Lomborg: Renewables are stuck, although green hopes keep rising

george e. smith says:
August 14, 2013 at 4:36 pm
….Renewables never got us to here, and they never will sustain us here.
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Correct.
A cut of 80% of CO2 emissions (Obama and EU goal) without 100% conversion to nuclear power puts us back into the 1800’s or even the 1700s without the technology, training and small population that allowed a peaceful civilization.
The average energy use for the USA is 335.9 million BTUs per person. http://www.nuicc.info/?page_id=1467
(Total population: 313,914,040 -2012)
In 1949, U.S. energy use per person stood at 215 million Btu.  http://epb.lbl.gov
The change from horses to tractors was just happening from 1945-70. In 1940, 58% of all farms had cars, 25% had telephones, and 33% had electricity.
The U.S. in 1800 had a per-capita energy consumption of about 90 million Btu. http://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2010/11/12-PP-Nov2010.pdf
(Total population: 5,308,483)
If the USA reduces its energy consumption by 80% it equals 45.18 million Btu. per person.
Without nuclear power it dumps us back into the 1700’s because the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels and such requires mining and smelting of ores. Very high energy processes that were normally done with COAL or earlier with coke.
The Warmist idiots have ZERO concept of the amount of energy necessary to fuel civilization and seem to think it is run on Pixie dust and Unicorn farts. They also have a kum ba yah view of primitive cultures and turn a blind eye to the genocide that runs side by side with misery, illiteracy, and a daily struggle for survival.
Only a well filled belly make humans civilized instead of predatory. Pointman’s essay brings this home. Please read it.

….This erosion did not start in the Balkans, where previous military action in Bosnia was taken in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions, but in Somalia after the withdrawal of a tragically unsuccessful UN peacekeeping mission. A serious acceleration of this process has recently occurred in Central Africa, where it has been accompanied by a dramatic erosion of human rights that seriously puts at stake the credibility of the international community to impose the respect of a new international order based on universal human rights principles.
The series of conflicts from the Great Lakes region to Angola, which has uprooted several million people, is gradually destroying the achievements of more than three decades of development efforts; entire populations are sinking back into misery, inter-ethnic violence, illiteracy, and a daily struggle for survival. But while this political and humanitarian disaster has gone largely unnoticed by the international media, it is worthwhile to consider the unravelling of the Central African crisis from the Rwandan genocide to the regional war in the Congo basin in the light of basic principles of international law. It will have a severely destabilising effect on the geopolitical structure of Africa, and probably on the structure of international relations in general….
http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v4/v4i1a2.htm

Roger Sowell says:
August 14, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Renewable percentage of the total mix depends on the location, available resources, and policies….
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Yes and you forgot to mention Rolling Blackouts Hit California Again – ABC News
Govewrnment can force us into 100% renewable. It doesn’t mean it will actually work. Why in heck do you think the government is pushing Smart Meter. So they can close down electricity on the little guys. (Rolls eyes)

Don’t want smart meter? Power shut off
The rollout of smart electric meters across the country has run into a few snags: one woman doesn’t want one, and ended up in the dark as a result.
You might not think that would be an issue. But it is, because Duke Energy is now beginning to disconnect any homeowner who refuses a new electric meter.
Other electric companies are not pulling the plug…yet…..

Energy InSight FAQs
… With smart meters, CenterPoint Energy is proposing to add a process prior to shutting down whole circuits to conduct a mass turn off of individual meters with 200 amps or less (i.e. residential and small commercial consumers) for 15 or 30 minutes, rotating consumers impacted during that outage as well as possible future outages.
There are several benefits to consumers of this proposed process. By isolating non-critical service accounts (“critical” accounts include hospitals, police stations, water treatment facilities etc.) and spreading “load shed” to a wider distribution, critical accounts that happen to share the same circuit with non-critical accounts will be less affected in the event of an emergency. Curtailment of other important public safety devices and services such as traffic signals, police and fire stations, and water pumps and sewer lifts may also be avoided.

And the Department of Energy Report that show Obama’s Administration has had this planned since he took office.

The Department of Energy Report 2009
A smart grid is needed at the distribution level to manage voltage levels, reactive power, potential reverse power flows, and power conditioning, all critical to running grid-connected DG systems, particularly with high penetrations of solar and wind power and PHEVs…. Designing and retrofitting household appliances, such as washers, dryers, and water heaters with technology to communicate and respond to market signals and user preferences via home automation technology will be a significant challenge. Substantial investment will be required….
These controls and tools could reduce the occurrence of outages and power disturbances attributed to grid overload. They could also reduce planned rolling brownouts and blackouts like those implemented during the energy crisis in California in 2000.…

SAMURAI says:
So there isn’t a problem. Again, a LFTR was built and ran flawlessly for 5 years (1965-1969). It’s not a hypothetical idea. LFTRs work great.
Neat trick…
But that was an experimental reactor rather than an actual power plant.
No doubt we’d have to both relearn things and work with regulations which didn’t exist 50 years ago.
With all the subsidy money going to the likes of wind, which is literally a prehistoric technology.

SAMURAI says:
Glynn- CANDUs are a dead end. They require 70 atmospheres of steam pressure to run, and are still extremely inefficient in only converting less than 1% of nuclear material to energy compared to LFTRs, which convert 99% of thorium to energy. CANDUs also generate 200 times more nuclear waste per megawatt of energy produced compared to LFTRs and they’re much more expensive to build and run compared to LFTRs. They make no sense compared to the safety, efficiency, running costs and decommissioning costs compared to LFTRs.
CANDU power plants already exist and we know how to build more if needs be.
By comparison there are no LFTR power plants operating anywhere in the world. Until there are all the numbers are just theoretical.

Avfuktare – vindsavfuktare says:
August 15, 2013 at 6:44 am
Solar is and should be a local affair – where the use is close to the source and offsets grid usage at better than grid parity price. Solar can liberate a family from the grip of energy companies and politicians alike. What is not to like?
Nothing to dislike Avfuktare the problem starts when someone want to force the other not so lucky to have a good spot, to buy any excess in energy produced, at double price and also ask for money to finance it from the beginning.

richardscourtney says August 15, 2013 at 5:38 am
Windfarms operate intermittently: they only provide electricity when the wind is strong enough and not too strong. Thermal power stations are needed to provide ALL the required electricity when the windfarms are not operating.
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sergeimk
Current wind capacity is less than 10GW
Every day the grid handles a power change of 14GW over a couple of hours this is a lot more taxing than a slow changing wind output. It causes no problems.
Lose 1 GW of nuclear and all hell breaks loose.
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And when windfarms do operate then the electricity they produce forces thermal power stations to operate at reduced output. This – as Lars P said – reduces their efficiency.
And the reduction in efficiency of thermal power stations INCREASES their fuel requirement (the effect is similar to driving a car at 5mph in fifth gear: it can be done but it uses a lot of fuel).

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sergeimk
Efficiency is not the measure you sholud use- a power station generating 1 watt to supply 1/100watt is not efficient but it doesnot burn much gas.
this has relevant data to fast start generators
http://www.climateandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/efficiency-of-power-plant-operating.html
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@The Pompous Git –
Yes, home solar and wood are perfectly workable and practical renewable applications.
The failure is applying them to the grid, as others have pointed out, and perhaps I should have made that clear.
@Janice Moore and others –
Disagreements on matters like intelligent design would best be put aside so that everyone focuses on the most important objective we all have in common, to stop the AGW madness and save the planet – yes, save the planet! – from the greens and their counterhuman crusade.
I don’t happen to accept intelligent design, but I couldn’t care less whether a fellow AGW skeptic does or doesn’t. My concern is that we are all united in the effort to stop the madness and the murder. Things like intelligent design can be discussed at leisure – stopping the onslaught of green slavery doesn’t have that luxury.

The only reason they want to use renewables is their unshakeable belief that carbon dioxide is warming up the world. It so happens that this is completely impossible because the greenhouse effect alleged to cause that global warming simply does not exist. Just take a look at our atmosphere today. Carbon dioxide is at the highest level it has ever been but there is no warming. It is completely unable to call forth that greenhouse effect that IPCC, Al Gore, James Hansen et al. have ceaselessly told us about. Just none. And today is not an exception – that so-called “pause” or “hiatus” of warming has lasted for 15 years now and there is no end in sight. Remember that IPCC was established in the year 1988, the same year that Hansen gave his famous talk about the global warming ahead. Ten years later, in 1998, warming simply stopped. That stoppage has lasted for 15 years now, five years longer than they were able to see any warming in action. This should be reason enough to consider that the so-called “pause” in warming should be declared the new normal for climate science. And the warming they did claim to see before it stopped in 1998 was not greenhouse warming either. There were two periods of warming before 1998: the “early century warming” from 1910 to 1940 that raised global temperature by half a degree Celsius, and the “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties. The early century warming demonstrably could not be greenhouse warming because it had a sudden start but there was no corresponding sudden increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Laws of physics do not allow greenhouse warming to start unless atmospheric carbon dioxide simultaneously increases. That is because the IR absorbance of carbon dioxide is a property of the gas and cannot be changed. If you want to start a warming you must increase the number of absorbing molecules and this did not happen. That “late twentieth century warming,” on the other hand, did not even happen. Doing research for my book “What Warming?” I discovered that it was a total fraud and said so when the book came out in 2010. Strangely enough, nothing happened for two years. Then, late last year, I accidentally discovered that GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC had all given up showing that warming and were aligning their data with satellites where the warming is absent. This was done secretly and no explanation was given. I consider this coordinated action tantamount to an admission that they knew the warming was phony. This takes care of the two major warming periods before 1998 that IPCC has been pointing to as part of global warming. Clearly there has been no greenhouse warming in the past and its absence for the last fifteen years brings it up to date. The absence of the greenhouse effect follows from the Miskolczi theory of the saturated greenhouse effect that was published in 2007. He was shouted down in the blogosphere but no peer reviewed objections have been published for the last seven years, no doubt not for lack of trying. In 2010 he found a way to prove it directly using existing data. It was made possible by the fact that NOAA has a database of weather balloon observations going back to 1948. Miskolczi used it to study the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time. And discovered that the absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of this substantial amount of carbon dioxide to atmosphere had no influence whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. And without that greenhouse effect there is no anthropogenic global warming that IPCC was set up to study. This leaves it nothing to do and it should be closed down forthwith.

Arno Arrak says:
August 15, 2013 at 6:55 pm
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You omitted to include the further inconvenient fact that just when manmade CO2 emissions began to rise signifcantly, ie., late 1930s, rather than warming being observed, global temperatures cooled until the late 1970s.
This fact is also inconsistent with there being any significant GHE resulting from increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Again suggesting that by the 1930s any GHE brought about by CO2 was by then fully saturated by the levels of CO2 existing in the 1930s (since this is before ML measurements, and since the chemical analysis methods are disputed, and question marks hang over ice core data for the recent past, I will leave the reader to consider what level of CO2 was present in the late 1930s).

Renewables can’t work to meet our current energy needs, we all know that.
Fission is good, fusion is better, and the best form of energy is to harness the gravity well of the universe itself. Malthus will eventually be right if a species requires the total energy of the universe to sustain itself. Currently, I think ants are closer to that than we are. Indeed, I’ve often thought it’s an ants world and we just live in it.
Regarding ID, what better adaptation could there be than a species optimized for rapid mutation to meet new conditions?