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I don’t think the goal is to keep our current energy consumption. I think the left wants to drasticly reduce consumption and have the government ration it. Probably using a social credit system.
Ping
I believe government’s around the world are seeking to cut the worlds population in half, at least.
“for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion”
Or about $1.2 million per American - an obviously incorrect answer.
Suddenly …
Nuclear is cheaper.
Presumably these batteries wouldn’t last forever, so it would cost another $433T for every turnover period.
So a recurring cost of 20x GDP, every 10 years or so.
How exactly is that going to work?
The household cost would be about $20,000/house and about $15,000/car.
For houses about $2 trillion.
For cars about $2.25 trillion.
For industrial and commercials uses add in another $2 trillion.
Somewhat over $6 trillion would be the conversion cost.
“is how to assure that there is always sufficient electricity available to meet demand at every minute throughout the year.”
This guy had better check his PEON UPPITY PRIVILEGE. How dare he think peons should be entitled to electricity all the time. It should be like Commifornia or Venezuela, a few whatts here and there.
Fossil fuels will be around for at least another 75-100 years especially natural gas.
Don’t believe all the doom and gloom written to get people riled up and make their web sites money.
A record amount of new well permits and record amount of natural gas was pumped under Biden in 2021 in the Marcellus Utica gas region.
Natural gas will be our main source of energy way after even our kids are dead because it is cheap and relatively clean.
Abundant energy can be used by a free people to cause trouble for dark overlords. That abundance must be eliminated with malice.
I tell greenie beanies if we build too many wind mills, the wind will slow down and change the climate.
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There are a few things to work out. Mining for the elements. Storage. Entropy. Corruption.
I have been an engineer in the petroleum industry for all of my adult life, 44 years now. Much of that time was spent in finance and economics. Engineering after all is the application of physical sciences to feasible economic ends.
What the author describes are scoping studies, a broad brush of work to as much detail as practical with an attempt to provide equal assumptions and accuracy to all of the alternatives so as to see which, if any, merits more work to develop. The wheat is separated from the chaff and then if there is any wheat it gets ground into flour so-to-speak.
Most options fall apart on cursory inspection. This fool hardy idea of carbon zero life as we know it needs to be forgotten in favor of something else like Thorium based and distributed electric power.
Even without all these calculations the author mentions the idea of carbon zero life via wind, solar and batteries is a failure if you require it to be economic and efficient. As for the economic assumptions, when did the cost of anything in enforced and massively increased demand ever come down in cost? No scoping study cost I have ever seen went down.
We have 1.2 billion killowats of installed electric generating capacity in a single system consisting of coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and wind. It is complex but not nearly so complex as a zero carbon system would be. How many Texas winter of 2021 events are necessary to demonstrate the folly of solar and wind power? Answer, infinite numbers without good sense applied. How about Germany or Denmark where pollution went up when wind conversion went full swing because of all the spinning fossil power reserve that was needed to back-up periods of insufficient wind? Oh right, batteries will take up the slack. By-the-way, batteries mean you must also have a sufficient excess of power generated to charge them as well as meet base load demands.
Zero carbon requires MULTIPLE and nearly completely duplicate sources of power. By inspection, any fool should be able to see that such a system is vastly more costly and less reliable than the system we already have in place.
Sadly though this is not a debate of reason but reason attempting to sway emotion and hidden agendas of the zero carbon crowd who can only think with all they have, a heart instead of a brain.
Never mind that this issue is one of throwing away something that works to take a headlong rush down a dark tunnel that is probably just a dead end and for no good reason. Don’t look now but global temps are moderating. The world has been right here and worse many times before. It is the sun that controls our temperatures but having that argument with non-thinkers is also a waste of time.
Whole hog conversion to carbon zero is the same as scrapping your perfectly good IC car that does all you need for some expensive pie-in-the sky less capable alternative.
50 percent of the people you went to school with were in the lower half of the class, they still are. At least half of the other half were marginal thinkers at best.
We are doomed.
What will it cost?
Only the United States of America, which is their goal.
What an interesting article... no surprise as Francis Menton has tackled related pieces of this puzzle that were also very interesting reads.
I suspect that what will happen is that we really will have massive electrical supply problems in the future (a future that is not that far off)... in fact, it seems inevitable. At the same time as there are moves afoot to shut down coal fired generators, there are similar efforts to curtail natural gas use (it isn’t just NY). Then there are announcements of EVs and the phase out of ICE. The idea that IUs (interruptible/unreliables of wind and solar) can make up the massive shortfall is a joke.... which then means that plans have to be cranked up very fast to build nuclear plants. It will be very interesting to see how quickly that can occur and I’m not aware that this is part of much public discussion at the moment... if we go back to an earlier era when nuclear plants were actually being built, they did not go up all that quickly mostly due to all the regulatory stuff that they needed to go through. One wonders how quickly they could be built today... .
BFL
$433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP.
***These greenie weenies don’t care. The future is going to be Nukes, in particular Low Energy Nukes.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/lenr/index?tab=articles
And the windmills' spinning blades would kill millions of birds, bats, and flying insects every year.
And there are very few places in the continental US with the necessary continuous wind speeds (10-12 mph) to keep them producing electricity 24/7/365.
So there's that.