The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics, And Common Sense

Issues and Insights ^ | 09/24/2019 | Henry I. Miller and Andrew I. Fillat

[SeekAndFind]

Whether it’s the Green New Deal, in which climate change abatement is only one of several radical proposals, or the general brainwashing of the younger generations about the impending end of the world, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals. Leaders from around the world will be at it in earnest this week during the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019.

Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.

The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:

• Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.

• Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.

• A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.

• The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.

• No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.

• To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.

• Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.

• A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.

• Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.

• A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.

• Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.

• The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons.

This non-exhaustive list illustrates that salvation with respect to energy production does not lie in solar and wind, especially given that it ignores the subject of transportation, where weight and capacity considerations are not trivial. Electric cars are feasible (although they still need a source of electricity to be charged), but electric airplanes are difficult to conceive.

So, where does that leave us? There are several short-term possibilities that might help on the supply side: greater use of hydropower and large-scale and small-scale nuclear. The last of these is largely untapped but intriguing. Consider that hundreds of ships are powered safely and reliably by small-scale nuclear plants. Although not without some problems, these have operated largely uneventfully for many years, and because of their size, they pose manageable risks and waste disposal.

The long-term solution, we believe, is nuclear fusion. There is no significant waste, and the supply of raw ingredients is essentially unlimited. But significant technical obstacles remain, and the most likely timeframe is 30-50 years away.

On the demand side, efficiency measures can and should continue. Household appliances have become drastically more efficient in the last decade or two. Even ordinary gasoline cars have improved greatly. These efforts should continue, although we should not forget that these advances are primarily applicable to industrialized countries. Plug-in Teslas are not likely to take sub-Saharan Africa by storm in the foreseeable future.

Finally, mankind is resourceful enough to find innumerable ways to adapt to climate change. Many of the predictions of planetary doom are almost certainly exaggerated. Common-sense measures such as protecting rain forests, planting more trees, fortifying coastal protection, and abandoning overly vulnerable property will be necessary. But these costs are eminently manageable.

There are also many ingenious approaches to “geoengineering,” the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change; these include solar radiation management and greenhouse gas sequestration.

We are best served by “un-brainwashing” ourselves about climate change — that is, dispensing with the hyperbole and nescience that distract from reality. The drumbeat of the apocalypse may demand responses, but, especially from politicians, so far it has not elicited the right ones.

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Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. They were undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Dilbert San Diego]

No, no. Greta shreiked “how dare you” at us. That’s it, end of discussion. Greta has weighed in, and some Democrat presidential candidates praised her message and courage.

[EnglishOnly]

Nuclear Power was/is/will always be the Energy for the 21st Century.

[ctdonath2]

Solar nets 10 watts per square meter (give or take a fraction).
That’s it.

Ergo 1 square mile for 25 megawatts.

Math accordingly.

[CincyRichieRich]

Yes, it defies all those variables of logic...so...STOP looking at climate change in those terms.

Atheists and the Godless, are those true believers in climate change...it is their religion and cause, sans any presence of God, much less, Jesus.

So if someone questioned you religion, what would you say?

That’s why.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: 1 square mile for 25 megawatts.

I almost always used the handy formula 1 MW = 1,000 homes. So, one square mile of Solar can power 25,000 homes, or for an average of 4 people per home, a small city of 100,000 people.

[RayChuang88]

A HUGE issue few people want to tackle is how to store all the power generated by solar and wind power for times when the Sun is not up and wind speeds are not appropriate for wind turbines to operate. It may be a couple of decades until power storage systems are reasonably cheap and viable.

[litehaus]

“The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics, And Common Sense”

The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics,by folks with no Common Sense....(More accurate)

[BuffaloJack]

Just start collecting unicorn farts as a renewable energey source.

[Secretmtcman1]

As I’ve said before. Our energy supply needs are like a cake. All wind and solar can ever be of be is the frosting.

[SMARTY]

Shooting-off-your-mouth, IS the Liberal default style. 😊 Facts, content, commonsense, etc., are all incidental. Talk loud, use popular catch words, parrot the latest BS, rinse, repeat.

[Lou L]

It may be a couple of decades until power storage systems are reasonably cheap and viable.

You mean batteries?

I think the OP pointed out that battery technology is already pretty far along, and saving more energy in a smaller-sized battery likely won't be achievable. How large of a battery would you need to save energy for several days or weeks?

[from occupied ga]

While the article accurately points out the many flaws of the so-called renewable energy sources, the authors are obviously not as familiar with fusion as he should be. Practical usion power has been a couple of decades away for the last 50 years. plus the authors state

There is no significant waste

This is NOT true. Various fusion reactions occur at different temperatures, The easiest to achieve is tritium/deuterium. This releases a neutron which then goes onto activate something. The first likely thing to be activated is whatever the shell material is surrounding the plasma. Lithium would be good insomuch as it produced tritium whe hit with a neutron, but its far to soft and has way too low a melting point to be the material that provides the first wall of the reactor, so while the reaction itself doesn't product radioactive isotopes as residual waste, it produces copious quantities of neutrons that go on to transmute everything in the vicinity into radioactive isotopes. Neutron bombardment also mechanically degrades materials so the life of the fusion reactor itself it not going to be particularly long.

[Robert A Cook PE]

For only 6 hours per day. Multiply by 5 for evernight delivery and storage conversion. And that is with NO margin for clouds. Snow. Rain.

[ctdonath2]

1 square mile of solar => 100,000 people.
Good summary.
Just need to make people aware of how big a square mile of black panels is, and how much that costs to install/maintain.

Next calculation: backup.

You’ll need 240 Watt-hours of storage to evenly buffer the 1m^2 panel’s output (~5 usable hours of power in, 24 hours of power out, average 10 watts per hour).
That’s for just 1 day.
To account for excess cloud cover, you’ll need another 240Wh per day of backup planned. A miserably rainy/snowy week with negligible sunlight means you’ll need 1680 Wh of storage. Sure there may be enough light getting thru to lower that to 1400 Wh.
That’s full cost of a day times 7 days to cover those infrequent times clouds intervene for an extended period, there whether or not it’s used ... and a “brick wall effect” when you run out.

To bracket the upper end of cost, one 1m^2 panel plus 1400Wh storage, courtesy of GoalZero.com, is ~$2000.
Discounts are likely, but then so are other costs (land, maintenance, etc).
For 1 square meter, reliable to 1 week of bad weather.

Now multiply by 2,500,000.
That’s $5,000,000,000.
5 billion dollars to supply solar to 100,000 people ... and if that storm goes more than a week, it’s lights out.
That’s $14/day for 10 years per person.

[ctdonath2]

Hence my earlier “10 watts per day”.

Sun provides 1300 watts per square meter.
When you subtract out night, weather, efficiency, angles, and other factors, your net solar harvest is about 10 watts per square meter.

[_Jim]

re: “The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics, And Common Sense”

AND ignores the continued progress of Dr. Randell L. Mills ...

[ctdonath2]

BTW: I’m running my office computer on 100% GoalZero solar (100 watt panel, 250 Wh storage) right now, getting quite familiar with the nuances of positioning, weather, shadows, efficiency, maintenance, cost, etc. It’s not the magic “panel, done” wannabe-environmentalists seem to think it is.

[_Jim]

re: “Various fusion reactions occur at different temperatures, The easiest to achieve is tritium/deuterium. This releases a neutron which then goes onto activate something.”

Just have to say it: “old tech.” Look at the progress in harnessing the Hydrino for the future ...

[USS Alaska]

The use of nuclear power, natural gas, oil and coal will power the demands for generations to come.

When the next, cost efficient method is discovered/developed the world population will adopt it with no gummint force, because it is cost efficient.

People are smart and make decisions that benefit themselves.

PERIOD.