Guest essay by Eric Worrall
David Attenborough and a group of other prominent people, have called for a publicly funded $15 billion / year research programme over 10 years, an international “Apollo” project, to make renewables economically viable.
The letter;
We, the undersigned, believe that global warming can be addressed without adding significant economic costs or burdening taxpayers with more debt. A sensible approach to tackling climate change will not only pay for itself but provide economic benefits to the nations of the world.
The aspiration of the Global Apollo Programme is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal within 10 years. We urge the leading nations of the world to commit to this positive, practical initiative by the Paris climate conference in December.
The plan requires leading governments to invest a total of $15bn a year in research, development and demonstration of clean energy. That compares to the $100bn currently invested in defence research and development globally each year.
Public investment now will save governments huge sums in the future. What is more, a coordinated R&D plan can help bring energy bills down for billions of consumers. Renewable energy gets less than 2% of publicly funded R&D. The private sector spends relatively small sums on clean energy research and development.
Just as with the Apollo space missions of the 1960s, great scientific minds must now be assembled to find a solution to one of the biggest challenges we face.
Please support the Global Apollo Programme – the world’s 10-year plan for cheaper, cleaner energy.
David Attenborough
Professor Brian Cox
Paul Polman CEO, Unilever
Arunabha Ghosh CEO, Council on Energy Environment and Water
Ed Davey Former UK energy secretary
Nicholas Stern IG Patel professor of economics and government, LSE
Bill Hare Founder and CEO, Climate Analytics
Nilesh Y Jadhav Programme director, Energy Research Institute @NTU, Singapore
Niall Dunne Chief sustainability officer, BT
Carlo Carraro Director, International Centre for Climate Governance
Professor Brian Hoskins Chair, Grantham Institute
Mark Kenber CEO, The Climate Group
Ben Goldsmith Founder, Menhaden Capital
Sabina Ratti Executive director, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)
John Browne Chairman, L1 Energy
Zac Goldsmith MP
Professor Martin Siegert Co-director, Grantham Institute
Professor Joanna Haigh Co-director, Grantham Institute, and vice-president of Royal Meteorological Society
Peter Bakker President, World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Dr Fatima Denton African Climate Policy Centre
Denys Shortt CEO, DCS Group
Adair Turner Former chairman, Financial Services Authority
Gus O’Donnell Former cabinet secretary
Richard Layard London School of Economics
Professor John Shepherd
Martin Rees Astronomer royal
I wish someone had thought of making renewables viable, before the world’s politicians wasted countless billions of public money, building renewable systems which are not fit for purpose.
Having said that, $150 billion seems an awfully high price to pay for speculative research, given there are already other options.
If CO2 is an urgent issue, we should be building nuclear reactors, not delaying action by 10 years in the slim hope of a major breakthrough in renewables technology. A few years ago, former NASA GISS Director James Hansen published an open letter demanding that greens embrace nuclear power.
If nuclear fission is unacceptable for whatever reason, what about nuclear fusion? The ITER project is a serious international effort to explore the viability of nuclear fusion. $150 billion would dramatically accelerate the pace of Nuclear Fusion research. If the ITER project succeeds, it could open the way to limitless non-polluting energy. Unlike Attenborough’s renewables dream, hopes for an ITER breakthrough are based on known physics. Fusion plasmas are not self sustaining because they lose heat too quickly. The rationale behind the ITER project is based on simple geometry. The hope that by building a really big plasma, they can take advantage of the improved volume to surface area ratio, to slow heat loss enough that the fusion reaction becomes self sustaining.
And of course, we would have to think about what opportunities we would miss, personal and public, by spending so much tax money on energy research. For example, a mere fraction of $150 billion could buy an awful lot of clean water and medical care for the world’s poor people – but somehow poor people always seem to end up down the bottom of the list of priorities.
Have these people defined “economically viable”? If you include the subsidies it is economically viable now or else there wouldn’t be any renewable energy. This is a double whammy on the tax payers. We pay more tax to fund a research project that will tell by how much our energy bills will have to rise to use renewable energy. Great!
PS. I just noticed Professor Brian Cox’s name up there. Great research project for him! With his knowledge of the solar system I’m astounded that he thinks that CO2 drives our climate!
In a recent article I wrote along with my co-author, Barrie Lawson, posted in WUWT titled “Going Solar; System Requirements For 100% U.S. Solar Generated Utility Baseload Electricity,” we demonstrated that a solar only system capable of meeting today’s American electrical generation capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days per year including needed plant margins would require an area of 1,100,000,000,000/37.5 sq meters, made up from 29.333 billion, 1 meter square panels, covering an area of 29,333 km2 or a square with sides of 171.3 km long. This is about the size of Belgium, just for the silicon PV cells. Additional space is required to mount and separate the panels for maintenance and construction. The article is at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/04/going-solar-system-requirements-for-100-u-s-solar-generated-utility-baseload-electricity/
To store the needed 4,400 GWH to insure power availability 24 hours per day and during times of limited sunshine requires 4.4 million 40 foot containers with lithium ion batteries, cooling systems, and low voltage to 480 VAC inverters.
At a production and installation rate of one, 1 square meter PV panel per second it was shown that it would take over 930 years to build the entire system. What our article did not state is the life expectancy of the PV panels is 25 years and the life expectancy of the batteries is 10 years, best case. Nor did we state the energy investment required to produce such a system.
It should be noted that electricity accounts for roughly 22.3% of all energy consumed at the end user across the residential, commercial, industrial and industrial energy user segments.
Thus, to totally “go solar” would require about 4 ½ times greater PV area (plus batteries) and would take over 4,150 years to produce; life expectancy of panels and batteries notwithstanding.
Clearly the energy flux densities associated with solar (and wind) are far too low to support a worldwide population of close to 9 billion people by 2060. Once fossil fuels are depleted beyond economic viability there are only 2 solutions:
1. Massive worldwide population reduction by a factor greater than an order of magnitude.
2. The direct conversion of matter to energy. There are only 3 ways to do this; nuclear fission (we have today,) nuclear fusion (can be developed and commercialized over the next 30 to 50 years, and the matter anti-matter annihilation reaction (maybe we can make this work in 500 years or so.)
Keep in mind the physics principal of the conservation of mass (and its associated equivalency of mass and energy per the special theory of relativity. Don’t be fooled by any scheme to produce energy from lower energy levels.
Over 4,150 years to produce, eh? . . Any estimates on how long it would take to harness the energy in the hot air coming out of DC?
Yes, let’s use VW supplied software to get there.