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]
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
During this whole renewable little attention has been paid to improvements in efficiency. A typical home can be made about 40% more efficient, at a cost that’s recovered in 6 to 8 years. Honda has technology to build a 240 hp engine, in a midsize car, that gets about 40 mpg. The incremental cost of building the engine, according to someone I trust on stuff like this, is about 2000 bucks, again the cost in saved fuel is recovered during the first five years of vehicle life. Greens don’t want efficiency, they want an absolute change. There all into this “transformational” thing, (if I hear one more school teacher use that term I might go berserk). Even though I believe that AGW is contrived bullshit it just makes sense to lower our dependency on fossil fuel, and quit spewing so much crap into the atmosphere. The Fed’s focus on renewable energy is a great fraud to the taxpayers when it distracts from real and meaningful steps that we can take now
I worked for Honda in Swindon, UK. And I can tell you, having dated a girl from the purchasing department, their costs were much less than you think. As an example, an automagic 4sp gearbox, cost to an owner to be fitted was about at that time about GBP800 (Excluding the actual fitting). Cost to Honda, about 80 quid to make. This was in 1994. Thankyou Sian and Sato San!
If anyone wants to see what individual power gennies and the pollution it creates, go to Lagos in Nigeria!
My Honda 2012 FIT gets 35 MPG using trustworthy, non- revolutionary technology and will last me 15 years with care. With good driving habits, my energy savings will pay for half of it compared to a mid size sedan. My total cost per mile compared to any green nonsense on the road can’t be beat.
I had to work/fix a Kanji IBM PS/2 that was used to run a program on a machine to test crank/main bearings at the Honda plant. I fixed the PS/2, all in Kanji, and showed the operator that swapping the program for each bearing set that was run from a 3.5″ diskette and pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL sped up the process!
The Honda Fit is called the Jazz here in the UK. Many moons ago I had a correspondence with a guy on the other side of the ‘Pond’ who told me that vehicles are routinely re-tuned for the US market to reduce their economy markedly. My Honda Jazz, bought in 2007, returned 63mpg on its first long run and even today gets way over 50mpg in everyday use. You, my friend, are being well and truly shafted!
TonyK you miss the fact that the normal octane level of fuel in UK is 95 while ‘Regular gas’ in the USA is 87 octane. Then (thanks to the USA having 16 fluid ounces to the pint rather than the UK 20 fluid ounces) the US gallon is 3.8Li rather than 4.54Li. So yes the engines in the USA tend to be longer stroke and tuned for lower grade fuel compared to the short stroke oversquare engines in Europe that need higher grade fuel; and the quoted fuel consumptions ‘per gallon’ are all 25% lower as they are not ‘imperial’ gallons.
I don’t know much about the technologies that might make my home “40% more efficient”, but let’s look at that engine that gives 40 MPG in a midsize sedan. I spend roughly $150 a month to drive to and from work, a distance of almost exactly 45 miles round trip, in a vehicle that gets about 23 MPG. (As a check, if gas is $3.50/gallon, and I work 22 days per month, I get $151 per month. Okay, I’m in the ballpark.) Assuming that the 40 MPG is highway, that is comparable to the 30 miles per gallon my car could get if I never drove it on surface streets instead of only on the surface streets. So, I would get roughly 31 MPG in my daily commute, assuming the mileage increase is proportional. (It’s not, but I don’t want to try to build a more complex model, and a proportional increase should be good enough for BOTE calculations like this.)
That would reduce my monthly gasoline cost to $112, giving me $38 left over. Okay, ignoring opportunity cost, it takes 53 months to pay back $2000 at $38/month. So far so good. The question I have: Is that $2000 the cost to Honda, or the cost they would charge their customers for the technology? It’s not made clear by how you phrased it. If it’s the cost to Honda, then the customer isn’t trying to recover $2000 at $38/month, he or she is trying to recover substantially more than that.
Let’s assume it’s end-user cost. My vehicle is a 1998 model (with 226,000 miles on it.) If I got a more recent midsize car, something I hope to do real soon now, then I would be comparing 35 MPG to that 40 and the repayment time gets longer. Running the numbers for the midsize cars of several different manufacturers, I get payback times in the 29 to 150 month range, with the Honda Accord having the longest payback?
Did the person that you trust about such things render an opinion about why Honda wasn’t already manufacturing and selling that engine in their vehicles? It looks to me like they may already have done so.
Jonathan,
Good analysis.
Also, if you’re buying a new car, here’s my recent experience. I bought a Mazda3 for only about $16K. Very good gas mileage, has all the bells & whistles of many more expensive cars, top-rated in it’s class by Consumer Reports, good power, etc. I was astonished at what that small purchase price bought. It’s every bit as good as a comparable Subaru, which cost $5K – 6K more for essentially the same thing. Better than the comparable Honda coupe, which I thoroughly checked out. Mazda is a real sleeper. I liked it so much I bought my wife one exactly like it. Same color even. Just my experience, FWIW.
150 month payback – how long will you keep your car? I tend to keep mine around 180 months, but I am very unusual.
I once had a discussion about fuel mileage with a very nice lady in Lyme Regis. She new her mpg, and I knew mine, and she was proud to say she was getting better milage than a Yank, since we all waste energy. It finally occurred to me that she was using Imperial gallons, while I am using US gallons, and we were actually getting exactly the same mileage.
Maybe I’m being a bit pedantic here, but if you are going to talk about mpg, please tell us which gallon you are using.
Thanks.
I drove one of the larger Hondas across country with three other adults and 2 children and much luggage and got 39MPG on a 5-speed transmission. No hybrid, no anything fancy, and speeds up to 80MPH on the Interstates.
Interesting that these true believers can use the terminology ‘catastrophic climate change’ and it has only one meaning for them, an increase in temperature caused by increasing CO2.
Why would you think Google, a software company, knows anything about renewable energy?
To start with, do you know who designs and builds Google’s computers?
Oracle.
Mark
Oracle? (Yes, I know we bought Sun….) Did you forget the smiley?
http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/google-considering-building-its-own-chips-rumour-says/87683
says:
Building its own chips would allow Google to better manage the interaction between hardware and software, an unnamed source told a Bloomberg reporter.
This would be a blow to chipmaker Intel Corp., which is heavily dependent on server processor sales to make up for a flattening market for personal computer chips. Google is possibly the world’s largest single purchaser of server chips; estimates of the number of servers Google has range from 2.3 million to 2.6 million. Bloomberg says Google accounts for more than four cent [sic] of Intel’s server revenue.
A job posting for a position as a digital design engineer at Google in Mountain View, Calif., had attracted 98 applications by press time. The ad specifies experience designing application specific integrated circuits (ASICS).
“You develop from the lowest levels of circuit design to large system design and see those systems all the way through to high volume manufacturing. Your work has the potential to shape the machinery that goes into our cutting-edge data centers affecting millions of Google users,” the ad reads in part.
See also http://www.wired.com/2012/09/29853/ – Intel Confirms Decline of Server Giants HP, Dell, and IBM, it has several notes about Google.
Do a search on Google Cluster Architecture.
IMO, they will fail if they get into the business of making their own computer systems, particularly down to the chip level. They will probably also garner federal attention regarding monopolistic practices (not that I agree, that’s just how things work in the US). Large-scale vertically integrated operations (when they make the things that make their things) don’t seem to do well. They become inefficient. Eh, who knows…
Mark
Google are a technology company not just software, consider google glass or even the loon project. They also have futurists such as Kurzweil working for them. If they can’t make it work I would take that very seriously.
That doesn’t mean anything. An appeal to authority is just as fallacious as the argumentum ad hominem tactic so many alarmists prefer. This is a big “problem” they are trying to come up with a solution for (in their minds), and they began with several fundamentally flawed assumptions to begin with. I tend to question how “top” these engineers really are.
Mark
Mark,
I take it you are not an engineer.
Do you have to go to hexagonal bolt school [to] design hexagonal bolts, or is a general mechanical engineering degree enough? It is you who are appealing to authority to suggest a gang of well funded engineers are unable to study anything but their bachelors degree.
Math and data are math and data. Ive had enough shifty analysis from phd sociologists and poly sci with self-certified climate science honors and no apparent science skill.
“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.”
That’s called the Energy Trap.
China has solved that problem. They construct more coal plants to power their renewable plants (about a 50 to 1 ratio)
This is welcome timing. One big reason I haven’t be as active here as I have been in the past are several wind projects targeting New Hampshire. The latest has submitted their turbine locations for FAA review, so we know they’ve settled on 29 turbines, each 499′ tall (probably GE 2.85 MW systems), some will be in a town I own property we intend to retire to.
The selectboard will be talking about this next week, having documents like this will be very helpful to stop the “do it for the environment” assertion.
Good luck Ric. I really hope your endeavor will be fruitful. In any case, just be sure that your land and view is located several ridges/miles downwind from this site to mitigate the impact. If not, then sell out now as there really is no way of stopping the beast. I don’t know about New Hampshire, but in Vermont, the local governments have no say over siting issues. It is all decided at the state level.
Shipping became cheaper, faster, safer and able to use bigger ships when rowing changed in sailing, sailing changed in coal and coal changed into diesel.
Going ‘green’ is an economic disaster and will only create human misery because enormous amounts of resources and money are wasted only to enrich a very small (corrupt) part of the human race while the overwhelming majority only gets poorer .
You would think they do it on purpose.
ALL renewable energy renews at <1350 Watts·meter^-2, some on geologic timescales like fossil fuel. To consume at any greater rate indebts the future.
Not geothermal, which is ultimately running off the heat generated by radioactive isotopes still present in the earth from the time of its creation from the debris created by supernovae prior to the formation of the solar system.
Errm, so those would renew on cosmological timescales, beggaring, quibbling my geologic timescale? Same as fission fuel as a barely-renewable.
Some times you have to use more energy than is available to get to a more sustainable point. See starter, automobile. Fossil fuels are our starter battery.
Not nuclear.
Here’s the thing… and I know this might ruffle a few feathers, but that’s better than burning them to a crisp on the wing as they try to fly over a giant Google-financed solar farm:
Google, and for that matter, Apple, are complete and utter crap. Their products are toys at best, their target audience are people who have been programmed since childhood to believe in fantasies and pay for them. Both companies are HUGELY financed but produce little in the way of tangible product or benefit. The majority of their business was built on free software that OTHER PEOPLE BUILT, and they cynically stole it and used it to build giant empires. And not surprisingly, both companies have a few multi-billionaires and a whole lot of hippy-inspired experience-lacking drones working on lowest-common-denominator product.
While we’re watching the slow-motion collapse of Microsoft, a company that was hated and despised and even sued by a group of companies for doing the exact same thing that these companies are doing, remember that there will not be anyone replacing them. The entire industry has fragmented and degraded into armed camps on both sides. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains to be seen. But the days when a profit oriented company controls the hardware and direction of software are gone, never to return.
Today, the entire high-tech industry is focused on content… most specifically, advertising. That’s right, the trillions we spent running fiber and ethernet, installing backbones and cable distribution, getting servers and server farms operational, building OS’s, databases, applications, and more, and the largest (by far) use of all of this is Netflix, YouTube, and advertisers. My own sites are hit more often by SEO scammers than actual users, it’s a constant chore just keeping them out since new ones appear weekly. All we’ve done is built a new format of billboards and newspaper ads. Nothing has advanced, nothing is better. We’re even more inundated with disinformation, outright lies, and it’s even more transparent than ever that he who has the gold makes the rules.
Google has squandered billions and billions of dollars to learn something that I, and almost every other WUWT regular, could have easily told them. And I agree with the comments above stating that this money would have been far better spent building nuclear plants or something useful. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history… are apparently completely unaware of the energy crisis in the 70s and the resulting windmill/solar boom, which ENDED because they will never, ever work like the fantasy says they should.
I never bought Google stock, and my reasons for staying away from it remain. They have no more tangible reason for existing than Bre-X or Madoff… eventually the walls will come tumbling down and they’ll be replaced by the next starry-eyed deluded idealists, out to change the world and save the planet on someone else’s dollar.
Interesting that you mention Bre-X. Steve McIntyre played a significant role in exposing that company’s misdeeds. I suppose they also called him a denier.
Since I live in Calgary, Bre-X is on my mind. I used to strenuously argue that people should pull ALL of their money out of it. It was something of an open secret that it was all fake, but money was flying around like crazy toward the end and everyone was hoping to still have a seat when the music stopped playing.
I used to do some contract work for a web design company that leased a lot of the old Bre-X building. It was an astonishing amount of concrete.
lol… obviously you’ve been around too long (agree with all you say bye the bye).
Best comment on the thread. The internet has been a bust just like cable TV. We are always promised information, art, and culture but all we get is advertising and disinformation with enough violence and soft porn to get people to look. Every “upgrade” of Google is just to track your traffic better to target adds for junk no one needs; Apple has always functioned as a cartel to control access to entertainment for people with more money than sense. Sites like this one are too few are far between; just exceptions that prove the rule.
The internet has not been a “bust” and this excellent site proves no rule. There are probably more points of interest online to continue my education than I could absorb in the remainder of my lifetime.
But I agree as regards “far between.” The worst garbage and misinformation is repeated ad nauseam and it’s often difficult to get past the junk to find what’s being searched for.
A couple of things I’ve found to make browsing more pleasant: (1) turn off auto-play of videos in the browser. (2) If you have Windows, install a junk-filtering “hosts” file:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
.
Comparing Google to Madoff is far fetched and not even close to accurate. Nor is calling their and Apple’s products toys at best. Google’s bread and butter is search, and that is not going away anytime soon. While you may consider iPhones to be toys, 170M people per year like them enough to buy them. And Microsoft is not in slow motion collapse. While Windows may be in slow decline, Office is doing well, especially the cloud versions, and their business software division is growing like a weed. Their cloud computing revenues are growing rapidly as well, albeit from a small base.
Sigh… he did not “compare” Google to Madoff. Learn how analogy works. This is no different than d****** Mann saying Steyn compared him to a child molester.
Mark
Chris, I have a Nexus 5, last year’s flagship Android phone. Although there is now a Nexus 6, the Nexus brand is the showcase, the pure Android experience, yadda yadda. And this week we got Android 5.0, which to be honest I wasn’t even expecting.
Guess what I found within about 10 minutes of installing this 500 megabyte upgrade? That’s right, bugs. How is it possible that a company with their financing, their wide ranging and publicly accessible beta program, could possibly not have noticed the things that I did in the first few minutes? Did nobody else try the things I do with it? Like, for example, making a phone call?
iPhones, Android phones, and the tablets built on them are toys. Reality check, Chris: they’re PHONES. The goal is to use them to talk (or text), and any other functionality is a bonus. While 170 million might buy iPhones, 315 million spit on Apple’s closed source draconian control and choose Android devices. In “emerging markets” those numbers are Apple:95 million, Android: 930 million. Apple will never, EVER stay relevant and open source will crush them.
I’m puzzled what your MS connection is that you feel the need to vigorously defend them… I’m actually not an anti-MS person. I’ve defended them through the years, hollered at Janet Reno over the TV while watching the Clinton administration do Apple’s bidding, and stayed with IE up until it was clear that they were never, ever going to get it. But cloud computing and Office are not going to slow their descent to irrelevance. Most companies that I’m dealing with these days are migrating to OpenOffice, which is interoperable and free.
Mark T, please enlighten me and explain to me the validity of the analogy between Google and Madoff. I do understand the word analogy, here is the definition: “a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects.” I know that CodeTech is not implying that Google and Apple are committing large scale fraud and misleading investors. Madoff pitched a completely fabricated investment return story. Google makes money when people click through to a paid ad, Apple when people buy their products. I just don’t see the analogy between the two – one is selling an expectation of future returns (based on on falsified data), the two companies are selling real products/services. RIM and Nokia are living proof that if you don’t products the market wants, you can be gone very quickly.
Well said. You’ll note from my posts a hint of distrust of Google as well.
Mark
I wonder if CO2 could be reduced more by cutting spam, marketing, and ads traffic by 50% than all renewables combined.
Wonder why Google has not researched this, oh never mind, their financial model relies on spam, marketing, and ads traffic.
Wonder if I can get a grant to research this……I know how to use Excel…..which is apparently about 90% of what you need for research now a days.
Both companies are HUGELY financed but produce little in the way of tangible product or benefit. The majority of their business was built on free software that OTHER PEOPLE BUILT, and they cynically stole it and used it to build giant empires
There is so much wrong with this, I don’t even know where to start. Without Apple you wouldn’t have things such as GUI (no, they didn’t stole it from Zerox, they licensed curiosity that nobody cared much for) for Windows, Mac and any other system, iPhones, iPads, iPods, zillions of similarly looking smart phones and tablets, watching movies on computer (Qucktime) and many other technologies. What they make (both in hardware and software) is very tangible.
I am not quite sure what is so innovative about Google, but their product is certainly provides extremely tangible benefit for me when I am looking for information.
Whatever money Google squandered, they squandered their own money. You should direct your ire at people who confiscate (with force) other people’s money and then squander it – i.e. government.
What ire, Udar? I’m not angry, just pointing out facts.
BILLIONS of dollars are wasted. Don’t think none of that came with government backing or tax credits. And NOBODY else on this planet can make money on advertising, since between Facebook and Google there is no other advertising market. So the crushing of actual innovation and smaller business continues, only the players have changed.
Apple did, in fact, steal the entire Lisa interface from Xerox PARC, Jobs was very clear on that. And if nobody was shamelessly using open source software for their businesses, why did Heartbleed affect almost the entire internet? Hardware devices, browsers, servers, Linux, Windows, Apple, everyone was using the exact same exploitable code. Is there not something wrong with that???
Microsoft has 16 separate billion dollar businesses. Microsoft is currently the second most valued corporation worth over $400 billion. I admit that I am a big fan of Microsoft, bought Windows 3 on the very first day it came out. I turned into a independent Microsoft developer starting out with the betas of Windows NT (and Window 95). I had to buy a system with sufficient memory to run NT, paying $500 for 16 MB of RAM. That’s megabytes people, compared to todays gigabytes. I consider my area of expertise on the future of computing to be better than Kurzweil’s.
Kurzweil?
I also was a fan of MS, I always thought it was a GOOD thing to have a single guiding entity during the IT industry’s biggest years, and unlike those who felt Bill Gates’ wealth was a problem, I thought it proved that he wasn’t “in it for the money”. He was a pragmatic idealist. I’m sad to see him throwing billions at dubious charities and “climate change” causes, but it’s his money. I too spent huge money for what is now a few cents at Walmart… and since I worked at a Tandy Computer Center through the 80s I watched it all go past, back in the glory days. I had Windows 2.11 on my desktop, and was at a really cool rollout event for 3
I’m not even arguing. But MS’s role is past, and they will fade into the past, the same way that IBM is no longer running the show and Intel is no longer the only game in town. The degree of mismanagement over at the Windows divisions has been breathtaking…
Kurzweil? :
I was kinda replying to some other commenters as well. I couldn’t really afford a computer much before Windows 3 came out. I lusted for an apple machine, but they were even more expensive than PC machines. I still have my Commodore 64 machine. It took a couple of minutes to repaginate a 5 page document.
Microsoft has the best software development tools in the business. And on my birthday they made one of their premier software development products free (previously several hundred to purchase) for everyone except large corporations :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx
Spam and pop-up ads, not to mention virus adware, needs to be strongly criminalised with bankrupting fines and long prison sentences for the spivs and deviants who churn out all the unsolicited advertising. The law needs to step in, or people are going to simply turn their backs on the whole technology.
Just because it won’t work, doesn’t mean anything to the politicians.
You’re correct . For a politician the reason it did not work is because not enough taxpayers money was invested in the project.
That’s why stimulating the economy printing more money will never work. You can’t fill a hole digging it deeper. The economic crisis has just started.
People are clueless about fiat money. Let me give you a 16 trillion dollar hypothetical. You have a license to print money. All you want. Do you ever need to borrow and go into debt? Do you need a source of income? Do you need to budget? Of course not. You would simply print the money for what you need or want.
If the federal government can print money why then does it have sixteen trillion in debt, have to tax for income and have a budget?
The answer is that the federal government never needs to go into debt, never needs to tax and never needs to budget because it can print whatever it needs. There is a new economic theory called MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) that understands this is what all sovereign governments can do. One of the proponents of this theory suggests the federal government mint a sixteen trillion dollar coin and pay off the federal debt. These are very serious and prominent economists by the way.
Both Edison and Ford knew this well. Ford used to say if the American people ever understood the scam they would be rioting in the streets the next day.
Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the practical.
Reblogged this on Sierra Foothill Commentary and commented:
Reality catches up with the lefts environmental renewable energy fantasy.
I find it strange that this article did not mention the investment made by Google in solar energy.
Google is a project owner in Ivanpha, currently the largest solar project in the world.
It will be interesting to see if they will come to the same conclusion about 3 years from now.
For an update on this project, see the site:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/11/top-five-things-people-cant-seem-to-remember-about-the-ivanpah-csp-plant?page=all
That’s a puff piece by the owners. In reality Ivanpah is not meeting expectations:
http://breakingenergy.com/2014/10/29/at-ivanpah-solar-power-plant-energy-production-falling-well-short-of-expectations/
“Output did pick up in the typically sunny months of May, June, July and August, as you might expect, with 189,156 MWh generated in the four-month period. But even that higher production rate would translate to annual electricity output of less than 600,000 MWh, at least 40 percent below target.
Another sign of the plant’s early operating woes: In March, the owners sought permission [PDF] to use 60 percent more natural gas in auxiliary boilers than was allowed under the plant’s certification, a request that was approved in August.”
There is no difference between the site I posted and the site you posted.
Simply, this is the beginning. Some problems. Nothing new when starting any new plant and both sites stated the early difficulties.
Projected time to reach final output is about 3 more years.
Since Google is a project owner in this plant we can expect them to evaluate performance in a few years and render an honest opinion.
This plant has no energy storage with it. However storage is planned for a proposed similar plant in Nevada.
I am willing to wait and give them a chance.
Don’t forget rare-bird “streamers” and other lifeforms deemed “endangered” before Obama eviscerated the Endangered Species Act:
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/220735-obama-on-protecting-endangered-species-habitats-no-we
To hell with raptors whose previous demise prompted over-banning of DDT. Critical habitat needs to be freed up for crony-corporatist, sprawling monstrosities like Ivanpah, which would still be an inefficient abomination even it lived up to the hype that can’t possibly be realized.
Well, to nutso fast:
It is a sprawling monstrosity to you, the new term is optic pollution. There was absolutely nothing there before. Just nice plain desert. Plenty more available.
As for the birds, no problem at all.
You are now using energy. You will not quit using energy. So give us your sources of energy.
I you do not like this plant, stop using Google.
The problem with this plant is simply energy/cost efficient. It is an “experiment”, but a huge one.
We have to solve this problem first, always the same:EROEI. If it works we can then think about the birds, transmission, storage etc., otherwise it will simply die.
Ivanpah.
$2.2 billion initial cost, $1.6 billion of which is a taxpayer guaranteed loan.
A 20-year California-guaranteed inflated price for its “green” electricity, of which a significant quantity is actually fossil-fuel generated.
Primary investor NRG energy has requested a $537 million taxpayer grant to avoid defaulting on loan payments.
Just one part of a massive redistribution of wealth to already-wealthy political contributors.
But “we” have to do this to find out if it works?
Methinks “RD50” is a pseudonym for Nancy Pelosi.
(And, no Nancy, disliking government corruption doesn’t obligate me to avoid Google, which invested a relatively-paltry $168 million in this plant.)
nutso and rd50, with the new natural gas allotment to generate 200 MW per year, the Ivanpah plant may hit 800 MW of which 1/4 would be fossil. Also solar thermal has always been lower EROEI than photovoltaic and the differential is getting worse since photovoltaic has room for improvement, but mirrors with tracking motors do not. I think that is established fact now, and won’t change in three years.
To all the replies below.
Yes, say what you want.
I have no problem with your opinions, I read them and value them.
I certainly will not contradict you. I know, you are all against me (not really against me, just saying).
Are you willing to give me a chance?
I am just asking, give me (Ivanpah) a chance.
Ivanpah is REAL. It is EXISTING.
Don’t you get it?
If after 2 or 3 years it does not work you can sell your shares in Google.
But what if it works and you shares in Google ……………..
Bottom line is did you make money or not with Google investing in this experiment.
Google share holders will decide, not engineers, scientists, climatologists…….
The experiment works = you made money = the plant goes on
The experiment does not work = you lost money = the plant shuts down.
It is no wonder,why Ivanpah is not meeting expectations. Their announced solar resource, 2717 kWh/m²/yr, is the total available solar energy including ultraviolet, visible and infrared radiation. From this only 42% is usable thermal energy, which can be used to heat plant’s boilers. See
http://konitohtor.blogspot.de/
They did claim that with their efforts Google offices and installation achieved a CO2 net balance of zero – they saved as much CO2 as created or something like that.
But that’s not the point. The point is renewables will have no measurable impact on CO2 even in the most fantastical best case adoption of renewables. I am amazed by the naivete or blind optimism required for them to take so much money and time in figuring this out.
BTW of the renewable, solar is the worst practically and financially. Wind surpasses solar by a large margin and of course gas surpasses wind by an even larger margin in efficiency and practicality.
I like the idea of renewables, I like the idea of moon colonies, I like the idea of sending a manned mission to Mars, I like all of this stuff, but I understand it is not practical or realistic. Maybe in 10, 50, 100 years it will be, who knows. If renewable technology advanced at the same rate as computing power, we would all be on renewable at this time. But it hasn’t, not even close, it’s still way too expensive, problematic, and unreliable. At best renewables are like the guys who run food service for a large movie production, important but a tiny part in a large production.
Would this be the same Ivanpah co-owned by Google that received a $1.6 billion construction loan from US tax payers and are now applying for a $539 million US federal grant (again from the US tax payers) to help pay off the construction loan?
Since the media started exposing the reality of Ivanpah, NRG has been touting Google as co-owner. But Google’s investment is just 7.6% of the total cost. At this point, it appears the real owner of this abomination is the entire U.S. citizenry that guaranteed $1.6 billion of government funding to see electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.” And it’s built on “our” land.
BTW, wasn’t Ivanpah begun early enough for NRG and Google to get a 30% tax credit on their investment?
Will Ivanpah be the last of its kind, as even some diehard catastophists contend? There are others proposed, including the much larger Palen facility, and Governor Moonbeam has a $22 million war chest to promote them. He’s got to keep U.S.-taxpayer-funded employment up to preserve the appearance of a healthy economy, and the high-speed rail line alone isn’t going to do it.
There are millions of acres of roofs and parking areas that can hold solar panels, forgoing the infrastructure needed for boondoggles in the boonies. The environmental destruction from industrial-scale wind and solar projects has got to stop.
Yes, Ivanpah is a done deal. But reminders of its shortcomings need to continue.
Duh!
This conclusion took them 4 years?
They could have just read this about the EROEI’s of renewables and energey storage and have come the same conclusion:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Agreed. The EROEI for solar and wind was a quantified catastrophe many years ago. The fact that Google engineers frolicked in this technology space in apparent blissful ignorance of the hard engineering facts says a lot about Google.
With the warmists, doing is more important than being, Google went through the motions, that’s what counts the most. They can always blame failure on “big Oil” colluding to keep “200MPG carburettors” off the market or some analogue of that theme.
Oh no!!
We’ll never be able to save the planet !!!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-39-lx5Qs3Us/UCbpkpiN83I/AAAAAAAAAKc/GFtR5_RG0YI/s1600/Shocked+face.jpg
This article may create a credibility issue for WUWT. The ‘money quote’ :”According to the IEEE article; “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,…” is nowhere to be found in the actual IEEE article. This appears to come from a uk site. On that site is is not attributed.
Charles Davis is right about the “money quote”, nothing even resembling it appears in the IEEE article. Nothing they say implies that renewables can’t work or that they take more energy to build than they produce. The problem is that nothing can meet Hansen’s ridiculous target of 350 ppm. But we don’t need any “geniuses” from Google to tell us that.
Mike M.
HEADS-UP Anthony Watts and/or Eric Worrall Agree with both MikeM and Charles Davis. I ctrl-F looked for the money quote in IEEE article, could not find it. Either it never existed OR it was scrubbed from IEEE article OR it belongs to Register article that references the IEEE article.
The Google folks should have read Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry ,Richard Smalley’s article “The Terrabyte Solution” which made the case that solar was the only Terrabyte solution for our long term energy solution. However, monies spent on large solar farms will be wasted until research monies attack to the 2 biggest problems — 1) a new transmission wire that prevents the great losses that now occur & 2) both large energy storage devises and small mass market washing machine storage devises that can be used to facilitate distributed storage capability. Mass market devises will drive the price down so that consumers will save monies by storing energy during the peak energy generation period to use when needed.
Bill, these two biggest problems are not solar related. If you solve the problem of energy loss along transmission lines, efficiency will increase for all forms of energy, not just solar. If you develop an efficient method of energy storage this would benefit all forms of energy, not just solar. In fact solar might have an even greater problem competing. But don’t look for these two problems to be solved any time soon.
Superconductors rule… in theory. 😉
Mark
High-voltage direct current would boast transmission efficiencies, just by getting rid of capacitative and inductive losses.
You can reduce transmission line losses by making the wires thicker.
Slightly. Very slightly.
But!
At a tremendously increased cost in material weight: That increases as the volume of copper (high enough already!) or aluminum cable, which is cross-section area x length. Increase diameter, area goes up as the square of radius, weight goes as the square. Towers have to be replaced, cables torn down before they can be replaced or the new cables interfere with the old and are too close for voltage limits. Worse, electrical resistance doesn’t go down all that much. A little yes. But by much? No.
So, while you are essentially throwing away the worthwhile (still useable!) high voltage lines just to replace them with new cables and new towers, you are adding nothing. No net benefits to the taxpayers, power users, or company. Just throwing away billions of dollars. And thousands of tons of copper and steel – all of which has to be re-manufactured costing even more energy!
We’ve had an Industrial revolution, we’re in the information revolution, now we need the (Thorium?) energy revolution. If we don’t do it, the Chinese will. Life is like an intelligence test.
Life IS an intelligence test, but collectively or individually, and measured how? Why ignore we who have excelled by every objective measure?
I’ve never heard of an engineer that believes any of the catastrophism angle of the alarmist message, and only a few that actually buy the anthropogenic angle at all. Where did they find these “top” engineers?
Mark
I work with several. Good engineers it is a contradiction I can not understand
I have great news for them. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that renewables “don’t work”. They were never meant to do anything but rob people, destroy economies, and cause untold human misery. Kudos to them for “finding out” what countless people already knew, and more importantly, reporting it. Maybe now, even True Believers will have second thoughts about so-called “green” energy.
Don’t understand the hatchet job on the RE<C quote. From the article, "Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#mediaviewer/File:EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Returned_on_Energy_Invested_-_USA.svg
Not sure I would agree with the exact numbers there (other sources have different numbers) but certainly they make us think and a long way to go for the “renewables”.
Hello, 1st post here. I am an engineer from the US. I am not a climate scientist nor a physicist, just a simple engineer. I am a skeptic in the sense that CO2 is the cause of “climate change” but a full believer in the notion that the climate changes, has always changed and always will change do to natural variability. Has mankind influenced the climate? Absolutely. In small geographic areas throughout the world we of course have changed it. Building a city the size of New York for example changes the local climate and that is what I mean. Now that is my introduction here (I read WUWT multiple times daily but have always been a lurker) I would like to comment on this story:
I applaud any scientist or engineer that tries to challenge the conventional wisdom of anything. People who assume that renewable energy is a viable plan just because someone said so are ignorant of the facts. These guys set out to prove, or disprove, this concept and they succeeded! The truth is, and I’m sure everyone will agree, fossil fuels of all types will eventually be gone. It might be in hundreds of years but eventually they will no longer exist if we keep using them at our current rate. We NEED “white paper” or “green fields” or “blue ocean” or simply “outside the box” thinking. The Google engineers just gave us a place to start and that is current renewable energy ideas will not replace fossil fuels. Many commented that “we have always known that won’t work” but have any one of you actually tried on the scale these guys did? I’m pretty sure they went into this project with an open mind to determine if renewable energy can replace our fossil fuels. They succeeded and should be applauded. Now that they have definitively proved this concept won’t work gives everyone a starting point for fusion or any other technology that currently only exists in the minds of our brightest people. Thanks for reading.
Welcome to joining the WUWT commentator side. Always room for another sensible engineer.
One comment, on human influences – I think agricultural development has had a much greater impact than city building. The transitions from forest to orchards or row crops, from prairies to circular irrigation, etc all bring measurable changes.
It is nice that Google allowed (encouraged?) this to be made public.
One quibble (pretty big quibble, actually) that I haven’t seen a comment on is:
Engineers learn to look at all possibilities, but in causes and solutions. Google seems to have missed the possibility that at 400 ppm, we have an 18 year pause in the satellite temperature record. They should be taking a step back to look at their underlying assumptions.
Thanks for the welcome! I will continue to follow with interest.
Hi Greg,
As an engineer, you might want to co-sign the OISM Petition. Much common sense in only a few sentences.
It is a great point about New York city changing the local climate.
We of course do affect our environment, locally or regionally much more so. If I dumped all my garbage in my backyard, after a while the eco-system around my home will change and the repercussions will affect me and my neighbors health and safety.
On a global scale we also affect the climate as every living creature and plant does from microbes to the largest mammals. Where climate science has gone off the rails is in extrapolating that simple understanding to concluding we control the global climate and therefore everything on the planet.
When put that way, I can’t help but think that level of grandioise thinking points to a mental disorder. God complex comes to mind.
Re: Energy Return On Energy Invested EROI
Greg
Re: “These guys set out to prove, or disprove, this concept and they succeeded!”
As another engineer, logically they (ONLY) found that the solutions they were testing were not technically/economically feasible because:
“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”
i.e. Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI or EROI) is below 3 (or even below 1).
See Charles Hall, Energy and the Wealth of Nations
and studies on EROI.
e.g., See David Murphy and Charles Hall: Year in review—EROI or energy return on (energy) invested
That does not negate other solar options – only those that they tested.
EROI is critical. Petroleum EROI has fallen from > 100 to ~ 12.
We need sustainable replacement fuels with EROI >> 30.
Bioethanol only has ~ 1:1 which is <3 and << 10 and << 100
Fusion might be one option.
Solar may still be doable.
Ask the Designer.
“This is what the Lord says, he who made the earth, the Lord who formed it and established it—the Lord is his name: ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’ Jeremiah 33:2-3
Your second quote is not from the Google article, it’s from Lewis Page’s article about the Google article. Actually, I could not find a reference to the energy needed to construct renewable power generation in the Google article, so I don’t think Page is reporting accurately, which, actually, he is somewhat known for.
i thought it was called Trafalmadore
You mean Tralfamadore I think. That is a space alien.
Same-same.
☺
To maintain the hot object’s original set point temperature after adding insulation only half the heat flow, i.e. 0.5 kW. Without a thermostat to reduce the original heat input of 1 kW, the hot object is going to get hotter. Without a thermostat…… (a straw man conditional, btw) (see realscience)
The house thermostat is set at 65 F, it’s 30 F outside. I do all those activities to cut my energy loss in half. To maintain the 65 F set point the furnace now has to deliver half as much heat. If the furnace continues to fire at the same rate w/o the thermostat, the house would get really hot.
I’m outside in my shirt sleeves. It’s 30 F. I’m losing heat and getting cold. I wrap a blanket around my body & get warmer. And a second. And a Mylar survival blanket. And a $350 Hudson Bay 100% wool, cream colored with red and yellow stripes. And guess what? I start to overheat so my body’s thermostat turns on the water vapor cooling/refrigerator – I begin to sweat.
Let’s stick with the green house analogy. I’m going to hazard a guess that as the day warms up and sunlight streams into a greenhouse the relative humidity increases as the water vapor cooling/refrigerator thermostat operates. As the day cools, clouds appear, overnight, the relative humidity fluctuates.
So, kiddoes, here’s your science fair project. Two identical glass or Plexiglas boxes, maybe 3’ cubes. One is empty, the other has a pan of water in it. Set them outside in the sun. Track the internal temperatures and relative humidity. The hypothesis is that the empty dry box is going to get really, really hot while the box with the pan of water will stay much cooler as the relative humidity increases, the water vapor cooling/refrigerator thermostat at work.
The earth’s atmosphere has climate thermostat called water vapor cooling/refrigeration.
The problem with the GHE as used by AGW/CCC advocates is that it is a dry greenhouse, without water vapor, considering only the LWIR, SWIR, jumping electrons and only the sensible heat.
The greenhouse with water vapor modulates the internal temperature using Miatello’s water evaporation/condensation cooling/refrigerator thermostat.
It’s a matter of simple observation, doesn’t even need thermo or differential calculus.
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/PSI_Miatello_Refutation_GHE.pdf
A small step along the way – they still need to figure out that CO2 is just plant food!
and we need 700ppm
min 1000ppm
Renewable energy, as currently understood, is just a dream.
The real renewable energy is our Sun.
Orbit vast solar energy converters; beam power down to microwave collectors.
Cheap. Lasts forever.
But hopelessly impractical: can be turned into a weapon far too easily.
Most computations do not include all the quantifiers, such as the amount of water needed, the treatment needed of wastes, the amount of land needed, all the associated costs of raw materials, and the real life expectancy of the devices.
But it sure made money for Al Gore.
I even studied the Orbital solar power station concept for real power production. Same problem, the energy cost to create it exceeds the output. We can’t even get there from here! So I now work on the solution to true space propulsion. Roman Candle propulsion is showy but not practical and will never result in true space travel. pgtruspace. pg