What Keeps “Energy Transition” Going? $ $ $

RON CLUTZ

Robert Gauthier answered posting on a Quora topic How could we reverse the damage done by the “green energy” global scam that brought less efficient and highly polluting energy producing projects and high energy prices? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Wind and solar power has provided politicians with an excuse to dispense favours—including taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax preferences to a supposedly “green” industry—while appearing to do something for the environment. And yet, despite more than two decades of massive subsidies, tax preferences and purchasing mandates from governments, wind and solar power still represent barely more than a rounding error of global energy production. In jurisdictions where renewables enjoyed strong but ill-considered political support, consumers and taxpayers now face much higher electricity bills and less-reliable power. And despite promises to the contrary, countries such as Germany, which have significantly increased wind and solar electricity production, have seen no meaningful reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Far from being a miracle cure-all for the shortcomings of conventional power generation, wind and solar power exaggerate the symptoms they pretend to address. Added up over the past two decades, the cumulative subsidies across the world for biofuels, wind, and solar approach about $5 trillion, all of that to supply roughly 5% of global energy.

The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the West are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.

In the end, however, politicians cannot defy the laws of physics and economics. The promise of wind and solar power will always clash with the need for electricity that is low cost and reliable. That’s why voters routinely punish politicians who pursue flawed renewable energy policies. Rising electricity costs due to increased wind and solar power damage the economy by making businesses that consume significant volumes of electricity less competitive and by leaving less money in the pockets of consumers.

In Ontario, Canada during the run of the Green Energy Act there which attempted to replace coal and nuclear with wind and solar the upshot was a 138% increase in the price of electricity at the meter for the consumers. This led to the government that brought in this legislation to lose the next election so badly that they were no longer recognized as a party in the legislature. Naturally the government that replaced them killed the program and started refurbishing the nuclear reactor fleet there.

Unfortunately, solar and wind technologies require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, disrupting natural habitats. The real estate that wind and solar energy demand led the Nature Conservancy to issue a report last year critical of “energy sprawl,” including tens of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry electricity from wind and solar installations to distant cities.

Building a single 100-MW wind farm—never mind thousands of them—requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of nonrecyclable plastics for the huge blades. With solar hardware, the tonnage in cement, steel, and glass is 150% greater than for wind, for the same energy output

Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves.

And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.

Spend enough time researching this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about green energy shows that at best it’s really a dark shade of brown.

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This article (What Keeps “Energy Transition” Going? $ $ $) was created and published by Ron Clutz and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: wolterskluwer.com

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