Utilities are starting to experiment with adding batteries to wind and solar projects. These storage projects are feeding the mistaken belief that batteries can cure the intermittency that makes wind and solar unworkable as a reliable source of power.
The reality is that these battery projects are trivial in size compared to what would actually be needed to make wind or solar reliable. The cost of battery based reliability would actually be stupendous, far more than we could ever afford.
Here are some simple numbers to make the point. The reality would be far more complex, but the magnitude would not change much.
First comes the cost of utility scale battery facilities. This is much more than just the cost of the batteries. At utility scale these are large, complex facilities. Connecting all of the batteries involved and getting them to work properly together is…
In the face of the utter failure of large investments in renewables to deliver CO2 reductions, greens are increasingly embracing nuclear power as the solution to climate change.
Nuclear Power Can Save the World
Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.
By Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker
Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard.
April 6, 2019
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Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.
Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.
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But we actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.
The rise of mainstream green advocacy for nuclear power is long overdue.
I have never understood how anyone who thinks CO2 is a looming threat can argue in good faith against the evidence of two countries which have affordably reduced their CO2 emissions to a tenth of what everyone else emits, by embracing nuclear power.
Admit it, you have no clue. Of course we have all seen the diagrams of Shale Gas Wells with the pipe going vertically down into the ground and then turning a right angle to proceed horizontally where the well will be hydraulically fractured (not Fracked). How is that possible? Can you think of any mechanism underground where pipe could turn ninety degrees and keep the end of the pipe, where the drill bit is spinning 360 degrees, to continue penetrating the rock encountered? Of course you can’t, because it cannot be done. Yet amazingly, surely 90 percent of all folks even remotely interested in the topic of shale gas development do not question the possibility of this impossibility. So read on, this well kept secret will be unveiled.
Hydraulic fracturing flat schematic vector illustration. Fracking process with machinery equipment, drilling rig and gas rich ground…
TUCKER CARLSON: I keep hearing from watching television in this country that many people are dying of climate change in the United States. Is it a leading cause of death here?
BJORN LOMBERG: No, by no means and, look, we actually have pretty good data for how many people die from weather-related disasters, so climate-related disasters, and the truth is over the last 100 years it’s dropped dramatically. Every year in the 1920s, we estimate about half a million people died around the world. Now, we quadrupled the population and, yet, the number has dropped like a stone. It’s 95% reduced. We are now down to about 20,000 people that die every year. This is not because of global warming. This is simply because getting richer means you stop being in trouble when the weather is bad.
In recent years, cattle farmers in France’s Brittany region have lost hundreds of cows to deaths that veterinarians simply cannot explain. After running various tests on their land, some now claim that the solar panels and wind turbines in the area are releasing too much electricity into the ground, which is slowly killing their animals.
Although mysterious cattle deaths have been reported in various parts of Brittany, the situation is particularly dire in Cote-d’Amour, where several farmers have sustained hundreds of losses in mysterious conditions. According to local farmer Patrick Le Nechet, his cattle just started losing weight a few years back and many of them ultimately died. The strange thing was that the animals didn’t seem to be suffering from any diseases and the veterinarians couldn’t explain the cause of death. After conducting his own investigation, Le Nechet concluded that the mysterious deaths started occurring around the time…
Everyone knows the Dutch are serious and determined people. Their saying: “God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” A relative of mine had some run-ins with Dutch neighbors, and his saying about them: “Wooden shoes, wooden heads, wouldn’t listen.” Well, now the Dutch have another saying: “Whatever you do, don’t try to cut carbon emissions the way we did.”
You see, being Dutch they took on the challenge of “fighting climate change,” and are now living to regret their actions. Karel Beckman writes in Natural Gas World The Flaws in Dutch Climate Policy Mar 20, 2019. H/T GWPF Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Why should the wisdom of Dutch climate policy be of concern to anyone besides Dutch taxpayers? At this moment all developed countries are entering a new phase in their climate policies. They are moving beyond broad reduction targets and temperature goals to the…
An observed decline of surface shortwave radiation (SSR) in Europe discovered from about 1950s until about the 1980s and many parts of the world is attributed to increasing emissions of anthropogenic aerosols (dimming phase). The followed increase of SSR in some regions (brightening phase) is a consequence of the clean air business in Europe.
The simulations with detailed treatment of aerosols and their interaction with clouds are needed for understanding the regional SSR trends. The NASA GISS ModelE2 is used in this study. It is based on transient simulations with natural and anthropogenic forcings.
We compare two simulations with transient aerosol emissions with the focus on aerosol effects on clouds. For the annual mean SSR, the dimming trends range between -4.4 W/m2 over the Mediterranean region and -1.7 W/m2 over the middle Europe. Brightening trends range from…
These two similar sounding terms are perhaps the most misunderstood things in the whole electrical power generation debate, and while there are some important things in this debate, these two terms are in that small group of the most important of them all.
Firstly, the simple explanation for both terms.
Megawatts means the design specification maximum power that the generator can actually deliver. This is what I refer to as the Nameplate for the generator. The acronym for Megawatts is MW.
MegaWattHours is what that generator, while it is actually working, delivers in power to the grid over a period of time, here hours, and that period of time can be an hour, a day, or a year. The acronym for MegaWattHours is MWH.
I will explain it in a little more depth below, and show you, with the use of some graphs what the difference…
Environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that it’s not possible to shift the country’s grid completely to renewable energy.
“I was one of the founders of, sort of, the first Green New Deal back in 2003, 2007,” Shellenberger, the founder of Environmental Progress, began. “People don’t remember President Obama, we spent about $150 billion on renewables between 2009 and 2015, and we just kept encountering the same kind of problems.”
WATCH:
Shellenberger laid out the two main problems that plague wind turbines and solar panels: unreliability and low energy density.
“They just depend on when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing, which is 10 to 40 percent of the year,” he said, demonstrating how the intermittent energy production of wind and solar makes them unreliable sources of power. “Something people are not as aware of: the low energy density of sunlight and wind. Basically what we’ve been finding is that the lower the energy density of the fuel … the bigger the environmental impact.”
Because solar and wind produce such small amounts of energy, according to Shellenberger, they require a much larger amount of land to generate electricity.
Instead, the Environmental Progress founder touted the benefits of nuclear energy, a source of power that can generate large amounts of reliable energy while emitting zero carbon emissions. However, Shellenberger said the public has yet to fully embrace nuclear energy because they associate it with nuclear bombs, past nuclear accidents and a desire to use energy that harmonizes with the natural world.
“That turns out to be a bad idea because the more natural resource we use, the worse it is for the natural environment,” he said.
Nuclear power plant Ohu near Landshut, Bavaria, Germany. Shutterstock
As environmental activists become more alarmed about the threat of climate change, many are re-evaluating how they perceive nuclear power. The U.S. nuclear industry currently supplies about 20 percent of the country’s total electricity, but it provides roughly 60 percent of its zero-carbon electricity. A growing number of climate change-oriented lawmakers are now passing subsidies and support programs to keep nuclear plants in operation. (RELATED: Lawmakers Overwhelmingly Vote To Modernize US Nuclear Fleet)
Shellenberger went on to say it was “very disappointing” that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s widely publicized Green New Deal does not include provisions for nuclear energy.
Ocasio-Cortez’s original FAQ document on the Green New Deal, in fact, called for a phase out of nuclear power. However, following the botched roll out of the deal, her team took the anti-nuclear language off their website.
By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~
The reality is that these battery projects are trivial in size compared to what would actually be needed to make wind or solar reliable. The cost of battery based reliability would actually be stupendous, far more than we could ever afford.
By Dr. Jay Lehr ~
By Anton Lang ~
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