VERY SLOWLY if you mean wind and solar alternatives. If you review total world energy consumption wind and solar at around 2% after trillions of money wasted on subsidies. The simple reason is intermittency that is easy to understand. There is no such thing as a stand alone wind or solar electricity plant. Any renewable plant must be coupled with a reliable coal, gas or oil partner plant so the electricity is produced every second 7/24 even when the wind does not blow or the sun shine.
“The World Energy System”
Every year energy use increases, and in 2018 the addition of fossil fuelled primary energy outpaced that from renewables for the 3rd consecutive year.
Fossil fuels accounted for 65% of electricity generation and the annual increase of fossil fuelled electricity generation was 9% greater than the combination of hydro and renewables.
The amount of CO2 released per unit of primary energy in 2015 was the same as that in 1995.
* Post date December 7, 2019 (The World Energy System)
Renewable energy companies are failing and not sustainable.
Nottingham council ‘sorry’ as Robin Hood Energy collapses
Robin Hood Goes Belly Up: Green Energy Company Collapses, 230 Staff Lose Their Jobs
- Date: 05/09/20
- BBC News
A council has apologised after losing millions of pounds of public cash in the collapse of an energy company it started.
Robin Hood Energy (RHE) is shutting with the loss of 230 jobs despite millions poured into it by Nottingham City Council.
British Gas will take on its customer base of thousands of homes in England.
The council said the sale will not make up all its losses, which leaked documents suggest are £38.1 million.
Council leader David Mellen declined to say how much it stands to lose, saying the total from the sale will depend on how many customers switch to British Gas.
However, leaked documents seen by the Local Democracy Reporting Service suggest the taxpayers of Nottingham are out of pocket to the tune of £38.1 million.
The confidential documents show the sale price for the customer base of RHE is estimated by the council to be around £26 million.
The final exact figure will not be known until the transfer of customers to British Gas is complete, but the £38.1 million write-off is the council’s estimate.
Robin Hood Energy (RHE) is shutting with the loss of 230 jobs despite millions poured into it by Nottingham City Council.
British Gas will take on its customer base of thousands of homes in England.
The council said the sale will not make up all its losses, which leaked documents suggest are £38.1 million.
Council leader David Mellen declined to say how much it stands to lose, saying the total from the sale will depend on how many customers switch to British Gas.
However, leaked documents seen by the Local Democracy Reporting Service suggest the taxpayers of Nottingham are out of pocket to the tune of £38.1 million.
The confidential documents show the sale price for the customer base of RHE is estimated by the council to be around £26 million.
The final exact figure will not be known until the transfer of customers to British Gas is complete, but the £38.1 million write-off is the council’s estimate.
‘Very sorry’
Mr Mellen said: “There will be significant amounts of money we won’t be able to recoup.
“Today my thoughts are particularly with those people facing a redundancy process.
“I’m very sorry that is the case, I don’t hesitate to say sorry when we’ve got things wrong, my priority now is to get things right.”
Image captionThe city council said RHE customers do not need to take any action and will be contacted with more details
The company was set up in 2015 with the intention of tackling fuel poverty and claimed to be the first council-run energy company in the UK.
But a recent report by auditors Grant Thornton found the company had struggled in the energy market, making losses every year it existed and becoming reliant on council cash.
Their report showed the council had invested £43m into it and provided £16.5m of guarantees and accused the authority of “institutional blindness” for continuing to prop it up.
Councillor Mellen said they “had to” stop supporting it “off the back of the people of Nottingham”.
Analysis
By Hugh Casswell, BBC Radio Nottingham political reporter
This has been a disaster and an embarrassment for Nottingham City Council.
At a time when they routinely criticise central government for a loss of funding, they’ve been publicly shamed for losing millions in taxpayer cash. What’s more, they’ve had to accept it. No spin. No deflection. A straight and unavoidable mea culpa.
One key question remains though – exactly how much has been lost? We may not know that for some time.
And what do all those lost millions mean? Put simply, it’s added to the council’s need to make savings – a particularly bitter pill to swallow for council employees who may be facing redundancy and for Nottingham residents who may lose out from service cuts.
Local government minister Simon Clarke said: “The people of Nottingham will be aghast at this disastrous waste of their hard-earned money.
“This will likely have stark consequences in the real world in terms of service cuts and job losses at Nottingham City Council.
“It is now for the council’s leadership to decide whether they are the right people to continue to lead one of our most important cities.”
Robin Hood Energy supplied 10 council-run energy providers. According to the company, these are:
- Angelic Energy (Islington Council)
- Beam Energy (Barking and Dagenham Council)
- CitizEN Energy (Southampton City Council and neighbouring councils)
- Fosse Energy (Leicestershire County Council and Leicester City Council)
- Great North Energy (Doncaster Council & Barnsley MBC)
- The Leccy (Liverpool City Council)
- RAM Energy (Derby City Council)
- Southend Energy (Southend-on-Sea Borough Council)
- White Rose Energy (Leeds City Council )
- Your Energy Sussex (West Sussex County Council and local authorities)
In total it supplied 112,000 people and 2,600 businesses.
Every customer will now be automatically switched to British Gas, unless they opt to go elsewhere.
British Gas announced they were buying the customer base, but not the rest of the company.
CAVEAT: Wind and solar are not renewable if you consider how they are manufactured.
The myth of renewable energy
By Dawn Stover, November 22, 2011
“Clean.” “Green.” What do those words mean? When President Obama talks about “clean energy,” some people think of “clean coal” and low-carbon nuclear power, while others envision shiny solar panels and wind turbines. And when politicians tout “green jobs,” they might just as easily be talking about employment at General Motors as at Greenpeace. “Clean” and “green” are wide open to interpretation and misappropriation; that’s why they’re so often mentioned in quotation marks. Not so for renewable energy, however.
Somehow, people across the entire enviro-political spectrum seem to have reached a tacit, near-unanimous agreement about what renewable means: It’s an energy category that includes solar, wind, water, biomass, and geothermal power. As the US Energy Department explains it to kids: “Renewable energy comes from things that won’t run out — wind, water, sunlight, plants, and more. These are things we can reuse over and over again. … Non-renewable energy comes from things that will run out one day — oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium.”
Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there’s one big problem: Unless you’re planning to live without electricity and motorized transportation, you need more than just wind, water, sunlight, and plants for energy. You need raw materials, real estate, and other things that will run out one day. You need stuff that has to be mined, drilled, transported, and bulldozed — not simply harvested or farmed. You need non-renewable resources:
• Solar power. While sunlight is renewable — for at least another four billion years — photovoltaic panels are not. Nor is desert groundwater, used in steam turbines at some solar-thermal installations. Even after being redesigned to use air-cooled condensers that will reduce its water consumption by 90 percent, California’s Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world’s largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment.
• Geothermal power. These projects also depend on groundwater — replenished by rain, yes, but not as quickly as it boils off in turbines. At the world’s largest geothermal power plant, the Geysers in California, for example, production peaked in the late 1980s and then the project literally began running out of steam.
• Wind power. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the 5,700 turbines installed in the United States in 2009 required approximately 36,000 miles of steel rebar and 1.7 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to pave a four-foot-wide, 7,630-mile-long sidewalk). The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium — rare earth metals that are rare because they’re found in scattered deposits, rather than in concentrated ores, and are difficult to extract.
• Biomass. In developed countries, biomass is envisioned as a win-win way to produce energy while thinning wildfire-prone forests or anchoring soil with perennial switchgrass plantings. But expanding energy crops will mean less land for food production, recreation, and wildlife habitat. In many parts of the world where biomass is already used extensively to heat homes and cook meals, this renewable energy is responsible for severe deforestation and air pollution.
• Hydropower. Using currents, waves, and tidal energy to produce electricity is still experimental, but hydroelectric power from dams is a proved technology. It already supplies about 16 percent of the world’s electricity, far more than all other renewable sources combined. Maybe that’s why some states with renewable portfolio standards don’t count hydropower as a renewable energy source; it’s so common now, it just doesn’t fit the category formerly known as “alternative” energy. Still, that’s not to say that hydropower is more renewable than solar or wind power. The amount of concrete and steel in a wind-tower foundation is nothing compared with Grand Coulee or Three Gorges, and dams have an unfortunate habit of hoarding sediment and making fish, well, non-renewable.
All of these technologies also require electricity transmission from rural areas to population centers. Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it. And while proponents would have you believe that a renewable energy project churns out free electricity forever, the life expectancy of a solar panel or wind turbine is actually shorter than that of a conventional power plant. Even dams are typically designed to last only about 50 years. So what, exactly, makes renewable energy different from coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power?
Renewable technologies are often less damaging to the climate and create fewer toxic wastes than conventional energy sources. But meeting the world’s total energy demands in 2030 with renewable energy alone would take an estimated 3.8 million wind turbines (each with twice the capacity of today’s largest machines), 720,000 wave devices, 5,350 geothermal plants, 900 hydroelectric plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 1.7 billion rooftop photovoltaic systems, 40,000 solar photovoltaic plants, and 49,000 concentrated solar power systems. That’s a heckuva lot of neodymium.
Unfortunately, “renewable energy” is a meaningless term with no established standards. Like an emperor parading around without clothes, it gets a free pass, because nobody dares to confront an inconvenient truth: None of our current energy technologies are truly renewable, at least not in the way they are currently being deployed. We haven’t discovered any form of energy that is completely clean and recyclable, and the notion that such an energy source can ever be found is a mirage.
The only genuinely sustainable energy scenario is one in which energy demands do not continue to escalate indefinitely. As a recent commentary by Jane C. S. Long in Nature pointed out, meeting ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gases cannot be accomplished with “piecemeal reductions,” such as increased use of wind power and biofuels. Long did the math for California and discovered that even if the state replaced or retrofitted every building to very high efficiency standards, ran almost all of its cars on electricity, and doubled its electricity-generation capacity while simultaneously replacing it with emissions-free energy sources, California could only reduce emissions by perhaps 60 percent below 1990 levels — far less than its 80 percent target. Long says reaching that target “will take new technology.” Maybe so, but it will also take a new honesty about the limitations of technology. Notably, Long doesn’t mention the biggest obstacle to meeting California’s emissions-reduction goal: The state’s population is expected to grow from today’s 40 million to 60 million by 2050.
There are now seven billion humans on this planet. Until we find a way to reduce our energy consumption and to share Earth’s finite resources more equitably among nations and generations, “renewable” energy might as well be called “miscellaneous.”
The myth of renewable energy – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
WORLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION GROWTH IS FOSSIL FUELS NOT WIND AND SOLAR
Not possible to imagine a world where wind solar really matter as alternatives to fossil fuels. The hope seems just a pipe dream when after a trillion or more in subsidies they do not exceed 2% of world energy consumption.
The evidence of excessive consumer costs when renewables are added is well documented and I submit this factor alone means renewable energy future is dim. Wind and coal are coupled to ensure reliable power as this next photo shows. How is that renewable power when it depends on coal?
Wind turbines in Europe, with a coal power plant in the distance.
Ina Fassbender/Reuters
These Countries Have The Highest Energy Usage Per Person
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING RENEWABLES CAUSE HIGH RETAIL ELECTRICITY RATES
SOUTH AUSTRALIA, DENMARK and GERMANY have the most investment in wind and solar renewables for its grid and the highest cost electricity as a result. It is a matter of math renewables demand two producers one unreliable (wind and solar) and one fully reliable (fossil fuels)
Electricity prices in selected countries 2018
Published by N. Sönnichsen, Aug 25, 2020
This statistic shows electricity prices in leading economies worldwide in 2018. In the United States, electricity prices stood at 0.13 U.S. dollars per kilowatt hour. In the United Kingdom, electricity users paid 0.22 U.S. dollars per kilowatt hour.
Electricity prices in selected countries
Electricity prices by country can vary widely and even within a country itself, depending on factors like infrastructure and geography. Among developed countries, Sweden enjoys some of the cheapest electricity in the world. For global electricity prices, Germany topped the list of countries with the highest electricity prices worldwide in 2018. German customers were charged around 0.33 U.S. dollars per kilowatt hour plus value added tax.
The selection of fuels used to generate electricity remains a main driver behind Italy’s high electricity prices. There are no nuclear power plants in the country. Due to the fact that Italy is located in a seismically active area, all nuclear power plants were closed following a popular referendum in the late 1980s, when an explosion in Chernobyl reminded Europeans of the dangers of nuclear power. As a result, the country’s electricity generation mix consists mainly of natural gas, renewable energy, petroleum products and coal. Although Italy has one of the largest proved natural gas reserves in Europe, the Mediterranean country produces very little natural gas and is heavily dependent on imports. The main source countries for Italian natural gas imports include Algeria, Russia and Libya. In light of political instability in the said countries, Italy might turn to producing more electricity from renewable energy sources, including hydropower, geothermal power and solar electricity. In 2017, Italy’s cumulative solar photovoltaic capacity reached 19.7 gigawatts, making it the fifth largest market for solar PV power.
Read more
Global electricity prices in 2018, by select country(in U.S. dollars per kilowatt hour)
Electricity prices around the world 2018 | Statista
These graphs tell the story as more renewables go into the grid the price of electricity goes up. Why? Intermittency of wind and solar require backup of fossil fuel reliability.
It is a big mistake to look at wind and solar in isolation from their effect on installed power where the intermittency hits the consumer hard with dramatically increased costs.
Research in the UK shows that thanks to expensive subsidies for renewables seniors must decide whether to heat or eat. This is horrible and in addition these subsidies for renewables do nothing for the climate.
Coal Rush: China, Japan & India Back Coal-Fired Future With Hundreds of New Plants
August 5, 2020 by stopthesethings 2 Comments
Reports of the ‘death’ of coal have been greatly exaggerated, with the economic powerhouses of Asia – China, Japan and India – building new plants hand over fist.
The pattern across Asia is unmistakable; unreliable wind and solar have been snubbed in favour of coal-fired power plants, with new nuclear plants running a close second.
Don Dears takes a look at the resurgence of coal as the power source of choice in any country serious about delivering reliable and affordable electricity to businesses and households.
Don’t Ignore Coal
Power for USA
Donn Dears
14 July 2020Don’t ignore coal. Other countries aren’t.
In fact, the new high efficiency low emission (HELE), ultra-supercritical coal-fired power plants are being built in China, Japan, India, and elsewhere.
These power plants operate at very high temperatures and pressures, with an efficiency of 45% HHV. This compares with the existing fleet of coal-fired power plants in the US that have an average efficiency of 33% HHV.
This means that pollutants from HELE power plants are 45% lower than from existing coal-fired power plants while CO2 emissions are cut even more.
Countries that are rich in coal, but lack plentiful, cheap natural gas, are finding that coal is the cheapest, most reliable source of electricity, other than hydro, they can have.
Wind and solar don’t come close, especially when they need expensive storage. For more information go to: Coal and the future of Energy
Japan is planning to build 22 HELE plants, largely to replace the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster.
China has plans to build over 300 HELE plants, some in China and the remainder in other countries around the world.
The fact is, China is tearing down its subcritical and supercritical coal-fired power plants and replacing them with new HELE, ultra-supercritical power plants.
The United States could benefit by doing the same thing, but EPA regulations prohibit building HELE coal-fired power plants in the US.
Replacing existing supercritical coal-fired power plants in the United Sates with HELE plants would reduce CO2 emissions, while also reducing pollutants such as particulates.
These power plants would provide baseload, reliable power, 24/7/365 at a cost lower than the cost of building a like amount of wind and solar together with their accompanying storage.
The HELE coal-fired power plant would last for at least 60 years, while the wind and solar installations would have to be replaced every twenty years, and their batteries would have to be replaced every ten years.
In addition, the HELE coal-fired power plants would generate over twice as much electricity.
The reason? HELE plants have a capacity factor of 85%, while wind has a capacity factor of 35%, and PV solar has a capacity factor of, at best, 22%.
The United States is blessed with a large amount of low-cost natural gas which allows the building of power plants even more efficient than HELE plants, but efforts to prevent building natural gas pipelines and preventing Fracking could mean that HELE plants could be competitive in some areas of the United States.
Coal shouldn’t be ignored anywhere in the world where HELE ultra-supercritical coal-fired power plants can be built.
Power for USA
Isogo Power Plant, Japan: cleanest coal-fired power plant in the world.
Coal Rush: China, Japan & India Back Coal-Fired Future With Hundreds of New Plants
Mexico Says “Hasta La Vista” To Inefficient Green Energies. Could Be “Death Knell” For Renewables”
By P Gosselin on
22. May 2020
German public broadcasting Deutsche Welle (DW) here reports how Mexico has decided to end its transition the renewable energies, angering activists and investors.
The move, DW reports, “is scaring off environmentalists and investors” and could be the “death knell for renewable energies.”
Apparently President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had traveled to Oaxaca and saw how the local hills were blighted by wind turbines, commenting: “These windmills are spoiling the landscape” and “produce very little energy.”
Wind energy is notorious for its inefficiency, unreliable supply, high costs, blight to the environment and health hazards. Moreover, the business has been taken over by crony capitalists out to make a killing on the massively subsidized projects. In fact, as Michael Moore’s latest film shows, green energies aren’t really green at all.
The move by the Mexican government has angered green energy activists and investors. Another reason cited by the Mexican government is “grid instability”.
The reform will have some impact on German investors, DW reports. For example: the Potsdam-based company Notus, who since 2014 has been planning five solar and wind power plants. Now their future remains uncertain.
“The new directive could be the death knell for renewable energies,” DW reports. “Protest letters from the Canadian and European Union embassies refer to 44 ongoing projects worth USD 6.8 billion.” Another problem is Mexico’s power grid is not designed to handle the massively fluctuating power fed in by wind and sun.
Though DW suggests that the return to fossil fuels is going to mean higher costs for Mexican consumers, most results from around the world suggest the opposite is the case. Germany, for example has committed a whopping 1 trillion dollars to green energies since 2000, yet today the country has among the world’s most expensive electricity prices for consumers. Annually tens of thousands of households see their power cut off because they can no longer afford to pay the power bills.
Mexico is wise to move to a source of energy that is plentiful, affordable, stable and one that doesn’t destroy the environment on a massive scale.
Mexico Says “Hasta La Vista” To Inefficient Green Energies. Could Be “Death Knell” For Renewables”
The Reason Renewables Can’t Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To
Michael Shellenberger Contributor
I write about energy and the environment.
“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” reports… [+]
DER SPIEGEL
Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.
“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.
Most Popular In: Energy
With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.
But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.
After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace, criticized Germany, journalists came to the country’s defense. “Germany has fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so ambitious,” one of them argued last summer.
“If the rest of the world made just half Germany’s effort, the future for our planet would look less bleak,” she wrote. “So Germany, don’t give up. And also: Thank you.”
But Germany didn’t just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.
Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” (“Murks in Germany”). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.
“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” write Der Spiegel’s Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story.
Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.
“The politicians fear citizen resistance” Der Spiegel reports. “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.”
In response, politicians sometimes order “electrical lines be buried underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer.”
As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were added in 2017.
Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.
It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of electricity from today’s 35%… [+]
AG ENERGIEBINLANZEN
Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.
Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany’s renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar.
Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is below 40%… No viable business model can be developed from this.”
Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 will start coming to an end next year. “The wind power boom is over,” Der Spiegel concludes.
All of which raises a question: if renewables can’t cheaply power Germany, one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to “leapfrog” fossil fuels?
The Question of Technology
The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century, Martin Heidegger.
In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning of Technology,” Heidegger condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.
The use of “modern technology,” he wrote, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.”
The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating the natural environment, and praised windmills because they “do not unlock energy in order to store it.”
These weren’t just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to industrialize.
In the US, Heidegger’s views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to bring modern civilization “into harmony with the ecosphere.”
The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic Environment.
Bookchin admitted his proposal “conjures up an image of cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds.”
But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were profitable aside from subsidies.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars.
Journalists reported breathlessly on the cost declines in batteries, imagining a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be “disrupted.”
But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.
Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more devastating.
The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds. Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.
“It’s one of the three worst sites for a wind farm that I’ve seen in Africa in terms of its potential to kill threatened birds,” a biologist explained.
In response, the wind farm’s developers have done what Europeans have long done in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project.
Kenya won’t be able to “leapfrog” fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of electricity and make Kenya’s slow climb out of poverty even slower.
Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities.
Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.
Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. “It’s our gift to the world,” a renewables advocate told The Times.
Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent on renewables would redeem them. “Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in the 21st,” noted a reporter.
Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely “botched,” but it wasn’t. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.
The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.
The Reason Renewables Can’t Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To
Author Steve Goreham discusses the costs of wind and solar being added to the grid and how consumers pay in two ways – for subsidies and through much higher electricity rates. In the US, electric power rates in 9 of 12 wind states went up 12 to 35% from 2008 to 2015, while in the same time overall US power prices rose only 4.8%. He explains that South Australia is now seeing wide area blackouts due to unreliability related to wind power on the grid and simultaneous coal phase-out. Steve’s full presentation can be seen at: Climate Science and the Myths of Renewable Energy: https://youtu.be/mtHreJbr2WM
Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’
February 18, 2019 by stopthesethings 41 Comments
Bill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar.
When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.
Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.
For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind and solar have all but trashed the electricity generation and delivery system, as we know it. Germany and South Australia are only the most obvious examples.
During an interview at Stanford University late last year, Bill Gates attacks the idiots who believe that we’re all just a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.
Gates on renewables: How would Tokyo survive a 3 day typhoon with unreliable energy?
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
14 February 2019
Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.
He quotes Vaclav Smil:
Here’s Toyko, 2p7 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.
As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.
During storms, clouds cut solar panel productivity (unless hail destroys it) and wind turbines have to shut down in high winds.
The whole interview was part of a presentation at Stanford late last year:
Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill Gates
The interview by Arun Majumdar, co-director of Stanford Energy’s Precourt Institute for Energy, which organized the conference, can be watched here.
When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”
“The idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we could just beat on them and put (solar panels) on our rooftop—that is more of a block than climate denial,” Gates said. “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.”
If he only looked at the numbers in the climate science debate…
Jo Nova Blog
Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’