Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Finance Summit, US Secretary of State John Kerry thinks new breakthroughs are required to bring the renewable revolution “to the finish line”. My question – if the technology is not yet fit for purpose, by Kerry’s own admission, why is the Obama administration wasting so much US taxpayer’s money, funding production scale renewable projects which won’t deliver value?
… I think it’s fair to say that here in the United States, President Obama is leading as no other president has yet dared to do. His Administration put in place fuel standards that empowered automakers to invest in more efficient automobiles. We’ve finalized rules that limit the amount of carbon pollution coming from new and existing power plants, making investment in harmful energy far less attractive than investment in cleaner alternatives. And this past winter, in a hard-fought win, Congress did pass a five-year extension of the production and investment tax credits for solar and wind installations, in order to make it easier to get new clean energy projects up and running. And they did that with bipartisan support, both sides of the aisle recognizing that leaving aside their differences and their fight over the evidence, investing in clean energy just makes good business sense.
Now, since President Obama took office, wind and solar power have grown by more than 200 percent. Costs for these technologies continue to plummet and today more than four times as many Americans are employed by renewable energy companies than by the fossil fuel industry.
Let me be clear. Government can provide the structure, the incentives, the framework. But I know – and so do you – that it’s the private sector that will ultimately take us to the finish line. And it will be the private sector – innovation, entrepreneurial activity, maybe something we haven’t discovered yet – the breakthrough on battery storage, a breakthrough on a clean fuel burn – I don’t know what it is, but I trust in the ingenuity and the capacity of the American people and of our allocation of capital and our capacity to make this work.
Solving climate change will require perhaps the largest public-private partnership the world has ever attempted. At its core, the Paris agreement that President Obama and I – and so many of you here, and Mike and others worked for – is about ensuring public-private energy collaboration in every part of the world, for generations to come. Together, what we did was create a framework – based on ambitious, individually determined emissions-reduction targets – that is designed to become even more ambitious as time goes on and energy technology evolves. And the legally binding component of that agreement is the part that requires the review and the technology updating as we go along. …
Read more: http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/04/255506.htm
The people in Kerry’s audience know that renewables don’t work. Even the legendary engineers at Google Corporation tried and failed to make renewable technology viable.
But now we know the US government is also aware, that current generation renewables are not up to the job.
Even if you believe renewables are the future, surely it makes more sense to spend money on research, rather than wasting vast sums building production scale systems which don’t work. If the billions of dollars currently being wasted on unviable renewable projects was diverted to research, there might actually be some useful breakthroughs.
Funding production scale projects which everyone knows will fail is just a colossal waste of taxpayer’s money.
“I trust in the ingenuity and the capacity of the American people ”
That’s exactly what the crapitalist statists in their arrogant ignorance don’t trust .
What is the next headline?
“John Kerry announces government funding for the new School of Alchemy, which will undertake research to convert the lead in old car batteries into gold bullion.”
Calling CO2 pollution is science incompetence. Calling it carbon makes it sound more ominous and distracts from attending to possible real atmospheric pollutants from coal such as particulates, NOX and sulfur (as the Chinese are experiencing, especially with the smog in Beijing. The US uses precipitators to remove the real pollutants).
6 Apr: Times of India: IANS: West has double standards on climate change, says Goyal
Charging the Western nations with adopting double standards in their approach to climate change, Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday urged them to “show some magnanimity” and keep renewable energy out of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) framework.
“My concern is that there is a lot of gap in what is being said by the West and what is being delivered. There is no denying for the fact that for last 150 years, the West has enjoyed low-cost fossil fuels and developed their economies,” Goyal, who also holds the renewable energy portfolio, said at an International Finance Corporation (IFC) event here.
“I appealed to the US, when negotiations were going on, that we can keep renewable energy out of the WTO framework. After all we decided in Singapore that no country will put import duties on renewable energy, on solar products…
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/West-has-double-standards-on-climate-change-says-Goyal/articleshow/51705540.cms
5 Apr: NDTV India: PTI: Piyush Goyal Attacks West For Its ‘Double Standards’ On Climate Change
Most of the western world survived on coal. The coal consumption in the US, in per capita terms, is as much as India consumes in 2016. Today, in absolute numbers also, with one-fourth of population of India, the US consumes over 2-2.5 times more coal than the world’s largest democracy, he added…
“So, I think the reality is that West waited till it found cheaper sources of energy. Till shale gas become affordable, it kept talking about the inconvenient truth,” he said at an event jointly organised by World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, Exim Bank, NSE and Institute of International Finance in New Delhi…
Today, there are 16 state-run programmes in the US where the domestic industry is protected in solar equipment procurement and this “double standard” has to stop someday, the minister said.
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/piyush-goyal-attacks-west-for-its-double-standards-on-climate-change-1339109
Solyndra was the epitome of a tax-payer funded top-down entrepreneurial high tech start up, which is kind of a silly imitation of real entrepreneurs using real money on loan from wary, intelligent investors. Solyndra built themselves a nice campus, hired all the suitable people, looked just like a real company with a great idea.
The one thing they didn’t do is ask one simple question: once we start production of these great solar products, what exactly is going to stop China from building an equivalent product for one-third our cost?
A simple little question. No one asked it. That is because politics is a pretend world and government funding of even good ideas can be rife with politics and magic thinking. The F-35 is another example.
That simple question — was never asked because the politicians directing the debacle didn’t want to know the answer or were not prepared to deny it. Politicians work that way, business managers do not. Businessmen look for REAL answers, politicians look for answers that fit a predetermined mold. With predictable results.
Well at least 3 Chinese solar companies were sued (and lost) for selling below cost against Solyndra. As a result of Solyndra’s failure and a anti-dumping lawsuit by Solar World there is a import tariff on almost all Chinese solar manufactures. Last time I checked it ranged from 18 to 35 percent at the port of entry. Personalty I don’t think their design yielded enough extra performance for the price. Their CIGS coated glass tubes were way too expensive to make and their big selling points were they shed dust and snow and had a lower wind loading factor – none of theses ‘features’ were ever going to compete with low cost 20% efficient flat panels.
They lost a “lawsuit” because their subsidies were more than ours?
Well Michael you have the story a little bit pear shaped there.
“””””….. looked just like a real company with a great idea. …..”””””
NO ! Solyndra was built on a truly terrible idea. The designers of their cylindrical tubular solar cells, should be incarcerated for scientific and engineering malpractice.
Solyndra was a scientific disaster long before it became a financial and political RICO test case.
Anybody with just a 4-H club knowledge of solar cells, understands the folly of having a large area semiconductor photodiode that is non uniformly irradiated with radiant energy.
The portions of the cell area that are under illuminated, operate at a lower voltage than the areas more highly illuminated, so they lug down the operating area, instead of contributing to the current output, they short circuit the producing areas.
So folding a flat cell into a cylinder simply guarantees that you can never uniformly illuminate all of the parallel connected diode area.
Also they used a known hygroscopic II-VI compound semi-conductor material, so the glass tube that the semiconductor was plated onto had to be itself enclosed in a hermetically sealed outer glass tube envelope to keep moisture from destroying the diode.
And last time I checked, a cylinder uses Pi times as much glass as does a flat strip that is as wide as the space the cylindrical tube occupies.
So their ” great idea ” require six times as much glass area as a flat solar cell the same width. And because the tube is three dimensional, it casts a moving shadow as the sun rotates about it during the day, and those shadows fall on the next tube over and cause it to short circuit, unless you place them a long distance apart, just like the field of mirrors at Ivanpah.
The Solyndra “great idea” was a criminal. mistake. And the Solyndra folks managed to hide that from both the government, and their private venture investors, who all got taken to the cleaners; along with us taxpayers.
Not a great idea at all.
G
Microbes have probably been guzzling hydrocarbons at a fantastic rate since the inception of life billions of years ago.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16642268
Only a true “renewable” could be so “sustainable.”
* * * * *
I, with reason for my guide, have learned one thing from my Arab teachers, you, something different; dazzled by the outward show of authority you wear a head-stall. For what else should we call authority but a head-stall? Just as brute animals are led by the head-stall where one pleases, without seeing why or where they are being led, and only follow the halter by which they are held, so many of you, bound and fettered as you are by a low credulity, are led into danger by the authority of writers. Hence, certain people arrogating to themselves the title of authorities have employed an unbounded licence in writing, and this to such an extent that they have not hesitated to insinuate into men of low intellect the false instead of the true.
– Adelard of Bath, Uncle & Nephew, 1137
* * * * *
Petroleum (literally “rock oil”) is abiotic and renewable. Not a profitable fact–but a fact nonetheless.
Chirality kills abiotic petroleum.
The infestation of planet Earth with petroleum eating microbes from pole to pole for billions of years renders the fossil fable logistically impossible, so you ignore the biology…
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/10chile/background/methane/media/methane3_600.jpg
(Life from petroleum, not vice-versa. Gulf of Mexico, NOAA)
Regurgitating the world “chirality” may very well confound the ignorant–a favorite tactic of fossil fanatics. But it isn’t an argument by any standards.
quote:
============
The optical activity commonly observed in natural petroleum has been for years speciously claimed as “proof” of some connection with biological detritus, – albeit one requiring both a willing disregard of the considerable differences between the optical activity observed in natural petroleum and that in materials of truly biotic origin, such as wine, as well as desuetude of the dictates of the laws of thermodynamics.
Optical activity is observed in minerals such as quartz or Iceland spar, as well as in oil, and among biological molecules. The optical activity observed in petroleum is more characteristic of the same in abiotic minerals, such as naturally occurring quartz, which are polycrystalline minerals, with a scalemic distribution of domains of left- and right-rotational properties. The chiral molecules in petroleum manifest scalemic distributions, and significantly lack the homochiral distribution which characterize biotic optically active matter. The optical activity in natural petroleum is characterized by either a right (positive, or dextrorotary) or left (negative, or levorotary) rotation of the plane of polarization. By contrast, in biological material left (levorotary) rotation dominates.
The observation of optical activity in hydrocarbon material extracted from the interiors of carbonaceous meteorites, and typical of such in natural petroleum, discredited those claims.2, 26 Nonetheless, the scientific conundrum as to why the hydrocarbons manifest optical activity, in both carbonaceous meteorites and terrestrial crude oil remained unresolved until recently.
The chiral molecules in natural petroleum originate from three distinct sources: contamination by biological detritus in the near-surface strata from which the oil has been taken; the biological alteration and degradation of the original oil by microbes which consume and metabolize oil; and the chiral hydrocarbon molecules which are intrinsic to the petroleum and generated with it. Only the last concerns the origin of petroleum.
The genesis of the scalemic distribution of chiral molecules of natural petroleum has recently been shown to be a direct consequence of the chiral geometry of the system particles acting according to the laws of classical thermodynamics. The resolution of the problem of the origin of the scalemic distributions of chiral molecules in natural petroleum has been shown to be an inevitable consequence of their high-pressure genesis.19 Thus, the phenomenon of optical activity in natural petroleum, contrary to supporting any assertion of a biological connection, strongly confirms the high-pressure genesis of natural petroleum, and thereby the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins.
–J.F. Kenney
http://www.gasresources.net/disposal-bio-claims.htm
============
“Chirality” is not evidence for biological origin.
We brainwash children with the fossil fable using cartoons of palms trees and dinosaurs, providing no physical evidence to substantiate it, deliberately neglecting the history of debate and all evidence undermining it.
The ubiquity and antiquity of petroleum eating organisms alone demonstrates the renewable and sustainable nature of the stuff. “Fossil fuel” is a post modern social construct that has no correspondence with reality.
Oh crap…I never thought of just asking them to come up with something that worked. While they’re at it, maybe they could just make teleportation a reality or make food that has awesome nutritional value but tastes EXACTLY like an ice cream cake. And here I was thinking there were some sorts of constraints on it like actually knowing how.
lol — and +1 — and oh, boy, do I wish that food thing would happen — I LOVE TO EAT! Pizza (great tasting) with zero calories… ice cream (NOT with sugar alcohol — there is an embarrassing side-effect to that stuff, though it tastes great)… brownies….. Frangos….. sourdough bread…. baked potatoes….. wild rice…. lol — guess that’s what heaven is for (for me, anyway :)’ ).
There IS low-carb pasta, so that’s not on the list! 🙂
Janice, tried this last week and was amazed with how good it was.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/232930/cauliflower-pizza-crust/
multiple links…what’s not to like? Brad will tell you:
5 Apr: Vox: Brad Plumer: Hundreds of coal plants are still being planned worldwide — enough to cook the planet
I’ve written before about the global coal renaissance — the single biggest energy and climate story of the last 15 years. Since 2000, countries like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam have been building coal-fired power plants at a torrid pace…
This coal boom has had real benefits, helping poor countries climb out of poverty. But it also has serious downsides…
So the biggest, most important climate question for the next 15 years is: How long will this global coal boom last?…
One invaluable data source here is an annual report from three environmental groups: CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace…
In their 2016 “Boom and Bust” report (LINK), they find the equivalent of 1,500 new coal plants in the pipeline worldwide. That’s a staggering number…
Ultimately, most developing countries are building coal plants because they need access to low-cost electricity to light up their homes, provide an alternative to indoor wood burning, support industry, and lift people out of poverty. For all its downsides, coal has proven capable of doing just that…
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/5/11361390/coal-plant-pipeline-china-india
with link to the approval of 25 March, only made public Tuesday:
5 Apr: KCET: Chris Clarke: Feds OK Huge, Controversial Solar Project Near Mojave Preserve
A solar project that has spurred intense controversy for its likely effect on the Mojave National Preserve’s desert bighorn sheep has won approval from the federal government.
The Soda Mountain Solar Project, slated for more than four square miles of public lands along the north boundary of the Preserve, was formally approved Tuesday by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The project, owned by the engineering firm Bechtel, has been a flashpoint for opposition from environmental groups, who say the project would block a crucial bighorn migration route between the Preserve and the Soda Mountains to the north.
Unusually for a solar project on public lands, the Interior Department approved Soda Mountain without the project’s having secured a willing buyer for the 350 megawatts of energy the plant would produce at its maximum output. The project site, a few miles southwest of Baker along Interstate 15, also lacks available transmission lines to connect the project with energy users in California’s cities…READ ALL
https://www.kcet.org/redefine/feds-ok-huge-controversial-solar-project-near-mojave-preserve
“…more than four times as many Americans are employed by renewable energy companies than by the fossil fuel industry.”
————
So how much electricity is being produced compared to the fossil fuel industry?
And how much electricity per worker is that renewable energy producing compared to electricity per fossil fuel worker?
I really don’t think that’s something he should be bragging about.
Most of them are telemarketers who keep calling, day after day, week after week, month after month even though we’ve been on the FTC No Call list since 2003. If we pick up the phone, they tell us about the wonderful government subsidies we’re eligible for (and without which they wouldn’t be able to call us). Thank you, President Obama.
“I really don’t think that’s something he should be bragging about.”
He’s no doubt looking at this as a jobs program funded mostly by taxpayers. That’s a good thing according to those who want more government involvement in (and thus more control of) the economy and it also of course benefits anyone paid by government.
Doesn’t anyone take high school physics anymore? The usable energy content just isn’t there. And why would you want to defile the environment with that crap anyway? The market decided on fossil fuels centuries ago. They have the added benefit of replenishing life-giving CO2 and may even give us some beneficial warming.
” if the technology is not yet fit for purpose, by Kerry’s own admission, why is the Obama administration wasting so much US taxpayer’s money, funding production scale renewable projects which won’t deliver value?”
Why??? Hey. They have to pay their cronies and supporters off some how. I wonder where Obambam’s name is the Panama investors list is?
Good point, the commercialization of a technology before it is ready is insane. Any responsible enterprise would never advance a project from the labs and research stage until all the links are worked out. It is like Tarzan letting go of a branch with his left hand before the next branch is within reach.of the right hand The results has been the same, a crashing to the ground and waste of $$$$$. Commercialization stage is much more expensive and dumb before doing all the “homework”.
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/junglegeorge-treewatch2_4936.jpg
This is the classic phrasing that accompanies totalitarian dictatorships.
Next there will be pictures of our fearless leader on walls at every street corner. All telling how wonderful our ‘leader’ is.
Informing us how his forced regulations and penalties ’empowered’ us.
After that we’ll get the wonderful news that dissatisfied and treasonous workers are causing the food and energy shortages.
About how our ‘leader’s’ newest laws will empower us to endure greater cold and hunger.
Yet, the sheeple trolls still attempt to derail discussions while they refuse all logic and science.
You could be right, but I think ‘His Administration put in place fuel standards that empowered automakers to invest in more efficient automobiles’ is just nonsense. Word salad.
Gamecock
Well, look at the software research VW was inspired to invest in…
I see someone else noticed Kerry saying “empowered” when he meant “coerced”.
Kerry provides comments of national stupidity seemingly weekly on the subjects of climate change and terrorism alone.
I wonder if Kerry is as bad on “breakthroughs” as he is on international treaties and trade?
When governments artificially remove price discovery in an industry through: subsidies, tariffs, tax breaks, government low-interest loans, government research grants, arbitrary rules and regulations against competitors, etc., humongous amounts ($trillions for wind/solar) of land, labor and capital will be squandered, leading to a multiplier effect of unseen economic harm.
Under a free-market system, grid-level wind and solar energy production would not exist until these technologies were competitive with existing conventional energy sources. PERIOD! (TM).
Just let the free-market system develop new alternative energy sources and implement them when they are viable and competitive to existing energy technologies.
Until governments stop trying to pick winners and losers in the market, $trillions of taxpayers’ money will always be squandered, and devastating economic repercussions will ensue.
Socialism, Crony Crapitalism and Fascism don’t work… How many more lives will be lost and destroyed, and how many more $trillions will need to wasted until humanity finally learns this important lesson of history????
This is most precise summary of the contents of my own mind.
This has turned into the mother of all boondoggles. Misallocation of capital has occurred on a hitherto unseen scale.
And the saddest irony is that meanwhile – Chinese manufacturers have been competitively pushing down the cost per watt of P.V. (in a free-market environment called China (more irony there)).
And now we will witness the mass roll-out of billions of mass-produced P.V. silicon panels AND the crazed left will consider this to be the clear evidence of the success of their program of price fixing and squandering grants on boondoggle research.
Whilst, in reality, it will be the victory of the market solution and competitive forces that have been driving the P.V. price curve since 1979.
The only thing that the market manipulators offered towards this conclusion – was a punitive 70% tariff on Chinese panels in the E.U. area.
You would struggle to make this shit up!!!
Hoy Hoy. Was it John Kerry, Al Gore, the NE Attorney ‘Generals’, the George Mason University RICO who poured money into Sun Edison (SUNE) today, 05/04/16, to create an up to 61% “pop” at the top but to have it fall back at the end of the day to “23%” increase, 0.05 cents! A phucking ‘Wooden Nickel’, back in the day! [George Mason wants to rename their “School of Law” the ‘Antonin Scalia School of Law’ {the ASS of Law}, What a Joke!] And Goldman Sacks is throwing out the “baby and bathwater” and baling out calling SUNE Bankruptcy Bait! “Il mio tua d.”
Ja ja ja ja ja ja.
Solar cell efficiency, converting light to electricity, is under 50%. Efficiency must be improved to 200%!
Why not make it a real breakthrough and improve efficiency to 1,000,000%?
I would just point out that there are very few “engineers” at Google and certainly no legendary ones … sure lots of smart folks at Google if you are talking about computers or search algorithms … energy production engineers ? zero, or so close to zero that they get zero’s mail …
I’m gonna take a crack at this scale up thing. How hard can it be? I’ve got a huge lab at my disposal, lots of funding that my accounting department hasn’t figured out yet (aren’t Panamanian law firms just the best?!), I’m going to take a crack at this.
First I need to figure out the relationship between power and surface area, that’s probably pretty fundamental, I’m going to start with a marble, and scale up from there.
OK, ran all the numbers, for a marble it turns out the P=5.67*10^-8. Excellent. I’ll try a bowling ball instead.
Huh. Just finished with the bowling ball. P=5.67*10^-8. OK, let’s scale for serious. Supertanker.
Well…. first it turns out those morons in accounting weren’t as dumb as I thought. Boy are they p*ssed! But too late, we already took delivery on the supertanker. Ya know what? The effing thing tested out to a g*d d*mned P=5.67*10^-8!
DOESN’T SCALE AT ALL!
Screw the fundamental physics and the accountants too. Going for some practical research instead. Ordered a thousand solar panels and bought some desert on the equator to set them up on, I figure that’s going to give me the max value in terms of insolation intensity and clear skies. Will report initial results shortly….
OK, I’ve run into a problem with the solar panels. Turns out they only generate power 12 hours a day. Clearly I don’t have enough scale. I ordered another 10,000 solar panels.
Huh. Been running 10,000+ solar panels and you know what? THE NUMBER OF HOURS THEY PRODUCE POWER DIDN’T CHANGE ONE BIT.
I got a refund on the supertanker. The accountants were so happy they didn’t notice I ordered 1 million solar panels. I got like a 45% discount over the 1,000 panel price, maybe this scaling thing is starting to work?
SH*T! I’ve got over a million solar panels and they STILL only produce power 12 hours per day! WTF!
DOESN’T SCALE AT ALL!
I’m going into wind mills. I know, I know. You’re wondering how it is that the accountants haven’t caught up with me yet. Well truth is they are giddy happy. Turns out they dug into it and if we do the right paperwork, we can get he government to PAY us to look into these things. In fact, we didn’t get paid for the marble or the bowling ball, but we got all our money back for the supertanker. Apparently the small projects don’t get much funding, the bigger the project, the more likely it is to get funded. Panamanian law firm is all involved again though, apparently the accountants are trying to cover up the fact that we already got a refund for the supertanker.
So my requisition for 1,000 windmills was cancelled. They want to order 100,000 instead. They’re really into it now, will report results as soon as available.
Well! You know that a good windy place blows at about 30 km/h? Real poor energy density, turns out that wind is made out of air. Yes, AIR! You know how thin that stuff is? Stick your arm out in front of you and waver it around. Anything you can do THAT to, that easily, is not a good place to extract energy from.
Sigh. We ordered a million wind mills. You know what that did to the wind speed? STILL 30 km/h. And STILL made of air.
DOESN’T SCALE AT ALL!
But our subsidies are really taking off. My boss is thinking of buying a small island with his bonus but I showed him that video where the congressman asks the admiral if Guam might tip over and now he’s decided that might be too risky.
Taking a break for a bit. Accountants pestering me to death about the next project. I’ll figure out this scale thing eventually. If I ever come back to work. I have a lot of money to spend….
Even when in jest, accuracy is paramount.
P=5.67*10^-8*T^4
Still doesn’t scale.
just excellent – made my evening
thanks
David you are an idiot. Instead of ordering 100,000 1 MWe machines, order 20,000 5 MWe wind machines.
To call for a “breakthrough” is to put the horse before the cart. To place the cart and horse in the proper sequence we need to replace the pseudoscientific method of investigation of modern global warming climatology by the scientific method of investigation.
That’s right. Scientists and engineers have failed to find a new form of renewable energy that can compete with fossil fuels because they just haven’t tried hard enough. Fortunately we have visionaries like John Kerry to point the way.
It’s not like people haven’t been trying for decades. People don’t realize there is a past. It’s like the Left’s rationalization of why communism hasn’t worked: “It hasn’t been done by us.”
If WE look for a breakthrough, we will find it.
… need to look at what Kerry actually said.
“I don’t know what it is, but I trust in the ingenuity and the capacity of the American people and of our allocation of capital and our capacity to make this work.”
“… and of OUR allocation of capital …”
He can’t force ingenuity out of the american public, nor can he provide it on his own; but allocation of capital is another story … he’s just the guy to help manage that aspect of the solution.
The break through the renewable grant seekers are hoping for is access to federal and state tax payers wallets .
Pissing way $2 Billion already on Solyndra and the soon to be broke Sun Edison are a couple of examples
of why governments need to quite trying to run the casino .
There is zero accountability for essentially massive fraud. Someone robs a store and gets 20 years while the grant seeker tie crowd sail around in yachts after bilking tax payers for hundreds of millions . No wonder Trump has a following . More Kerry and Clinton ? Same old same old …government solves everything nonsense .
Rewarding criminals is the new norm. It goes under the trade name of “priming the pump” . Kerry can chirp all he likes but he is wasting his breath and billions of working peoples taxes on pixy dust .Hillary’s announcement to shut down fossil fuel wasn’t followed up with how she was going to repair a broken economy or the billions in taxes that every government would have lost . Maybe it’s time for some new people to run the show . Let the entrenched politicians of the Washington establishment go write their legacy books .
This is a bit off topic, but here goes. Just so I can (perhaps) get a decent answer to a question, let’s make one (1) assumption. Let’s just assume that wind generators are viable and all those things. Do NOT stop reading here and start trolling. I have asked this question many times over about 50 years. Not once have I received any reasonable response. So, I’m going to be stupid about this and ask again. Here goes:
With the above assumption made, how much energy can we extract from the winds before we foul up transport of heat and water vapor and thus screw up the climate we are supposedly trying to save?
Having grown up in multiple locations in and at the edge of the Great Plains (central USA), I am quite familiar with transport of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to points northward into the North American interior. Just so you will know. I first asked this question when I was 9.
Not Oscar, just a grouch
I think you are suggesting that the energy of moving moisture laden atmosphere, will lose some of its energy, when causing the blades of the turbines to rotate.
I know of no studies which have tracked the loss of wind velocity down range of wind turbines.
Considering the havoc the turbines inflict on local birds and bats without any concern on the part of those who expound on the virtues wind power, I would not hold my breath waiting for any study of environmental degradation, do to wind flow loss.
sorry I don’t have a better answer
michael
Mike the Morlock, replying to Not Oscar
Locally, each wind turbine slows (creates a turbulent interference pattern) 10x the rotor diameter. Thus, if the second wind turbine is within 10x rotor diameters (up to 1/2 mile or more for large turbines), its performance is significantly degraded. Further away (over even a 10×10 km area) you will find near-immeasurable wind “slowing”. The earth is too large, and the wind too low an energy density.
[There] are studies out there. Short version is local effects could be large, global effects would be very hard to even measure:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.long
At the scale to meet human energy needs I mean.
I’m sure there would be some point at which global effects would become significant. But it would be orders of magnitude larger than anything the combined efforts of all of humanity could build.
RACookPE1978 already answered your question very well.
To help put this into perspective:
Consider an elephant seal as it shuffles over a sandy beach.
A grain of sand is representative of individual windmills where the seal skin meets the beach.
Each grain of sand is abrasive and can cause local irritation; but the overall movement of the seal continues and the irritated, momentarily slowed, miniscule patch of skin rapidly recovers full speed.
Some thoughts:
Yes, the wind turbines extract energy from a moving air mass.
Yes, it is possible that wind turbines can affect heat and moisture transport air systems. Whether mankind can measure such a small impact relative to the overall air mass at any time soon is unlikely.
Naval sailing ships, urban planners, wind turbine designers and installers and many others are well aware of the wind shadow and turbulence caused by objects standing against the winds.
Anyone living in on the lee side of hills and mountains are also aware, if indirectly, of impacts that large objects cause to local weather patterns.
The Sierra mountains are tall enough to seriously deplete moisture from the prevailing winds and even cause disturbances in the upper atmosphere.
Can a mass of wind turbines in a pass seriously deplete downwind wind energy? Yes.
Can we tell? Probably not.
That said, I sure do not want to live downwind of a wind farm, as the days I stand the greatest chance of noticing a loss of wind energy are those days with small breezes. I really hate hot days where the leaves on trees just hang straight down with nary a rustle.
Well, how many blades and how much power input, running the other direction, would it take to push enuf energy into the system to create a change of state?
Assuming that the earth is not at a low or high point where it would it take a significantly more (or less) energy to accomplish a change of state one way or the other, then the above can give something to think about.
Don’t east coast hurricanes originate somewhere in northwest Africa with a shirraco(sp) or some such thing … can’t the terrorists just set up a bunch of fans over there to create havoc in Florida … no?
Except for local impacts, I would guess that it would take a hell of a lot of added wind resistance to make a significant change.
Good luck with that!
Yeah, what does ‘solving’ even mean.
Yes, more semantics. I’m sure ‘solving’ is defined in some obscure government climate change document somewhere and it doesn’t actually mean what 97% of non-politicians or non-recipients of climate change money/status/perks/fame/etc. think it means.
Memo to Kerry ,
Imagine if today some grant seeking maggot actually announced the discovery of nuclear power today .
It is telling that greenies love bird blenders yet hate nuclear