by Vijay Jayaraj
We all love energy solutions that make life better. It is an undeniable fact that coal propelled the Industrial Revolution and led to the alleviation of poverty in the West. More recently, the oil reserves in the Middle East have made it one of the most economically developed regions in the world.
Despite their continuous support to the global economy, these fossil fuel sources have now become unpopular among the climate-sensitive, anti-fossil fuel, green lobbyists and environmental enthusiasts. They’ve branded fossil fuel as “evil,” and the reason for the on-going “climate emergency.”
As an alternative, the mainstream media, celebrities, and a section of scientists ask us to embrace energy solutions like wind and solar, because they will make our future better. They ask us to accept renewables as the miracle energy solution that can meet global energy demands in a clean and green way. Interesting stories from poor countries—where stand-alone renewable systems power very small households—are often presented as evidence for renewables’ life-changing role among people who are not connected to the electricity grid.
The issue of replacing fossil fuels with renewables is important to the American presidential election. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has proposed a Clean Energy Plan that aims at spending trillions of dollars on developing renewable energy technology and ending fossil fuel use completely.
However, anti-fossil activists do not promote these new and popular renewable energy sources based on their proven effectiveness. Instead, they ask us to blindly trust the hypothetical benefits they claim renewables will bring in future.
The ground reality has been contrary to the glory that the mainstream media attribute to renewables.
Intermittent and Unreliable
The biggest problem with renewables is that they are unreliable. In energy terms, they are intermittent, owing to their nature of energy generation. Wind turbines are completely dependent on wind flow, can be very volatile when wind is inconsistent, and cease producing electricity during windless days and seasons.
Likewise, output from solar is also highly variable when there isn’t sufficient sunlight, and it stops completely after sunset.
Data on the annual change in energy generation reveal the overall volatility of renewable energy output—hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal, and bioenergy—at a macro-scale in the recent few decades. This volatility also increases the unpredictability with renewable energy output forecasts, resulting in overall uncertainty to power companies and consumers.
Annual change in energy generation from Renewables
Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy Image: Our World in Data
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?tab=chart&time=earliest..latest&country=~USA
Besides, both wind and solar require adequate energy backup in the form of batteries. But currently available battery technology is not capable of supporting large renewable systems. Hence, major renewable generation units depend on backup support from other energy sources (like fossil fuel and nuclear) to make up for the loss in the energy grid.
The recent wildfires in California exposed the inefficiency of renewables, where widespread blackouts brought life to a standstill for thousands of customers. Governor Newsom said that gaps in renewable energy systems led to the blackout of millions of Californians.
More states are beginning to understand this inescapable intermittency problem with renewables. In the Pacific Northwest, Benton Public Utility District (PUD)—which serves 55,000 consumers—is now requesting the state authorities to refrain from installing more wind farms.
“We are continuing to sound the alarm regarding the unacceptably high risk of power grid blackouts in the Pacific Northwest being precipitated by overly aggressive clean energy policies and deepening dependence on wind power to replace retiring coal plants,” read a statement by Benton PUD.
They also stressed the need for critical evaluation in the midst of a renewable craze that is sweeping the states: “While development of wind farms may be politically fashionable and appeal to many in the general public as a harmonization of nature with electricity production, the science and economics indicate powering modern civilization with intermittent generation resources like wind and solar power comes at a high financial and environmental cost.”
Renewables Drain Your Bank
Analysis of power markets in a few European countries have shown that renewables played a major part in increasing electricity prices for domestic households. The same is true in the U.S.
California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New York are not only the leading states for renewable energy in the U.S., they also boast some of the highest residential electricity prices in the country. There could be other factors that influence these high prices, but it is certain that renewable energy has played its part in raising the electricity prices in these states.
In the UK, renewables drove electricity prices higher and made energy access a luxury for many. Even the UK government acknowledges this, and millions of children and elderly Britons suffer regularly from unavailability of cheap power to heat their homes.
Dr. Alan Moran—a respected economist from Australia—evaluated the impact of Australia’s climate and renewable policy on the economy. The pro-renewable climate policy cost each household around 933 USD annually, accounted for 39 percent of household electricity bills, and
caused a net loss of jobs in the economy.
It is also important to note that the cost of operating windmills has not come down in the last two decades despite the contrary claims. A study done on 350 onshore and offshore wind farms in the UK revealed that the operating costs have increased, not decreased, significantly in the last two decades.
Renewables Are Dirty
Renewables are dirty, but the mainstream media usually don’t admit it. They seldom address the proven toxicity of raw materials used in manufacturing of wind and solar energy generation units.
Besides, the end-of-life recycle factor is extremely poor for wind and solar. Decommissioned wind turbines are buried in mass landfills as they cannot be recycled. Wind turbines are also notorious for killing thousands of birds each year, including endangered raptor species.
The notion that renewables are “clean and green” has been nothing but a myth. So are the claims concerning their ability to produce reliable electricity for energy intensive commercial energy units and households in cities. The belief that they can somehow miraculously replace fossil fuels in the next decade and a half is a myth, too.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), is a Research Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and resides in New Delhi, India.
Aussie columnist Tim Blair sums it all up with his oft-repeated line –
“nothing green ever works”
Just for the fun of it, I made a solar powered boat a few years ago. Aluminum dingy, solar panel on a roof, batteries, electric trolling motor. Top speed – 3 mph. Run it for an hour, then spend a full summer day recharging the batteries. Batteries had to be replaced every few years.
Sorry, not interested in an electric automobile.
Slightly off topic, I love the graphics that go with WattsUpWithThat threads. This particular edition, floating islands in the atmosphere, really illustrates the point, kudus to whoever finds these nuggets needs some recognition.
The left really believes renewables are the way of the future. I asked my favorite liberal, a talented smart successful guy, way smarter than me, “Do you really think the world’s economy can be run on wind turbines and solar panels?” “Yes” was his simple answer. It’s as if I asked Charlie Brown if he really believed in the “Great Pumpkin.”
Somehow the folks touting renewable energy believe that the technology will come along to make it viable. How is it that they refuse to believe that the technology will come along to enable us to adapt to whatever changes come along.
Everything climate change related falls apart at the seams if you examine it closely.
The best transport is no transport.
The best electricity is no electricity.
This is the real green agenda.
They know that non-fossil alternatives are inadequate and it’s a feature not a bug.
That’s also why nuclear will be shut as well out since it is the one alternative to fossil energy that would actually work as France has shown for more than half a century.
Low energy feudalism with peasants (us) locked to the land is where our elites are herding us.
Has anyone tried to analyze the effect of removing enough energy from the environment to replace fossil fuels? It cannot be either negligible or benign.
The problem of intermittent and unreliable was knowable from day one. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. The sun sets every night and in most places the wind does not blow continuously. So every night when the wind is not blowing you are out of power. It didn’t take having the recent brown outs here in CA for our government leaders to know there was a problem. Alternate energy phobia is foolishness at its worst. It is the modern day version of the king has no clothes.
“The biggest problem with renewables is that they are unreliable.” Woody biomass is renewable and reliable if it comes from sustainably managed forests and the wood is sent to a modern biomass facility or pellet factory. It’s a renewable that has nothing to do with wind and solar- which destroy landscapes. It sustains landscapes.
The world is being mushroomed about renewables and it’s at the point that they can’t hide it anymore. I’m waiting for the same thing to happen with AGW.
I had no power outages EVER from when I moved into my house 15 years ago, until I found that the power company had started to include wind & solar as resources for the electric grid. For the past 5 years, I have had a minimum of one power outage, always at a very inconvenient time, as in right in the middle of saving something on my desktop or working on it (learned my lesson: save constantly), and this month, I had two outages on the same day. The outages are not just me, but hit the whole neighborhood. The outages seem to always occur when the weather is starting to turn chilly or in the midst of very cold weather.
The power company’s so-called renewable sources are NOT reliable, and at some point, as happened two years ago, the entire county will shut down in the midst of a blizzard. And we will all give them hell for it, count on it. It is less reliable than my great-grandma’s oil lamps and makes it necessary for people buying a home in this area to install a gas line linked generator for emergencies. Never used to have to think about such things, and I have no way to add that to my household. The entire electric connection to the power line would require rewiring. No thanks!
My concern is that these fanatics of The New Religion (Gaia – the Green Goddess – etc.) will try to force this on us with no thought to the consequences for us unimportant taxpayer people. Good reason to NOT let them have jobs, eh?
No, the biggest problem with wind and solar PV is that their life cycle energy cost exceeds the energy produced.
They are subsidy farms.
People are starting awakening everywhere.
Let’s see how Moonbiot or that unknown glasses and small hat guy that criticized (if we can call their arguments critics whatsoever) “Planet of the Humans” are going to speak about this one”. Highly recommended.
https://www.gad-distribution.com/en/one-off-documentaries/current-affairs-investigations/the-dark-side-of-green-energies
Hmm, so is ethanol a “renewable”? It comes from plant matter that gets it’s carbon from the air. That means 10% of all Texas gas is actually a renewable. Never mind it isn’t efficient – it’s renewable. I guess it does suffer in the reliability department – if there is a huge drought then there is less ethanol. So why isn’t it considered “Green” seeing as how it comes from green plants?
Honestly, if one really wanted to do the most good for people and environment we would be building nuclear power plants. Yes, they are not as cheap as natural gas currently is, but getting 20 or 30 years experience in building ever better nukes would provide a solid foundation for the future when gas prices start going high.
Meanwhile I am stuck watching beautiful landscapes (i.e. not the cornfields) sprouting these awful wind warts (wind turbines) which are putting the Texas Power Grid more and more at risk. They do nothing but suck capital out of the government (so really out of taxpayer pockets). They play smack-a-bird and whack-a-bat with the local wildlife and NO ONE seems to care.
Geothermal volatile?
If renewables worked, there would be someplace in the world, where they worked.
Instead all we got is someplace in the world in which a lot money has wasted trying
to make renewables work.
Now Germany is a lousy place to try to make solar energy work. Or hardly surprising that
Germany has caused it electrical power to be expensive, when they spending a lot money
trying to make solar work in region that gets very little solar energy.
Hawaii on other hand gets a lot more solar energy, and they import fossil fuels and use that for most energy needs and it has higher cost of electrical power compared other states.
Next higher portion of electrical power is geothermal energy {makes sense as it’s volcanic island, similar Iceland which also uses geothermal energy a lot}. But it seems one do a lot geothermal energy, and a lot more solar and wind energy. And do as much fossil fuel use at current portion as they get from their solar energy. But they aren’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii
Iceland:
“About 85% of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources.
In 2016 geothermal energy provided about 65% of primary energy, the share of hydropower was 20%, and the share of fossil fuels (mainly oil products for the transport sector) was 15%. In 2013 Iceland also became a producer of wind energy. ”
And in terms electrical power:
“Iceland today generates 100% of its electricity with renewables: 75% of that from large hydro, and 25% from geothermal.”
And
Iceland, March 2020: The price of electricity is 0.126 U.S. Dollar per kWh for households and 0.050 U.S. Dollar for businesses which includes all components of the electricity bill such as the cost of power, distribution and taxes.
Though Iceland has about 1/3 population as Hawaii. Making getting so much more higher portion hydro, a lot easier. But since 1/2 electrical price as Hawaii, Hawaii should able to more geothermal energy and not cost much, and if solar worked, a lot more solar energy.
Iceland has roughly the same population as Anaheim…. It is also “blessed” with volcanoes and easy access to geothermal power, and has abundant sites for building dams.
Doesn’t sound like many other places in the world…..
“Wind turbines are completely dependent on wind flow, can be very volatile when wind is inconsistent, and cease producing electricity during windless days and seasons.”
The solar duck curve and nothing by moonlight is undeniable but they simply refuse to understand how wind is geographically correlated over very large areas and as you add ever more unreliables to a reliable system-
‘The Average’ becomes less and less dominant as a key performance indicator and ‘The Extremes’ increasingly matter.
http://www.wattclarity.com.au/articles/2020/10/wind-nemwide-lowpointtrend/
Essentially these numpties are trying to disprove a fundamental axiom of engineering: You can’t build a reliable system from unreliable componentry.
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2020/october
Presumably they dress daily for for the average climate too?
Dirty unreliables.
Just a sham to distract the masses from the ongoing Marxist coup.
A child of the 1950s I grew up in rural Perthshire, many of the farms round us had single cylinder diesel generators, 1 or 2 kW surplus from WW2. On still days or nights you could hear them chugging away, our nearest neighbour was over a mile away. We relied on bottled gas and paraffin for lights, our neighbours had electric lights and TV but not much more.
When the mains supply was extended nobody refused and kept their generators. We and our nearest neighbour missed out because extending the supply a total of 3 miles for 2 houses was uneconomic. It took another 30 years for that to happen.
Having lived in the 19th century as far as domestic energy is concerned I regard anyone who wants a return to that as insane.
Science and technology is continuously advancing in all spheres. A mere 30 or so years ago, photography relied upon a cumbersome and expensive process using film and chemical processing. Consider how much better and more efficient a modern digital camera is.
Likewise, consider how heavy, cumbersome and low-resolution the average TV set was around 30 years ago. A 36 inch screen was considered huge. Compare that with the latest TV technology, such as a 98 inch 8K screen which is only 1/2 an inch thick. During that 30 year period, we’ve progressed from standard definition, 720×576, to HD, to Ultra HD or 4K, and recently to 8K which has approximately 80 times the amount of picture information (pixels) as those cumbersome pre-HD models, or a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels compared with 720 x 576.
Now, it’s true that the transition towards renewables will be expensive, and many mistakes or poor decisions will be made, and have already been made along the way. Intermittency of supply is obviously a major problem, but why should anyone who claims to have confidence in the scientific process assume that such problems will not be solved as we progress?
20 years ago I used a petrol-driven chain saw on my 5 acre property, to clear trees for a garden bed and remove trees in danger of falling on my house in a storm, and so on. I often wasted a lot of time trying to start the chain saw and replace the spark plugs and take the saw in for a service, and so on.
I now use a battery-operated chain saw with one spare battery which can be fully recharged in 40 minutes. I could work all day long with that chain saw, switching batteries every hour or so. It’s less noisy than a petrol chain saw, requires less maintenance, and is more efficient. That’s progress.
There is already a solution to the intermittency problem of renewables. It’s called ‘battery storage’. However, there’s no need to tell me that that’s currently very expensive and makes renewable, or solar power, more expensive than power from fossil fuels. We all know that. This is a major problem which is being addressed. Battery technology, as with all technology, is in a continual process of improvement.
Is there any reason to assume that such progress has come to an end and that there’s nothing more to be discovered about battery storage? Is it too difficult to imagine that, in another 30 years, we could have batteries that are half the initial cost of current lithium batteries, half the weight with twice the storage capacity, 4 or even 10 times the durability, and which require one quarter, or less, of the current recharging time for full recharge?
Recycling used batteries and solar panels is also an environmental problem which should be addressed. Is there any reason to supposed that advances in technology will not be able to handle this?
Energy supplies are fundamental to the progress and prosperity of mankind. The more the better. Whatever we do, requires energy, from whatever source.
‘Interesting stories from poor countries—where stand-alone renewable systems power very small households -are often presented as evidence for renewables’ life-changing role among people who are not connected to the electricity grid.’
Or you could look at Kenya and Morocco – large scale electrification of whole villages using renewables (in the case of Morocco home grown CSP)
Or even Algeria
https://www.pv-tech.org/news/algeria-picks-solar-to-power-4gw-five-year-renewable-push
Great graphic – I am sure inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver at the Flying Island of Laputa.
At the Island Academy of Lagado they were extracting sunbeams from cucumbers – call back in 8 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagado
However this academy had discovered Mars had 2 moons, 151 years before Hall published.
Remember when being green meant you were about the actual environment? I do. I remember when it was about reducing pollution and trash and finding innovative ways to clean up rivers and the land. I remember when it was OK to enjoy nature and not feel shame that you are destroying it by driving your car to enjoy a nice hike or beach or lake.
I remember those days. And it wasn’t that long ago either. I remember when the idea behind carpooling was so that you didn’t have to sit in traffic for hours on end just getting to work. When the air was really dirty and it was about cleaning the air you breathe by not polluting it.
I remember when companies were held accountable for direct pollution into the water supply or ground. And fines were levied for doing so. And I also remember when PG&E floated the idea that Chromium was “good” for the water of the surrounding town…poisoning it with their “good will” agenda of obfuscation and believing the locals were idiots.
I remember when being “green” meant education about the environment, how you could help and how you could make a difference as a consumer.
And then came government money. Oh yes that bottomless well of money…..the government. I’ve seen it in action. I personally know of how unscrupulous people view government money–it’s FREE. Despite pointing out that it is indeed not free money, they all thought it was because it comes from “on high” like manna into their bank accounts.
My point: the current green movement is not green. It is corrupt. Just like all the institutions and polluting companies before them, they have become corrupt. I have seen my green environmentalist movement become what you can do scaled up to a global threat because they are right and everyone else is wrong. And blast those that disagree, pound into the ground anyone that does not believe or spout the rhetoric because they have FREE MONEY on their side and nobody is going to stop them! They are the ones in the “right” and anyone who is a dissenter or skeptic is a crockpot shill of the oil and gas industry.
So this paper, in it’s finite extreme will be shunned because it doesn’t matter how prominent the scientists are, it does not agree with their viewpoints and so they are nothing more than “paid advertisements” for fossil fuels.
So sad. Because the solution is actually pretty simple and it goes back to the original movement of the environmental movement. Clean up after yourself. It really IS that simple. A chore that does not need justifications bordering on the absurd to avoid, just do your damn chores.
There are politicians attempting to shut down the country to save us no matter the poverty and suffering it will bring. For what, predictions of change that never happen. And who is to blame, we are of course. Those who would save us blame us! It is mystical they can see what we cannot and we are to blame for what they see.
There has to be big bucks in it for some to push hard for renewable energy that is not efficient or reliable. Personal income and the economy will be destroyed along with quality of life. So why do it? Personal profit in a short term for a few and a long recovery for the rest of us. What a grand legacy for grandchildren.