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.
“And that there is a limit to how much can be made from a diminishing supply of resources.”
The problem with your reasoning is that we do not face a diminishing supply of resources.
As a practical matter, our resource base is unlimited for at least hundreds of thousands of years.
The earth does not limit our resources.
The key to discovering new energy sources that work is abundant energy, prosperity and new technologies. First we have to quit playing politically correct games with science.
The big PV hidden animal, is that they degrade.
Have they made improvements on that?
BTW, thanks for the answer on the question of what the payment risk might be.
In some municipalities it is currently illegal to not be hooked up to the grid.
There was a lady in Florida that was being sued by a town for collecting her own water and not using the town’s electricity.
This is how governments make use of renewables “feasible. “
Renewable energy for anything but personal use is BS and a total waste of time.
If whatever you need power for can wait until the sun shines or the wind blows, go ahead and waste money on the equipment. You will still find it cheaper to use normal power sources.
On a commercial scale it is worthless because you still need conventional backup for all the energy that will be used, all that is created is extra wasted energy.
It was taught to me in Intro to Engineering 101 by a rather famous (or as famous as they get) thermodynamics Prof who used basic thermodynamic analysis and evaluation of all of the various existing and alternative energy schemes being touted at the time and balanced the daily and lifetime potential energy output with the energy expenditure required to build them.
His spot on analysis produced the following conclusions -
The only three that had any chance of producing more energy than it took to build them and which were suitable for industrial grade power plant type service were geo thermal, hydroelectric and wind turbine power generation.
Geothermal works great where there is geothermal activity but it's very rare to find a good commercial grade geothermal energy source, especially near populated areas where you need power and geothermal is very hard on the power generation equipment which means lots of maintenance .
Wind works when the wind is blowing but we are learning the downsides of wind turbines, not the least of which is avian mortality issues - these things kill birds, especially raptors, on a regular basis. Many of the California Condors and Eagles that they are trying to re introduce to the wild have biten the dust due to wind turbines.
Photovoltaic cells work great for small, isolated installations in remote areas where you need stand alone power but it takes far more barrels of oil to manufacture solar cells than the cells actually produce over a 20 year life span and very few solar cells last for 20 years before failure.
Large scale power generation from solar is simply impractical due to hardware costs and the fact that 1000 mega watt natural gas fueled power plant takes up about 10 -20 acres of land and a 1000 mega watt plant Solar power takes up around 5000 acres of land.
The only thing that has changed is that very efficient thin film organic solar cells are being developed that require very little energy to manufacture, are potentially low in cost and are well suited for distributed solar - ie where you have a roofing membrane or awning integrated with embedded solar cells .
This sort of Distributed Solar is the future of the alternative energy industry.
Unfortunately, Obama’s big push to force a trillion dollars worth of crappy old technology and even more crappy immature new technology on America as “shovel ready” “green energy” projects into the market kick start some ill conceived, impossible to implement and doomed to failure from the start utopian Green Energy Revolution to kick start a “Green Economy” has been a disaster and almost a TOTAL WASTE OF TAXPAYER MONEY.
Roughly a trillion dollars was pounded down the Green Obama rat hole and three fourths of the Green Energy power generation capacity it installed by be broken, non functional and non repairable by the time Obama leaves office in 2017. His only accomplishment will have been to make a lot of Obama and Democrat cronies rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Obama’s Green Energy Program has also been a disaster for the innovative alternative energy companies themselves and the collapse of the Obama Green Energy Fraud has put most of them out of business.
It has been a moral disaster as well, especially for the desperately poor living in remote , unimproved areas of the world.
Alternative energy is really the savior of these poor people in the Third World as it is a way to get power tot them in remote areas with and primitive conditions to allow them leave the world of dirt floors, no electricity, no ability to pump massive ground water resources they are standing on for agricultural development and basic daily survival needs , and a basic subsistence existence where the pressure from living hand to mouth leaves no time for education or modern economic development.
Obama and his Green morons have killed off much of the alternative energy capacity that was being developed for installation into the Third World and it is the people in these poverty and misery stricken regions that will suffer the most because projects never will be built that otherwise would have been were it not for Obama’s crony green energy fraud.
Obama’s “Kick Starting A Green Economy” plan is analgoues to Jimmy Carter in 1979 forcing through a “Digital Personal Computer” revolution with a goal to kick start a computer revolution by using a Trillion dollars of borrowed taxpayer money to purchase every American family a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer.
Such an act in 1979 would have saturated computer market with obsolete, comparatively worthless computers, killed off the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh and killed off the technological developments of the Silicone Valley that have driven our economy for the last 30 years.
With the death of innovation due to the government spending a trillion dollars on TRS-80s in Silicone Valley and the bankrupting of young start up computer companies , including Apple by killing mass market demand for innovative products (I mean, who really need more computer power than a TRS-80 provides ) we would be using Radio Shack TRS - 100s with 20 mega hz 16 bit processors and 10 megabytes of memory and 100 mega byte hard drives, using VisiCalc 2014 for our spread sheet needs and playing Pong v86.02 for video games.
Obama has imposed the alternative energy equivalent of this Alternate Universe scenario effectively destroying the alternative energy industry and his central planning energy fiat has especially destroyed the amazing progress that was being made in organic thin film, nano solar technology for highly efficient, low cost and low energy to manufacture thin film photovoltaic cell technology .
Obama is an incompetent leader and everything he touches falls to ruin and his “ Green Energy Economy’ initiative is the poster child and fitting long term monument for the incompetent hubris and corruption of the Obama Commissars central planning
“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.”
Unless you are in a totally off-the-grid location, all you created was extra wasted energy. If you can plug into the grid and the power is there, whatever you produce is redundant energy. You can use it, but an equal amount of energy is wasted because you didn’t use that.
Yes.
An “engineer” who thinks CO2 is a pollutant has not taken a single botany or biology course.
Or, he is just creating a four year long sinecure.
I read that one, and there was a fine and they were going to take her house if she didn’t meet a deadline right?
The way around that is to connect to the local electric, but don’t turn on the heat etc...just pay minimum bill of $10 or so pr month. And if you have extreme heat or cold you can turn it up...just don’t use it. One or two lights and couple of plugs and small meter approved should do it..
No one said that, it was just a comment to state it wasn’t the first time it was tried. I think Solar, if used properly as well as wind, could help out in smaller doses.
I do not think it sustainable, as Google said, in HUGE FARMS like Nevada and Harry Reid & son are doing. Wonder how much money they got from our taxpayer dollars for that.
Might want to go back to it, after you are ‘empty nesters.”
Absolutely, retain that independence. Hook up to electricity to fulfill the zoning crap, but keep it off...and pay that tiny bill of minimum use. It might come in handy on occasion.
For example, Solyndra was a roaring success because it made some very special people a lot of money. Other renewable energy firms made similar fortunes for their owners.
Isn't that considered "successful" in today's world?
Tiny homes adapt to that very well....easily built, heated and add extra insulation.
Handy? As in 'we already thrown tens of millions at the wall, let's see if we can use any of it so it's not a total waste', maybe.
Otherwise it's just wasting money.
Perhaps the trend will go back to smaller homes.
It already has with most builders, and the Tiny house movement is strong.
If the day finally comes that the benefit of solar outweighs the cost, I suspect it’s going to be more in the form of thermoelectric ceramic roof tiles, myself. It’s not so much the sunlight itself that generates electricity with that, but the heat differential between the exposed exterior ceramic and the cool(er) underside. The aesthetics would be much improved, too. They haven’t proved prone to degrading with many hundreds of thousands of hours of test use.
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