/use. All those enviro-whackos promoting widespread adoption of "green" energy are actually, gasp (!), advocating a position that will result in a net increase in environmental harm. Ouch, that's gotta hurt if/when they eventually realize that.
Some day, maybe, probably, we'll have technology available that will make renewable/green energy sources not only economically viable (without artificial government incentives/distortions) and that is actually lower net environment impact than other energy sources. Not there yet. Therefore it is (currently) environmentally irresponsible to promote green energy.
“We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
Different approach? How about OIL, NATURAL GAS, COAL......
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