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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What a misleading headline. This sort of media is the start of confusion. Watts, you need to read papers without any bias and being objective, read the papers as they are. Notice how different the story you paint here:
Your quote:
“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.”
What the whole section says:
"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—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed. As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
So if I quote this one single line: "Trying to combat climate change EXCLUSIVELY with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach." it changes the whole picture.
We need to change our way of living to be able to live sustainably. We have to reduce the energy use and carbon dioxide emissions.
Please tell the whole truth, and don't spread the false notions of your misinterpretations as a result of being biased due to a lack of understanding of the problem.
You suffer from being biased on the offset.
“EXCLUSIVELY with today’s”
Today is the only day we have.
If RE solutions available today do not meet societal energy needs, then Eric Worral’s take on the Google admission is 100% correct and justified.
There are too many irresponsible calls for good energy solutions like nuclear to be scrapped in favour hypothetical future green technologies which may or may not ever exist.
‘We need to change our way of living to be able to live sustainably. We have to reduce the energy use and carbon dioxide emissions.’
Which is the real green agenda , taking society in to some ‘mythic golden’ past through creating energy shortages. Renewable cannot work and opposition to all other forms of power generation is the toxic mix to be used . Although its no longer said in public in reality the greens still regard energy has to easy and to cheap so wish to change that and did so long before AGW became the new faith , indeed has with others AGW is merely a a band wagon they have jumped on to forward an agenda that already existed.
Oddly the number of green prophets that are willing to live totally of grind , no longer fly nor use motorise transport is zero , but we understand how important it is for them to fly around the world attending conferences and demonstration so its OK for them but not for the little people .
well said. Also note the line …”that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emission” So THERE WILL BE REDUCTIONS IN CO2. Right? As AN Engineer implies, the trick is to increase that REDUCTION… to make it SIGNIFICANT
No surprise.
http://www.nextnature.net/2014/02/next-nature-and-the-curse-of-oil/
Regards
Its all basic engineering about power intensity. With wind and solar its just not there. Add intermittency and it becomes even more like “chasing the wind”.
NOTE — I am not a warmist — just a realist — COAL will be gone in 200 years, and why on earth would the US, UK and Europe put their energy security in the hands of Russia, Kazakhstan and Australia ( they have Uranium we don’t)
THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD IS DISINGENUOUS
The Google initiative only specifically addressed a 1GW renewable plant that is cheaper than a 1 GW coal fired plant.
The article cited simply stated that they don’t think switching to renewables will stop AGW — it never addressed the actual feasibility of Renewable energy.
Furthermore, as CO2 based AGW is total bollocks, their entire study was fatally flawed from the beginning.
They started using 2007 tech, and ended in 2011.
Anthony — with all due respect — at least cite articles that refer to subject matter that is current, and not based on analyses using data going on a decade old.
AS FAR AS CURRENT DATA: (not AGW just economics $ and cents)
For Plants that would start construction today (2015 with 4 years construction time) 1GW of wind is cheaper than coal per Mwh according to the EAI
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
Table 1. Estimated Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for New Generation Resources, 2019
U.S. average levelized costs (2012 $/MWh) for plants entering service in 2019
Levelized cost for coal =95.6
Levelized cost for Wind = 80 (there is no more subsidy)
For all those proposing nuclear – get real. Wind is cheaper even with the Nuclear subsidy taken into account.
Levelized cost for Wind = 96.1 (without subsidy, 86.1 with)
Go to the nuclear industry’s own website and you will see current U3O8 cannot even meet demand for the current set of reactors worldwide.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Facts-and-Figures/World-Nuclear-Power-Reactors-and-Uranium-Requirements/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Facts-and-Figures/Uranium-production-figures/
Requirements 68,000 tonnes Production 53,000 tonnes.
Even 20 years of infrastructure enhancement wont make up for the shortfall considering adding any additional reactors.
Thorium is a non-starter, they have been screwing around with it for 40 years and still can’t get a commercial reactor design that works.
Renewables are the ONLY feasible energy source for the future, and
That’s it.
If renewables were competitive economically with fossil fuels, they wouldn’t need the enormous subsidies they receive and without which they would never have been built.
“Levelized costs” are computed based upon current rebates and subsidies. They’re not meaningful in the real world. Given the interruptions to power output from wind and solar, the LC also don’t account for the much longer time it would take for their lifetime energy to be produced.
There is simply no comparison between fossil fuels and renewables economically and in terms of energy reliability and availability. Even solving storage problems won’t close the gap. Green Energy, so called, also incurs greater environmental costs.
Humanity probably won’t need to rely on fossil fuels for the next 200 years, but even if we do, turning to “renewables” now only causes gross misallocation of resources.
96.1 is the Levelized cost for Nuclear — copy paste error
Avery Harden – so, tell me exactly where it is that the power companies store the energy that your solar panels produce?
@ur momisugly phlogiston
The power density of the wind increases as the 3rd power of velocity — so it is there
Stanford has concluded that multiple linked wind farms can contribute BASELOAD POWER of at least 33% nameplate capacity
http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
“Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by
Interconnecting Wind Farms”
@ur momisugly mrmethane nanopore ultracapaitors — look them up on kurzweil ai, or compresed air energy storage, also stealing the adiabatic heat of compression.
@ur momisuglymrmethane – why would power companies be involved?, distributed solar WILL INEVITABLY be the home power source of the future — you can get UL panels for 58 Cents a watt, non UL slightly imperfect
FOR 24 CENTS per watt
A 20KW rated solar power system for the home = $4800 for the panels, plus another $5K for inverters, installation and intertie
http://sunelec.com/
So the wind power increases as the wind speed cubed.
So if the wind speed drops in half (50%), you just lost 87.5 % of your design capacity.
And if the wind speed doubles (2x), both the axial thrust (drag) , and the torsional loads (lift) go up by a factor of four, as does the wind shear vibration , so the damn thing will shake itself to pieces.
In fact you can’t let it run, in wind speed double the design wind speed, so you have to shut it down, feather it, and lock it down till the wind subsides.
That is the problem with virtually ALL renewable energy besides hydro-electric.
With hydro, the real energy source is gravity, and you only need to supply as much gravitational energy flow, as required to deliver the current load factor.
Now if you use wind to turn a 24 or so bladed “windmill” that operates a water pump, and pumps water (for the cows) when the wind blows, then that has been proven to work ok.
@ur momisugly mrmethane — the batteries in my PRIUS charge and discharge multiple times a day, they are warranted for 150,000 miles – or approximately 15,000 – 20,000 charge discharge cycles — that’s 30 years of daily charge, then overnight discharge
The replacement cost for a 2012-2014 Prius Battery is $2500
I heard somewhere that Prius batteries get replaced when they have degraded only 20 percent and still retain 80 percent capacity. That 80 percent has a potential second life as energy storage in a home photovoltaic system. Anyone one here know anything about this?
“approximately 15,000 – 20,000 charge discharge cycles”
Sure, if you discharge and recharge them one or two percent. With 10% discharge you will get about 4,000 cycles. With 100% discharge you will get about 400 cycles.
If they were used for Solar energy overnight discharge at home, you would likely want the newer Li Ion batteries that are rated at a minimum 20,000 charge discharge cycles, new developments have led to a cost of $500 to $750 per kWh. So a house using 15 kWh overnight (average) would need a $7500-$11k battery pack that would last almost 30 years — with current Lithium Ion tech.
” newer Li Ion batteries that are rated at a minimum 20,000 charge discharge cycles”
I don’t see that anywhere. It will be developed eventually, but I don’t think it has yet.
20k cycles with a supercapacitor: http://www.ecnmag.com/news/2014/11/dual-purpose-film-designed-next-gen-energy Those store static charge and will eventually last for a million cycles in theory. With chemical batteries the breakdown is the limiting factor with a few thousand full cycles top. The highest numbers I can find is for relatively small specialized batteries. Here’s the scoop on automotive batteries:
http://www.ecnmag.com/articles/2014/10/taking-power-you
“The automotive industry, for example, has a particular sensitivity to wear-out mechanisms and, as a result, operates NiMH and Li-Ion traction batteries very conservatively to extract operating lifetimes well in excess of 10 years. They accomplish this only by using a small fraction of a traction battery’s capacity, never allowing it to fully charge and only permitting discharge a few tens of percent of total capacity.”
So I was wrong above, discharging “a few 10’s of percents” is good for 10 years. Sizing the battery for more storage (e.g. a house) just means using more space which you would not have in a car.
[And the weight of a battery in a car is even more important than size. .mod]
I think that most of those who say that solar and wind power cannot compete with fossil fuels are short sighted and biased. They only see this as “Greens” vs skeptics. Of course Google engineers says its not viable because it is not profitable on a large scale. the real forte of using renewables is in the small (e.g. household) level. A lot of people are starting to look at renewables to cut their bills and it is working for them regardless of government support. Graphs are good on paper but what’s important is what works on the ground. BTW, if most of you are in the North or South tough luck. I guess that these renewables are fitted for us in the tropics near the ocean. They are more than economically sound investment. They are life savers.
Then if it works for them “regardless of government (taxpayer) support.”, then why don’t they remove the subsidies. Hydro-electric is about the only renewable source that has worked, and it is extremely limited in capacity, and quite destructive environmentally.
We were briefed in our local community club on solar energy for our homes. The price tag was $30,000. With energy tax breaks, maybe a payoff in 5 to 10 years.
My monthly payments for energy in Florida in the pass have been about $120. That would equal about 250 months of energy at this time or nearly 21 years of service.
I am 61 years old, plus 21 = 82. As the man left the briefing after introducing his produce, I thought to myself and told those sitting around me, I might as well buy an RV and go enjoy the USA before Obama and Hillary destroy what I can enjoy.
Paul Pierett
Mr. Pierett, if it takes a 30k system to cover your usage, maybe your low hanging fruit for saving money would be in conservation. Lots of us get by with photovoltaic systems significantly less than 30k, but we also focus on conservation. I bet the carbon footprint for air conditioning in Florida is substantial.
Well the corporate tax rates are 35% or so. So that means a corporation must make a $3 profit to pay $1 in taxes to subsidize your $30,000 solar system.
Average profit of all US corporations is about 4%.
So on average, a corporation has to sell $75 worth of goods and services, to subsidize you at $1.
That $75 worth of enterprise will of course be done with fossil fuels, and most likely coal.
So the environmental cost of subsidizing your “renewable” is staggering, and a really big waste of energy we already have available.
Clean green free renewable energies are obtained on the backs of profitable enterprises, that use existing energy sources, and it’s just a big waste of energy and a big extra pollution load, we don’t need.
Global warming can be stopped and reversed after all.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide(CO2) can be combined with hydrogen to produce methanol(CH₃OH):
CO₂ + 3H₂ → CH₃OH + H₂
The hydrogen can be obtained from electrolysis of water:
H₂O + (286kJ/mole) → H₂ + ½O₂
And the electric power for the electrolysis of water can be produced by an aneutronic fusion reactor with no neutron emission, no radioactive waste, reducing the CO2 concentration and increasing oxygen in the atmosphere, and making available hydrogen for fuel cells and methanol for vehicles. http://youtu.be/u8n7j5k-_G8
But if you burn methanol, you create CO2. So how would watermelons think this better?
But the CO2 (carbon dioxide) is from atmosphere to produce methanol by (neutron-free) fusion-powered chemical reactions within small land usage; consequently, establishing a CO2 virtuous circle that can stop the climate change.
So why not do: CO2+2H2 –> CH3OH +1/2 O2 That only needs 2/3rds of the amount of hydrogen, and makes oxygen available.
Where do you get the energy to make to hydrogen anyhow. The idea in making methanol, is to get a fuel not to use up other energy sources, we already have.
CO₂ + 3H₂ → CH₃OH + H₂O
energy can be from aneutronic fusion:
http://youtu.be/VUrt186pWoA
Why would you want to remove beneficial plant food from the air, which has greened the planet and possibly slightly warmed it?
Well my comment to Google, and their revelation would be:
“You may not do very good work; but you sure are slow ! ”
You see, not only will renewable energy not work (to 100% sustain us), but it also would have no positive impact on either the environment, or for that matter, the climate of the earth.
And the same goes for your silly out of control automobiles !
Tonopah is California’s monument to self delusion.
The negative environmental effects of “Green Energy” are worse than for fossil fuels, with pollution emission controls.
Solar panel productions pollute the environment with toxic chemicals and use rare and valuable resources in inefficient ways. Windmills not only rely on concrete, the production of which releases CO2 (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but massacres birds and bats, which means more insect pests requiring more chemical pesticides and lowering crop yields.
There is no free energy lunch, but fossil fuels are still the cheapest and most nutritious lunch available.
So much for educated idiots, I have been involved as inventor,designer of high technology for the last 35 yrs ,and have no degrees but have worked for many different institutions . I have designed a new type of renewable energy using an Atomic Hydrogen Reactor process.When someone listens to what we have to say we might solve a lot of major problems in the world.
The authors of this study did not consider that the costs of solar are coming down at exponential rates. Sure, you couldn’t get it to work on a cost basis with just a 4 year time frame. But it will be doable in just a few decades:
Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn’t worried about climate change.
By Lauren Feeney
February 16, 2011
[quote]
Ray Kurzweil: One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it’s twice as good as two years ago for half that cost. That is happening with solar energy — it is doubling every two years. And it didn’t start two years ago, it started 20 years ago. Every two years we have twice as much solar energy in the world.
Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly — we are only a few years away from parity. And then it’s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don’t care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it’s at half a percent of the world’s energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world’s energy needs. So that’s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.
People say we’re running out of energy. That’s only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.[/quote]
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/environment/futurist-ray-kurzweil-isnt-worried-about-climate-change/7389/
Their claim that the infrastructure would also be impossible also seems dubious. An average middle class home could supply all its power needs, electricity, heating, cooling, simply from solar panels attached to its roof. The reason it’s not is that for most families the costs are prohibitive. But the costs are coming down to such an extent that even middle class to lower middle class families could afford to be completely energy independent through solar within a 20 to 30 year time frame.
Bob Clark
In a few decades everything is doable.
Fusion power.
Teleportation.
Cheap space flight…
Everything is doable in a few decades. And that has been true for a few decades now.
The key point it’s not a technological advancement. It’s purely a matter of price. The price for solar power has been decreasing exponentially for 30 years. We are well familiar with this kind of drop in price in regards to computers and consumer electronic devices in general by Moore’s Law. The same level of price drop has been occurring for solar power for decades.
It is quite key to note, this means we will convert to solar power not because of governments passing laws forcing us to do so but because it will be cheaper for us to do so.
Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?
By Ramez Naam | March 16, 2011 |
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/naam-solar-moore_s-law-1.jpg
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/
Bob Clark
I always thought that the Sun had a job to do – like heating up and give “energy” for plants and gras to grow.
If entire California was coverd by solar Panels, all other “life” die – thus no People would¨/could live there ?
Am I completly off ?
@ur momisugly Sten_Gral
current solar panels are 20% efficient
In places like California, Arizona, etc the Incident Solar energy is ~1000 watts per square meter
Accounting for inverter, hysteresis and other losses, you would get approximately 150 usable watts per square meter.
that means a square kilometer of panels would be a 150MW power station
a square 100km on a side (4000 square miles) would equal a 1500 GW power station — the equivalent of 1500 Nuclear power plants
California and arizona combined are 273,000 square miles.