By Dr. Lars Schernikau
Dr. Lars Schernikau has founded, worked, and advised many organizations in the energy, raw material, and coal sectors in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Lars finished his PhD on the economics of energy, commodities, and the global coal business and published two industry trade books (Springer, available on Amazon) in 2010 and 2017.
Summary
· Costs for renewable power generation have dropped fast, but they will not improve 10-fold anymore… physical limits will be reached
· Common comparisons of renewables vs. conventional power generation are misleading. One cannot compare marginal costs for intermittent power with costs for base power
· Adding wind and solar to the power grid beyond a certain point is not only uneconomical but hurts the environment
· Gas’ GHG emissions from production to combustion are essential the same as coal, replacing coal with gas will achieve nothing but increase costs
· The material needs and the environmental impact of today’s renewables far out-shadow those for conventional power
“The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.” (Forbes, May 2019).
I am all for renewable energy. Our long-term future will need to be all renewable… but is what we are currently doing good for our environment?
Figure 1: Graph on global energy[1]
The world today is inhabited by close to 8 billion people and we feed our hunger for power to almost 80% with hydrocarbons (coal, gas, oil). Wind and solar make up an estimated 2% of 2017 primary energy, the remainder largely comes from nuclear, hydro and some biomass. Only a 100 years ago we were 2 billion people. Of today’s 8 billion people there are at least 3 billion with no or only erratic access to power… and global population will increase by another 3-4 billion within the next 50 years.
Now look at Figure 1 and extrapolate to the future. Do you believe that non-hydro renewables wind and solar will give us the energy we need? Can they sustainably and environmentally friendly power the future?
Solar and wind power are not new. However, over the decades we have improved their efficiency. The Betz Limit states that a blade can capture maximum 60% of kinetic energy in air – modern windmills have reached 45%. The Schockley-Queisser Limit states that at maximum 33% of incoming photons can be converted into electrons in silicon photovoltaic – modern PV reaches 26%. “The era of 10-fold gains is over”[2]. There is no Moore’s Law in energy. It is time that we are take a whole-system view when looking at solar and wind.
Figure 2: Global prices for power – power in Germany is the most expensive[3]
Wind and solar are inherently intermittent means for power generation. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. We need to account for the cost of batteries or the cost of conventional power as backup for wind and solar when comparing the cost of power. None of the current Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) measures account for this. Neither do standard LCOE measures account for (1) the additional cost of interconnections required, nor (2) the cost of managing networks with highly volatile energy inputs, nor (3) the efficiency losses resulting from keeping coal, gas, or nuclear power as backup. Number (3) is interesting and actually explains why the total cost of power goes up the more wind or solar you install beyond a certain point. What that certain point is depends on the country and region, but one thing is sure: Germany is beyond that point, illustrated by their high-power prices (Figure 2).
Only recently has the IEA developed a new way of measuring cost of electricity with what they call Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE). In February 2019, the IEA writes “In India … using VALCOE… as the share of solar PV surpasses 10% in 2030, the value of [solar] daytime production drops and the value of flexibility increases.” Figure 4 below illustrates the misleading cost comparisons that the current LCOE would give vs. the more correct VALCOE.
Figure 3: Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and value-adjusted LCOE (VALCOE)
for solar PV and coal-fired power plants in India[4]
Germany has become aware that they need conventional power despite its huge wind and solar capacity installed (Germany’s installed wind and solar capacity by the end of 2018 was 59 GW for wind and 46 GW for solar or 51% of total German capacity; Germany’s wind and solar share was 17% for electricity and only 4,6% for primary power in 2018[5]). You might have heard that Germany decided to exit coal power in addition to exiting nuclear. Wind and solar will not suffice, thus Germany decided to build new gas-fired power plants instead. We know that gas is typically more expensive than coal, more difficult and expensive to transport than coal requiring pipelines or LNG, and generally more difficult and sometimes dangerous to store. What is the reason that Germany shuts down its existing coal-fired power plants and builds new gas-fired ones? Correct, the reason is green-house gas emissions. It is a very well-known fact that gas emits about half the CO2 per kWh during combustion than coal.
What appears to be a less-known fact is that gas emits/leaks methane (a 28x more powerful green-house gas than CO2 over a 100-year horizon and 84x more potent over a 20-year horizon6) during production and transportation. This has been documented in several studies including Poyry 20166. Figure 4 illustrates this fact and compares direct emissions (direct = during combustion) with indirect emissions (indirect = during production and transportation):
– Gas emits about half of CO2 compared to coal during combustion
– Gas emits more CO2eq. (mostly in form of methane) during production and transportation
– Total gas CO2eq.emissions are on par with coal, depending on the type turbine and the location of the power plant
Note: CO2eq Emissions for LNG or shale gas are significantly higher than for pipeline natural gas (PNG)
Figure 4: coal vs. natural gas – green-house gas emissions during partial load operation[6]
Batteries have become far more efficient and the recent move towards electrical vehicles has driven large investments in battery “Gigafactories” around the world. The largest known and discussed factory for batteries is Tesla’s USD 5 billion Gigafactory in Nevada which is expected to provide an annual battery production output of 50 GWh by 2020. Such factories will provide the batteries for our world’s electric vehicles and are supposed to provide backup batteries for houses (see Tesla’s Powerwall6).
Figure 5 below summarizes the environmental challenge of today’s battery technology. The problem with any known battery technology has to do with two main issues:
1) Energy density
2) Material requirements
Energy density: Hydrocarbons are one of the most efficient ways to store energy. Today’s most advanced battery technology can only store 1/40 of the energy that coal can store. This already discounts for the coal power plant efficiency of about 40%. Energy that a 540 kg 85 kWh Tesla battery can store equals the energy of 30 kg of coal. The Tesla battery must then still be charged with power (often through the grid) while coal is already “charged”.
In addition, you can calculate that one annual Gigafactory production of 50 GWh of Tesla batteries would be enough to provide backup for 6 minutes for the entire US power consumption. Today’s battery technology unfortunately cannot be the solution of intermittency.
Material requirements: Next comes the question of the inputs and materials required to produce a battery. It is expected and conservatively calculated that each Tesla battery of 85 kWh requires 25-50 tons of raw materials to be mined, moved and processed. These required materials include copper, nickel, graphite, cobalt and some lithium and rare earths. We will likely also need some aluminum and copper for the case and wiring. Additionally, energy of 10-18 MWh is required to build one Tesla battery, resulting in 15-20 t of CO2 emissions assuming 50% renewable power.
I am not even considering the overburden that needs to be moved for each ton of minerals mined. The overburden ratio can be estimated 1:10. Thus, you can 10x fold the numbers above. One Tesla battery requires 500-1.000 tons of materials to be moved/mined compared to coal which requires only 0,3 tons – a factor of 1.700 to 3.300!
Figure 5: case in point: Tesla‘s batteries – energy density & environmental impact[7]
This article cannot discuss the details of global warming. However, it is very worrying that young people are taught in school to fear the warming created by fossil-fuel burning. We had 1 degree of warming in the past 200 years. The “human cause” has much more to do with the heat that our existence (energy consumption) produces and releases to the biosphere rather than with CO2. The majority of warming is natural, caused by the sun as we are coming out of the Little Ice Age that ended about 300 years ago. We are not heading into a catastrophe, but we need to worry about real pollutants to our environment and the waste we create. This is where we should focus our attention and spend our resources.
Wind and solar – while certainly being appropriate for certain applications such as heating a pool, and thus earning a place in the energy mix – cannot and will not replace conventional power. We need a “New Energy Revolution”. To reach this New Energy Revolution we need to invest more in base research and at the same time invest in, not divest from, conventional power to make it efficient and environmentally friendly.
[1] Note: Primary electricity converted by direct equivalent method; Source: Data compiled by J. David Hughes. Post-1965 data from BP, Statistical Review of World Energy (annual). Pre-1965 data from Arnulf Grubler, “Technology and Global Change: Data Appendix,” (1998).
[2] Mark Mills “The New Energy Economy”, Manhattan Institute, March 2019
[3] Note: This statistic shows electricity prices in selected countries worldwide excl VAT; Source: Statista 2019, Release Date October 2018
[4] Sources: IEA; WEO Analyst; February 12, 2019 by Brent Wanner
[5] Frauenhofer ISE 2018 reported in Clean Energy Wire April 2019
[6] 1) CCGT operation without bypass (incl. operation of the steam turbine); Source: Poyry 2016; German Study on “Comparison of greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired and gas-fired power plants”
[7] Note: 1 kWh = 860 kcal = 0,086 kg oe = 3.600 kj; 1 kcal = 4,1868 kj; 50 GWh = 50.000.000 kWh = 317.500 tons batteries
(1) Tesla‘s Powerwall has a usable capacity of 13.5 kWh and weighs with frame 125 kg. Assuming 100 kg is net battery weight this means 0,135 kWh/kg, so even less effective than Tesla‘s battery
(2) Tesla battery 90% efficient = 76,5 kWh; assuming 5.500 kcal per kg for coal, 40% power plant efficiency to generate 76,5 kWh requires 191 kWh or about 30 kg of coal
Sources: Author‘s Analysis and Research based on Mills „The New Energy Economy, an Exercise in Magical Thinking“, Manhattan Institute March 2019; Matthew R. Shaner et al., “Geophysical Constraints on the Reliability of Solar and Wind Power in the United States,” Energy & Environmental Science 11, no. 4 (February 2018): pp 914–925, pictures taken from: https://www.tesla.com
‘We need to account for the cost of batteries or the cost of conventional power as backup for wind and solar when comparing the cost of power. None of the current Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) measures account for this.’
Well that’s not exactly correct. We’ve been doing this since 2011.
http://www.iesisenergy.org/lcost/
We provide spreadsheets for several generation technologies that include system integration costs: the capital cost of any new transmission costs, and the capital and revenue costs of providing backup capacity (based on renewables capacity credit). A recent addition to the sheets has been the development of a new sheet for storage (not yet published). Using storage as a solution for intermittency results in costs much higher than using OCGTs.
We have also costed some of National Grids Future Energy Scenarios, and because our LCOE sheets are load factor sensitive (obviously) we can cost these scenarios accurately following the reduced load factors of gas and coal. The renwables scenarios are always far more expensive than a gas or nuclear dominated renewable scenario.
http://www.iesisenergy.org/agp/Gibson-Aris-paper-cost.pdf
This work was carried out between 2011 to the present day. As a headline observation, in the UK, the system integration costs for onshore and offshore wind are greater than the generation costs for CCGT generation, so wind has no possibility of under-cutting gas.
I noted in the appendices to National Grid’s final report on the August 9th blackout they claimed that running with higher levels of inertia would cost billions a year. I presume they are talking about very large scale grid batteries, or assuming that we would be paying out £150/MWh on massive volumes of wind curtailment. The idea that we could use conventional generation at far lower cost is now verboten.
RE methane emissions from gas production and thus parity of CO2 emissions with coal.
I looked at this for the UK and I think it’s misleading because gas leakage is referenced to ALL gas consumption, and not just the gas consumption for generation. In the UK we use far more gas for heating and cooking and industrial processes than we do for electricity production.
And in recent years I’ve seen figures for methane leakage being corrected downwards.
Since we have about 1.8 ppm methane in the air and by a factor of 80 this is equivalent to 144 ppm CO2. The effect of 120 ppm CO2 increase since about 1950 on temperature is negligible, so what?
I think I must take a somewhat more level-and-futurist stance, fellow WUWT-ers. There are several things written in the synopsis header that have deeper answers, less concerning to whether solar and aerodynamic energy might conceivably become the majority of a (our) nation’s power.
First, I believe it to be the author’s coal-is-great centric conceit to blithely complete the “but it doesn’t work at night or when the wind stops” with “thus needs batteries”‘. As another site has often published, there are a LOT of ways to store opportunistic overproduction that don’t require “batteries” per se. Most of us know this, but in brief:
• № 1 — compressed air (“thermodynamic” power storage)
• № 2 — rail transported masses up mountains (“gravitational” power storage)
• № 3 — … and coastal oceanic undersea gas-bags (variation on compressed air, more ‘constant pressure’)
• № 4 — electrochemical AKA “aluminum smelting” and “sodium reduction” and so forth
• № 5 — reverse dams. Pumping water up to store energy, back down to recover it.
• № 6 — conventional prismatic batteries
• № 7 — unconventional “flow” batteries
• № 8 — steampunk inertial storage (HUGE flywheels. Ridiculous things….)
• № 9 — über-nanotech inertial storage (way smaller flywheels. Carbon nanotubes.)
• № 10 — reverse CO₂ sequestration-to-liquid-fuels processes
There are others but these pretty much cover it. № 10 has been getting a LOT of press because of the appeal-to-the-obvious-reasoning-greenwitch argument, “but, but, but! We could take the Bad Old CO₂ out of the atmosphere and RECYCLE it into motor fuels, making them clean and green!!!” yah, right.
Some may remember that I am a UCBerkeley edumacated Chemistry / Physics / Maths / Computer Science goat. With enormous (and it turned out somewhat misguided) emphasis on chemistry. Thermodynamics, organic synthesis, physical chemistry, computational chemistry, that kind of thing.
The thermodynamicist in me balks loudly at the idea that № 10 … could be made efficient enough to be a PRACTICAL energy-storage idea. The reasons abound, but come down to the fact that CO₂ really, really hangs into the oxygen, requiring rather prodigious amounts of energy to break those bonds, to reform carbon compounds of lower oxidative state. As an example, plants … with a billion years of evolution … have NOT figured out how to reduce CO₂ to the sugars and proteins necessary for life, at better than 0.7% solar-to-biological energy conversion. It again is a marvel, a conceipt to expect that chemists and thermodynamicists will conjure a way to get 70% conversion turn-around by this route.
The remaining methods are NOT exclusive, either. In fact, they’re rather complimentary. If you are near mountains, shipping enormous masses (or water!) up the mountain is a pretty good way to store significant power. Gravitational storage. You need a BIG hill though.
Compressed air is pretty good … when there are a lot of large, deep underground exhausted-or-deprecated mines that could be repurposed. Compressed air exerts enormous net pressure on the overburden though, so to keep such facilities from exploding, the pressure cannot be more than the mass of the stuff above. Yet that still leaves a lot of power to store. And thermodynamically, it can easily offer 70% or higher turn-around.
№ 4 is obvious, and all the objections to it as the ENTIRE way to store short-term energy are true. But having the other 9 as complimentary alternatives … kind of defuses that argument line.
№ 5 is a variation on № 2 and № 3.
№ 6 isn’t really much different from № 4: separating oxides or halides from their highly reactive elements and physically isolating said elements to recombine under battery-like conditions is just really another form of fuel cell. But prismatic batteries are what we think of mostly: all in one, self-contained electrochemical energy storage technology.
№ 7 like № 10 has been the doyan of the press (episodically). Using redox (reduction-oxidation in chemical engineering parlance) liquids instead of solids (AKA “plates”) allows the possibility of really large electrochemical storage facilities with large tanks to hold the reactants. It answers a long-standing problem with fuel cells: transportation, hopefully continuously, of the energy-holding reactants into, and the byproduct out of the cells.
… Conventional reactive-gas fuel cells (the Grand-daddy of them all being hydrogen-oxygen gas, on platinum plates) have a serious problem of “gasses aren’t conductive”. Hence why the only efficient gas-flow cells so far have required some variation on platinum, iridium, other ‘noble metals’. Which are frustratingly rare, expensive and non-renewable resources. Liquid reactant ionic-fuel cells ‘fix’ that replacing the non-reactive, non-conductive gasses with electrically conductive fluids. Thus, theoretically WAY easier to implement on a mass-scale without rare catalysts.
The “steampunk” and high-tech inertial storage ideas have been around for a hundred years. Not long after physicists and mathematicians hooked up to figure out the maths of how inertia and momentum, kinetics and springy-things worked, it was realized that flywheels were GOOD at storing energy. Not great, but still quite good. Many a War-of-the-Worlds era Science Fiction deployed city-sized flywheels to be the energy-storage mechanism for the then-deep-future, the 1990s LOL.
The one really helpful thing about flywheels is that so long as their bearings are kept well lubricated, for the most part they don’t degrade over time. This in particular suits them well for shortest-to-not-very-long storage. Repeated cycles of charge/discharge. Potentially so, many times an hour. Or per minute. But certainly many times a day.
________________________________________
The authors also suggest that PV and/or wind power generating technologies are not going to get 10× cheaper, in the foreseeable future. I didn’t see citations to buttress that, but to me it doesn’t ring true. We just purchased and had delivered “320 W” solar panels, all wrapped in boxes on a pallet, retail, for 78¢/watt. That’s remarkable, given that not all that many years ago, it was 20× that.
Likewise, as the Great Windmills have become breathtakingly ginormous, their per-watt-delivered costs continue to drop. Drop to the point where they’re viable competition for fossil fuels within the usual exigencies of a year’s worth of Mother Nature’s zephyr caprice.
________________________________________
I’m not trying to say that we could go 100% wind-and-sun, as America the nation, or Europe, or the World. While we certainly could overbuild PV (especially) and sufficient-build Wind to comfortably create the degree of excess opportunity-generation capacity to keep those 10+ energy storage mechanisms “topped up” for the most part, there are things that petrological energy extraction and generation do that really don’t yet have an equal from an alternative potential energy perspective.
The most important of which is JET FUEL (and aviation ‘gas’). Commercial, Shipping and Military aircraft depend critically not just on the energy-density of jet fuel, but on the lightening-of-the-load as it is consumed. This is how a 747 can carry basically 4 swimming pools of jet fuel half-way around the world in one shot. Because it gets lighter as it burns up. Batteries, apart from not having anything close to comparable energy density, also don’t get lighter as the trip wears on. Oh sure, one could imagine a steampunk ejection-and-parachute-recovery system to accomplish that, but … ah … no, I don’t think the FAA will dig it.
The next most important is diesel fuel, especially for long haul trucking and heavy construction equipment. And for “portable power” generation, such as would be rented-and-installed at a large stadium to power the huge sound equipment and lighting power requirements. While we might imagine that batteries could do it … all it takes is just a larger diesel tank, and/or more frequent replenishing top-offs of the tank by the servicing company. Not so with batteries. Especially not so with № 1 thru 10, as well.
Trains? Well, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in Asia, Europe, and the subways of our cities everywhere, electricity itself is a viable, clean, reliable, relatively uncomplicated power transportation and utilization technology. Large batteries can (and will) work for transitioning from non-electrified rail lines to their eventually pantograph-supplied overhead power configuration. Kind of like the old “coal cars” of steam trains, having the coal to burn and the water for the steam. Instead, the first few railcars will be the battery railcars. Conveninently, can be unhooked and swapped, permantly answering, “but, but, they need to be recharged and they’re huge!” problem.
________________________________________
Personally, I hold that as much as 70% of the total energy-consumption infrastructure of a large industrialized nation will be convertable to some combination of PV, wind, geothermal and large-scale biological (akin to solar!) … PLUS STORAGE … technology. I don’t see 100%, nor do I even see a need for 100%. Rather, I see the need to conserve the millions-of-years-in-the-making treasure of Earth’s supply of crude oil and coal, and to use it strategically instead of wantonly.
Which seems WAY more balanced, to me.
Doing the right thing isn’t easy.
But it is easy to understand.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
GoatGuy
Thanks for the appreciated comment, even if a little bit too lenghty for easy digestion.
I agree with you: mass storage of renewable energy is really feasible, even if it sounds too expensive at a first glance.
Here in Germany, we have a similar acceptance problem, especially because the coal lobby is extremely powerful, across all party lines.
The lack of mass storage for electricity, and the lack of high voltage power lines from the North sea down to the great power users in Germany’s South (which were delayed since 20 years), are really amazing.
To your list of storage techniques let me add this for the sake of completeness:
http://eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/Energiespeicher-Erneuerbare.html
The idea of this guy was very ‘en vogue’ 10 years ago but vanished inbetween.
The idea was to cutoff a very big piece of rock elevated by water pressure energy coming from electricity energy overhead, and vice-versa.
Too expensive.
But… what does mean ‘too expensive’ in comparison to the dismantling costs of all nuclear plants which appear, in these plants’ profit and loss accounts, at some 20% of reality?
Rgds
J.-P. D.
There’s a reason why nobody is building any of the things that you mention, despite the fact that all of them are being pushed by someone or other.
The reason is that they are all either economically, or physically (if not both) infeasible.
Gas compression losses at least half of the energy stored when the heat generated by compression is lost to the surrounding environment.
Moving weights up mountains consumes a lot of iron and a lot of land, but provides very little actual energy storage.
Pumped storage is being used, where ever it is practical. The problem is that the number of places with both sufficient elevation changes AND sufficient water supply are very few in number.
You forgot hydrogen, and its derivatives, for some reason. It is somewhat as #10, but better in energy terms. Some push for that golden hydrogen society wheee everything blows up and leaves only water droplets on the remains…
Jokes aside, any storage means loss of energy. None of the proposed mass storage technologies will be above 50% in real life, so the idea of capturing excess energy for later use is kind of moot. You need dedicated energy production for storage, in addition to what is there to power society in the first place.
Now, to add to confusion some people advocate for the possible future where we use less energy than today, even with a growing population. This is apparently due to electrification and higher efficiencies. So you have to know where people are arguing from, their assumptions.
A wise former colleague of mine used to say that to assume is to make an ass out of u and me. Most of the time I find he is right.
I can heartily recommend the analyses of storage methods (including all those you cite) and requirements using renewables at Euan Means’ site.
Perhaps the biggest factor is simply the shere quantities of storage required to bridge seasonal and international year shortages. The only vaguely feasible way to do this is with hydro schemes, if your country has suitable geography.
Start here
http://euanmearns.com/is-large-scale-energy-storage-dead/
Perhaps the biggest factor is simply the shere quantities of storage required to bridge seasonal and international year shortages. …
That’s assuming our goal is 100% renewable power sourcing. In reality, as I think I said, achieving 60% to 80% renewable (which necessarily includes hydroelectric dams), and the remainder “more conventional” — whether more like France with a bunch of nuclear, or like the USA, with well distributed natural gas generation — certainly sidelines your point.
With a fairly sophisticated and carefully vetted model of the stochastic piecemeal generation of power and energy by a mix of PV, Wind, Hydro and both natural gas and baseline nuclear, it becomes “a remarkably long computer run” to find the optimizations that quantify sufficient conventional generating capacity to make up for both seasonal and international demand changes. However, the results become pretty defensible: stable power grids are possible with mixes of renewable energy upwards of 70% of the total power generating capacity of broadly-industrialized countries.
Moreover, one can … with not too much tweaking of the driving economics of the model … also determine that build-out above 70% is essentially futile absent a sudden (and not historically encountered) rise in the prices of conventional backstop fuels, be they nuclear or natural gas … or coal for that matter.
That 70% drops to 50% optimization limit when one also (rightfully) considers the presently irreplaceable utility of commercial aviation jet fuel. So far at least, there is no competent alternative to jet fuel for comporting people and goods the billions of air miles per year. But both the industry and I personally have hope that some alternative to jet fuel may someday be conjured that compactly, efficiently and safely allows electricity to be stored in large-and-low-mass quantities for electric aircraft use.
Meanwhile, 50% optimization is about the limit for renewables. Eventually it could rise as high as 80% or more, especially when civilization decides to abandon nuclear fission as a safe-enough, cheap-enough, potent-enough and resource-for-the-forseeable-future compliment to the more expensive mass-storage technologies presented herein.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
Not sure I agree. I’ve done 30 year simulations at the hourly data level, and looked at Europe wide data that reveal Europe wide lulls in renewable generation because weather systems such as stationary winter highs can cover almost all the continent. The plain fact is that you need 90+% of peak demand as dispatchable capacity. You can of course reduce storage requirements through massive overbuild of renewables capacity with the corollary that marginal capacity is increasingly curtailed, which effectively makes it expensive.
While in South America hydro is easy come by, it’s not so simple if you lack convenient mountain ranges.
This is the key point in the article.
· Adding wind and solar to the power grid beyond a certain point is not only uneconomical but hurts the environment”
The mainstream media fed by fake left engineering studies pushed a urban legend that sun and wind gathering will work. We can get to zero Co2 emissions if only more money was spent.
It does not matter how much money is spent there is a point and Germany has reached that point where installing more sun and wind gathering causes more environmental damage that stopping the insane scheme.
Making electricity more and more expensive made sort of made a little sense if there was an environmental reason.
… I am all for renewable energy. Our long-term future will need to be all renewable… but is what we are currently doing good for our environment? …
That is just the ritual genuflection that usually accompanies articles like this, maybe simply to get published, or maintain peace with colleagues, friends and on the ‘home front’.
Excellent article. I wish the writer had touched upon the issues associated with the disposal of spent solar panels, batteries and wind turbines. They are (will be) quite considerable.
One could reasonably ask WHY?? Consider that it didn’t occur for much of the existing fossil fuel industry. Around the world we have numerous communities looking at massive cleanup costs following abandonment of various mines and power stations.
Massive clean up costs you say, as a person who has more than a passing interest in old so called toxic mine sites, I can tell you nature adapts very well to these environments, Natural regeneration including grasses who thrive and adapt to metal particles, while growing extract metals and store them, lichens that have adapted to grow on mine dumps,down stream insects thzt only survive in these environments because they have adapted ,growing rushes in discharge areas that thrive and harvest minute amounts of metals, of course nature takes time to adapt,but it does and thrives once adapted,time to do some real research Robert,nature it would seem without getting hysterical gets on and thrives,
When, simply, left alone to do what nature does best. Chernobyl and Fukushima for instance.
Once upon a time, long, long ago in what is now South West Africa, a natural nuclear reactor ran for a couple of million years. It self moderated in a very interesting fashion until the fuel ran out. We’re still here. Who knows, perhaps we are here because of it.
Erosion over millenia has exposed the same “natural resources” to the surface environment, and seas since … forever. Our continents were recycled many times over before we ever were.
Hike down the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River. At the bottom look up ask yourself “Where did all the rock that used to be above me go ?”
There is more than just “disposal pollution” involved with solar. If panel enclosures are broken, not rare at all, toxic and carcinogenic cadmium gets leached out of the panels by rainwater and into the ground and then into the ground water.
Panels are ALWAYS broken when tossed into landfills.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/amp/
WRONG ON EVERY COUNT … Author does not include the JMCC WING Generator which does 1) increase energy from the wind by a factor of 10 (and more) with generators up to 250 MW per unit. 2) Reduces cost of energy by more than a factor of 10 over the planned obsolescence 3 blade wind monsters and even more so over solar. 3) With the McCanney “Distributed Energy” design and large 100 MW JMCC WING Generators we CAN power the USA from the wind with a minor supplement from Natural Gas ONLY (eliminating nuclear … every nuclear plant is leaking in the USA today – Nuclear IS NOT GREEN !!!). 4) A single 100 MW JMCC WING Generator will replace 125 of the 3 blade disasters or 600,000 solar panels with less than an acre of land footprint – WITHOUT government subsidies. The author Shernikau bit the “Myth of Renewable Energy” hook line and sinker as outlined in McCanney’s 2009 book. This amounts to collusion of GE/Siemans and the central power company (government oversight) monopoly to push for massive government subsidies of crap that they knew would never work and most importantly would never compete against the central power company monopoly (GE and Siemens core business). When the public finally woke up to this … the Nay sayers would rush in to claim that we have to return to coal – Natural Gas – nuclear and petrol based energy (ala Dr Shernikau and a host of others including the ignorant wattsupwiththat editors who post this tripe). The only truthful statement in the entire article (aside from the standard charts and graphs) is the Forbes statement “The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.” (Forbes, May 2019). The 3 blade monsters and solar panels were never meant to replace the central power company in fact they were designed NOT TO. The only problem is they never counted on an independent thinker like James McCanney to design the system that would replace the central power companies.
I just had a look at the
JMCC WING I could not help thinking,how many Guinea pigs do you have running around in there,
(HUMOUR)
“Thinker” James McCanney:
You speak very well of yourself!
I’ll give you that!
Bravo!!
(snort)
The only thing he has “thought” of is a new way to separate suckers from their money.
seems the gov internet trolls have crawled out of their caves on WUWT
And to be fair you are here to try to promote your own product,blatantly. Your e-commerce web site is just that.as to the “blade” no doubt you have researched and come up with a interesting product, but you seem to emphasis criticism of the wind lobby ,which I dont disagree with ,but should you not be EG explaining the advantages and figures of the blade demonstrated,If the wind industry have blackballed you, how? if they feel so threatened by your blade,have they not offered to buy you out?you haven’t been trolled you have been questioned over a blatant sales pitch,with very little technical information.
So anyone who can see through the nonsense you are trying to scam off on others, is just a government troll.
Typical.
I’ve taken a look at your video. I didn’t see anything that was tried and rejected generations ago.
BTW, since you are planning on replacing centralized power generation, how do you intend to get around the problem of wind being an intermittent source.
In every generation, there will always be a con man trying to sell 100 mpg carburetors to the general public.
If this thing was as good as you claim, power companies would be beating down your door to license it.
the power companies have been beating my door down to prevent it from coming to fruition … you seem to assume the world works on normal … seems the internet trolls are alive and well on WUWT
Where are your patents?
Evidence please.
Everyone of your “designs” has been around for generations, and all have been abandoned for reasons of being both impractical and inefficient.
Paragraphs please, otherwise it’s just a big blob of text!
KiteGen have also had difficulty getting their project off the ground. It seems the technology has at least teething troubles.
They seem to be going for highly specialised markets, suggesting cost is also a problem.
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/1728011/saipem-backs-kitegen-as-energy-kite-wind-power-takes-off
Eventually, we’ll need to exploit resources from off-planet sources. “Eventually” might be a half a billion years or it might be much sooner, but eventually, we’ll run out of the crucial elements needed to produce -any- of the existing sources of power. Crude oil, coal, natural gas, rare earths, lithium, uranium, thorium, copper, etc., none of these is unlimited on this planet. They are going to run out. Even if they did not, the Sun is going to burn through the hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, … etc, … and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant phase. At that point the Earth will be burnt to a cinder because it will be inside the Sun surface. Our time here is limited by these indisputable facts.
All life on this planet requires that we develop space technology and establish extra-terrestrial resource surveying and acquisition capabilities. Then we need to expand out into the rest of the solar system, and beyond. Let’s get to it before we run out of the crucial elements needed to sustain space technology.
That’s assuming humans outlive all the resources we can extract. The evidence suggest to me the resources left will still be here when we are all gone.
Exactly Patrick; there’s a lot of climate deniers here who can’t see or refuse to believe the published data re global temperature rise versus fossil fuel combustion. There is a very narrow window remaining for survival of humanity. When I look at data since 1980 I suspect may already be too late.
I think you misunderstood my post. Too late since 1980, really? Yeah, you misunderstood my post.
Sorry Patrick, you can’t be as smart as I thought! 🙂
First off Roger, it’s isn’t polite to come in someone else’s home and whiz on their carpet.
“Denier” is a cheap insult that really means “heretic”. The cry of “heretic” historically preceded persecution, followed by mass murder. There’s NO science in your current ideology.
Temperatures have gone up, down and sideways all while CO2 levels have gone up.
There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature.
Not in the last 200 years, not in the last 120 million years.
You obviously haven’t studied (or had false data for) last 50 years!
Things like rare earths, lithium, copper etc are never “used up”.
When they are worn out and thrown away, they get put into dumps. Where they sit until the price goes up enough to make it worth mining the dumps for all the raw materials being stored there.
“Why today’s renewables cannot power modern civilization”
They were never intended to.
Exactly.
They are intended to power a population of 1 billion max. As Dr. Schellnhuber CBE, mekes perfectly clear.
Collateral damage – 6 billion people. But as Lord Bertrand Russell wrote in Impact of Science on Society, the really high minded say what of it.
Wind not only suffers from low wind speeds but also high winds speeds and it is the high winds and turbulence that cause gearbox and other failures in the whole structure. A decent line of very severe thunderstorms can totally destroy any wind or solar farm and the evidence is there to see in Puerto Rico where Hurricane Marcia left those systems unusable. Wind and solar cannot provide extra power when the grid is put under load and are not able to provide reactive power into the grid where it is needed, and at night and early morning large grids still need around 80% of day time base power to keep modern cities and industries operating.
“thus Germany decided to build new gas-fired power plants instead”
That statement is absolutely untrue. The Germans are not replacing coal with gas, certainly not building gas to save on CO2. They are replacing their electricity generation across the board with renewable energy.
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/SecurityOfSupply/GeneratingCapacity/PowerPlantList/PubliPowerPlantList_node.html
further, when citing power plants, it is misleading not to show the percentage of ELECTRICITY generation from renewables in Germany separately, but only to bundle it in with heat and transport.
German electricity was 40% of total electricity in 2018 – more than coal
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-power-renewables/renewables-overtake-coal-as-germanys-main-energy-source-idUSKCN1OX0U2
All is well, right griff?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-carbon-companies/german-carbon-pricing-plan-may-cost-dax-companies-billions-report-idUSKBN1W31M3
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecb-policy-rates/ecb-cuts-key-rate-to-restart-bond-purchases-idUSKCN1VX1DB
A listener asks the question “how do you account for intermittent wind” with the JMCC WING Generator system. This is all explained in my 2009 book “McCanney WING Generator – World Energy Project” (with addendum “The Myth of Alternative Energy” where I expose the corrupt energy industry). Everything I predicted in that book has now come to pass exactly as predicted. Intermittent wind is a problem with the failed 3 blade turbines which are a bandaid at best. To solve the intermittent wind problem you 1) need a system that works down to low wind speeds and up to very high wind speeds (the WING does this), 2) you need distributed energy (there is always wind blowing somewhere … my studies show the national average wind energy is a constant), 3) you overbuild the wind segment of the energy system so the distributed WING units are working at partial capacity (something again the 3 blade things could never do), 4) (and most importantly) you remove the control of the voltage from the hands of the central power company. The control of voltage is a defacto control that no one has ever questioned. Who ever gave the central power company the mandate to control the voltage ??? They do a terrible job of it and with increasing alternative sources of energy they fail miserably (ask the poor mates down under in Australia if you have any doubts). ALL OF YOU have a UPS or many of them in your house or business BECAUSE THE POWER COMPANIES CANNOT CONTROL THE VOLTAGE. The Nikola Tesla designed power grid was never meant to have a constant voltage. The best place to control the voltage is locally. You are already doing that ALL OF YOU with your UPS power control units at every computer/TV/etc etc. Do you want to continue to charge your electric cars with coal and nuclear electricity? The WING moto is “The Jet Age of Wind Energy”. And about another comment above that the power companies would be beating my door down to get this technology. Actually they have done everything possible to prevent it from emerging. The controlled Wind and solar groups like AWEA and CWEA look at who runs those … GE AND SIEMENS !!! get a clue folks and quit repeating the misguided BS you learned in the planned obsolescence wind and solar industries. As my uncle Ben used to say … “Open up your big brown eyes and see what’s going on in the world around you”!!!! PS. to the comment of whether there is a guinea pig running inside the WING … actually yes we put one there to fool people like this into thinking it is a little animal and not the wind.
Paragraphs would help greatly in your post IMO.
A bit more logic may help too! The outcome for many households if voltage becomes quite variable is a bit scary. Oh, and I’m in AUSTRALIA with very stable voltage supply. Well, in Queensland anyway.
Absolutely no data, just constant whine about how powerful people are trying to shut you up.
Anyone who actually believes that the power companies can’t control voltage levels either doesn’t know enough about power generation to talk intelligently, or he’s hoping everyone else is.
Total scam from the get go.
Odd, I thought Tesla won the battle with Edison, and AC became world standard.
To control the frequency is the key, and the recent English windy blackout involed exactly that.
Notice the high tension lines for windy power are megavolt DC..
Which is why in Germany, they say Fidget Current has replaced AC.
Running a grid on Fidget Current gives me the shivers!
“I am not even considering the overburden that needs to be moved for each ton of minerals mined. The overburden ratio can be estimated 1:10. Thus, you can 10x fold the numbers above. One Tesla battery requires 500-1.000 tons of materials to be moved/mined compared to coal which requires only 0,3 tons – a factor of 1.700 to 3.300!”
That is some fudge factor, and as someone who has working in every phase of the iron and steel industry (mining to mill), is pretty inaccurate. Of course some basis should be given for such a large adjustment.
You describe the importance of methane production by gas on the case for coal vs gas. I have always wondered whether methane has an impact. If you look at the infrared spectra of methane and compare it with the dominant spectra of water (for instance on page 291 of ‘Climate Change, the Facts 2019’), it seems that the absorption band of methane at 1200 to 1400 (cm-1) is right at the edge where water starts to absorb. Water concentrations vary greatly in the atmosphere, of course, but such is its dominance as a green house gas that, if it does overlap with methane in this way, methane would have virtually zero impact on global warming. (CO2 is different, of course, as one of its lobes is in the 2200 to 2400 range where water transmits.)
Is any of this right? Someone must have more accurate spectroscopic spectra for water and methane and can tell me if they do indeed absorb at the same wavelengths.
Batteries can transpose energy from onehour of the day to another, but they cannot stre vast amounts of energy required when the sun stops shing for days or weeks or the wind stops blowing for days or weeks. Batteries DO NOT transfom an unreliable power generation technology into a reliable one.
“Our long-term future will need to be all renewable” Define renewable.
Why no mention of nuclear?
KcTaz
“Why no mention of nuclear?”
Are you aware of the costs of
– the dismantling (and not: decommissioning, of course) of a 1GWel plant?
– the final treatment and the secured disposal for centuries of
— the contaminated parts of the plant (reactor kernel, primary cooling system)
— the used fuel rods?
Do you know that 40 years ago, the dismantling of a French 4G plant (“Superphénix”, 1.2 GWel) had been estimated at 300 million French francs, i.e. about 50 million US$ ?
20 years later, as the maintenance costs bypassed anything imaginable, the plant was shut down, and the dismantling costs were suddenly reestimated at 1.5 billion French francs (increase factor 5).
The dismantling started 12 years ago, with a cost estimate of then 1 billion Euro (increase factor 20), and is intended to be completed in 2027. They needed 10 years to process the 5,500 tons of highly contaminated liquid sodium used in the plant’s cooling system. The reactor’s kernel, the rods and the breeding blankets still await final processing.
The billion Euro estimate? Hmmmmh.
Inbetween, the ASTRID project intended to be the next rebirth of the French 4G tech was prematurely abandoned.
And… there are in France 58 tradiational, U235-based nuclear plants (Westinghouse tech) awaiting their dismantling and the final processing of all the waste they produced during the last 40 years.
New nuke plants? Gracias no…
But you dont come up with any alternative do you,how about thorium reactors ? Smart,safe, can be built to any size, be it a rural community to a large city, power to the people in a real sense.but that would never do would it,cant have the monopoly broken, bit to much gloom and doom on this thread this morning.
B d Clark do you have knowledge of a single thorium reactor actually in use providing a decent sized city with power? My understanding is that it still theoretical but with good possibilities. Not taken up by major powers because it doesn’t provide waste product viable for atomic weapons. So much for our kids’ future!
Of course your wrong about thorium power plants being theoretical, you need to do some real research the technology was tried and tested in the 1950s,ttry doing some research extremist, do you see the blaring contradiction in your post
Did it cross your mind theres enough u235 across the world to make enough bombs to last for centuries,we dont need conventional reactors to create fission material.except you come up with the green party line as a excuse not to use any form of n reactor, a cheap,safe and easily adaptable form of energy that can supply energy indefinitely, of course this goes against your genocide beliefs.
Great to know there are some sane and sensible posters on this thread! 🙂
Our species may have a longer term albeit very expensive future.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES EMIT MORE CO2 THAN DIESEL ONES, GERMAN STUDY SHOWS
* Date: 23/04/19
http://bit.ly/2ZYdUXJ
Thorium can give humanity clean, pollution free energy | Kirk Sorensen | TEDxColoradoSprings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kybenSq0KPo
__Are we headed for a solar waste crisis?
http://bit.ly/2ZBR4Vp
Dirty Secret Behind Wind Turbines, They Need Lots Of Oil. http://bit.ly/2NiMJnZ
https://dailycaller.com/2017/03/03/dirty-secret-behind-wind-turbines-they-need-lots-of-oil/.
Just installing the foundation of a single offshore turbine can consume 18,857 barrels of marine fuel during construction, according to calculations published by Forbes Wednesday. Offshore wind farms often have over 100 wind turbines, meaning that building them requires almost 2 million barrels of fuel just to power the ships involved in construction.
“You can’t even construct or operate offshore wind turbines without oil,”…
Big Wind’s Dirty Little Secret: Toxic Lakes and Radioactive Waste
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
The Clean Power Plan Will Collide With The Incredibly Weird Physics Of The Electric Grid
http://bit.ly/2v5FJip
Wind farm turbines wear sooner than expected, says study
Britain’s wind farms are wearing out far more rapidly than previously thought, making them more expensive as a result, according to an authoritative new study.
http://bit.ly/2ORnz0x
You can’t diet by eating more diet snacks. Likewise, you can’t reduce fossil fuel usage by using a lot more fossil fuel to do “green” things.
*
* “Ignorance can be fixed, ……. stupidity is permanent.”
Wake up you fool! That can only be true if your batteries are produced with fossil fuel power generation and even then extremely sus depending on lifetime of battery.
The links for the source documents are pointing to the C: drive.
Could that be corrected, please?