Posted on 10/18/2022 6:39:44 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Not being a dope, you likely realized a long time ago that it was going to take a lot of energy to manufacture the components of the future green energy utopia. Wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and so forth — there is lots of steel, other metals, and silica involved that all need to be melted at high temperatures to get formed into the devices. How are they going to achieve that at reasonable cost using just the wind and sun as energy sources?
Up to now, the main strategy has been to buy most of the devices from China, where they are made largely using energy from coal. Out of sight, out of mind. But both Europe and the U.S. have made an effort to get at least somewhat into the game of making these things. Europe finds itself leading the acceleration into the green energy wall, with the intentional suppression of fossil fuel production and now the substantial cutoff of Russian gas supplies causing sharp spikes in the prices of both gas and electricity.
Without any low-priced fossil fuels to use for making the green energy devices, what is the current situation in Europe? A source called renews.biz has a roundup on October 4. Some excerpts:
Research from Rystad Energy reveals that 35GW of solar manufacturing and more than 2000 gigawatt hours of battery cell manufacturing capacity in the EU could be mothballed unless power prices return to normal. The energy intensive nature of these manufacturing processes is leading some operators to temporarily close or abandon production facilities as the cost of doing business escalates.
Who might have guessed that making solar panels and big grid-scale batteries might be “energy intensive”? There’s this specifically as to battery manufacturing:
Battery cell manufacturing – crucial in the EV and battery storage supply chain – is even more energy intensive than solar manufacturing, and Europe is a major global player. The EU currently boasts about 550GWh of capacity, representing 27% of global operational capacity. Announced projects under development are set to boost that total significantly, increasing capacity to 2.7 terawatt-hours, positioning the EU as a global leader. However, those are now at risk and the car manufacturing and battery storage sectors could struggle to source Europe-made batteries as a result, stated Rystad. “High power prices not only pose a significant threat to European decarbonisation efforts but could also result in increased reliance on overseas manufacturing, something governments are eager to avoid.
Looks like it takes lots of carbon to achieve “decarbonization.”
Meanwhile, over at the Guardian on September 12, they have begun to fret that high electricity prices are threatening the whole idea of electric cars. The headline is “Soaring energy costs could threaten future of electric cars, experts warn.” Excerpt:
Electric car owners, whether charging their cars at home or through contracts with charging operators, have seen price rises of 10% or more. Further price rises are expected, owing to the fact that the price of electricity is linked to that of gas, which has become ever scarcer since Russia turned off its gas supplies to Germany almost two weeks ago. Allego, one of Germany’s largest charging station operators, raised its prices at the start of this month from 43 cents a kilowatt hour to 47 cents. Express charging, via a continuous current, has risen from 65 to 70 cents a kilowatt hour while the fastest, so-called ultra-fast charging, has gone up from 68 cents to 75 cents a kilowatt hour.
According to the automobile economist Stefan Bratzel, the development is an immediate threat to the industry. . . . “If electric cars become more expensive to use, the surge in electric mobility is in danger of collapsing. . . .
And then we have the story of Britishvolt, the UK’s first “gigafactory,” supposedly on the road to making big batteries to backup the renewable energy future. They even have substantial backing from the UK government, but apparently it’s not enough. With European energy prices spiking, investors are heading for the exits; and the Times (London) reports on October 15 that now they are “running out of money” and need an infusion of some 200 million pounds by year end to avoid going bust:
The company building Britain's first battery "gigafactory" is in emergency talks with investors including a major carmaker amid fears it could run out of money before the end of the year. Britishvolt, a government-backed developer of battery cell technologies, is reportedly holding talks with seven potential investors after recent market turmoil led to prospective backers pulling out of its latest funding round.
I’m willing to place a bet right now that it will never be possible to build all the green energy devices to power the world using only green energy. Does anybody want to take the other side?
PhD 9 minutes ago · 0 Likes
Reading some of the comments.... it is clear that some of your readers still do not understand that man made CO2 affecting the climate is complete and utter pseudo scientific nonsense.....if you understand Henry's Law, you have always known this AGW stuff of the Left is political science not real science......
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is not affected by humans but instead is controlled by natural chemical and physical processes which control CO2 solubility in ocean water. Similarly, CO2 residence time in atmospheric is also irrelevant to this chemistry and physics. CO2 gas will always find the equilibrium concentration ratio between sea surface and air determined by Henry’s Law which is a function of sea surface temperature at that location.
https://climatecite.com/henrys-law-controls-co2-concentration-not-humans/
PhD 9 minutes ago · 0 Likes
Reading some of the comments.... it is clear that some of your readers still do not understand that man made CO2 affecting the climate is complete and utter pseudo scientific nonsense.....if you understand Henry's Law, you have always known this AGW stuff of the Left is political science not real science......
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is not affected by humans but instead is controlled by natural chemical and physical processes which control CO2 solubility in ocean water. Similarly, CO2 residence time in atmospheric is also irrelevant to this chemistry and physics. CO2 gas will always find the equilibrium concentration ratio between sea surface and air determined by Henry’s Law which is a function of sea surface temperature at that location.
https://climatecite.com/henrys-law-controls-co2-concentration-not-humans/
Utterly brilliant. Plain and concise.
Don’t solar panels grow on trees?…
Shhhh. We don’t want to point out that their perpetual motion machine is a perpetual motion machine.
The democrats’ goal is not to force people to drive electric cars. The goal is to force people to move to high density apartments in democrat controlled large cities and ride mass transit. Rich liberals who can afford EVs will then be able to drive them wherever they want without sitting in traffic.
Silly gator, solar panels don’t grow on trees. Our tax dollars grow on trees. Didn’t you rake your money this weekend? It’s autumn and the dollars are falling.
Liberals won’t do the math.
But it’s worse than just that. They now will not let anyone else do the math. Try it, and you’ll be ignored - if you’re lucky. It’s more likely that you’ll be denounced, shunned, and cancelled.
No civilization can maintain itself under these conditions.
I'll probably complete the year about 90% energy independent with my solar and driving my EV. The other 10% of energy I'll buy either from the grid, or buying gas to drive my ICE pickup every once in a blue moon and for my lawnmower etc., or buying power to charge the EV if we take it on trips. It'd be horribly cost prohibitive to try to make my home 100% energy independent (even if we exclude the road trips).
And that's not even getting into the fact that I didn't make all of the components for the solar equipment and my EV. Mr. Menton (the article author) is entirely correct. Those things could not have been made with "green" energy alone. It's a fantasy to think we don't need fossil fuels. The only thing that makes fossil fuels bad is that the left has figured out how to regulate them into scarcity. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't have ever thought to go solar and get an EV (so I can manage most of my own energy supply).
PhD 51 minutes ago · 1 Like
Also FYI...... The amount of CO2 gas emitted into air by humans (about 8 gigatonns per year) is trivially small with respect to both the existing CO2 reservoir in air (about 700 gigatonnes) and the existing CO2 reservoir in ocean surface (about 1000 gigatonnes) and it is also trivially small with respect to the two ongoing annual fluxes of CO2 (about 90 gigatonnes each) circulating between the atmospheric CO2 reservoir and ocean surface reservoir. The human emission is easily absorbed by ocean surface.
The whole thing is asinine. Yet, here we are. People have wholly swallowed it.
There are few things that make me believe humans are fundamentally stupid in large groups as strongly as the overall sheep-like acceptance by the general public of the climate change scam.
At the Manhattan Contrarian website below the article are some very good comments on the article. Some have some good science in them.
What is clear is that regardless of what is happening with CO2, the “climate change” agenda is an alarmist agenda, and that alarmist agenda is moving politicians to premature and not-well-figured-out actions which are already economically dangerous and by crimping global economies from taking actions in the nature of implementing adjustments and mitigations of climate affects, they insure the world will not be prepared for the worst of what the alaramists predict. I am not saying their predictions are right and will come to pass. I am saying the actions they are demanding now would in fact defeat their own program, in terms of an appropriate human response.
The “climate change” agenda is a Pol Pot style agenda. Destroy everything so all can be remande in a “green” Utopia.
They’re talking about solar panels, windmills, and all that stuff.
But I have NOT seen anything about all the CHARGERS they will need. Talking about 500,000 chargers scattered about the US alone.
What are they going to make all those chargers out of? Plastic? Metal? (steel, can rust, Aluminum, oxidizes, copper, ... ) Wood?.
There is NO ANSWER. Nobody in power has thought it through.
This is a f*cking disaster and MUST BE STOPPED NOW!
“Don’t solar panels grow on trees?…”
Actually they do - they’re called ‘leaves’ - sadly the technology for hooking them up to the drive train of a Prius hasn’t yet been developed, though I expect there are some in the unicorn/rainbow crowd who expect that to become feasible if we all just believe in it hard enough.
The answer to that question depends on how loose your definition of “solar panel” is.
I think AOC already patented that idea.
Sheer genius!! However, my power strip must be defective, as it can’t power even a 40-watt lamp.....[wondering what to do...?]
It takes fossil fuels to make glass (or to refine silica for solar cells) because there are no (industrial) electric heating elements that can get that hot without the element itself melting first. To make glass, you got to have a flame.
Not just in the manufacture but industrial-scale solar collection devices — like those they’re building in the desert out west, like at Crescent Dunes — the collector has to be pre-heated (with natural gas) — sort of “priming the pump” — to get them started, even on warm mornings.
Those concentrators also set birds and/or bats on fire instantaneously with they have the bad luck to fly between the concentrating mirrors and the collector.
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