Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states.
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
[Post updated at Eric’s request to correct the source of the second quote – Anthony]
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This is one of the very few times I was pleased to see someone buying hook, line, and sinker the Warmist’s claims. It means they were really motivated, and gives them some street cred in saying renewable policy needs to be reconsidered.
Yes, I have been at presentations by Google where they take the government-led Corporatist planned economy as a given. This admission means that much of the rationale for a planned economy–the CAGW threat and the need to force Green Energy on everyone–is impossible.
Now if we can just get Google to relinquish its vision of transformative K-12 education since it too is tied to the planned economy/collectivist future vision once we dig into the cites.
Contrary to their motto, Google have been evil for a very long time.
They, among other big corporations on the left coast, are contributing sponsors to the Khan Academy.
https://www.khanacademy.org/about/our-supporters
That can’t be all bad from what I saw of Khan’s teaching website a few years ago. Big corporations have a couple of faces. They’re beginning to show their conservative one now. I’m guessing they’re anticipating a moderate corporate tax reduction in the next few years, and a bigger one after 2016.
Even if Google believe in collectivism, they are still a company who need educated people who actually know how to do things. That mission is completely different to public education as currently practiced.
Tsk Tsk:
You accuse Google of doing evil for a very [long] time without bothering to cite a singe example (nope, I’m not an employee; just a frequent user).
You appear to have won the trifecta with a content-free, anonymous, corporate ad hominem.
Thank you for adding exactly zero value to the discussion.
Nuke the Greens
sounds like the old joke about losing $ on each sale and making it up with volume
Now — All we need to do is convince some of the icons of Lefty Capitalism such as Google that the future is Nucular [as W would say]
i.e. Nuke the Greens and then we can return to a productive use of our innovation skills [love those self erecting windmills — but perhaps they just needed some Green Viagra]
Nuke the greens? Do you realise how much energy there is within the atoms of a greenpiss campaigner? If only we could somehow break them down, the energy provided is more than the sum of their parts. E=mc2. Finally, finally, a greenpiss campaigner would actually be of use.
West – you got it right. Some of us have dug into the scary stuff greens put out about nuclear power, and like the Google research into renewables, their claims do not pan out. Pencil out the human injury and death from each power source and nuclear comes out far superior. The US Navy saw through bogus green fear mongering sixty years ago and has not looked back since.
Thousands of Navy crew have worked, ate, and slept just feet from powerful reactors with not a single radiation injury, let alone a death since 1950 when the nuclear Nautilus sub set sail.
But big “environmental” organizations like Friends of the Earth are going all out to close Diablo Canyon. Given complete lack of evidence of damage, some are starting to look at this feverish opposition more carefully. The Washington Examiner reports groups like the Sierra Club take “millions” from fossil fuel (natural gas). Read Forbes about the far greater safety of nuclear power (“How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt? – 6/10/12)
“Nucular”. I have listened to him saying that word over and over – and never been able to work out what he was actually saying. It was like an optical illusion that I could not fathom. Thankyou.
“losing $ on each sale and making it up with volume” is correct.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about energy. We would make better choices if it were more widely understood that no one “consumes” energy. By the 1st law of thermodynamics, energy is neither created nor destroyed. What we’re actually consuming is orderliness, or negative entropy, or neg-entropy. The most central cost analysis relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy.
Understanding neg-entropy is important because different energy sources do not have the same negentropy density by any means. In particular, the renewables such as wind, solar, wave etc. are typically are far more dis-ordered at the source. This makes it intrinsically very difficult to cost effectively harvest renewable energy.
In fact, this whole question has deep similarities with the age old attempt to make a perpetual motion machine. In both cases, there is a fundamental underestimation of the centrality of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
West’s last comment is also on target. The energy source that has far and away the highest neg-entropy is nuclear. In the 1950s the prediction was that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter”, and on a thermodynamic basis that should still be true. The bulk of the cost of nuclear power lies in satisfying safety and environmental regulations.
Actually,. Carter said “nucular” too, and he didn’t have an excuse–he actually studied the subject.
“Nucular” was the term used by Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander diring WWII. As such, a huge percentage of the population learned that pronunciation, at the dawn of the nuclear power era. Many people in the industry have used both pronunciations, depending upon where they live. Like words such as pop and soda, different areas of the US use the different pronunciations as normal variations. It only became a “big deal” when left-wing political propagandists were looking to it as yet another issue to divide people and foment hatred.
It’s well worth your while to click through to the direct link to the IEEE Spectrum article, and look at the comments. Essentially all of them are calling BS on the article — not for finding out the obvious, which is that it costs more to harvest distributed energy and make it useful than you can get back, but for blindly ignoring nuclear power as a rational option.
Three good things about this.
1. As you say, since the study was produced by True Believers, it suggests that the arguments are extremely compelling. Those of us who are not experts in the field can feel that we are not being too foolish if we tentatively accept their conclusions.
2. Accordingly, we can stop wasting resources and effort in trying to make the “renewables” work.
3. And it is encouraging to know that there are still people who follow the argument where it leads, even if they don’t want to go there. Kudos for intellectual honesty.
One bad thing.
1. Renewable energy isn’t going to work. Bugger.
It was always obvious that renewables could never overcome the laws of physics. We can never get more energy out of a system than we put into it. Kudos to google for putting their best brains into examining this and reconfirming the obvious though.
+1 my sentiments exactly
+2. Mine too.
+3
We published a similar conclusion to the Google engineers – 12 YEARS AGO.
Every sensible decent person is an environmentalist – contrary to green rhetoric, nobody has a monopoly on the moral high ground.
However, I suggest that to be a “stalwart environmentalist”, one must first get one’s facts straight.
A few hints for the good folks at Google:
1. CO2 is the basis for all carbon-based life on Earth – and Earth is CO2-deficient.
2. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 – there is no global warming crisis.
3. CO2 LAGS temperature at all measured time scales – we do not even know what drives what.
Happy US Thanksgiving to all my American friends.
Regards to all, Allan MacRae
____________
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
PEGG debate, reprinted at their request by several professional journals, the Globe and Mail and la Presse in translation,
by Sallie Baliunas, Tim Patterson and Allan MacRae – PEGG, November 2002
http://www.apega.ca/members/publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”– Google Engineers – November 2014
Now they can put their “best brains” into reinventing the wheel.
Maybe the next project should be Google LFTR?
Actually, I am by no way a Green, but thegobby*****’s comment on laws of physics is one of the most stupid things I have seen on WUWT. Renewables get their energy from the Sun, which is continually adding energy to our system, fortunately about as fast as we are losing it to space. So there is no question of us having to put energy into a system in order to get some out.
Rich.
Well let me try and explain the study in simper terms for you.
The amount of energy that has to be put into the infrastructure to capture and distribute the energy from the sun is larger than the energy captured from the sun.
Now do you get it?
Rich the issue is all about the concentration of energy in order to do useful work
You can plot human achievement and quality of life over millennia on a single exponential plot of energy density that a person could command
Begin with human muscle power — not much different than an Ape — spend all your time looking for enough food to survive — not much time composing Sonnets or developing Differential Geometry
Breakthrough Zero was harnessing other animals — to do our work for us
Unfortunately for the Greenies — wind and direct use of the sun are way back in the Dark to Middle Age period — with water power in there somewhere a bit later — note in simple terms — water beats wind because its denser so a 5 M/s wind is ignorable — 5 M/s flowing water can be life threatening
Major human breakthrough number one was to introduce coal to make steam and replace water to power our factories and gave us the first real non-muscle powered land transportation network
number two — oil / natural gas replaced coal for transportation and we got diesel trains, cars and aircraft
number three nuclear has given us gave us the potential for essentially unlimited electricity on-demand to replace all the earlier for nearly everything
WestHighlander well said, what you left out was before we harnessed animals for power the elites did have time to “not much time composing Sonnets or developing Differential Geometry” they did it on the labor of slaves. Present day elites are working to take us back to those times with their devious(i was going to say stupid, but they probably not stupid) energy plans.
That comment, in a nutshell, is why people keep getting suckered into these “something for nothing” schemes.
I have read here in one the the articles that 3.8 million .5 MW wind mills would be needed. Now think maintenance, trucks people going from site to site for routine maintain; the need to stock pile replacement parts, lubricants. Now think about that same maintenance , but now for the infrastructure you have just created to maintain the wind farms Oh and don’t forget labour costs. and on and on. And you still need coal,gas, and oil as back ups. And you would need trained staff to operate them. That means you have to pay them to sit around playing cards until they have to fire up their power station. Ack.
Michael
Fossil fuels get their energy from the sun also. The trick is that they add the dimension of time to concentrate solar energy that has been collected over eons in far greater quantities than can be collected over spatial dimensions. We should all be quite concerned about the environmental consequences of trying to collect comparable amounts of solar energy in real time, thereby diverting it from its normal impact on the planet. I don’t see where that has been very well thought through.
On the other hand, we have plenty of uranium laying around that is doing nothing but decaying.
Indeed, Jeff. The very notion that thousands upon thousands of square miles of solar panels, which are specifically engineered to capture as much sunlight as possible, would heat the world less than a small uptick in a trace gas in the atmosphere is thoroughly ridiculous.
davidmhoffer: “Now do you get it?”.
Yes, I got it all along, but perhaps didn’t make that clear. My only complaint was thegobbysh***’s comment “We can never get more energy out of a system than we put into it.” Whilst that is true, it has nothing to do with efficacy of renewables powered by the sun, i.e. the subject of the whole thread. That is an engineering problem, which may be beyond us to solve, which is apparently the conclusion of the Google engineers. But is there a physical law which says that the energy to build a renewable energy installation must exceed the lifetime output of that installation? I don’t think so.
One parallel, perhaps dubious, is the engineering problem faced in the 19th century: can we build a steam locomotive of 90% efficiency instead of the 7% or whatever efficiency is actually achieved?
Anyway, thanks go to you and to the other respondent for further stimulating the discussion.
Rich.
““We can never get more energy out of a system than we put into it.”
=========================================================
Why is that a true statement, if the energy we are getting out, was put in place by nature. We just need to be efficient about it.
” But is there a physical law which says that the energy to build a renewable energy installation must exceed the lifetime output of that installation?”
Well, no, not a physical law. But, if you’re not getting more out than you put in, why go to the trouble?
Oops. Read the sentence wrong. Never mind.
Not to pile on, but I just thought of another good example. Ethanol is made from corn, which is essentially captured energy from sunlight. However, getting the corn processed into ethanol takes considerable energy. But ethanol is itself a source of energy right? So, in theory, you could use the ethanol produced from your first batch of corn to process the next batch of corn into ethanol, and the surplus ethanol produced during each cycle would be sold at profit. Okay, so how many ethanol producers power their conversion plants with ethanol? Zero. Why? because the surplus energy produced is tiny (if it even exists at all). Instead they mostly use coal to provide energy to ethanol power plants. So, in essence, ethanol from corn is simply used as a means to convert coal to a liquid motor vehicle fuel. Or to put it another way, ethanol is being used to greenwash coal.
In the same exact way, coal power is used to provide power to create solar cells, which in turn slowly supply the power back to the grid over 30 years. After 30 years (when the solar cells wears out) your net return is actually negative.
I wonder if there isn’t some sort of economic or physical law at work here? There must be a direct relationship between energy density and economic value, right? It seems that it would be directed related to entropy – after a certain level of diffusion all energy sources are uneconomic, with “economic” simply being a measure of energy gain over time.
It’s the really sad thing about electric cars: fantastic in principle; unrealistic in practice. Too expensive, and too limited in range. I would buy one tomorrow if those two things weren’t so.
Actually Ghost, Tesla gets ~500km/charge
http://www.teslamotors.com/en_CA/goelectric
I had a ride in a Tesla from Quebec City to Ottawa (440km) about a week ago). It takes 30 min. to charge at Tesla charge station (~300v, 350 amps)
Also, a new phenomenon has been occurring regarding charging. Businesses, hotels, etc are offering free charging for guests. They are low power charges but if you are staying overnight, you will be charged up by morning. Even fancy coffee/sandwich places can give you 20 to; 40 km worth if you stop for lunch. Already you could drive from Montreal to Miami for free. This is a far more attractive incentive than the subsidies given to buyers – it is a bigger game changer than originally thought.
@Gary Young, Really !! you think hotels are going to give you the equivalent of a free tank of Gas, how long do you think a loss leader like that will continue ??
Talking of Teslas – Amsterdam Schiphol Airport now has 167 Tesla taxis. Yup, 167 of them.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/21/amsterdam-airport-enlists-167-tesla-taxis
They look and sound great, but I am left wondering how they can do usual taxi milage, without running out of elections.
The book range of the S Class is 420 km per charge, which should be enough for local work, but not much more. We often take a taxi from Schiphol to Brussels, which is 205 km. So by the time the driver has done one round trip, the car is dead. What then?
A driver will normally do two trips like this in a day. So are they taking the dead cars back to base, and taking out another? i.e.: two cars per driver? Now that is EXPENSIVE. Or do they refuse to do long journeys, and pass you onto the usual Mercedes diesel?
And what about winter? How are they going to heat the cabin, when it is -10º outside?
Ralph
Now, one part of good news. While waiting for new riders in those very, very long “taxi – herds” lined up before the cabs are loaded with the next passenger, the electric cabs will not be running (idling) and thus, will not be discharging their batteries.
Now, the bad news. They will also NOT be charging either! (Because they are in constantly refilled queue moving slowly forward at irregular intervals.) Nor will they discharging their batteries (ie, heating up their interiors and drivers while waiting in the snow and ice half the year, or running their air conditioners the h other half the year.
Lights on? Battery drain.
Heater on? Battery drain.
Radio on? Battery drain.
A/C on? Battery drain.
Fan on? Battery drain.
But, so long as the enviro’s control their propaganda through the biased, lying media, I fear they will never run out of elections.
>>It takes 30 min. to charge at Tesla charge station (~300v, 350 amps)
Not according to that Tesla website, you cited. 30 min of charge gives you an extra 20-40 km of range, depending on the charger type. Just enough to limp to another cafe.
But I don’t believe this website.
The range at 110 kph and 20ºc, is 372 km. But if you raise the temp to 40ºc, and put the air-con on, the range goes up to 378 km? Eh? Are they implying the air-con uses no energy? Or are they saying that the batteries are more efficient at 40ºc?
Conversely, if the temp goes down to -10ºc, the range goes down to 316 km. That is not very much degradation, considering the batteries are much colder and the cabin heater is on.
Are these trustworthy figures?
Ralph
>>Nor will they discharging their batteries (ie, heating up their interiors
>>and drivers while waiting in the snow and ice half the year.
Yeah. During the winter the drivers normally run their engines to keep warm. And yes, there are no taxi recharging points because they have to move up the rank-queue. I cannot see how this is going to work, during the winter, or when the battery is 4 years old. In fact, with the milage that most drivers do, I cannot see it working in the summer, either.
I did ask the driver about the car, and he said it was great, with no problems. But he was from a region where they happily say that jet black is actually brilliant white, to con tourists out of their cash.
R
Nobody I know can afford a Tesla….
It seems odd that a business supplying DC powered vehicles names itself after Nikola Tesla whose major achievement was getting away from the limitations of DC to AC.
Those are the reasons Thomas Edison gave for getting out of the electric car business over a century ago! The batteries and electric motors weren’t advanced enough.
It takes more power energy to recharge the batteries in these electric cars than it takes to operate a Humvee the same amount of miles. A real good strategy.
Doesn’t seem cost effective. Why doesn’t your local taxi operator use a Bentley?
So you don’t believe in coal mining, oil and gas extraction, or nuclear power either? Because ‘We can never get more energy out of a system than we put into it’. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s one of the silliest things I’ve read on a comments thread here, which is saying something.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? The system is the universe. Plenty of energy there to live off. Give me a break…
You can get more energy out than you put in if you consider a small subset of the universe. Ir is why coal, oil, and nuclear plants have value.
The quantity you are describing is measured by the Energy Return On Investment (EROI). Ike Kiefer explains this in “20th Century Snake Oil”. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/Kiefer%20-%20Snake%20Oil2.pdf
Bio-fuels involve less energy out than energy in due to the use of fossil fuel based fertilizers. Apparently when the costs of production plus the cost of transmission makes solar and wind energy inefficient. As opposed to fossil fuels that produce 8-12 times as much energy output as energy input. Only such efficient energy sources provide a sufficient energy base to yield a modern society. The result of adopting so-called renewables will result in destruction of modern societies.
An honest attempt at accounting must include the externality costs the public is left with in dealing with AGW. Renewables out compete fossil fuels in that regard. Of course you probably think AGW is a hoax so that makes you irrelevant to the discussion.
Nor economics. Opportunity costs for land use (or ocean use) are tremendous. 10% of California power produced by wind turbines would require 2500 square miles of ocean from the Oregon border to the Channel Islands, because only off shore winds could support the generation capacity needed. The 33% capacity factor means you need to build 3x the name plate capacity to produce the amount of energy required. Operation and Maintenance will cost even more than construction over a reasonable operational life of the facility. Offshore wind generation requires corrosion resistant cables and components. Furthermore, the power delivery system has to be constructed along the entire coastline. All this to meet only 10% of our power needs. Whereas, 24 San Onofre scale reactors could be built on 3 square miles of land to produce 100% of our power needs. Or better, 240 modern modular units, preferably integral fast reactors, and California might become the 3rd largest economy in the world after the US and China.
it’s not so much the physics as it is the imperfection of the power source and the economics of that. There’s no actual physical science reason why power can’t be harvested from the Sun. It’s just that the expenses associated with harvesting it are significant and the reliability of the source (night, clouds, etc) is just not there. Same goes for the wind. In the free market, the fact that something is costly means that it has high costs to society overall and the price without monopolistic benefits simply reflects that cost (don’t worry about who owns and who pays – not relevant to this comment). Plants have been able to harness solar energy and do so by biological processes. There are dyes that can produce electricity without highly processed semiconductor materials (pvs). Unleashing self replicating nanotechnology or super altered genetic plant life (think electric jungle lol) might possibly overcome that high cost to society present in human manufactured electrical and mechanical renewables and maybe even overcome the need for turning backup electrical supply needs. The risk of that sort of solution is super dangerous. Anytime man has played with simple biology, catastrophe ensues. Doubtful there will be any improvement with more complex biological manipulations.
“This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants”
Everybody knows that the more windows you break and replace, the better off society is as a whole. It’s a multiplier thing. 😉 I mean, Google may not get any better at what they do, but all the window makers and their suppliers will be.
Well, there is a solution, and I’m sure that an eco-wacko will point it out shortly: mass suicide of the human race will save Mother Earth. I almost guarantee that some variant of such will be proposed.
Population control advocates almost never discuss methods, since most people find all of them abhorrent.
Human misery never has been a problem for those in power.
http://youtu.be/XxG-h-IMjx8
Just one of many examples.
Population control advocates never want to lead by example, either. One wonders why if it’s such a good idea, the proponents wouldn’t want to be first.
…Population control advocates almost never discuss methods, since most people find all of them abhorrent…
But every so often they let the mask slip. The 10:10 ‘No Pressure’ film, for instance…
I have heard the idea that some people want to drastically reduce the global population. I can’t seem to take it seriously because it is one of the few ideas were everybody loses.
In the socio-economic sense, the only people that would not be knocked down the ladder are those at the very, very top and those people didn’t get to the top by undermining themselves. The more people there are buying barbeques and outboard motors, the more money, power, and stature there is for the people at the top of the socio-economic food chain. The good news is; these would not be the people getting eliminated from the gene pool.
This brings us to the middle class, lawyers, economists, professors and such. Most of the people in this group should survive the cut as they are mostly intelligent, alpha-type personalities.
Lastly, we have the working sods. If we are to have any kind of functioning society we still need people to build space-heaters, make the water potable, and clean up vomit in the restroom. Unfortunately, these will probably be the first to go, and the more people that get eliminated from this group, the more people from the previous group will have to fill in. I can imagine someone in this alternate future saying, “I used to be a stock broker, now I clean toilets and take out trash for a living”.
From a technological standpoint this idea also makes no sense. Right now we (as a species) are making dramatic strides forward in every major field of study and the technological innovations that follow are revolutionizing everything from cosmology to nuclear medicine. Eliminating a large part of our population would slow progress proportionally (perhaps logarithmically as proportionality assumes low interaction). I read somewhere that technology is currently doubling every seven years, if that gets knocked down to seventy years or more we could be well into the next glaciation before we have the technology to survive with an intact civilization or to prevent the glaciation itself.
From an environmental standpoint this is also a losing proposition. An environment that is well managed is a more productive habitat for all living things, including people. As someone who has both studied environmental science and lived in the wilderness for years on end, I can say definitely that environmental management is better for the ecosystem than environmental chaos. Also, there was a reason for the low life expectancy and high infant mortality before modern civilization and if we lose the population we could easily slip back to that point.
That is why I can’t believe that anybody capable of driving this absurdity, actually would. Even political systems are largely population based, a monarchy could never survive a high population situati……….. Wait a minute.
The ecoFascists have proposed a method involving a box and a red button. Pressing the button will blow up a Gaia-polluter. This is what’s in their hearts and minds. Implementation will certainly follow if they’re given the power: killing men, women, and children in the service of Gaia.
Education is the best population control.
Mass extermination is already part of The Plan. Why do you think that the Green Blob tries so desperately to deny cheap energy to the Third World and advocates policies to send the First World back to a Medieval technology and standard of living?
You don’t need mass extermination because declining TFR’s will eventually reduce the human population dramatically. There is argument as to when populations will peak, but with global TFR at or near replacement (often stated as 2.2, but probably higher), the peak is within a few decades.
The Malthusians will likely celebrate the peak, but post-peak isn’t likely to be a happy time. Demographic decline will be something entirely (although Japan provides a nice preview).
AGW will hit the bottom two billion a lot harder than the top 5 who can afford to adapt. Coal fired plants could never reach those two billion anyway out in the boondocks where they live. Like with cell phones, they need a technology like solar that leap frogs the need for a centralized grid.
Uh, why you such harsh terms?
Why not call it “Government Guided population optimization”??
I believe they will call it “Government Optimized Demographics”
Quantitative easing?
No, it is called ‘collateral damage while bringing freedom, justice and democracy’.
Some would just bluntly call it ‘killing in war’.
“Quantitative easing?”
YOMANK
John Law : Quantitative easing?
Ha! Good one.
Re: Stock brokers cleaning toilets, earlier. No, stock brokers on food stamps in subsidized luxury flats playing video games while machines clean toilets, flip burgers, drive cars and deliver mood stabilizers in bulk.
Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
Den slutsatsen är inom den nu tillgängliga tekniska utvecklingens och kunskapens ram en sund och hållbar slutsats. Mer behöver inte tilläggas.
Cue Danny Kay’s perfect German translation. LOL!
Took me a few tries:
I guess a Swedish form of “res ipsa loquitur”.
Swedish text for good latin: Saken talar för sig själv…
One problem… what scientists say is a healty and sustainable conclusion always has an aber of what next generation of scientist might find that completely alter the paradigm of today 2014…
but apart from that: You are right.
Nice Bastiat reference.^^^
>Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’
This is a “reverse Gruber”, recognizing the common wisdom in most people, who already know that Green energy schemes are mostly stupid, designed to distribute wealth to the un-wealthy.
Actually to distribute wealth to the already wealthy.
Amen. Big Government is very inefficient in distribution of wealth, and creates little or no wealth on its own. (e.g look at the BHO regime). By stifling free enterprise with excessive regulation and taxes, they tend to kill, in effect, the enterprising geese that create wealth in our modern world.
True. But would you like a feudalistic society where wealth is never redistributed at all? Nobility, knights and serfs? For a thousand years or so? Dark ages ad infinitem? I will take inefficient government redistribution any day. But seems like to me we are headed back to the dark ages of nobility, knights and serfs. We just don’t call ourselves nobles, knights and serfs.
David, I guess you missed the experiment called the United States of America. (The left did not miss it they are however changing it as rapidly as possible.) We are all getting equal, equally poorer, except for some very small few.
A feudalistic society is not the only option to large central Government.
>”…would you like a feudalistic society…?”
No, that would be even worse. That’s why I specified “excessive” regulation and taxes.
It’s the Goldilocks principle. Government now is “too big” and “too powerful”. A feudalistic government would be “too small”. What we need is to “regulate” the size and authority of the government so that it both protects and serves the nation and its people. “Just right”
To David A: Being an attorney for thirty five years I am pretty familiar with the experiment we call the USA. But my point is that the USA is looking more and more like it is reverting to the kinds of government it was designed to replace. I just read that in this last election four billion dollars was spent on the campaigns and that entire sum of money came from .2% of the population. Even if that figure is off by ten times that amount, it pretty much means our government is pretty much bought and paid for by a handful of people, a/k/a/ the new nobility. This is not a new phenomenon; it just seems to get worse with every election.
I doubt that any of the posters on this site would consider themselves members of the modern noble class. This site just doesn’t strike me as a hangout for the royal class.
The Left don’t like the idea of a nation where the talented and hard-working are rewarded. It is simply not fair. And they are right, because the concept of “fair” is subjective, and can be defined any way you like. Just watch House of Cards. You learn money is not as important as power. The game is to reward those who make a difference as they play along with government. Let the Judas Goats live, and harvest the rest at will.
Starting with Teddy Roosevelt, no person or private entity would never again be allowed think they could ignore the Administration. Since that time, the big winners and losers have been selected by regulation and prosecution. Free enterprise is a nearly mythical concept that hasn’t seen the light of day for decades. Freedom is at odds with government power. However, it is alive and well in the underground economy practiced by millions working off the books. Strange how we are becoming more like China under Mao. Which country is winning since Nixon and Kissinger went to Beijing? Eventually, China realized it could not restrain its underground economy, not if it wanted to have a chance at fulfilling its own concept of China’s destiny.
If we continue to let public education rot the minds of our young people, we will become another third world nation. Of course, that’s the plan. With meaningful education, more bright ideas could be created and they might have a chance to grow. It may be stereotypical, but the winners in China are better educated and they insist their children study hard and learn real skills. It’s still generally true of Asian-Americans and a few other sub-cultures here too, despite our bad schools. Shamelessly, state universities are trying to prevent hard working ethnic Asians from taking “too many” seats and interfering with the student body diversity envisioned by officials using an outcome-based strategy.
When you value basketball and rap, or football and death metal, or reality TV, and let government take care of you, you wind up with modern Detroit, not Motor City, USA.
At Johanus. Define excessive. Because every one has a different opinion as to what is excessive based on who’s ox is being gored. In my experience, businesses don’t like competition and all want to be monopolies to ensure a profit. And the larger they get, the more clout they have in getting legislation that favors them and works a hardship on their competitors. Much of this so called excessive legislation is designed to squeeze out the little guy but it is done by the big guys who can afford it. But as I pointed out above, if all of the campaign contributions come from .2% of the population, who do you think is really responsible for this “excessive” regulation. As they say, “follow the money.”
Nixon in China. Clueless.
@davidgmills: … Define excessive. …
From a system engineering POV there can be no answer to the question “How big is ‘Big’?” without some notion of reference metrics related to the system’s goals. Then the Leaders should try to optimize the system define metrics for all the critical parameters for measuring the success or failure. And tweak for maximal Success while trying to minimize Failure.
But there’s that nasty Hobbesian Dilemma to deal with, which states that any ruler with enough power to prevent or end war will also have the power to start war for his own purposes.
In the U.S his dilemma is nicely mitigated by “separation of political power”, where the executive is the commander and chief of the military, but cannot make or change laws without the approval of the U.S. Congress.
Oops.
Rats. Img tags don’t work. Here’s the link:
http://i.imgur.com/aGqBeOo.jpg
Speaking of “clueless”, well, less so now.
Not as bad as when Bush Sr. barfed in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap:
http://postimg.org/image/4n5zew0i5/
Read the article, that is not what the Google engineers said.
The key is “replace coal”. Or oil. They work anywhere, and transport and use are cheap. Wind needs windy places – and where the hoi polloi don’t mind their views to be altered. And lots of dead birds. Solar needs the sun, so puget sound and western Michigan aren’t good candidates. Then there’s night.
There is another adjective on the renewables they looked at: Intermittent. Nuclear is constant, problematically so. Fossil fuels are on-demand. Geothermal might work but is more expensive and isn’t being looked at.
Hydro is the renewable that works, but you have the problem of the dams creating lakes, and altering the ecosystem. And it also has to be where the gradient will create enough pressure and there is enough water.
Conversely, if you need to power air conditiining with extra power on sunny days, it fits.
It’s entirely feasible to design nuclear power plants that can load follow, indeed most existing plants can to a greater or lesser extent; France load follows with its PWR power stations. The problem is that their efficiency drops off quite quickly and the marginal cost of the electricity generated rises rapidly(it should be pointed out that coal- and gas-fired generators lose efficiency when load following also). New designs such as Molten Salt Reactors or High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors could offer greater flexibility to load follow, but outside China, Russia and India there’s little budget or political will for developing these technologies into fullsize commercial power stations.
Indeed, China’s main increase in non fossil fuels is nuclear, and hydro, not something the greens in the west will allow.
Molten Salt Reactors is the nuclear solution, they can’t blow up or melt down; are walk away safe and are about 200 times as efficient than our current PWR fleet. Problem is our DoE Has given China the keys to ORNL’s MSR design and is actively prevent US firms from working with ORNL on the MSR design. http://www.energyfromthorium.com
Green energy’s waste stream of Rare Earth Elements tosses away enough of the super fuel Thorium yearly that can power the entire planet using MSRs.
Western Michigan does have one of the few storage facilities,
that seems both effective and economical. Add that to the near constant wind off lake Michigan, I figure if wind has a change any where it’s in Western Michigan. It’s not that renewables are impossible, it’s a matter of finding the right mixes, the correct amounts and in the places, fine points often lost on the megalomaniacal eco-loons.
Pumped storage is fine to even out intermittent power sources, but it is not a net-power producer — it actually uses some power.
I work in generation. Pumped hydro is a net economic plus. It is not, of course, a net energy plus, because there are losses associated with pumping the water uphill. You simply do so when the cost is cheap (middle of the night, usually) and then run the water through the turbines during peak hours, when the cost of electricity is high. It makes money for the company (my employer included), but it is not in any way, shape, or form energy efficient.
And I missed that someone had already made my point. Sorry about the duplication.
That this actually got published surprises me. I would have thought they would have just quietly killed the project and moved on.
Here is Google’s Eric Schmidt in September.
So what they’re saying is that people in favour of adapting to climate change are wonderful. And those fighting it by extremely expensive, and ineffective measures, are hurting our children and grandchildren, and are also liars. For once I agree with them. Giggle.
“They’re just literally lying.”
Eric Schmidt is no dummy. He knows better. That the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful company, a company with more data than any other on all of us, would debase himself by saying such things should send a chill down the spine of free people everywhere.
The penny drops.
And the spin goes full circle.
And the bearing starts to fail.
If we could only harvest the potential energy in that penny. For a few million pounds, I am willing to do the research!
Yea, like the lenr people…
“Got promising results, we need just a little bit more money to get this free energy generator to market! It would be a killer app if it we can just afford building a commercial version. We have already a Nigerian investor who is ready to invest $510m, but we need more partners. Wanna join?”
Imagine if all the hundreds of billions, if not trillion dollars spent on fabulous renewable energy and CO2 mitigation schemes were spent on making nuclear energy safe, even for gree nuts.
Yes, they could have done a lot of good with the resources wasted on “green energy”.
Or they could have used the massive support they had to promote conservation or adaptation. Instead they grabbed for the loot, with carbon trading and crony energy schemes. A lot of conservation could have been done for very little govt cost, and savings for the populace.
Civilization and populations will collapse when liquid fuels for transportation and agriculture become too expensive/ unavailable. How much battery would a semi truck, or farm tractor need? Would it be practical – hell no.
They could have:
-Reduced highway speed limits. Fuel used is the square of velocity.
– Changed the rules for using nat gas as vehicle fuel.
– Put a stop to shipping raw materials to the far side of the world, and shipping crap back.
– More harvesting of renewable material and fuel (logging), rather than “let it burn” and road closure, which results in expensive airborne fire fighting, or none.
– An energy tax, or a ration card would mean that Al Gore would be paying for his exorbitant use, and those who use little would save lots.
They could have gotten wider support, and done a lot of good. They grabbed for loot instead.
This sounds like a nice receipe to return to the Dark Ages circa 500 CE — we give up: the Roman “global” trade system, modern interoperable currency [as long as you like the emperor]; and predictable legal process [see as long as the emperor likes you]
In exchange we get: locally sourced food [when there is any and given good climate]; green transportation [walking or riding a horse] on unpaved green paths; marrying your cousin [you will live your entire life within a couple of days walk of one place]; and regular famines
Also Jeff, they have to protect their phony baloney jobs. Can I get a harumph?
harumph
Seriously, more rules and regs from the asswipes already micromanaging our lives? Thanks to fracking we are now #1 in oil production. The back-to-the-past greens need huge government subsidies for their loser projects and still they FAIL.
I believe fuel use goes up as the cube of velocity. As to reducing speeds. Time has value. So limits are not obeyed.
Fuel use is not the square of velocity. You need to look at mpg not miles per minute. Highway driving is the most efficient for mpg because stopping and starting are wasteful. This is the kind of silly idea that caused Carter to give us the frustrating 55mph speed limits for no savings in oil.
Agree with Craig. Highway travel speed limits are a bad answer. Adding absurd bridges and cloverleafs at major intersections to eliminate stop lights would be more effective and just as dumb.
Google: ‘broken window parable’. Very apropos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
That’s what I have been saying for years. Renewables are no substitute. Unviable and unaffordable.
I hope people at Google will start doing some reseach on AGW too. These guys and girls are very smart; they should be skeptics in less than an hour if they seriously looked at that failed theory .
Unfortunately ‘Smart’ and ‘Intelligent’ are not on the same continuum as Common Sense and Stupid.
Any engineer working in academia for a period will attest to the quote
These smart Google engineers were sent on a fools errand and did not realize it. Simple back of an envelope calculations would have shown the impossibility of the task.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/03/14/germanys-green-energy-disaster-a-cautionary-tale-for-world-leaders/
But when bankers are told that governments will “guarantee a return well above current market levels to invest in ‘green energy’ the engineers get steam-rollered into coming up with solutions that they know will not work and have a lifetime cost that exceeds the implementation cost by orders of magnitude. In come the starry eyed brilliant academic scientists with no real world engineering capability and failure is guaranteed.
http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/11/spiegel-germanys-large-scale-offshore-windpark-dream-morphs-into-an-engineering-and-cost-nightmare/
This is why Greenpeas and the “Gang Green” in general do not have engineers on their staff. Too much reality.
This is why Greenpeas and the “Gang Green” in general do not have engineers on their staff. Too much reality.
Yep.
They are very smart but their boss, Schmidt, has sold his soul for 30 pieces of political silver so the engineers are smart enough to play along. They do the research, dot every “i” and cross every “t” and present their results. I would not put it past the people who did this study to have done it just to show unequivocally the folly of green energy.
Yes, and Ivy League MBA’s told the world that the MBS market was triple A.
The real problem is that these people (warmists) began with the goal of renewable energy replacing so-called fossil fuels.
Once this was firmly in their minds, they than needed to vilify current energy generation. As the engineers had already developed and installed virtually pollution free systems for coal. oil and gas this proved to be a most difficult task.
Finally the consensus of AGW folk (with what seems to be limitless funds), struck upon CO2 as the prime culprit.
All that was needed then was to collude, obfuscate, forge and otherwise lie about CO2’s supposed role.
This “bull by the foot” process is what pollutes much bad science.
Start with a “problem” than proceed to find a culprit.
The facts however are:
By all trial evidence and arguments in this kangaroo court, CO2 is found to be 100% innocent.
Over these decades of debate and prosecution, there is NO perpetrator and NO crime.
Regardless of how you feel about the use of fossil fuel energy, regardless of the new technologies that may extend their use for hundreds of years, they will eventually run out. We had better have an alternative in place. Any reasonable scientist will agree that solar and wind won’t work. I’m of the opinion that controlled fusion is the only energy source that has the potential to power a multi-trillion dollar economy.
Controlled Fusion works just about as well as wind and solar, and has even less likelyhood of improvement.
I did engineering studies in the 1960s on fusion and realized that it CAN NOT work. Solar and wind in the 1970s same result and I was in the solar business! there is NO net benefit. No matter how much I like them these “Green” alternatives can not work for industrial levels of energy production. pg!
What you found is that thermally initiated fusion can not work. I agree. The Tokamoc et. al. are dead ends. However a bimodal beam-beam reactor has promise. I like Polywell Fusion.
Controlled hot fusion has not shown promise of being practical yet, and is looking more and more as a non solution. However, several fission processes do work (Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors, and some intrinsically safe Breeder Reactors) and can be made safe from dangerous runaway, and have low amounts of dangerous waste products that need to be secured. In addition, LENR, or other so called cold fusion processes, do seem promising. There will be solutions in the future, but very likely not hot fusion.
I like Polywell Fusion.
There are renewable power sources that may work. Wind and solar are not among them. Geothermal heat for residential heating works in many areas, there are a few places where tidal waters can be used, the world’s greatest hydroelectric power source, the Congo river is yet to be tapped – and they don’t even have to build a dam! Other than that, the best future source is Thorium based nuclear power, with a million years supply of fuel available. Nothing else comes even close.
http://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/eleven-reasons-to-switch-to-thorium-based-nuclear-power-generation/
http://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/eleven-more-reasons-to-switch-to-thorium-as-nuclear-fuel/
http://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/nuclear-power-and-earthquakes-how-to-make-it-safer-and-better/
http://lenbilen.com/2012/02/15/nuclear-power-why-we-chose-uranium-over-thorium-and-ended-up-in-this-mess-time-to-clean-up/
True. Geothermal and Geoair both work. Russ Finch has been running the citrusinthesnow.com and more recently greenhouseinthesnow.com shows how simple stuff works. Greenhouses (16×80 feet) in Nebraska operating for $500 a year to heat (and cool if required).
But lets waste more money on Solyndras because they offer kickbacks.
Perhaps a little more precisely, they offer democratic campaign contributions, and the Government offers the kickbacks.
It is the specter of limitless energy available to the common herd, with a million years supply that is the reason that the Malthusians in government are so against Thorium. The last thing that those in power want to see is limitless energy.
Bardarbunga is an untapped energy source.
Unlike the energy sink of Bundangawoolarangeera.
Not because of supposed AGW, alternative sources of energy production will happen but not with current materials technology. Just not there yet and to ignore the facts as presented is like trying to drive a square peg into a round hole and going broke doing it. The best is yet to come as the EPA force the retirement of older generation coal powered power plants while implementing regs that prevent replacement power plants being built and operated in the false “hope” that alternatives will take up the slack.
Newsel — a realistic EPA would “Force the retirement of the solar and wind give-aways which have diverted innovative people from productive innovation into gov’t-facilitated scamming of the taxpayer and the utility rate payer with the special assistance of the ignorant political and media “inteligencia”
So how do we start to undo the damage of the past forty or so years — which began circa Earth Day
:
1) Restrict Taxpayer dollars to fund research on energy only — no more subsidies — no more Solyndrias
2) stop forcing Green wealth transfer scams on rate-payers — no m ore selling Green Electricity production by taxing the ratepayer
3) Return all licensing of Federal Lands for energy production and shipment to the resective lands’ caretaker and aggressively license energy production and transportation infrastruicture
4) trim the EPA back to a research agency — all enforcement of environmental regulations will be relegated to states, or voluntary regional state cooperative groupings
5) require the cost of any new regulation be rigorously investigated before implementation
They could have just read my letter to IEEE spectrum which laid out the math showing its an absurdity
Another solution
I once read that 500 grams of pure Kriptonite ( Superman’s home planet ) would contain enough energy to power Earth for 1,000 years, Now where is my grant money ?????
True Green Energy.
Metropolis greens say no!
Dr. Mabuse says “off with their heads”.
“To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines…”
Oh…the visual of that…and an entire hilltop…ROTFLMAO!!!!!!
And inflatable?
They could mine the coal off the hilltop first.
“self erecting wind turbines”
I can see the cartoon of a couple looking out of their window. “Oh, no. Another patch of windmills has sprung up on the lawn again. Get the weedkiller out.”
You mean like “Otto Pilot?’:
So if the turbine fails to self-erect would we call it turbinerectile dysfunction? And would the repair folks have a sign on their van saying “Does your turbine fail to erect? Call 1-800-HARD and we will get it up again in minutes, not hours.”
(Warning: If your turbine fails to lose its erect position during windless days, seek immediate attention.)
Who says nerds don’t have sexual ideation?
I wonder if Jerry Brown will ever read this interview.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for renewable energy,
So I guess the solution is therefore complete de-industrialization. We can all go back to scratching out our subsistence from a rocky patch of ground.
Except, of course, for the elites, who will still have their iPads, jet aircraft and Google (for the benefit of “the people” to be sure).
I think it HAS been established that Amish farming with horse and plow is the most efficient and sustainable.
For genaral base load capacity with 240vac appliances, yes, renewables (Solar/Wind) don’t work. If you have a small site, a single domestic site with renewables (Solar, wind and hydro) it works. However, as I have posted before here at WUWT, whatever system is used to GENERATE the power it has to be *matched* with the appliances. So, 6, 12 or 24vdc must be matched with 6, 12 or 24 appliances for maximum benefit, least waste and maxium reliabitity (When I did my research a 12vdc “family sized” fridge would cost me NS$12,000, that was in about 2000). Inverters are better these days but they are still not good for appliances that need proper sinusoidal sinewave AC. None. I have not seen any yet that can work that well. Unless you are wealthy enough to bin your 240vac appliances on your “home grid” regularly!
I have spoken to people over the years and they say that a car’s power system in 12vdc. I say that is true, but the alternator is producing 110vac, 3 phase, which is rectified to 12vdc. I am met with blank looks on their faces.
Actually it’s 14 volts, otherwise the battery would never get charged.
You know nothing about power conversion or the design of inverters.
Carry on.
The reason your car alternator has a regulator is so that it doesn’t produce 110V 3 phase AC. You ignorance is unmatched.
Carry on.
A number of technical issues here: for one, an auto alternator does not produce 110vac, but much lower. The real issues have more to do with the quality of the generation in terms of its “dispatchability.” A small bit of solar is somewhat correlated with peak demand times and contributes more value to the grid than its raw KW/$ would indicate. Wind is cheaper, but terribly bad to dispatch as it is anti-correlated and must be paired with backup generation such as gas turbines to compensate for windless days. A safer nuclear technology or deep geothermal must be considered to replace fossil fuels as wind and solar clearly have limited applicability.
Am I the only one who don’t find the second quote ion the IEEE article? Where does it comes from?
I looked for that, too. The article the first link took me to did not seem to arrive at that conclusion.