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.
Only explanation.
It is a theory and only a theory and the Democrats see it as a means to an end — taxes and control.
“One more liberal myth blows up in their faces.”
No, not really. Liberal leaders have always known, FULL WELL, that these schemes cannot compete against convention energy.
But their goal was never to REPLACE conventional energy, it was to SHUT DOWN conventional energy. They were pushing this crap in the 1970s, when solar costs were at least 10 times what they are now. Even the White House, in Jimmy Carter’s days couldn’t afford solar power, they ended up putting on solar water heaters instead.
But solar and wind did get a lot cheaper than before, much cheaper.. Now the left could provide an ‘alternative’ to conventional that does pass the giggle test, rather than telling everyone to shut off their air conditioners and heaters, and move back into caves.
But is still way too overpriced to be practical and doesn’t do jack for the carbon footprint. But it buys them time...the time they need to dismantle coal, in particular, and the plan has been working very well for them.
It looks here that Google had REAL ENGINEERS, with legitimate leftist credentials, working on it and that blew their cover. This will be fun to watch.
I’m surprised that google scientist would say this.
However, this might lead them to investigate msr lftr thorium reactors.
I wonder if Google’s board and pension funds dumped their renewable energy funds and stocks Friday.
IIRC Gore is on the board.
B
It’s not just the power. It’s also the highways. Our freeways our here are terribly clogged. They make some cosmetic changes, but not the type they really need to be making. I will say there are some exceptions. In Orange country they seem to be coming around. In LA a little, but still woefully inadequate.
They fought to get all these people in here, and not don’t want to up the infrastructure to handle them all.
Of course a quarter to half a billion isn’t too much to spend to education the illegals though. We’ve got money for that.
Your point was related to the power. It seems to me that if solar cells are put on your roof for free, and then you pay a monthly bill at about half the rate you used to pay, that’s not bad.
One FReeper did say that this is only possible because the government in subsidizing though. So that being considered your comments are reasoned.
If they can run this model without government funds, then I think it’s a good plan.
“Perhaps the trend will go back to smaller homes.”
Now we’re getting to the rut of their plan. It’s not “replacing” energy that they ever wanted, it’s getting rid of energy. Make people live in smaller homes, or better yet, just apartments, and per-capita energy use plummets. It also gets much harder to have large families.
Who is ‘they’, it’s a trend by demand and has nothing to do with anything else. The economy and lack of jobs has people who live in high rent districts look for ways to cut their housing costs...so the small house gives much lower electric bill, taxes, and some are movable for later.
Supply and Demand drive the markets, and with housing you must add Costs of not only the house, but taxes and utitlies too.
Guy, it is time for you to get out of there.
Would you not agree that doubling the costs of utilities, versus what they otherwise would be, as “they” are in the process of doing, would accelerate their goal of driving people out of their large houses?
I’m sure it would...and utilities do up costs on a regular basis. Of course they would say the cost of supplying that utility has gone up.
If you think about it, in the 1920s houses were huge before the Great Depression...then in 1930s the small houses came out of that economical downturn. And in the 1940s if you look at the size...it’s creeping upward and by 1950s prosperity returns to the USA.
Bigger modern houses were the rage 50s, 60s, and then in 1970s a recession backs things off again, then comes the 90s and boom...big houses again..
All of this is the unintended consequences of bad governmental decisions and greedy bankers complicated now by the Community Investment Act under Carter, which insisted people be given loans for housing they could never pay for. So a crash in 2008 and on schedule.... smaller homes again.
Life is cyclical...the real weathermen will tell you there is NO global warming only weather cycles like everything else. So maybe the damage we see in nature is more of a distorted environmental plan, and due to man’s lousy taking care of things.
For example: the Indian used to burn the underbrush, and even here there were fires set to destroy the junk and make things clear again. The environmentalists of today leave dead trees in the creeks, and tell no one to touch them its nature, well cleaning out something makes it healthy.
Part of our nation’s problem is never looking back and see what worked ...instead of driving 100 mph and like Thelma and Louise go off the cliff.
I don’t think that’s a bad suggestion.
I’m 63. I was born a mile from here. I’ve lived in different parts of the U. S., and been to many others, but this is home for me.
I like Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, parts of the New England states and other parts of the nation.
California is a unique place. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t want to live somewhere else. And for what, to have that place turn out just like California in twenty years, as it relates to this problem?
I may have revealed my ignorance on these systems, in that it was my take the solar cells do degrade. You may be talking about something a bit different here.
I appreciate you addressing the issues though. I do have an understanding that the set-up could be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing.
Some of the appliances that don’t play well with PV solar electric systems:
Electric clothes dryers
Electric ranges
Forced air heating systems (blower motors)
Electric heating systems
Electric water heaters
Dish washers
Small, electric pumps, if not more powerful than needed, are okay for solar-radiant heating systems (circulation through collectors in drainback systems, circulation through PEX tubing in or under floors in smaller houses).
The problem with net metering is that the rest of us ratepayers are buying that solar power for 2X or more what it is actually worth. We can buy wholesale power for about 4 cents and spend another 4 cents delivering it to our houses. Or we can buy the neighbor's solar for 12 cents (or whatever the retail price is). The neighbor's power is unreliable. Except for the summer the neighbor's solar power is not delivered when it is needed. Because of the unreliability and bad timing, the solar installation does not reduce the need for the reliable fossil fuel plant, so the electric company cannot save any money on capital costs.
In short, it is basically a scam to enrich the providers of such systems, while paying the homeowner a little money to use the roof, which is often dumb place to build a power plant. The homeowner gains no extra reliability since the solar is typically turned off when the grid fails.
Good to know.
Thanks for the comments Palmer.
I appreciate the explanation.
Solar cells do degrade, but most well made photo-voltaic solar modules should last about 25 years with very little loss in ability to produce power (only a few watts). Some fail within that time frame but not very many.
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