Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Steve Case; According to Boston Review, we have to surrender our obsession with continuous electricity supply to save the world from climate change.
To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity
Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives.
Many decades ago electricity became the new oxygen, and the vast majority of Americans today believe they need it every moment of every waking or sleeping hour. The United States has built a vast infrastructure for generating, transmitting, and consuming it—all almost entirely based on planet-destroying fossil fuels and nuclear power.
…
For those seriously concerned about climate change, the inverse—the demand for electrical continuity—may be the real problem. Today’s most ambitious plans to abandon fossil fuels—which are certainly not supported by the natural gas industry—allow ten, twenty, or thirty years to wire the whole country with solar and wind power, running all day, every day, for everyone, everywhere. The plans differ in speed, but all agree on the last point: except for six agonizing hours per year, electrons must flow 24/7/365. To make that steadiness possible, solar plants will have to store some electricity during the daytime feast to last through the nocturnal famine. “As economies shift to variable renewables,” environmental activist Paul Hawken writes in his aggressive climate proposal Drawdown (2017), “management of the power grid with energy storage systems is critical.”
…
Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico thus provide models for what we might call pause-full electricity. Admittedly, neither Zimbabweans nor Puerto Ricans chose to accept this rationing. And in Zimbabwe, official incompetence has reduced electricity to a nearly unbearable degree. Still, Zimbabwe’s past and Puerto Rico’s potential indicate just and feasible ways of living amid intermittency. With a pause, life goes on. By abiding that interlude—by shedding their load—people can preserve life near and far. If my town’s blackout will lessen, say, the force of Puerto Rico’s next hurricane, then, please, shed us half a day per week.
…
What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere. Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment—perhaps some “continuous” businesses and cell towers too. And, in cities, elevators, streetlights, and subways must run reliably. One could imagine battery-assisted, semi-smart micro-grids connecting such infrastructure as well as home medical devices. But we don’t need the entire residential third of U.S. electricity consumption to run off lithium or to operate seamlessly.
…
Read more: http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/david-mcdermott-hughes-save-climate-give-demand-constant-electricity
The same arguments could be applied to switching off household access to the electricity grid completely. Historically people didn’t have any electricity, they developed plenty of ways to preserve food which don’t rely on electricity, like pickling, canning or drying. People who need refrigeration to preserve life saving medications like insulin could pick up their supply a few times per week from a central depot.
But there is a noticeable lack of people who actually choose to live this way.
Hughes: “…We can live with some intermittency and rationing…”
No, I can’t. I will go out and purchase a home generator and generate my own electricity rather than live with blackouts, brownouts, and rationing. Take your Central Socialist Planning leftist BS somewhere else.
If you really want to reduce dependency of the over-abundant fossil fuels left in the Earth, then invest in MSR research and start building MSR power plants. Then I am happy, your are…well, you are never happy, but I am happy.
Classic ivory towerism. All verbal diarrhea, and zero connection with reality or common sense.
So – we have this writer, and I would assume he proof read his own work. Then I presume there are editors in this publication. They all looked at this mess and thought to themselves, ‘we should be more like Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico, that sounds right’
Ah the old “let them eat cake”. If I had a nickle for every multi millionaire… I would be one.
These people haven’t thought things through. For a start, their envisioned society would be able to produce no metals. No steel, no iron, no aluminium, no copper, bronze or brass. The reason is simple. The modern production of such materials relies heavily upon a continuous and substantial supply of electric power. True, these materials were produced before electricity but only in small quantities and in inferior qualities, at the expense of a substantial consumption of wood, or sometimes coal. Without the availability of reliable power supplies or the ability to burn oil, gas or coal, the substantial lack of metals arising from the totality of their policies would very quickly have us back in the stone age without even the intermittent power supply which they regard as adequate.
My observation is, in most countries that don’t have a stable grid electric supply.
There is more generating capacity in all the privately owned diesel generators, than there is public generating capacity.
The sound of tropical Africa is Cummins diesel engines.
This article proves yet again that there is no shortage of college professors anxious to tell everyone else how to live.
It is beyond belief that a University Professor could write such drivel.
Where is the data that proves man made carbon dioxide emissions is causing dangerous global warming?
Carbon dioxide is the basis of all life on earth, all plant growth, all food and oxygen.
We really need to do something about all those undersea volcanoes caused by plate tectonics. For millions of years they have been putting carbon dioxide into our oceans, to the point where the oceans are saturated with it. And, of course, the oceans then emit the excess into our atmosphere! The idiots at the IPCC then try to blame us for acidifying the oceans.
It is all the fault of Alfred Wegener for stepping outside of his primary scientific specialty.
“According to Boston Review”
Yes, Boston- the capital of the most politically correct state, Massachusetts- which tops CA, in my opinion. A state where the “intellectuals” think never cutting trees will save the Earth and its species: “The Critical Role of Forests in Protecting Climate and Public Health”
Thanks for the link Joseph,
That video contains a scary density of utter tosh.
I think my favourite is 55:50 when the costs (nearly 300 million) of energy efficincy programs is shown as about fifteen times the 30 year energy saving (about 20 million), so they just add in a health saving estimate of almost 900 million.
People just acept this nonsense?
We drive for western PA to Cape Cod a couple times a year, a lot more people should make that trip, they would learn first hand that America is covered with trees. That is a fact greenunistas refuse to accept.
Here’s a reality TV show idea. Environmentalist Island Survivor. Put this David Hughes guy and the rest of his ilk on an island where they have to live in the conditions they propose everyone should have to live in to be “green”.
The first of them to say “Nuclear power is the solution! I want air conditioning!” is the winner.
The last of them to die of malnutrition or horrible tropical disease is the winner.
Yes, but make it an island in one of the islands in a lake in northern Canada.
Certainly not on an island where there is a balmy year-round temperature.
Having failed to convince that solar and wind can supply reliable power they’ve resorted to telling people they don’t need reliable power. Another means justifies the end gambit because that’s all they have left.
From the article: “If my town’s blackout will lessen, say, the force of Puerto Rico’s next hurricane, then, please, shed us half a day per week.”
Right.
The alarmists are ate up with the Dumb A$$ (they are extremely delusional).
Puerto Rico certainly does provide an example of “pause-full” electricity. Hurricanes do rather pause the production of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels…
And now that:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2029812
Maybe COVID is even more harmful than estimated. It attacks the brain. Even of people not known to have COVID!
Consider that the author of the article is on a life support system because of say “kung flu” and a load shedding event occurs and their life support system stops. How are they going to feel about that? THEY ARE NOT GOING TO FEEL ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY ARE DEAD. Actually I can live with that, it’s their own fault, the average of the world IQ will improve, the rest of us can now get on with life. You can’t fix stupid.
These days, with “load shedding” in South Africa, anyone who needs oxygen at home usually has an oxygen generator. But, as backup, they HAVE to have an oxygen cylinder, with someone able to change over when the power goes out!
Again, they’re free to go first.
I’d be more impressed if these people actually were living the way they want us to live.
Cowards.
Steve Pinker had the reply to this nonsense:
“You first”
” People who need refrigeration to preserve life saving medications like insulin could pick up their supply a few times per week from a central depot”.
Well they could if if the battery of the electric car the elites want to force us all into wasn’t flat, waiting for some power to charge it.
What? This is too ridiculous even for Griff to comment?
I do have other calls on my time…
Ok- not bad Griff!
“they developed plenty of ways to preserve food”, like keeping a pig in the back yard. In London, they even kept cows in the cellar, so people could have fresh milk. Yes, they were squalid conditions, but people survived. Except for the ones that died in the awful disease rife conditions.
The way the Climate Crisis propagandists throw out patently false statements, like being able to reduce Puerto Rican hurricanes by doing without reliable electricity, sickens me to the core. Even the alarmist IPCC couldn’t find a connection and yet the green media keep drowning us in scare stories like this. Will logic and truth win out, or we be taken over by a new eco-nazi reich?
Before it becomes a thought crime, let me get this out at least one more time: 15-20% greener over 40 years and 1.5°C over 100yrs is not a climate crisis – it’s actually a good start!
Zimbawbeans and South Africans would not agree about the joys of load shedding
So, assuming “shedding is the future” wouldn’t it be easier if states like, for example NSW, Australia made it legal to not be permanently connected to the electricity grid while generating and storing one’s own electricity?
Messed up the formatting there, didn’t I? Try again.
So he’s not prepared to give up his mobile phone or internet access.
Good luck with trying to keep the lights on using unreliables.
And what about fridges and freezers for those of us who don’t own our own supply of pigs and sea bream?
UK Q1 2020 – 47% electricity from renewables. Germany Q1 52% electricity from renewables.
No grid outages.
We don’t have to give up anything.
Windy February WEATHER .
Q2 is usually a lot lower.
Hopefully the gas keeps coming, since you totally rely on it…. hey griff
griffool ignoring the 122.5 TWh of GAS used for domestic purposes in Q1.
And total GAS use of 269.4 TWh.. far more energy than from wind and solar.than
Such mal-information from griffool.
Nothing unusual about that, is there.
But I keep reading posts from people like you saying that level of renewables is impossible…
and next year it will be still higher, won’t it?
Depends on the wind, and how much GAS you need to keep the grid stable.
Look at all that domestic GAS usage, griffool..
even you aren’t DUMB enough to think you can replace that. !
A lot of heating and cooking done with GAS, isn’t it.
What would you do without it.
Odd that you answer here, but STILL can’t provide any scientific evidence for warming by human replenished atmospheric CO2.
Cowardice, incompetence….. or you KNOW that there isn’t any. ?
Don’t push it
At 50% renewables electricity is largely just much more expensive than it need be, although you do run risks of blackouts such as August 9th 2019 in the UK if you don’t substantially bolster grid stabilisation support at considerable extra cost. Those costs are already three times what they were a couple of years ago.
As you start getting to 60%+ levels, the rate of curtailment starts increasing sharply, but you still need almost 100% backup. Costs start escalating alarmingly, and so do blackout risks. Nevertheless, it remains cheaper to throw away output in curtailment than attempt to store it.
Yep. You are right. Lets us just turn it all off. Much more sensible and sustainable.