Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
After reading some information at Friends of Science, I got to thinking about how impossible it will be for us to do what so many people are demanding that we do. This is to go to zero CO2 emissions by 2050 by getting off of fossil fuels.
So let’s take a look at the size of the problem. People generally have little idea just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. Figure 1 shows the global annual total and fossil energy consumption from 1880 to 2019, and extensions of both trends to the year 2050. I note that my rough estimate of 2050 total annual energy consumption (241 petawatt-hrs/year) is quite close to the World Energy Council’s business-as-usual 2050 estimate of 244 PWhr/yr.
Figure 1. Primary energy consumption, 1880-2019 and extrapolation to 2050. A “petawatt-hour” is 1015 watt-hours
So if we are going to zero emissions by 2050, we will need to replace about 193 petawatt-hours (1015 watt-hours) of fossil fuel energy per year. Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity. (In passing, for all of these unit conversions let me recommend the marvelous website called “Unit Juggler“.)
Starting from today, January 25, 2021, there are 10,568 days until January 1, 2050. So we need to install, test, commission, and add to the grid about 22 TW / 10568 days ≈ adding 2.1 gigawatts (GW, or 109 watts) of generating capacity each and every day from now until 2050.
We can do that in a couple of ways. We could go all nuclear. In that case, we’d need to build, commission, and bring on-line a brand-new 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every single day from now until 2050. Easy, right? …
Don’t like nukes? Well, we could use wind power. Now, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Typical wind “capacity factor”, the percentage of actual energy generated compared to the nameplate capacity, is about 26%.
So we’d have to build, install, commission and bring online just over 4,000 medium-sized (2-megawatt, MW = 106 watts) wind turbines every single day from now until 2050. No problemo, right? …
Wind farm densities are on the order of 20 MW installed capacity per square kilometer. That’s ten 2-megawatt turbines per square km. So we’ll need to identify 400 square km. (150 square miles) of land for new wind farms every day until 2050.
Don’t like wind? Well, we could use solar. Per the NREL, actual delivery from grid-scale solar panel installations on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 8.3 watts per square metre depending on location. So we’d have to cover ≈ 100 square miles (250 square kilometres) with solar panels, wire them up, test them, and connect them to the grid every single day from now until 2050. Child’s play, right? …
Of course, if we go with wind or solar, they are highly intermittent sources. So we’d still need somewhere between 50% – 90% of the total generating capacity in nuclear, for the all-too-frequent times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Finally, an update. A well-informed commenter below says:
I think you missed something, Willis
That 22 TW is average power. But generating plants, transmission facilities, transformers, circuit interrupters, and all that stuff, must be sized for the PEAK demand.
Most distribution systems in the US have a peak to average (PtA) ratio of around 1.6 to 1.7. Except for the New England ISO which is running around 1.8. Some systems in Australia have an annual PtA ratio of around 2.3. I expect Arizona would run that high taken in isolation, which, of course, it never is.
Take 1.8 as an estimated overall PtA ratio, you need to meet a peak demand of 22 * 1.7 terawatts or 37.4 TW.
But no power system can survive with generation equal to demand. So add 15% for reserves for when parts of the system are down because of maintenance, failures, or the like. The result is, you need peak generation of 43 TW. So roughly double all of your numbers as to what needs to be built.
And guess what? He’s right. We can’t just provide for average demand. We have to provide enough power for the hottest days in the summer, and for the coldest days in the winter. So we need to double the numbers I gave above.
However, there’s another factor to consider. This is the fact that there is not as much heat loss in electric generation and electric cars. Using fossil fuels for generation and transportation is less efficient. So we won’t need to replace the full total of fossil fuels.
At present, about 60% of the fossil energy is lost as heat. However, not all of this inefficiency will disappear if we switch to an all-electric world … and some will increase. For example, overall transmission and congestion losses for the electrical grid are on the order of 15%. So if we are powering homes and industry and transportation via electricity, those losses will be greater, not less.
In addition, while electric car running efficiencies are greater than internal combustion engines, the batteries are very energy-intensive to make. And internal combustion engines use waste heat for heating the car interior, while battery cars use electricity. So the efficiency gains there will not be as great as they might seem.
Next, in some sectors there will be no reduction in losses. If the heating of a building is switched from gas to electric, there is no gain in efficiency, because the same amount of heat is still being lost through the walls and the roof.
Overall, due to increases in efficiency, we’re likely to have to replace only about half of the current fossil fuel use with electricity. So that offsets the doubling mentioned above to allow for peak consumption.
To summarize: to get the world to zero emissions by 2050, our options are to build, commission, and bring on-line either:
• One 2.1 gigawatt (GW, 109 watts) nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, OR
• 4000 two-megawatt (MW, 106 watts) wind turbines each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, assuming there’s not one turbine failure for any reason, OR
• 100 square miles (250 square kilometres) of solar panels each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, assuming not one of the panels fails or is destroyed by hail or wind.
I sincerely hope that everyone can see that any of those alternatives are not just impossible. They are pie-in-the-sky, flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible. Not possible physically. Not possible financially. Not possible politically.
Finally, the US consumes about one-sixth of the total global fossil energy. So for the US to get to zero fossil fuel by 2050, just divide all the above figures by six … and they are still flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible.
Math. Don’t leave home without it.
My very best wishes to everyone, stay safe in these parlous times,
w.
PS—As always, to avoid misunderstandings I request that when you comment, you quote the exact words that you are discussing so we can all be clear about who and what you are referring to.
Hard Copies: Someone said they couldn’t get this to print from WUWT. So I selected the whole document from the title to the end and copied it. I pasted it into Microsoft Word. Then I cleaned up the formatting and saved it to my Dropbox, where you can access it here.
I also saved it as a PDF file for those who don’t have Word. It’s here. However, because it’s a PDF, the links to other documents are not active.
Update re $$$: Top consulting firm McKinsey has calculated that the net-zero emissions targets set by global governments and championed by the United Nations would cost the public a staggering $275 trillion by 2050, or around $25 billion per day until 2050. Full article here.
Update re Efficiency: Several people have commented that we don’t need to replace all of the energy provided by fossil fuels, since a lot of it is lost as heat and won’t be if we go electric. My calculations indicate that the savings will be nowhere near what they claim, because for many things like home and office heating the losses are not dependent on the methods used to provide the heat. And electric systems have their own losses, such as transmission losses, which will increase if we go all-electric. Finally, solar and wind require 24/7 spinning backup to replace their generation at a moment’s notice … and at present that’s only practical with fossil fuels, and it requires the spinning backup to run at very low efficiency.
But heck, read the head post—relative efficiency of fossil vs. electric is why I divided all my numbers by 2, and it’s still flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible.
Technical Note: These figures are conservative because they do not include the energy required to mine, refine, and transport the necessary materials, plus provide the energy needed to actually build the reactors, wind turbines, or solar panels. This is relatively small per GW of generation for nuclear reactors but is much larger for wind and solar.
They also don’t include the fact that wind turbines have about a 20-year lifespan, so after 20 years we’ll have to double the turbine construction per day. And with solar the lifespan is about 25 years, so for the last five years, we’ll have to double the solar construction per day. And then we will have to decommission and dispose of millions of wind turbines and hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels …
The figures also don’t include the fact that if we go to an all-electric economy we will have to completely revamp, extend, and upgrade our existing electrical grid, including all associated equipment like transformers, power lines, circuit interrupters, and switching stations. This will require a huge investment of time, money, and energy. And this extends into the homes, as every home like mine that’s heated by gas and uses gas for water heating and cooking will need to greatly increase the electrical service to the house and install an electric furnace, stove, and water heater.
Finally, since nuclear power plants take about a decade from site selection to hookup, we don’t have until 2050 to start building them. We only have until 2040, about 2/3 of the time. So we’ll need to build ~ 50% more nuclear power plants per day to get there by 2050
So in terms of energy, these are still conservative figures.
They also don’t include the cost. The nuclear plants alone will cost on the order of US$170 trillion at current prices. And wind or solar plus nuclear will be on the order of US300 trillion, plus decommissioning and disposal costs for wind turbines and solar panels.
Finally, the cost of converting all the individual homes, businesses, and buildings around the world that use gas for heating, cooking, and water heating will be enormous. Who will pay for that?
And this doesn’t touch the cost of the land for siting the windmills and the solar panels, which will be stupendous. Here’s some information from California regarding how hard it is to find suitable land for solar power.
Land
… Another issue is the fact that such solar ‘farms’ require huge tracts of land. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been tasked with finding 24 tracts of public land of three square miles each with good solar exposure, favorable slopes, road and transmission line availability. Additionally, the land set aside for utility-scale solar farms must not disturb native wildlife or endangered species such as the desert tortoise, the desert bighorn sheep, and others. The wildlife issue has proved to be a contentious one. Projects in California have been halted due to the threat caused to endangered species resulting in a backlog of 158 commercial projects with which the BLM is currently contending.
Note that the BLM is having trouble finding a mere 75 square miles of land for solar power generation that doesn’t have too much impact on the environment, and we’re talking about building 200 square miles of new solar power per day …
So it is even more impossible … speaking of which, is it possible to be more impossible?
Because if it is possible … this is it.
Greenpeace will insist that combined cycle power plants running off unicorn farts will save us.
According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s 32 million light duty vehicles with next-generation EVs would require more than half the world’s annual production of copper; twice its annual cobalt; three quarters of its yearly lithium carbonate output; and nearly its entire annual production of neodymium. [i]
When you consider that today, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the world’s roads with projections of 2 billion by 2035, one can easily see that the world may not have enough minerals and metals to support the EV growth projections. [ii]
[i] Kelly, Michael, Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan, June 8, 2020, https://capx.co/until-we-get-a-proper-roadmap-net-zero-is-a-goal-without-a-plan/
[ii] Green Car Reports, https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1093560_1-2-billion-vehicles-on-worlds-roads-now-2-billion-by-2035-report
Without a plan, it’s no goal, it’s just a wish.
No, not a wish; they know it’s impossible. It’s an excuse for imposing more controls on how you live your life and paying public funds to themselves and their allies.
A fantasy.
All in power know or suspect that a plan is not possible. Indeed, it is not. But with OPM we can have a nice bonfire in these endtimes.
Call this plan Plan A. When (if) they realize it is impossible to provide the needed energy supply, they will go to Plan B, which is to cut the energy demand. No cars, trucks, airplanes, heating, industry, electricity, and keep cutting things. Until (if) they realize that that is impossible without revolution, then they will go to Plan C. Cut the number of people living. They will start by putting “deniers” in reeducation camps, they will end up putting non-party members in the gulags. I would not put a Final Solution past them. After all, we have seen it all before when an ideology rules.
Or they could just make a big mess of it and end up in a big bad war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse: Plague, War, Famine, Death.
There may not be enough resources for a World War II type total war, more likely continuous conflict between client states of major antagonists, perhaps over markets and resources.
I fear this may be closer to the truth than any of us would like ! ?
Our develop a vaccine for themselves that makes them immune & will be denied to the citizens. Then they will turn loose the deadly virus that has a 80-90% kill rate on the population.
This may seem dystopian in its outlook, but think about it.
Supply and demand. If I want to reduce the supply I just eliminate the demand.
God help us, but I don’t trust the Marxists in the US or EU.
Thank God we have the 2nd amendment in the US.
Bon fires will be banned.
I am reminded of this line from Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War of the Worlds:
“Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march – it was a stampede – without order and without a goal … It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.”
Sentiment beats planning, practicality and economic viability any day.
Given a choice, many people prefer to read about celebrities.
And there’s no known cure.
Put all the solar and wind sites in New Mexico, since the state’s ‘shocked’ by Biden’s attack on oil and gas. Cover the whole state with solar collectors and wind turbines, making sure to stuff as many as possible in Taos and Santa Fe, since those places seem to heavily favor green technology. I’m sure all the folks in those towns would have no problem with this, since ‘we’re all in this together,’ ‘we all have to do our part to save the planet,’ etc.
One small hurdle to overcome though. You would run out of space for the solar panels in 419 or so days.(121,690/290).
Stack them on top of each other 😂😂😂👍🤦🏻♂️
You Sir have an uncommon level of innovative talent.
I would do all that, the only thing I’d change is to do it with an abundance of caution.
Logic will not be tolerated.
Emotion rules.
You are correct Willis – see the bolded paragraphs below.
Regards,
Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/22/earth-day-should-celebrate-engines-and-electricity/#comment-2335996
Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of society – it IS that simple.
Most politicians are too uneducated to even opine on energy, let alone set energy policy.
Witness the energy idiocy of recent politicians in Western Europe, Britain, Canada, the USA, and Australia. These imbeciles have squandered tens of trillions of dollars of scarce global resources on costly, intermittent green energy schemes that are not green and produce little useful (dispatchable) energy, all to save use from imaginary catastrophic global warming – all in a (probably) cooling world.
Fully 85% of global primary energy is still generated from fossil fuels – oil, natural gas and coal. The remainder is largely generated from nuclear and hydro. Hardly any useful energy is generated from green sources, despite tens of trillions in wasted subsidies – enough money to buy too many corrupt politicians, civil servants and academics.
Anti fossil fuels, anti pipelines, anti fracking, anti oilsands, pro green energy, etc. etc. – these scams are all promoted by the same people, all deliberately harming our economies while wrapping themselves in the cloak of phony environmentalism.
These people are not pro-environment – many of their programs such as clear-cutting of tropical rainforests to grow biofuels, draining the Ogallala aquifer to grow corn for fuel ethanol, clear-cutting eastern US forests to provide wood pellets for British power plants, erecting huge wind power towers to slice up birds and bats, etc are ALL anti-environmental.
Their successful efforts to delay and ban fracking of petroleum-rich shales have caused great harm in Britain, continental Europe , and have hampered growth in Canada and the USA. Their successful efforts to shut-in the oilsands through anti-pipeline lies have cost Canada tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs.
By driving up the cost of energy and causing instability in electrical grids they have increased winter mortality and cost lives. Even greater loss of life has been caused in developing countries, where the installation of reliable fossil-fueled energy has been displaced by insistence on intermittent, near-worthless wind and solar power schemes.
Perhaps the greatest cost and loss-of-life has been due to the gross misallocation of global resources, where obvious first priorities such as clean water and sanitation systems, the fight against malaria, and the fight against world hunger have been displaced due to excessive spending on green energy follies.
These are crimes against humanity – they should be prosecuted and the scoundrels and imbeciles who promoted this nonsense should go to jail.
Yes, and what is worst about that is that we tolerate terrible inhumanities like child porn, human trafficking etc. The gullible do-gooders are misled. They have their priorities backwards.
The “easy” answer is to start drilling CO2 injection wells in the Gulf of Mexico and drill them at the same historical rate we drilled oil & gas wells. By 2050, we’ll have injected 60 years worth of current Co2 emissions from electricity generation.
An even easier solution and we already have the means to accomplish it … stop pretending that CO2 is doing what they claim it is. End the “climate change” monologue. Start directing our resources towards real problem.
That option expired on January 20, 2021.
Well, thanks for that. Now I’m even more depressed today. I guess we’re doomed, then.
We would have been doomed if the Democrats won a couple of more Senate seats… We might just be royally fracked for the next 2-4 years.
It’s in the bag. Now that they know they can get away with stuffing the ballot box (Nov 3rd & Jan 5th) elections will be rigged from here on out.
It was so obvious and blatant (regardless how much the media pretend otherwise) I doubt they’ll ever be allowed to get that far again, unless they plan to station the National Guard at every polling place.
Not true at all. None of the 60 court cases were able to prove a shred of fraud. The US decentralised election system means that 1000s of counties would have been ‘in on the fix’ which didnt happen. Indeed in many places Trumps vote increased, often in places that were ‘Democratic counties’ like Philadelphia.
Cant even produce one county in one state that has court level proof of fraud, Guiliani in his one appearance in court even pulled back from alleging Fraud when asking the court to invalidate that states election.
media doesnt pretend the courts kicked out the applications when its the Trump media whos pretending it was stolen…he also claimed he won the 2016 total vote count and appointed a blue chip commission to prove it. Never proved anything as there was no there there.
None of the 60 court cases reached the point where evidence was presented, as you well know.
You don’t need to corrupt every precinct, just enough to make sure that the state totals match what you need them to be.
Oh, dear gawd, what a buffoon. Of course Trump’s votes increased, (to be expected having increased his vote share by 10 million). That happened throughout the US. The courts didn’t even attempt to try the cases. The cases were rejected summarily on the basis of jurisdiction (legalese for cowardly cop-out). There is absolutely no question of massive fraud. The evidence is overwhelming … in the thousands of pages, hundreds of direct witnesses and video of fraud being committed, ballots being harvested, observers being rejected and on and on. It is statistically impossible for Biden to have won the election, considering the reality of Trump’s successes.
The courts were intimidated by the Democrat threats (Pelosi and Kamala) to riot and pillage by their military branch (BLM and Antifa). You need to stop posting until you learn how trials are conducted and how evidence is required. Stop watching the MSM then repeating their disinformation.
Folks, this post is about energy, not the election. Please don’t hijack it, whether or not you think the election was hijacked. That’s a discussion for a different place.
Thanks,
w.
Thanks for the wrist slap … it’s just too easy to stray when an opportunity presents itself.
the election (selection) are 100% connected.
left wing marxist stole the election so they can proceed with destroying the USA.
you can argue 97 different ways, but gorgia has video and 87 witness, statistically impossible results and no independant committe has been allowed to handle or examine any ballots, plus the fbi has not even interviewed any of the fraud employees.
Folks, this post is about energy, not the election. Please don’t hijack it, whether or not you think the election was hijacked. That’s a discussion for a different place.
Thanks,
w.
Amen
the election fraud
and the environmental fraud are one and the same.
find me a Marxist environmentalist that does not believe socialism govt induced force is necessary to save the planet and left wing politics is necessary by any means possible, even cheating, killing, burning and rioting 365 days a year,
dont you know burning buildings is good for the environment
it is a shame because we can move forward save energy and increase production.
one iron seeding cheap way to reduce co2
two. small nukes like France work well
three. insulation for all old buildings makes sense
four heat nacl solar like Australia make sense then use extra energy during non peak to make hydrogen, use hydrogen as the battery then run generator when no sun, any additional hydrogen get sold to fuel cell uses.
five. make all cargo container ships nuclear and stop trading with china saves hundred billion gallon of oil.
six use oil pipe line 100% oil tanker train cars cause 10 catastrophic wrecks and fires a year.
six. only use what makes sense in the different geographic areas, ie solar Nevada, nuclear in upper mid west,
seven. let the engineers at private companies make the decisions for what, where, and how not a bunch of political hack environmentalist
this would give actual results in fifty years.
but environmentalist and politicians do not want to fix anything!!!!!
they want to manage a totally useless program so that they can appoint and graft hundreds of thousands of jobs to fellow corrupt friends and relatives so that they will all have over paid jobs for the next 100 years..
oh and number 8. fix the election process so the USA does not continue the path of a banana republic.
They never “proved” Jimmy Hoffa was murdered either. You think maybe he’s still walking around somewhere Duker? Just because the proof hasn’t been uncovered doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The court cases weren’t very “scientific” and many ruled on rather strange criteria for evidence.Let’s start with specific examples:In one case A judge ruled as hearsay a person saying that particular instructions were given to staff regarding accepting late ballots, the judge wanted hard evidence and the press all laughed at the evidence without asking what possible evidence could a person supply when they hear what would be an illegal command being given? It’s evidence, it will need corroboration, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand as it was.In another case the judge happily accepted the statements from a Harvard professor (I’m getting rather nervous about academic standards in the US) that the incidence of voter fraud is tiny – because he divided the total number of people convicted for voter fraud by the total number of votes cast in all elections over the period of the time of those fraud cases. Apparently this sort of analysis was compelling. No analysis of the efforts to detect fraud, no investigation of electoral rolls, mail-in ID sleeves, just divide convicted by total votes and bingo. I guess you can therefore conclude that the amount of uncertified domestic electrical work is total number of people convicted for uncertified work divided by the total number of electrical devices sold in the US over a period … nope …Both parties try to take advantage of the electoral process in the US, pretty much every part of the election is open to abuse.There have been no statistical surveys of the electoral rolls (in 2017 an attempt to audit the rolls was made by a Trump appointed election integrity panel, zero states complied). I expect there are a large number of invalid registered voters (non-citizens, undischarged felons and people who no longer reside in that electoral area (important for congressional counts)).Similarly no validation was done on signature verification which would be very important in a high volume mail-in election – particularly when ballots are mailed to entire electorates rather than requested. The software “verification” base explained this way by one of the suppliers, they have a setting from 0 to 100, 0 meaning accept everything, 100 meaning use the maximum scrutiny (not the same as exact match), they set it to 60 because any higher rejected too many. Noone knows what the false positive/negative percentages are at this setting, yet it’s the only protection available against mass ballot harvesting in the last election.Observers were kept too far away to actually observe, as evidenced in many videos of counting rooms where they were restricted to the front of rooms many metres away from the handling of ballots.One case had a judge dismiss because “the state laws don’t require ballot boxes to be locked when transported” which may be true in a legal sense but pretty much invalidates any claims that the process has integrity. Remember – trust plays no role in free and fair elections – the system needs to be observably safe and those observers need to be independent of the process. The statements of election officials have zero evidentiary validity – just as they would have in Zimbabwe and NKorea, the process is only secure if it is observably secure.I could go on with many more examples but I think you get the gist.The election process in the US is broken, noone can say if it had an effect on the result – that’s the actual problem.STOP WITH THE DAMN POLITICAL POSTS!!! I’ve asked nicely a number of times. And despite the fact that I NEVER snip posts, if this nonsense continues I’m gonna break my rules. For now, I’m just striking this one out to prove I’m serious.
w.
Amen
Wow that’s scary 😂😂😂🤦🏻♂️
Willis, I appreciate your pages, and especially your ‘stories’, but the problem is that ‘global climate change’ IS political, not scientific. And people who feel helpless feel a need to spout off. The oppression of dissenting voices may yet lead to serious repercussions in ‘the West’.
But anyway, thanks for the pages and especially THE CHANCE to spout off!
Russ, climate change is political, but it doesn’t have one thing to do with voter fraud.
STOP IT!
w.
Certainly has to do with fraud though.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
Folks, this post is about energy, not the election. Please don’t hijack it, whether or not you think the election was hijacked. That’s a discussion for a different place.
Thanks,
w.
Amen
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
SNIP—I said five times I’d snip political posts. I was serious.
w.
Folks, this post is about energy, not the election. Please don’t hijack it, whether or not you think the election was hijacked. That’s a discussion for a different place.
Thanks,
w.
David,might I remind you that the DemocRATS own the machines AND the courts.You ain’t going to vote THEM OUT.
The damage will start by affecting many of those who were tricked by the MSM and big data into voting for Biden, especially those who can least afford it. The cost of the massive hand outs required to address this forced ‘injustice’, made far worse with subsidized illegal immigration, will then piss off the few taxpayers left who have to pay for it. It’s sad to see Biden setting up his administration to be the most harmful to America and Americans as his Marxist handlers can get away with.
2022 is going to be an eye opener. Unfortunately, the only eyes that need to be opened have long since been sealed wide shut.
It’s sad to see Biden setting up his administration …
Rest assured “Biden” is doing no such thing. It’s highly unlikely he has any actual authority at all. I haven’t seen him without Kamala in the background and his “Dr.” wife close at hand. I believe his dementia is advancing very rapidly … (answering why they’re pushing through so many “executive” orders).
Dementia Joe is not allowed to have any press Q&A but from carefully selected “journalists” who are told what questions to ask, and what not to ask or press him on. And the Left-controlled media just takes it.
You mean Biden is having the same ‘chosen media’ calls that Trump had ? Trumps media team stopped having any WH press conferences at all for last 18 months
You haven’t watched any of the press conferences in the last few years, have you.
Are you being paid to make a fool of yourself?
That’s because Trump answered reporters questions almost every single day. What would a formal press conference have provided over and above that!
I’d rather hear directly from the President than from a professional “mealymouth”.
Quick question? Is there anything, absolutely anything, that Dozy Joe could do that you would disagree with? Do you not yet understand, that Carbon-triggered global warning, is probably, THE greatest conspiracy theory of all time?
Right now, in many countries across the world, farmers are being forced to use Carbon generators (inside greenhouses) to get their crops off to a good start! I’ve met very few dumb farmers in my life frankly, met plenty of zealous, lying politicians though, and Joe Biden most be the most corrupt politician EVER, to be elected to the office of POTUS!
Smell the roses, the scent does not lie, we do not have an ongoing global-warming crisis, do the research.
BIDEN IS A USELESS PUPPET
look up SES
most powerful usa govt. agency you never heard of.
they run everything now in the USA
every dept and every usa govt agency. EVERYTHING!!!
Bro’ (say Brah), you are perpetuating the myth that people actually voted for Biden… I thought this was a scientific forum?
Where I live gas prices are up by 30 cents in the last 2 weeks
In the UK that date was June 1st 2008 when sec. state for energy Milliband commissioned Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to write our energy policy to be overseen by a numpity and failed politician called Gummer, since enobled as Lord Deben to run the whole shebang with family as consultants sort of HUnter Biden kind of stuff. We’ve already written the book for Joe.
With any hope, it may become an option in 2 years.
Joey Biden should invite people to look him in the eye….and then install 2 windmills on the White House grounds and cover the roof in solar panels……Joey must show people that he is serious Joey.
I’d rather see solar panels on every exposed surface, saving only the helipad. Homeless shelters on the West Lawn would be a nice touch, though.
My plan calls for a free Moderna vaccine with every flight you take on a 737 MAX.
And just how would the CO2 be collected for injection? A wee problem I think
The logistical problem of dispersed energy generation sources across North America. Nat Gas from WestTexas-NM-Colorado piped all over the western US to power generation stations as I referred to it in comment two days ago. The same situation for Montana-SpringCreek mine, Wyoming-Powder River, New Mexico-El Segundo mine coal, trains move energy-rich, low sulfur, stable, safe coal all over the Western US to generation stations.
How would the captured CO2 get to the GoM from hundreds of generation plants?
Answer: It wouldn’t. The regulatory permitting would take decades, held up by Green-socialists resistant to any pipelines. The Left’s clear intention is shut them all down. No gas or coal input, no CO2 output to capture and sequester.
Widespread, regional electricity Black-outs ARE coming under the Biden-Harris Energy plans for America.
Unaffordable gasoline and diesel fuels are coming for the middle class. Unaffordable agricultural produce and grains are coming for middle America under the Biden-Harris Energy Plans for America.
It’s not that difficult… But the necessary infrastructure would be pricey.
You do know that it’s not enough, don’t you? It will never be enough. This situation has empowered a small minority to be vocal and now they want the entire world to say that they were right all along, not fringe cranks.
@David, if price is no object… Better to spend the money on the first interstellar colonization expedition!
@joel, before you start – that would be for hollowing out a medium-size NiFe asteroid (reserving the “tailings” for use in fission powered mass drivers for propulsion), thus solving the radiation problem. Spun, of course, to solve the microgravity problem along the inner shell. Loss of life during construction would most likely be less than that in whatever war the Harris Regime starts to distract the populace.
If we do that then when we need the CO2 to delay an ice age we can let it rip again
But what if the earth burps?
Great idea, because when our grandchildren find out we actually need more CO2 we’ll have a ready reserve available.
As a lot of people talk about producing H2 with wind power, take that H2 for producing hydrocarbons, we have to add a lot of energy loss costs in the calculation, a calculation resulting in unpayable energy bills, at least.
People who pitch about H2 don’t know the first thing about actual chemistry, thermodynamics, and the many mechanical and materials engineering problems involved. The few that actually might, are simply con artists looking for a score big$ on the stupid. Scores like free-money grants to study the issues from Uncle Sugar.
Totally true as usual, Joel. See my post “Drilling For Hydrogen” for a discussion of some of these issues.
w.
You’re right, Joel. Hydrogen as fuel isn’t really an energy source, per se, but would be better considered as an energy storage method, in other words, a battery.
In Germany they push a lot of money in H2, it’s their way to the CO2 free future, as crazy as it is.
Germany’s National Hydrogen Strategy
“In the fight against climate change, hydrogen made with renewable electricity is increasingly seen as a silver bullet for sectors with particularly stubborn emissions, such as heavy industry and aviation. Germany has set out to become a global leader in the associated hydrogen technologies, and the governmnet has penned a National Hydrogen Strategy to fulfil these ambitions. This factsheet summarises the strategy, which was approved by government on Wednesday 10 June.”
Facepalm ^2
google or what else for “germany hydrogen”,
Generated by electricity from those nuclear plants Germany is shutting down?
Well, that would be another way of storing energy. 😉
Well, the “climate czar” in MA says that MA can get to net zero by 2050. He says we can reduce carbon emissions by 85%. Then we’ll need to find some way to balance the remaining 15% by sequestration- and much of that will come from forests. As a forester, I asked him to be more specific but he said we’ll just have to work that out! Even if we never cut another tree during that period- the forests can’t sequester nearly enough to satisfy the new “2050 net free bill”. And then we’ll have to replace wood products with what? Cement, metals, plastic? Makes no sense. And to even get to that 85% we’ll have to cover every building in the state with solar panels AND install several thousand wind turbines AND cover 60-120 acres of land with ground mounted solar- all in this very tiny state. When I complain about the stupidity of this- I’m accused of being unprofessional!
Also, I keep asking who amongst the green crowd will ask to have a solar or wind “farm” built next to their home. So far, no takers.
Joseph instead of solar and wind why doesn’t Biden build internment camps for all the white supremacists, racists, bigots, homophobes, misogynists aka Trump supporters and make them turn large cranks to generate electricity? The woke could hold whips to ensure those plebes generate the power needed for the 1%
😉
DO… NOT… DO… THEIR… THINKING… FOR… THEM!
What will that whip thing pay? How big a dent will it make on the unemployment numbers?
Hey, net zero by 2050 in MA is easy! Just institute all the “climate czar” plans and everybody will move to TX, FL, AZ, etc.
Many people have left the state. The population is roughly 6 million and it was the same 50 years ago. It hasn’t decreased because the state welcomes people from 3rd world countries. Now, most official state documents are published in numerous languages and schools now need expensive translators. The cost of living here is going up fast. When I went to the state university in the late ’60s, it cost $600 a semester. I think it’s now $10,000 a semester or more. Cheap compared to the many ivy league schools here but when most people can’t afford to go to a state college- we have a big problem.
Don’t worry, if the progressives get their way, college will be free.
Free to everyone except the taxpayers. In which case you can expect actual costs to explode.
My Arizona is turning libtard shades of Blue under steady assault by low-information voters fleeing unaffordable California for the jobs and affordable living here.
Slightly OT – have you signed the recall petition for Mayor
Brown Hoohayet? (Or perhaps you live in the county. I haven’t heard of one yet for any of the Board of Commissars.)Leave out AZ it been Californianated.
MA will be like California and expect fly-over country to take it in the backside in order to provide what MA needs!
“60-120 acres” Joseph?
MA must be a very, very tiny state.
Based on my trips up 84 to visit at MIT, it seemed as though even MA can spare that, IF means saving the planet.
I meant 60-120 THOUSAND acres- most of which will be forest. And it is a very tiny state- look at it on a map of the U.S. if you can find it.
If he can find a map? 😂👍🤦🏻♂️
I think the Biden plan (as promulgated in reality by the Green New Deal-ers) is designed to intentionally crater the US and world economies, so that the “experts” can take total power and control. Sort of like in the medieval, Dark Ages eras.
Clearly, it serves the interests of those in power. My guess is that it expands the size and power of the centralized bureaucratic state, so that the narrative serves those who work for the state. And, since the centralized state primarily exists to serve lobbyists for corporate interests, it is in the lobbyist’s interest to expand the central power of the state.
Everyone keeps talking about solving a nonexistent “problem” founded on bad science, imagined data, politics, virtue signalling and wishful thinking. For over 20 years I’ve watched, read and listened to people (on both sides) expanding on a science that barely surpasses astrology. It has been the blind leading the blind for decades. They know exactly how much unicorn horn and faerie dust is necessary to do the job. All they need now are unicorns and faeries.
The whole thing is laughable … a fantasy from 1st to last.
Unfortunately, that fantasy is now a nightmarish reality.
Climate change science clearly hasn’t been about either climate or science for over 20 years. Simply about change.
I call the climate modelers, Climate Dowsers. Dowsing is a perfectly correct description of what they are doing.
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
The pseudoscience rent-seekers took over academic “science” and drove out scientists, like Judith Curry, willing to be honest about the dismal state of climate science.
In Australia we’ve seen the same situation in attacks on good scientists like Peter Ridd and BoM’s ugly historical station temperature adjustment crimes.
Yes, dowsing IS the perfect analogy for the current state of climate “science”. It suits their reliance on logical fallacies (in all flavours). Post hoc ergo propter hoc fits both perfectly. I’ve experienced a few dowser ‘true believers’ over the years. You could punch a well anywhere, yet they strut around congratulating themselves when they hit water. I love it when they explain the method and how it works … (often in great detail), just like AGW true believers.
… Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, Murry Salby and so many others who’ve been cancelled to cover up the lies. Yet they laud pretentious, fraudulent toads like Mikey Mann and Gavin Schmidt.
Who was it, said: Magic is technology too advanced to be understood by the observer? There are quite a number of drillers who not only employ dowsing, they guarantee results. In other words, they dowse, and if they drill for nothing, you do not pay. For those who know what drilling costs, you will understand this is not a business model you can base on luck or wishfull thinking.
Sometimes I find those who laugh at things they do not understand, actually do not understand much of anything they regurgitate without understanding, geddit?
P.S. No, I do not “believe” in dowsing.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Arthur C. Clarke
w.
Read the long (original) version of Stranger in a Strange Land between Christmas and New Years. I remember reading it when about 14 or so and being very impressed. But couldn’t remember much about the plot, so decided to re-read it after almost 40 years. The second reading was just as surprising as the first. Glad no one ever tried to make it into a movie. The new (rejected) Messiah had infinite global energy all sorted out too. But they didn’t Grok. Replacing the fake with the real was a bit too upsetting for the fakers and controllers. Mass stoning of the heretic with free liberating magic for everyone was preferable.
Don’t believe in dowsing? Not so sure myself, had a dowser for a water well drilling company hand me his rods and challenged me to use them. I went over where I knew for a fact there was water and sure enough his rods crossed…This was on our farm and I spent over an hour in testing, not once did they fail to detect water where I knew there was water. Thinking maybe it was a subconcious twisting of my hands concentrated on holding my hands steady and still the rods twisted… Something was happening that I can’t explain, I suspect magnetism not magic.
Most dowsers I have heard of, use sticks, glass bottles filled with water, their hands… Magnetism seems …er…mmm.
Whatever it is, it works, at least for some people. Not every priest can make holy water, not only priests can make holy water, that has been shown.
Isn’t life a wonder?
Learned the term “Liehman rings” this week. Familiar with the concept of chaotic patterning on animals, it was still such a blast, curling my cat’s tail in foetal position, and actually seeing a theory demonstrated in practice, which until then was just some sort of natural magic trick. Always imagined a kinda splortch on the zygote, a sort of abstract …paint event passing through, now it’s maths, kinda.
I have this theory where your personal clock ticks every time you learn something new. I grew up a bit this week. Like, did you catch the WUWT article on CEEMD? Too cool! That’s two growth spurts in one week!
Imagine we had internet when I was a kid… Then again, libraries were cool… and no-one shat cookies into your memory.
I doubt they are that clever, but certainly they want to control humans – and be the elite that always rises in collectivism despite the everyone-equal claim.
Beautiful, just beautiful, thank you.
Maybe a bit optimistic in this part here:
“Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity.”
I think you could probably double the number of required wind turbines and all the rest to make up for the peak hours.
Right on the money as usual Willis. Thanks John
It won’t happen. But I doubt if that is the goal. Those leading the charge to fight climate change couldn’t care less if the battle is won or lost. They only care that they are in charge and get highly remunerated for it.
State administrators always want more money and power . It is their raison d’etre. But they can’t just claim more money and power. They have to at least pretend to have a reason.
Things rarely are what they seem to be. Look at an effort to depose an ex-president, scheduled for February 8. Surely it is the most pressing agenda for 100% of Democrats. They are still shocked at the number of deplorables.
I have an even better agenda for them: Banish the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
On the other hand, the more time they waste on trying to remove Trump from office, the less time they will have to do damage.
Unfortunately I think they will find time for both. Uh and the energy for it. (That last bit was for Willis.)
Now your talking. Then on to the first!
You are correct. Getting to zero emissions isn’t their goal.
Ever see that Ted Talk where Bill Gates put up a formula for getting to zero emissions, whereby one of the components was bringing human populations to zero? And the audience laughed?
Hence the need for a Bill Gates devised covid vaccine
Willis: Nothing wrong with your calculations. I’ve done similar ones that pretty much agree. But, of course, this doesn’t cover the other approach which is to reduce demand. We just need to eliminate 2/3rds of the population and move most of the remaining population into an agrarian society utilizing primarily horses and oxen for power. (This may seen unrealistic, but Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot accomplished population reductions of large magnitudes in just a couple of decades.) We could then use existing wind/solar infrastructure to provide everyone that’s left with 2-3 hours of electricity per day to charge their cell phones and run their refrigerators. Might need to restrict each home to say 5000 watts though so no high demand appliances like air conditioning, heating, electric dryers, ranges or deep well water pumps.
You may think that I’m just being sarcastic, but there are quite a few population control advocates among the radical Green groups advocating for drastic human population reduction. Apparently they want to save the planet from us humans so that we don’t interfere with plants’ and animals’ enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I do find some hope in the observation that nothing that is impossible has ever actually happened.
I love that: “I do find some hope in the observation that nothing that is impossible has ever actually happened.” Who said it first? The truth? CO2 is harmless, no measurable climate effect. beneficial on balance to human life.
“(This may seen unrealistic, but Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot accomplished population reductions of large magnitudes in just a couple of decades.)”
And they moved huge chunks of the population into an agrarian society using draft animals for power, just like you said would be needed. (actually a lot of it was *man* power, not draft animal power)
Today’s greens wouldn’t allow draft animals. Can’t have humans enslaving our 4-footed brothers after all.
Don’t forget the other climate boogieman—methane. More working animals would mean more methane, as would having too many humans around.
“Are you essential or non-essential?”
Unfortunately I think you are right. We keep on about the fact that current standards of living are incompatible with ‘0 carbon’, but what they mean is a whole lot less people will be there and they will live “simple” lives.
The Soviet Union under Stalin saved humanity from obscurantists who determined racial usefulness by the shape of the skull. And from “gas vans”, neatly, with German pedantry, placed throughout Europe. For inferior races.
The problem of reducing the population of China was at one time very successfully solved by British opium traders. Mao’s Cultural Revolution is simply a children’s party compared to the deeds of gentlemens.
The tragedy of Kampuchea / Cambodia is the result of the American military aggression in Indochina in 1964-1974. Pol Pot’s rise to power would not have happened without the bloody terror unleashed by his predecessor, the American protege Lon Nol.
I suspect that in a few decades after the epic failure of the green course, Putin will be named the main culprit.
An interesting data set would be how these numbers compare to what was installed per day over the last 5, 3, 1 years. And what it means if you add 3 to 5 years at the current pace.
Even more impossible is that doing away with fossil burning will lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Natural emissions of CO2 are at least an order of magnitude greater than all anthropogenic emissions. These natural emission rates have been rising for decades as tropical ocean SSTs have been riseing. It is true that over a year, practically all of these emissions are absorbed by multiple sinks (rain, trees, grass, cold ocean waters, phytoplankton, etc.). The concentration of anthropogenic emissions in the atmsphere are similarly affected by these sinks. So there is no significant accumulation of such emissions.
You seem to be forgetting that man made co2 is different and much much worse than normal co2. Sarc
Now you just got to add hydrogen to the mix and it’s losses. It’s insane.
Nor does your analysis address the intractable problem of transportation. Last time I looked you can’t plug a plane in. And what about all the derivative products that fossil fuels provide like plastic for syringes, waterproof garments that are loved by the greenies. Your analysis highlights just how difficult this is going to be without even factoring in these additional challenges.
All true, Stephen. I thought about adding that, and how if we want roads to drive electric cars on we need bitumen to seal them, and to get bitumen your byproducts are diesel and gas … but I like to keep my posts fairly focused.
Regards,
w.
And electric agriculture? What a joke.
Carlo,
Most people have no idea of farming and ranching. As I posted somewhere else I had a cousin that worked on a ranch where the bunkhouse was 11 miles from the nearest road (i.e. the ranch was more than 22miles long and there was only one accessible road. Imagine you are 11 miles from the ranchhouse running a combine in a soybean field and the battery dies.
What do you do? Have someone haul a diesel generator out to you to recharge the battery? It’s getting ready to rain and you wind up sitting there for two hours waiting for the battery to recharge? If it was a diesel you could refuel in 15 minutes and get back to work.
Mr. Eschenbach,
Thank you × 1,000,000.
The U.S. and its noise-manufacturers (a/k/a the media) are wholly innumerate (in the case of the media, that’s a large part of the reason its employees went into the noise production business in the first place).
You have now done the mathematics for them. Let’s see if they can read.
I just replayed the President’s short address and Climate Crisis EO signing this afternoon. Word salad, “good union jobs,” “we can do this,” etc. We are in serious trouble.
Whenever Human-caused Climate Change is discussed in a group, such as a public meeting on the topic, Skeptics should hold up a sign that says:
“Carbon Dioxide is a Harmless Gas. Show Me Otherwise.”
or something similar.
Let’s make the Alarmists prove their case. The Alarmists will try to dismiss the sign by saying the “science is already settled” but we can’t let them get away with that.
These signs should be waved in the face of a lot of Republicans, too, since a lot of them are either lukewarmers or unsure of their position on the topic.
Let’s give them some assurance. Assurance there is no evidence that CO2 poses any problem for humankind. They will get this assurance when they go to find the evidence the sign requires, and they can’t find any. Then they will question the basic premise of the scam. Which is what they should have been doing all along.
We need signs and T-shirts, that challenge the bogus Consensus.
We ought to give a cash reward to the first skeptic that manages to get the sign on television.
How about the question “you do know that every carbon atom in your body came from CO2” my bet is, you will be called a liar.
And to the “lukewarmers” – don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for Lindzen, Spencer, Curry, etc. – my sign would say, “Show me the evidence that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity can be reliably distinguished from 0C.” Or to fit on an actual sign, “ECS > 0C? Show me.”
“Show me the evidence that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity can be reliably distinguished from 0C”
They can’t do that because they don’t have that evidence. They are guessing.
They don’t even know exactly how CO2 in the atmosphere works. Some people posit that CO2 results in cooling, and some people posit that CO2 is now incapable of adding any more warmth to the atmosphere at current levels and higher.
So, the science definitely is not settled. Not by a long shot. Anyone who says it is demonstrates their misunderstanding of the issue.
“science is already settled” – There’s a word for that. Dogma. Like the geocentric universe. And dogma is not subject to challenge. Heresy will be punished. The Society has no room for apostasy.
Exactly what I have been pointing out elsewhere for here in ALberta
It requires converting to EVs, electric heat etc, conservative assumption of tripling grid
So AB 10GW becomes 30, 1/3 availability of wind means need 90gw installed, even with 3mw turbines that is 30,000 of them
For little Alberta with 4.4 million people, a moderate sized suburb in China or Korea
Absolutely ridiculous
But, didn’t your read Notley’s op-ed today?
Arithmetic and the concept of scale are not taught in lawyer school. [See: Biden & Kerry]
Not a chance that the calculations could be understood, even if such folks could be enticed to look at them.
Lawyer are Lawyer because they can’t do math but have fairly good memories and are good at telling people up is down and down is up.
Willis
A suggestion because the crazies talk about magic batteries in conjunction with wind and solar
Please add a short paragraph using best available battery technology
For every 10GW of grid renewables we need minimum 24 hours battery back up, here on canadian prairies 72hours more likely
How physically big would a 10GW 24 hour battery backup be?
Another problem with batteries is that you lose 10 to 20% of your power charging then discharging those batteries.
Also, you can’t let the batteries get too cold, or too hot, especially when being charged or discharged. So a lot of energy will be used just housing those batteries.
I’m not Willis, but I spent about ten minutes doing a quickie calculation with Powerwall 2s. See my comment above (or below, I have no idea how this site sorts comments some days).
Ah. The comment link widget only appears when you are in some small parts of the comment, so I mistakenly thought it had disappeared.
See https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/27/bright-green-impossibilities/#comment-3170876
Well done Willis Much the same computation as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago with my letter to my MP, and Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
I came to the same dismal conclusion as you regarding just how many windmills or Nukes we must build.
I did get a reply from mr Kwarteng,s researcher who assured me that it was all doable but to resend my spreadsheet so he could reply in detail. Here is hoping.
Meanwhile back at the GWPF pressure is being brought to bear on government for detailed costings of how we get to carbon free in 2050 and how much it will cost. They say some guff about 220,000 data points ( whatever a data point is and 100 spreadsheet. of detailed wisdom that is above the pay grade of we,the people.
Using the expertise that Andy May, David Middleton, and others routinely bring to bear on assessing viability of oil plays I think it could all be done on one decent spraeadsheet in a couple of weeks but there again we dont work for the gubmint
I think we’re missing “the big picture”. The other way to do this is to turn back the clock to the stone age. They’ll take your car, tell you you don’t need to heat your house, only run your factories when it’s sunny, run the internet servers when it’s windy, and convert everyone to be a vegetarian…or else. I, for one, will resist.
I am worried that everyone here agrees with these figures. I would be happier if Nick or Griff or Loydo popped up to dispute the calculations.
Because if the figures are correct it is difficult to believe our respective governments have not also done the same calculations. Yet they ignore the obvious nonsense of being able to do what they tell us they intend to do.
Dissenters please!
tonyb
How dare you!
A quote from Saint Greta?
Won’t happen. Surprisingly, Nick, Griff and Loydo are just smart enough not to take on Willis. And the odd time they do raise their head above the parapets it’s only to throw some left field diversionary comment. Present a well reasoned argument to Willis? Not in their playbook.
“t is difficult to believe our respective governments have not also done the same calculations.”
Governments are here to govern, not to calculate 🙂
tonyb-
“,,,it is difficult to believe our respective governments have not also done the same calculations.”
Of course they have. Or rather, some junior engineer in some agency did them, with the same results Willis showed. The junior engineer took them to his supervisor, who threw them in the trash, and told the junior engineer to go back to his desk and do what he was told.
A short story from my own experience. In the early 70’s I was employed at an institution that had EPA contracts for applied research in mobile source emissions. The EPA was a new entity, with a small staff and big job. Their entire emphasis was on getting the correct engineering solutions.
Some time it the ’80 that began to change, while correct engineering was desired it had to comply with the political goal. By the late 90’s competent engineering wasn’t even on the list. The political goal was all that mattered. I reviewed the engineering basis for an EPA regulation at that time, and found that it was complete nonsense! I knew it had been done by EPA engineers I had worked with, and knew were competent. They had simply came up with the proof they were told to, in order to keep their job.
So yes, there are government employees who know, they are just not allowed to speak.
I wonder if that’s what they mean when they say you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. It might work if we own nothing but I’m pretty dam sure we won’t be happy but because we’ll own nothing we’ll lack the means to fight back, and we’ll be to cold and hungry.
Obviously, the Net Zero push from the Left isn’t about climate or energy. It is merely a means to an end. The “end” being a total hold on political power for the Left.
Capital and control. They come for the taxes. They stay for your savings and liberty.
Joe Biden just said on TV (1/27/21) that the US will be off fossil fuel by 2035. So double all those figures for the US. It wouldn’t be 500 2MW wind turbines per day, it would be 1000. It wouldn’t be 40sq miles of solar panels per day, it would be 80sq miles, or an area the size of the Tulsa, OK MSA every two days!! It would be a 2.1GW nuke plant every 10 days.
Talk about lying to the American people. Biden should be impeached for this!
You can’t impeach someone for rank stupidity.
If you can impeach an ex-president for telling protesters to be peaceful then you can certainly impeach one for being stupid!
Not a democrat president, you can’t !
The House of Representatives can impeach the president for anything they so desire. It doesn’t matter if the president is guilty or not, it just matters if the low-life Democrats have the votes.
The Democrats have abused their political power. They are using the power of the federal government to punish their political opponents.
The Radical Democrats threaten the freedoms of all of us with their insane ideas.
Please, folks, this is a discussion of energy policy, not impeachment. Give it a rest?
w.
I’m just a dumb blond so bear with me. I for one when they started talking about this 2035 and everyone driving electric cars all I could think about is what are we going to do with all the millions of gas guzzling cars on the road today. Are they planning to convert gas cars into electric cars or are the cars going to be dumped into the ocean, or buried under ground? can someone tell me how this is.going to be accomplished so the electric cars we have to afford and buy can be driven on our roads and highways? So until we accomplish this problem we really can’t fix the problems you guys are saying is impossible. Anyone with common sense already knows none of this is possible. Please take me seriously. I need to know if I’m missing something. It is certainly a hoax on all of us living on this earth. How do they expect.the poor to buy electric cars? Can electric charging stations be built by 2035? And doesn’t electricity need fossil fuels? The thought of clogging up our beautiful land with those monstrosity huge ugly turbines is the craziest thing I can imagine and when they aren’t useful after their expiration date do they also get disposed of the same way as the gas guzzling cars?
I’m really not being facetious – we would wind up fixing the old cars like they do in Cuba, someone will surely make the parts or we’ll scavenge them from junkyards. Then we’ll buy black market gasoline just like black market drugs are sold. Illicit gas smuggled in from Mexico, Venezuela, and China.
And, no, charging stations won’t be built by 2035. Can you imagine digging up all the sidewalks and streets in every city in America that has on-street parking by 2035 in order to bring in charging stations? What are they going to repave all the streets with? Asphalt? Where will the gravel and oil come from to do all this?
Forget about the electric grid. If you can’t provide the charging stations there won’t much of an additional load on the grid.
Thanks, Mary. First off, the only dumb questions are the ones you don’t ask, because then you never get the answers.
At present, most dead cars are shredded and the metals (mostly steel and cast iron with some aluminum and copper) are recycled. I assume this would continue if there is a changeover to electric cars.
As to how the poor will buy electric cars, people proposing this lunacy claim they are helping the poor in 2100, so they don’t care in the slightest about the poor in 2021.
Is this possible by 2035? no way, no how.
Regards,
w.
Here is alberta it is -15c and snowing, our Wind assets are running at 9%, solar at 6%
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet
Can’t beat facts
100% renewables means death
Off topic- sorry- but this is interesting in a wrong way:
“Climate-Fueled Disasters Killed 475,000 People over 20 Years”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-fueled-disasters-killed-475-000-people-over-20-years/
“Nearly a half-million people, mostly from the world’s poorest countries, died over the past two decades from conditions associated with climate disasters, according to new findings from the nonprofit Germanwatch.”
What the hell is a climate disaster? They may be weather disasters but who can prove they are due to climate change? Not possible.
In another dumb ass Scientific American article, “On Climate, Biden Must Do More Than Undo Trump’s Damage” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/on-climate-biden-must-do-more-than-undo-trumps-damage/ I see: “to stay on course to meet the two degrees C goal, 90 percent of U.S. passenger cars and light-duty trucks would need to be electric by 2050”.
Given the fact that much of the world will not live up to the Paris agreement- even if 90% of U.S. vehicles are electric in 2050- we certainly won’t arrive at that perfect world only 2 degrees C- even assuming carbon emissions are actually the cause of that supposed problem, which of course is probably not the case.
Scientific American is going downhill fast. It offers no suggestion that perhaps the climate “problem” is exaggerated.
While I’m at it, check out: “Biden prioritizes climate change as national security concern, pauses oil drilling on public lands” at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-prioritizes-climate-change-as-national-security-concern-pauses-oil-drilling-on-public-lands/ar-BB1d98n8
In that article, I see, “”Science is telling us that we don’t have a moment to lose,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser”. So this new climate religeon has a God called Science which talks to them!
What this discussion fails to account for is that the ultimate green goal is to drastically reduce the amount of energy the world uses. It’s not to merely substitute ‘renewables’ for fossil fuels to meet the same projected energy use. Deindustrialization is high on their list. We are seen as consuming too much, and our desire for stuff we don’t really need is ravaging the planet. It’s not just CO2 and the GHG effect, In a perfect green world, that projected energy-use curve will go way down, not up. We’ll all be riding bicycles and plowing our fields with mules again like our great grandfathers did. It will also mean a huge depopulation of the earth in a new Cultural Revolution that will make Mao’s look like child’s play.
Your premise is correct, but your extrapolation is faulty. Am I using the right words here?
They will surely try to clamp down on energy usage, but that does not mean we will plough with mules. You will not be allowed to plow without a mining licence (you are extracting resources from the soil) and your crops will be a dangerous point of possible infection for licenced crops, think bird flu, pig flu etc, “necessitating” the culling of all wild strains (non-GMO or hybrid). That is IF you can find seed or breeding stock in the first place.
Already generating your own power is subject to taxation and fees, so going “off the grid” is a pipe dream, especially when considering they already remove children to “places of safety” from homes without municipal (poisoned) water and Mains power connections. Not being tied to the municipal sewage system is, apparently, tantamount to child endangerment, so living in the country will become illegal for families.
So, depopulation? Sure. Plowing with mules a la stone age? In Afghanistan, maybe, not in Zion’s Undeclared Soviets of America, you won’t.
Don’t you wish you Yankees were nicer to them sand-devils now?
There does exist, however, the vague possiblity the “ET disclosure” will allow us access to superior technology, negating the need for all this doom and gloom and Greenism.
Didn’t R.A. Heinlein prophesy something similar to this in the 1960s? Something about the “Crazy Years” and mass hysteria leading to a fundamentalist society?
Nice post, WE.
The way I see it, Dems ‘led’ by Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer are now actively destroying their own Democrat party for all to see via their extremes. Second shampeachment, US all electric vehicles, halt deportation of final order illegal alien criminals, Fauci double mask after vaccination, DC statehood (a constitutional impossibility thanks to A1§8.17 …piling absurdity on absurdity for all to see. The 2022 general reaction will be greater than the Teaparty ‘revolution’ of 2010, and Biden (if still around) will get NOTHING done from then to 2024.
Fingers crossed… 🙂
David, a fun side note which you can verify with Charles. More than just my fingers crossed.
I was greatly bothered by all the slow ‘steal’ lawsuits, given clear and constitutional legislative deadlines. One night, tossing and turning, vaguely remembered A3§2.2. Called Charles the next morning after checking. Said to him, so I already emailed the solution to DeSantis in Florida. Charles said, why not also Abbot and Paxton in Texas? So I did. And Paxton acted (Tx v. Pa), but SCOTUS declined to take it up, Alito and Thomas dissenting.
What Charles did not til now know is that my gold SCOTUS cufflinks were given to me, as a thank you for pro bono ABA Appelate division service at a banquet in the SCOTUS Great Hall, by Justice Thomas himself some years ago.
I used to be a pretty good lawyer.
I couldn’t believe how many judges wimped out on actually looking at the facts and took refuge in various excuses.
Most interesting, Rud, thanks,
w.
What happened to the ban on politics?
Thanks, Mark. Yeah, my bad. Shouldn’t have done it, but Rud is a friend. Won’t happen again.
w.
“DC statehood (a constitutional impossibility thanks to A1§8.17”
Democrat U.S. Senator Carper proposed making DC a State earlier today.
The Founding Fathers didn’t make DC a State, but the current batch of crazy Democrats want to change all that up. Let’s stick with the Founding Father’s plan.
The FF’s didn’t want the seat of government to have any impact on the politics of the country. The Dems want the exact opposite! They want government workers to vote in the best interest of the government workers! Which party wants bigger government and more regulation by government bureaucrats? Answer that and you’ll understand why the Dems want DC to be a state!
(ask yourself why the Democrats were so dead set against Trump moving the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado)
This has been going on since Hamilton/Jefferson. The founders’ concept of state autonomy is anathema to control freaks. Marx conceded that Communism could not successfully be implemented until it was universal. Probably because if there was anywhere else to go people would opt to go there. Marx even said “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” Tenth Amendment “The powers not delegated to the United States…” Like education, health care, climate control…
Today some Democrat was quoted as saying that the DC riots are proof that DC needs to be a state.
If that’s true, then Seattle should have been made a state last year.
No doubt all those windmill factories and solar panel factories will be powered exclusively by windmills and solar panels. 🤣
Of course not!
We’ll continue to buy those items from China.
Actual delivery from solar panels on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 2.75 watts per square metre depending on location.
Really, Is it that low? After a short search I find the claim of about 160 watts per meter² and then of course that needs to be divided by all the time it’s in the dark or not full sun ie., angle, clouds & what else? Just seems kind of low.
A run down of the arithmetic would be great (-:
Contrary to my usual habit, I didn’t note down the source I’d used … grrr. So I might be wrong. Hang on … nope, can’t find the reference. So let me start from the beginning.
According to a National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, it takes about 3.4 acres of grid-scale solar to produce 1 GWh/year of energy. That’s an average output of 114 kilowatts generated on a 24/7 basis.
An acre is 4,049 square metres. Since 3.4 acres give us 114 kW, that gives us 8.3 watts per square metre.
I’ve changed the head post to reflect that. It makes no difference, still impossible.
In passing, let me note that this is why I love writing for the web … my errors rarely last more than a couple of hours.
w.
Note not not Willis.
Thanks, Richard.
w.
Solar at good clip gives 1kW/m2. Divide by 4 to compensate for night at high latitude. That bit I have to guess, I am just off teh tropic here, never seen snow in my life, soooo…. Divide by, say, three for clouds (cloudy weather does not preclude usefulness, just as a clear sky with high humidity can severly impact power). 1000/12 gives me 80W or so, not 8. Unless you are one of the stupidses I see every day, mounting their panels where it is convenient or pretty, instead of aiming them at the sun properly.
Still, that means 3m2 just to run a small fridge. Provided you have batteries that run on unicorn farts that last forever, because the current state of battery technology, price/capacity/lifecycle, borders on a crime against humanity…
…and as I scroll down I see the need to calculate this per hectare, for those who think it a good idea to build entire landscapes full of these things, which I think stupid from top to bottom. You either decentralise it, or it become just another environmental nightmare.
Put on your best Dracula-butler voice and say “Decentraliiiiiise…”
Thanks, Paranoid. I’ve given values from the NREL for power from grid-scale installations. They average on the order of 8 W/m2, as noted in the head post.
You are correct that noon-time with the sun right overhead delivers about a kW/m2. One part you’ve missed is that solar panels are only about 15% efficient. So that brings your 80 W/m2 down to 12 W/m2.
Now, you say you think it is “stupid” to “build entire landscapes full of these things”. However, we’re not talking about just getting a few watts. We need to install enough every day to give us 2.1 GW of energy. And eventually, you’re going to need to put in two and a half million square kilometers worth …
So if you “decentralize”, you end up with a nightmare with regards to the wiring, maintenance, and routine cleaning of a huge number of panels. And that’s not to mention that if you decentralize, you have to deal with thousands and thousands of landowners to put a few panels on each house roof or backyard.
That’s why people build landscapes of them. It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they’re not doing it for fun. It’s a profit deal, and putting them all together minimizes all of the costs—installation, wiring, mounting, inverters, time to do the installation, and all the rest.
w.
Ah, I won’t argue with your stats, I get my numbers off of my own roof, which carries no serious argumentative weight. To be fair, I’ll half my own numbers, I have not actually measured the square meterage.
As for decentralisation, I have to clarify: I mean total self-ownership. Every guy for himself, no power companies involved. This will not be feasible in scenarios like factories or high-rise living, I realise that. I could use this as platform to denounce the stupidity of high-rise living, but I realise how stupid that would be.
Instead I can list a few benefits of individual ownership:
1) No single point of failure.
2) IF, I say IF we grant subsidies, it goes to the end user, not shareholders and CEO bonuses. I hate subsidies, they are always the result/origin of corrupt business practices, as far as my admittedly limited thinking goes.
3) People who become responsible for their own generation, will automatically become more responsible for their own usage, which would cut waste real quick, a much better approach than legislating good behaviour. The Greens should kiss my ass just for that!
4) Because the general public will be responsible for their own resource management, they will demand better design and manufacture of appliances and abodes, a major factor in the current wasteful design paradigm of “let’s add some more useless blinkenscheize to ‘differentiate our product'”. We shall not go into the dreadful state of battery technology now.
5) As a side effect, this will require people to be more tech savvy, meaning more engineering and trade schools, fewer underwater hairstylists and pet dentitionists.
A last thought: That terribly low efficiency of solar farms? How much of that is due to the mechanicals on the farm serving nothing but the farm? Automated cleaners are nice to have, but from my own experience, a little dust does not impact efficiency as much as one would think, I wash my panels no more than once a month, if that, and I live in the wind shadow of mine dumps, veritable shitheaps of ever-blowing motherloving dust. Don’t ask me about the friggin’ Uranium!!! Still…
In the end, we will still burn fuel, unless you can sell me a pocket-sized nuclear reactor, which I won’t trust, anyway, especialy if it was made in Fong Kong.
Now, about those ET disclosures and zero-point energy…
Thanks for the reply. I wrote that without any mental, back of the envelope, or quick & dirty estimate.
After a short search for Trenberth’s energy budget chart I find 161 watts/m² reaches the surface. And another search of solar panel efficiency finds a lot of different values I’m gonna use 15% (not to far from 13%) which yields 24.15 watts/m² call it 25 watts and as was pointed out not all of the land area is used on a solar farm here’s an aerial view a solar farm:
Looks like 60% is used, but there’s other roads and buildings associated with it so something less than that and I’m coming up with less than 15 watts. All my rounding off seems to have been up rather than down, so sticking my wetted finger in the air I give it between 10 and 15 watts/m² on a 24/7/365 basis which is a lot less than I thought when I posted that. 13% efficiency would have been 12.6 watts/m² Without accounting for any other reasons and there no doubt is some maintenance downtime it’s close to your revised 8.3 watts/m²
Another point is that efficiency goes down as the solar panel ages. It goes down real fast if the panels aren’t kept clean as well.
I just wanted to jump in with a quick comment. Solar panels lose their efficiency over time. Good ones are about 1% per year. Wind turbines have mechanical issues as well. It’s not a plug and play solution. I have lived off of both and had a diesel generator for back up.
I won’t live to 2050. So I don’t really care about being right or wrong. Humanity will be snuffed off the face of the earth long before anything like climate change will come to fruition, which it will not, because it is a scam. There are no known parameters of the amount of CO2 the atmosphere can hold and what levels result in what results, nor is there a control or a test. The “real-time” data is an extrapolation of averages based on suppositions based on theory. If I own 2 cars and drive 1, the data is that I am producing twice the CO2 emissions of a single car owner.
I also believe that blaming “Climate change” for destructive weather phenomenon or as they said about Hurricane Harvey, “Hurricane Hrvey wouldn’t have had so much associated rainfall with it had it not been for climate change.” What?
When can they predict the weather accurately? Where is the scientific proof that allows any credence at all to a statement that establishes a fact by saying what “could have been?” (For instance: “If he hadn’t farted in his bath, the tsunami wouldn’t have been so tall.”)
I don’t know how people became so ignorant and the media got so bold as to get people to believe all this rubbish.
But I see at least 4 more years of it.
At least the don’t call it “Global Warming” anymore. It fell out of vogue I suppose by apoplexy.
Not 100% of the land in solar farm can be used for solar panels.
True … however they are packed together as tightly as they can given the need for access for cleaning etc. Not sure what your point is here.
w.
Unless they are located at the equator, the panels have to be tilted to the south (from a north hemisphere perspective). Because of this, there has to be a gap between the panels, otherwise the northern panel will be partially shaded by the southern one. The further north, the bigger the gap has to be.
Hard to put voltage regulators, current combiners, etc in the shade of the solar panels. They would cook. So you need a place for those among the array. Nor can you haul replacement parts into a tightly packed solar installation, you need to leave access roads, storage, etc – just like an apple orchard can’t have the trees packed all together, you wouldn’t be able to get the harvesting equipment in among the trees. You’ll need all kinds of workspace for assembling panels, repairing panels, repairing the mountings for the panels, rebuilding motors if you have an articulated installation to follow the sun. Depending on the size and weight of the panels themselves as well as the infrastructure you might even need to leave room between panels to get a forklift into place around the panels. I could probably come up with more but wifey just called me for supper!
Mark’s point is that your estimate for solar panel area is a lower-bound on the amount of land necessary to produce the required power, and not able to be used for other purposes, such as growing food or even recreation.
Zackly what I wuz gonna say.
“We can do that in a couple of ways. We could go all nuclear. In that case, we’d need to build, commission, and bring on-line a brand-new 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every single day from now until 2050. Easy, right?”
I hate to see such ignorance from both global warmists and us folk. Think Small Modular molten salt reactors, sized 399 too 500 MW, which are built in factories and installed on land which need very little preparation and very little, oor no water for cooling. These cost about half as much as a conventional light water reactor and produce power at a levelized cost of 4 cents per kWhr, It would be easy, worldwide with dozens of factories, to produce 1000 MW of capacity per day. These SMRs are in development as we speak and look to commercialize before the end of the decade.
The operative phrase in your post is “These SMRs are in development”. When they are in production then start cheerleading for them. And if they aren’t available till the end of the decade, 2030, that only gives us 5 years to meet Biden’s 2035 goal.
As Willis calculated it would take at least twice 1000MW per day. 1000MW is 1GW. Willis calculated 2GW would be needed per day. And if you cut the interval down to 5 years from 30 years you would need about 12GW per day! More than 10 times what you estimate.
And this doesn’t even count the installation time to put them on site, turned on, and producing!
Thanks, Col. First, accusations of “ignorance” are not a good look on you. Please dial it back.
Next, let’s look at SMRs, say 400 MW units. We’d need to build, install, test, commission, and connect five of these to the grid each and every day starting tomorrow to meet the demand.
But of course, we can’t start tomorrow. They won’t even be commercialized until the end of the decade. So instead of having 30 years, we’d have 20 years. That means we’d have to build, install, test, commission, and connect eight of these to the grid each and every day …
But of course, “commercialized” doesn’t mean “dozens of factories” in operation, that’s just when the first ones would hit the market. By the time the “dozens of factories” are designed and get planning permissions and get funding and actually get constructed, and then can finally start building these units, likely another decade would have passed … and at that point we’d need to build, install, test, commission, and connect fifteen of these to the grid each and every day for a decade.
Next, it will likely take a factory something like a month to construct each of these reactors. So let’s be totally generous and call it one reactor per factory every two weeks. At that rate, to produce the fifteen per day needed would require 210 factories … yeah, like those will just spring into existence.
Finally, just the installation, testing, commissioning, and connecting to the grid of even five of these each and every day for thirty years is an impossibility. And fifteen each day?
Sorry, despite your facile accusation of “ignorance”, that’s still bright green impossible …
w.
For comparison Hinkley Point, the UKs newest , nearly built , nuclear power station was planned in 2008 and will be in operation in 2023. It will produce 3260 megawatts.
Based on your figures and our usage the UK needs a 2.1Gwatt nuclear power station built every 45 days until 2050 to meet the target of zero carbon.
There are some very optimistic, mathematically challenged people out there and in government.
Ho hum time for the adverts again.
ColMosby,
Once again: [Let’s start calling this John’s 10 to the 4th rule.]
Get 10 producing and on the grid;
get another 100 in the hook-up stage;
another 1,000 financed and permitted;
and 10,000 approved by the polities wherein located.
Someone might listen to you when you get 10^4.
They are in development as we speak, and have been for the last 20 years, and will be for at least the next 20 years.
Let us know when they finally get out of development and somebody has decided to spend their own money to build one of these fantasy power plants.
Keep in mind the work force for this construction has to come from somewhere. We have about 12000 from the KXL layoff and there are all of us nonessential workers that are now unemployed but if the corona scare ever is allowed to dwindle some of us will want our old jobs. It shouldn’t take much training to teach unemployed waitresses to set turbin blades 900 feet above ground or operate electric draglines in the mines we will need to put together these generators. Come to think of it maybe “more impossible” is the correct term for this green adventure.
RIP USA Will the last yank out please turn off the lights? Wait What lights they went off years ago
Either just before or shortly after that happens, we’ll be doing the same in Blighty. Of course as we leave we’ll be able to wave across at wee Jimmie Krankie stomping around her new kingdom!
“…teach unemployed waitresses to set turbine blades…” We already know what happens when you redeploy waitresses into jobs that actually demand practical skills and intellectual labour. Can anyone say AOC?
Your math isn’t the problem Willis, your logic stinks. In each of your calculations, you assume that the particular technology (nuke, solar, wind) replaces all fossil fuel. That assumption is flatly incorrect. The reality is that it will be a mixture of the technologies you mentioned. You also must calculate efficiency gains that can be implemented.
.
Logic, don’t leave home without it.
Uh, that *is* what Biden just said on TV today. Where were you? 2035 – the Dems date for eliminating all fossil fuel power generation. Along with 500,000 charging stations and no new ICE cars.
EXACTLY what efficiency gains do you expect?
Of course 500,000 new charging stations will barely handle NYC. With 60M rural population, each needing a charging station, I wonder where Biden is going to tell them to charge their EV’s?
People in flyover land won’t need charging stations, they can all just ride horses.
There are 2 million cars registered in NYC. Don’t you think one charging station for four cars is too much?
Many, many of those autos are parked on the street in NYC. I can just see people stringing out heavy extension cords to the nearest lamppost only to find out someone stole them all overnight for the copper!
How many times do you suppose that will happen before the people in NYC have a hissy fit?
1) Use aluminum wire instead of copper
(for block warmers)
2) Do it like they do in Canada:
OMG! You ever tried to wind up a heavy aluminum cable?
Have you *ever* seen the on-street parking in NYC or even St. Louis. It isn’t drive-in parking, it’s parallel ON-STREET parking. Many (probably most) on-street places inn NYC or St. Louis don’t have parking meters. Are you going to tear up all the streets and sidewalks to put in charging stations? Do you have even the smallest clue as to what that would cost?
Aluminum is no where near as good a conductor as is copper, so you are going to lose a lot more of your energy in the cable.
Aluminum is also expensive.
How do the thieves tell that the cable is aluminum and not copper?
Aluminum production also requires a bunch of energy.
A block heater for a Tesla sized ICE vehicle consumes about 3 kWh over four hours. A Tesla 3 battery requires 40 kWh to reach half capacity (ignoring all charging losses). So you have to push out somewhere between 12 and 25 times the power over your “charging network.”
Much more expensive installation.
What percentage of those cars have off street parking? You don’t know, do you?
Of course she doesn’t.
Doesn’t matter where they are parked
Of course it matters! If there is no electrical cable running down the sidewalk or street then one would have to be laid down and fed from somewhere. When you are tearing up the length of a block in a residential area depending on on-street parking WHERE ARE THE RESIDENTS GOING TO PARK? Now imagine doing that in a large city, block after block of pissed off residents screaming at the mayor and the press about the inconvenience!
And I can’t even imagine how many other services would get accidentally knocked out of service over and over again, telephone, cable TV, internet, etc. It would be a nationwide nightmare – and the Democrats to blame.
If the GOP want to win back urban and suburban voters this would be a prime policy screw-up to use in doing so! I almost hope the Dems try to push something like this through!
With that one statement you have proven yourself to be someone who doesn’t have a clue as to what you are talking about.
You left yours in the GARBAGE bin decades ago….. poor tyke !
Doesn’t matter what you PRETEND will replace fossil fuels.
I can’t happen WITHOUT USING FOSSIL FUELS.
ROFLMAO
You can’t get efficiency gains from using the MOST INEFFICIENT forms of energy supply !
Your total lack of any rational logical thought process is quite bizarre.
Seems that “logic” is something you never had, and never will have.
Better insulation in a building results is consuming less energy to heat/cool said building.
Can’t make insulation without FOSSIL FUELS, idiot !
I’m so glad that YOU are offering TO PAY for insulation in every home.
And I notice the dumb attempt to change the subject from energy supply to something else
FEEBLE !!!
The savings in heating/cooling bills pays for the insulation in less than 5 years.
Vermiculite and cellulose can be made without fossil fuels.
Really? Vermiculite can be made without fossil fuels? Do you actually know what vermiculite is and how it is made? Vermiculite insulation is not naturally occurring. It has to be processed.
Do you know what cellulose insulation is? It is shredded paper or denim treated with some kind of chemical. First, what powers the shredders? Fossil fuels, maybe? And how are the chemicals made? Bet it takes fossil fuels!
Depends entirely on the house and the climate.
Typical progressive, actually does believe that one size fits all. And if it doesn’t government will make it fit.
Thanks, Bethan. We’ve been insulating buildings better and better worldwide for the last 50 years. So that slow improvement is already pretty much baked into the current rate of increase of energy use.
Also, retrofitting insulation into existing buildings is costly in terms of time, money, and energy.
You’re talking about a difference that makes very little difference.
w.
I remember one poster awhile back who was convinced that the amount of energy saved by installing LED lights would be more than enough to power a complete conversion to electric cars.
it seems small but the new led lights are amazing,
good light
low energy usage
and if you live in hot climate like i do south Florida change every single light in the house and the LED generate almost no heat, this lowers the a/c bill because the A/C does not have to remove the heat from the bulbs.
i also have r50 and some r70 in attic, 2900 sq feet high ceilings etc. A/C on 78 with a newer unit
new seals on windows and doors house built 1998.
my elec. bill is 90-110 per month so insulation. and good construction fix-it skills make major difference.
and i am a right wing non environmentalist, conservatives actually do things, left wing nut jobs just talk.
i will share my discussion/lecture from my left wing neighbor. i in my hybrid Camry an getting a lecture from him in his extended Chevy suburban while he is having a picnic and filling five garbage containers with trash and recyclables, we have separate containers but he can not be bothered to separate. and he then complains his 14 year old a/c unit quit again which cost $400/month to run so he just got 3 window units for now to supplement.
also note he has 150-200k income so absolutely no reason for this stupidity.
Making insulation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy__ovlT0TQ
Cannot be done without FOSSIL FUELS
100% mining, gas, and fossil fuels.
What is the EROEI from insulation? (calculating the return as “saved” energy)
YAWN
CANNOT be made without fossil fuels
What part of that don’t you comprehend !!!
As I pointed out before, most houses built since the 70’s, already have adequate insulation. The benefit from adding more is pretty small.
BS only houses built last 10 years have GOOD insulation. even now builders cheat and insulate good but use super cheap windows and doors because 90% of buyers have no idea the difference from good doors and windows to super cheap just have to look pretty. i was fixing a 3 million dollar home last year was there just to fix a window and some kitchen pot lights. 14 ten hour days later i was done, unbelievable the many things they cheated on. it depends on the builder some good, some bad. (note the windows are so cheap 1/3 do not open and close, its florida so people never use the windows so they do not know, first window i open fell right out of the frame and smashed on the roof below.
i have dropped utilities 6-8 houses from 400-600 dollars a month to 100-150 per month. i used to have a couple rentals and buy and sell a house now and then.
and for 2 weeks work and $5,000 i can drop the utilities $4,000 a year. (note that is if decent windows) if the house has total crap windows then things get more expensive, doors are cheap and easy and give big bang for the buck, if you have crappy ill fitting doors you will be surprized how much cold air comes in on a 15 degree day up north.
Airtight buildings are also a nightmare for those who live and work in them. And they must be air tight or the heating and cooling units have to draw in outside air and exchange inside air. So what does the extra insulation buy you?
My parents ran into this a long time ago. They had vinyl siding put on with extra insulation, had the walls filled with foam, and about 3ft of cellulose added in the attic. After about a week they had to start leaving the front and back doors open in the dead of winter because the house got so stuffy!
They never added it up but I question still today if it actually saved them anything. They *did* finally buy a high efficiency furnace/air conditioner and I know that save them a lot of money. The insulation? I have my doubts.
Quite bizarre isn’t it.
These morons seek to have air tight houses to make them more efficient and hence decrease atmospheric CO2…
…. not realising that this will cause a build up of EVIL CO2 levels inside the house.
SO DUMB !!
https://www.amazon.com/Heat-Recovery-Ventilator/s?k=Heat+Recovery+Ventilator
WOW, look at all that STEEL and PLASTIC !!!
Now where does that come from, ?
Do you know ?
Powered by electric fans. There goes most of your energy savings.
Air exchangers don’t actually provide *any* energy savings. They are a cost over and above. You still have to heat and cool the air inside the house. An air exchanger won’t change that.
Air exchangers also only recover a portion of the heat in the outgoing air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation
Now were is all the metal, ducts, mechanics, electronics etc for these going to come from, moron
So glad that YOU are offering to PAY for all of these. !
Typical progressive, never bothers to actually think through the things it is proposing.
It’s a 156watt unit that will probably need to be run 24/7/365. A cost over and above your heating and cooling bill – remember this doesn’t provide any actual HVAC input to the home, it’s only an air exchanger.
$800 plus probably $1000 for installations. $1800 for someone on a fixed income.
At $0.13 per KWh this thing will cost about $20 per month to run.
You *really* don’t know much about living poor on a fixed income, do you?
a, almost impossible to make an old house :air tight”
b. there are formulas, setups and construction codes for all of these concerns, which you are not aware and did not do.
the house
the insulation
the windows
the doors
the furnace/a/c or heat pump
the air circulation (yes if house is perfect need some re circulation)
the type and size and length of duct work
the humidity, my first guess is you kept old furnace used a bunch of insulation and humidity was way outts wack.
a professional can calculate all these factors in 2-4 hours for $200-400 dollars, if you ever do it again it will be the best money you spend, because you can really fu@k a house up when you improvise major HVAC changes.
even worse if have a high humidity problem, i have seen people destroy a house, turn into a mold night mare in one year, many times the mold starts out of sight behind the walls and by the time it is obvious and visable the house is ruined.
really minor stuff can cause issue, i used plastic then insulation in part of an attic, it was installed correct. but didnt matter that corner was wind area and condensation formed, i noticed it a week later removed plastic and used tyvec instead. now i just spend the extra money for tyvec always b/c never know when need the extra margin of error. i have seen walls that took years to build up condensation say from one cold water pipe. tyvec will breath a little and let those small condensation issues resolve.
True, and totally irrelevant to whether or not energy comes from fossil fuel or not.
Thanks, Bethan. It doesn’t matter if you do it with wind alone (plus the necessary nuclear backup) or nuclear alone or solar (plus the nuclear backup), or with any mixture of these.
Here’s a mixture—half wind, half solar plus necessary backup. That would require:
1,500 2 MW wind turbines installed, tested and connected to the grid every day for 30 years, PLUS
50 square miles of solar installed, tested and connected to the grid every day for 30 years PLUS
one 1.5 GW nuclear power plant installed, tested and connected to the grid every day for 30 years.
Still bright green impossible … you don’t gain anything by mixing the sources when each of the sources is technically totally infeasible.
Logic, indeed …
w.
PS—I fixed the formatting on your comment. Like you, I often forget that formatting in the new layout won’t take HTML tags, you have to use the buttons at the bottom of the comment.
How about you add in geothermal, tidal, and biomass?
Geothermal only works when its near the surface.. eg Iceland, New Zealand
Biomass? gotta grow it, the CHOP IT DOWN and transport it, lots of CO2
….. and its messy and polluting to burn.
Some third world countries use LOTS of biomass in the form of dung, for cooking heat.
Tidal is a non-starter in every experiment so far, plus it damages natural ocean life and habitats.
NONE of these can provide the huge amount of RELIABLE energy required by a modern society. They are only ever just tiny niche supplies.
That modern society is what the socialist/marxists WANT TO DESTROY
But remember.. YOU are also part of the modern society.
(or could be if you wanted to)
As New Mexico is starting to find out ..
GREEN virtue-seeking…. DESTROYS.
Geothermal heating and cooling installations can be installed almost anywhere: https://www.epa.gov/rhc/geothermal-heating-and-cooling-technologies#:~:text=Geothermal%20Heating%20and%20Cooling%20Technologies%201%20Ground%20Source,…%203%20Deep%20and%20Enhanced%20Geothermal%20Systems.
TINY NICHE !
Ground source heating deplete the ground’s energy, becoming inefficient after time
Again.. so glad that YOU are offering to PAY for all these
STOP TELLING OTHER PEOPLE WHAT THEY HAVE TO DO !!
Geothermal heat pumps aren’t really geo-thermal. The name is little more than a marketing gimmick. The reality is that it costs a lot of money and requires each house to have a large yard to accommodate the coils. They are also useless for apartments and multi-story buildings.
Gee whiz, it’s almost as if you were doing a school project in how to prove to the world that you have never actually thought about any of the ideas you are proposing.
the big downer about heat pumps is when they leak,
if get lucky and install in a moderate climate area and never get a leak could do ok.
but extreme weather kills the usefulness
and a leak is one of the worst things you will ever deal with.
although new technology may make finding a leak easy, but without high tech sensor technology finding and fixing a leak is night mare.
geothermal is pretty much tapped out everywhere except Iceland.
Tidal is a myth.
Biomass, not enough to make a difference, unless you want to start cutting down virgin forests.
You are clueless MarkW, see my post/link above to fred250
You poor empty sack of ignorant mindless rhetoric.
Live in your own FANTASY LA-LA-LAND world, fool.
So the guy who’s every claim has been refuted over and over again, wants to claim that others are clueless.
Fred has shredded every one of your claims.
Yesterday was the time to start on those three … So far, not a resounding success.
It doesn’t really matter if you use a mixture of technologies – do the maths and see that there is no possible solution. As to ‘efficiency gains’ – wind power is essentially technology thousands of years old and was abandoned for being a dead end technology – there are no more efficiency gains to be squeezed out. Most of these technologies are similar – they’re at the limits of their usefulness and just can’t be any more efficient than they are right now.
You neglect to envision new technologies, like https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/tidal-power.php
ROFLMAO
Tidal power has been trialed and FAILED MASSIVELY
The amount possible is totally insignificant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tidal_power_stations
TINY, NICHE.. just like geothermal
Exactly as I said
Thanks for the confirmation bozo. !
Now go and scrape up some cow dung so your mummy can cook your evening meal.
The places with large tides require harmonic oscillations to get the high tides.
Add tidal power the mix and the harmonic oscillations disappear.
Every where else, a couple of feet of change in sea level twice a day isn’t enough to power anything meaningful. Not to mention all the problems with salt water corrosion and the cost of protecting your investment from winter storms.
Thanks, Bethan. Tidal power plants suffer from some major disadvantages.
• They are intermittent, since the tides are not always flowing.
• Their output changes constantly, making them difficult to integrate into a power grid.
• They are very limited as to where they can be installed, as you need a large mostly enclosed tidal basin so you can site them in the entrance where the flow is significant.
• They need fairly high tides to operate, and those only occur in high latitudes.
As a result, they’ll never be a significant player in world energy. At present, after years of development, the total global tidal power has a peak production of about 500 MW. This means an average production on the order of half of that, call it 300 MW to be generous.
Recall from above that we’ll need 22 terawatts of generating capacity by 2050. Current tidal generation is 0.001% of our 2050 need, and is unlikely to be much more than that.
Finally, could I ask people to stop dumping on and insulting Bethany? She’s raising what she thinks are important issues in good faith, and dissing her is not an appropriate response to honest inquiry such as hers.
w.
No Willis, she is DELUSIONAL.
She needs to be woken up to that FACT. !
Thanks, Fred, but there’s no need to insult people in order to wake them up. In fact, that’s usually counterproductive.
And my take is that Bethan is not delusional, she just doesn’t have either the math chops or alternatively the desire to take a hard look at what she’s proposing.
As a result, she’s drawn by the “latest greatest” … like say heat pumps and tidal power. Yes, they’re real, but they are orders of magnitude too small to make a difference.
Take heat pumps. They do save some energy, in mild climates. In cold climates they don’t. And half the world’s population lives in cities, where there’s little access to the ground for the heat pumps.
The main part she doesn’t seem to understand is that even if her collection of ideas could cut the 2050 energy need by a factor of 4 (which they can’t), it’s still not doable. That’s still building, installing, testing, commissioning, and connecting to the grid a 500MW small nuke each and every single day for 30 years … bright green impossible.
Plus the mining and refining and concrete production to build them, plus the huge extension in the existing electrical grid …
And I haven’t even touched the need for things like electric jumbo jets and electric ocean freighters and the like, or the fact that there aren’t enough rare earth elements to build all the necessary windmills and/or solar panels, or …
My best to you,
w.
bethan is a regular around here, she has earned the derision she is getting.
Again not new technologies – all are variations on the medieval water wheel or wind powered wheels. The peak of efficiency was passed some 5 or 6 hundred years ago – this is turning the clock back hundreds of years to revisit technologies that were dropped because they were no longer efficient or fit for purpose, being replaced by modern designs. If you really want to find a new form of energy production, don’t wallow in the past, look towards the new emergent technologies – just remember that they take time to develop and can’t be rolled out when you stamp your foot and scream “but I want it now!” like some spoiled child.
You can save a lot of fossil fuels by using more efficient technology. For example replacing an oil burning furnace with a heat pump which uses less energy for an equivalent number of BTU’s.
Again.. so glad YOU are offering to PAY for people to do this.
Which is already happening and will only drop total energy needs by a couple of percent, at most.
Heat pumps don’t work well in cold climes. My parents had one before buying the higher efficiency furnace/air conditioner.
Not every environment is the same as the one you live in. Stop and think for once.
Have your parents dig a trench below the forst line, and use the heat pump to extract the thermal energy from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump
Yeah, that’s going to work real well in Kansas clay. If you just go below the frost line you are still only going to get air that is just above freezing, something a heat pump is *not* efficient at using.
This might work where my parents lived where house lots ranged from 1.5acres to 3 acres. But my first house where you could actually stick your hand out the bathroom window and touch the house next door? Not so much. Your trench wouldn’t be long enough to provide a continuous flow of air. If you dug it in Kansas clay you’d probably being pulling a vacuum inside the trench in two minutes! And if you vented the trench to the outside air then what’s the use of the trench in the first place?
Fantasy tiny NICHE
When are you PAYING for all these?
Where will all the materials come from.?
You do know your whole pitiful existence RELIES TOTALLY ON FOSSIL FUELS, don’t you !!
bethan really does like making proposals that cost other people lots of money. It’s almost like she has never had to handle a budget on her own.
1) Hugely expensive to install
2) High maintenance
3) Requires a large yard. The further poleward, the bigger the yard needed.
4) Not practical for apartments and multi-story buildings.
5) Not practical in areas where bedrock comes close to the surface.
6) Difficult in areas where ground water comes close to the surface. Extra corrosion and have to prevent the water from freezing.
7) You have to go well below the frost line, since the ground loops are pulling heat out of the ground, they will lower the frost line by several feet.
most Americans are so out of shape, if they had to dig a 3 foot by 6 foot trench they would fall over exhaustion first, i watched my dad 60 40 lbs over weight, was ok shape back when. try and help the contractors at his house, they just let him try, dad puked in about 15 min, spent the next 4 hours on the couch. he said i do not under stand, i watched you do that shit 10 hours a day 6 days a week.
and i said yes, i was in shape, ate a perfect diet, was about 12% body fat and it takes years to reach that kind of conditioning. even if in shape every summer the first month is brutal, every night i eat and go to bed at 9pm, after the first month i can start to do other stuff go out for a few beers etc.
the guys that go out and drink heavy pay a terrible price.one summer we sent 35 guys home (fired)
and 7 to the hospital, then one guy tried to hang with me all week end, that was scary, both his arms locked up like tetanus, turned out dehydration and severe low potassium caused his arms to lock, we had to put him in and out of the car, i thought he was gonna die when he started shaking and no sweat,. when you stop sweating you are in trouble.
Have you ever had a heat pump?
I once did; they’re awful. The heat is clammy, at best— and you have to have a back-up heat source when temperatures get too low for the heat pump to produce heat.
natural gas furnace
new doors
insulation
and led lights
is a good start
too many worry about huge fancy earth shattering changes.
but the practical conservative approach gets alot of results for less cash.
its always about what you do
not what you talk about doing.
buying 50 led bulbs off amazon and changing them in 2 hours is something people can and do.
digging up 10,000 cubic yards of dirt and heat pump is something 99% of people never do, i did 8 years construction thru college, and some of this stuff is back breaking PIA work.
and you always run into problems on big projects on old houses.
only time it is “easy” is when when all new housing, new development and lots of open access for heavy equipment.
let me mention a house in Pittsburgh PA, ran into an obstacle and 4 guys hand digging under a back yard concrete patio for 3 days.the houses were in a court yard, there was no path wider than 4 feet.
so no heavy equipment, hell we could barely use wheel barrows had to carry 100 buckets of concrete for one section.
ever bucket concrete 45 yards with a 45 min. time limit on the cement truck??
You can save a lot of fossil fuels by using more efficient technology. Fore example using a Toyota Pirus instead of a Ford F350 for a run to the package store.
So you have to use two cars.. A delivery car
…. and one you can actually USE when needed.
STOP TELLING OTHER PEOPLE WHAT THEY HAVE TO DO.
Don’t have to tell them anything……the price of a gallon of whatever will influence the decision the make in what vehicle they drive.
YAWN!
No people will drive the car they need to drive
Political idiocy of artifically increasing fuel prices HURTS EVERYONE, particularly those on lower incomes.
But you DON’T CARE about the little people do you
Its all about “feeling virtuous”
And of course, it makes ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to atmospheric CO2 or the climate.
Really is fascinating how you spend so much time figuring out how to use government to control the decisions other people make.
You *really* don’t know anything about living poor, do you?
Speaking of not being able to do even simple logic, while acting pretentious, here comes bethan.
Are you actually stupid enough to believe that by dividing the work between multiple technologies, that the total amount of work will be less?
Beyond that, what are these efficiency gains you rant about? When ALL the factors are calculated, electrics are less efficient than ICE cars.
See my comment above re: insulation
The topic is about SUPPLY, moron
Stop trying to run away from your ignorantly idiotic comments
Give him a break, incredibly ignorant is the only schtick he’s got.
See other people’s response regarding your comments about insulation.
Homes built since the 70’s already have sufficient insulation. Adding extra on top of that is barely noticeable.
More is better no?
No, the law of diminishing returns stops you from making any gains. You spend more energy on building insulation than you spend on heating/cooling
OVERKILL IS GOLDEN TO AN Extent i had a 12 room 1890s house in Pa the walls were thicker than 4 inch, the front of the house took all the wind, i put r30 in the walls, friends and a couple of the contractors that were doing sub-work had fun giving me shit about who the hell would put r30 in old walls, i also foam every elec. outlet(everyone) i do 2 per wall every room because i always run at least 40% more elec than needed,
i even run 2 /20 amp circuits for each and every bathroom so the wife can run 6-10 items if she wants..
well come winter it was minus 10 degrees out side
and that front wall was 62 degrees.
also note they were real plaster walls
my neighbor had the exact same house, they built like ten of them on that street exactly same design and square footage bedrooms little different, old days they tended to stick with a few different proven designs,
anyhow put your hand on her front wall and it was numb in five min.
insulation and spray foam and new rubber seals in all the right places can make a big difference.
another tip i will give for people in very cold areas. put one of those unvented natural gas ceramic heaters in the basement. use a smaller one that you can leave on 24/7 when temp out side stays below 30 for extended periods, put in a clear area protected by fire board.
and just let it run, extremely efficient and heat rises and keeps the basement from making the first floor cold.
NO, because someone has to pay for it.
Are YOU offering !
Tell you what, Go and wrap yourself in twenty blakets
….. then tell us if “more is better” fool !!
And so speaks the person who is utterly clueless when it comes to economics.
No, more is not always better. If the cost of the insulation is so high that you can never recover it in fuel savings, then you have wasted your money.
Thank you Willis
You are most welcome, Anthony, and my thanks to you in turn for creating and maintaining this most wonderful of forums where such ideas as these can receive full public attention and free public comment.
w.
“Math. Don’t leave home without it.”
You are talking about people who hide in momma’s basement, and skulk around “safe places”. That explains why they don’t need maths.
Good analysis. I posted something here a year or two ago along the same lines – equating the UK private vehicle fleet daily fuel needs with wind turbine requirements – whenever one does this type of maths, the conclusions become obvious –
put another way – the green policies will fall apart when they smack into the wall of physics……
” physics ”
You are kidding, right?
Biden, Kerry, and all the highly paid support folks last came close to physics when rolling down daddy’s driveway in a little red wagon. First timers usually tip over so as to not hit a wall.
Who care about facts when you are on the right side of history and have hope and normalcy at the UN, US and EU?
As compared to NASA doing it’s job {which we paying them 20 billion dollar per year to do.
NASA job has been and remains, to explore the Moon to determine if there in mineable lunar water. Which means roughly can produce water which can sell it, 500 per kg or 1/2 million per ton. Or if private company {without govt giving it money, other than government could buy water at $500 kg, but it’s NOT NASA’s job to buy lunar water, just saying if needs it it buy it, like it buys anything it needs, then it could paid the market price which would $500 per kg {or less} or could likewise buy lunar rocket fuel for $1500 to $2000 per kg which about 1/10th of current cost. So NASA explores lunar polar region {a fairly small region} and measures how water could mineable. Then NASA explores Mars. And private investment decides if what NASA discovers, is or less not “mineable” because mineable is a business decision- or gold everywhere but one only mines the gold, if it’s mineable.
Exploring Mars is about, can people live on Mars. NASA and space cadet have saying one could have settlements or Mars [only habitable planet other than Earth, it’s claimed} and NASA explores Mars to determine if such a thing is actually possible. NASA has sent robot craft to Mars { a lot them} simply because Mars could habitable- otherwise they send as many to the Moon or Mercury or Venus, and etc. Or NASA has already spend the most amount of tax dollars on Mars missions- due to Mars is thought to most habitable planet, other than Earth. But regardless of what Elon Musk says, we currently lack enough information. It’s possible. And what NASA needs explore is whether Mars has mineable water, and instead of $500 per kg, for living purposes, Mars water needs to be around $1 per kg. Now like Moon, NASA doesn’t mine water, to somehow cause Mars water to be the cheap price of $1 per kg, instead determines where Mars water is, which might mine and could be sold at $1 per kg, or $1000 per cubic meter {ton} or 1 billion dollar for million tons.
Any mars town will need millions of tons. Things like is Mars water polluted, and/or is most Mars water polluted, and other things about Mars water. And if NASA finds alien life, does that mean that Mars is not a habitable planet?
Oh, what does this have to do with energy on Earth?
Everything.
Butler James: My lordship. Rusians are on Mars!
His Lordship: Calm down, James – and all of them?
We have had people living in ISS for two decades and hundreds of people
living in Antarctica for several decades. And roughly speaking, they go unnoticed.
Could one have hundreds of free people living on Mars and have them, roughly speaking, go unnoticed?
I think we could have a few NASA base on Mars for decades, and they go as unnoticed, as ISS and bases in Antarctica, but I mean people who for whatever reason were not embedded in some bureaucracy.
Though I think American News, would cover it differently, if the people were embedded a Russian or Chinese bureaucracy.
It seems the news would constantly have stories that X country was doing things and US country was not doing something, a central part of the constant harangue would be pointing to X country with people living on Mars, and US lack doing anything useful.
But that is more about the nature of our non-news, news.
And my “point” is what if they were free people living on Mars, and what would the effect be of that?
Well, I have wild idea, that would cause World Peace.
And reason roughly is that just hundred people on Mars, would force the comparison between Earthlings vs Martians. Or it’s slight and constant push away from a Earth nation vs another Earth nation. And Earthlings vs Martians would not tend to be about conflict or potential war.
So, to be clear, what talking about is not NASA bases on Mars, and it will not do this, even if lots of Martian base crew are from other nations. Mainly because NASA bases will be mostly ignored.
It’s realized that NASA Mars bases will be mostly ignored, and this is commonly expressed in terms of worries about long term funding of the Mars exploration program. And such “worries” cause idiot ideas of doing Mars flags and footprint “type exploration”- which basically means having little exploration done but having the “success” of Apollo program.
In case anyone not aware, Apollo program was not about exploration of the Moon, it was a cold war PR stunt, a race to land Americans on the Moon, and beating Soviets which were also mostly concerned about global PR of space {or since on topic PR, I would say our heavens}.
Which if understand this, one might understand why US threw away the best rocket ever made, the Saturn V. Of course now, the Starship could be stiff competition for best rocket ever to made, though the SLS is not even close.
In bureaucratic jargon, the problem with Saturn V is it did not have mission after the Apollo program was done.
Of course the Apollo program did result in significant scientific discoveries, but that wasn’t primary purpose doing it. It’s more correct to say, one could not avoid running across significant scientific discoveries- if you also want to put a man on the Moon.
Now, the question occurs to me, how people know of any “significant scientific discoveries” related to Apollo.
And how many?
I thought people could cheat, and google it. So I googled it:
–Let’s look at some of the key science gleaned from Apollo 11 and its successors.
Another says:
“The Apollo 11 mission showed that the Moon formed hot, that it was magmatically active for at least 800 million years, and that the surface-blanket of dusty rubble contains a treasure trove of evidence of how the Moon formed”
That Moon is a lot like Earth, includes that Earth was also getting impacted like the Moon was.
Or a space rock could have hit earth and have killed the dinosaurs.
And one can find lists of impact craters on Earth surface and one guess
that large explosion in our atmosphere are not likely caused by nuclear weapon explosions.
At least some of the green elite are counting on the impossibility of producing 241 PWh/y from wind, solar, and a few other types of “acceptable” technology. They will put us normal folks on energy budgets. All “unnecessary” travel will be banned, so we won’t be needing energy for things like visiting out-of-town family members, taking trips to the mountains for skiing, hiking, and sightseeing, or travelling to warm places in the winter. (Travel and tourism will be only for the uber-wealthy.) Professional sports involves far too much energy consumption to be tolerated, as do heated garages, swimming pools, and shopping centres. Nobody needs to heat their entire home, right? Telephone and internet services require a lot of energy, so they could be rationed. If we’re allowed private vehicles at all, there will be one electric vehicle per family. The answer to any remaining energy shortfalls will be supply interruptions. As long as you don’t mind not having access to energy when it’s -30 C outside, life will be loads of fun under the Green New Deal.
It sort of shows the scale of what is ahead.
There is already a realisation that wind and solar have limited merit. If they had economic merit then they would not need never ending subsidies. The maths clearly show they have somewhat limited potential in current form.
The maths also show there is value in conservation. I was not surprised to see that the top three vehicle models sold in USA in 2020 were all pickups. All weighing over 3000kg and one topping out at around 4400kg. They were not hybrids either. Nor were they electric powered. Australia’s top seller is also a pickup but a tad lighter than the US behemoths.
The big shift in 2020 is something I did for the last 10 years of my working life; worked from home. The need to commute for work is rapidly diminishing. ZOOM also eliminates some need to travel for work. This is a big step in productivity and quality of life. In Australia, we are already seeing the impact on housing with pressure on larger houses further out from city centres. Coastal housing is under serious pressure. People want more space and a home office; typically on less land as that involved extra costs.
Post Covid, there should be pressure coming back onto fossil fuel demand. That will push prices. Inevitable high prices force conservation. If government lock up the resources then prices will go up real quick.
Energy efficiency in homes has only just started. Homes in tropics and sub-tropic regions could quite reasonably be self sufficient from an energy perspective and operate off grid. The technology is already economic for that.
Will there be fusion power by 2050 and will it be economic?
Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity.
That’s the average amount of energy needed. The actual number is worse, because we need to build enough power generation to handle peak power.
Absolutely true, Mark, but I like to keep my analyses conservative so people can’t point to one issue and discount the whole analysis based on that one thing. For example, folks would likely say “well, time of use pricing will level out the peaks, so you’re wrong, wrong, wrong …”
w.
Goals like that are always 10 or 15+ years out, it will never happen, nor will Xiden live that long.
As you build more wind and solar farms, you inevitably start with land that is well suited to wind or sun. Then as that is used up, start utilizing land that is less well suited.
This means that the total number of windmills and acres of solar panels will inevitably be greater than even the estimates that Willis has produced.
Willis also didn’t get into line losses that will be suffered because many of the good places for wind and sun are not close to where people live.
Don’t forget the new copper that has to be strung between the boondocks and the huge number of vehicle charging stations…there isn’t enough worldwide.
At which point it will pay the thieves to filch the copper and sell it for reclamation. Then what do the people needing to recharge going to do?
Er…. I’m afraid that Mr Eschenbach has made a fundamental error with his computation.
He has assumed that the amount of energy which we currently use is the amount which will need to be generated. I have some bad news for him.
Currently, environmentalists claim that energy savings will square the circle. We know that they will not. But, in anticipation of this, the environmentalists are building ‘smart’ metering systems which can also act as smart rationing systems. Installation of these is already well under way in the West.
What is going to happen is that we will be given some kind of green energy system. It will provide far less energy than we currently use. And that is what we will have to make do with.
Say goodbye to continuous cheap power, lighting, water, etc. For ever…
dodgy geezer: “Say goodbye to continuous cheap power, lighting, water, etc. For ever…”
The long and the short of it is that in order to reach the targeted green energy goals, per capita energy consumption by Americans must be half of what it is today, and possibly only one-third of what it is today.
I have been pointing out for some time now that currently existing environmental and national security legislation could be creatively integrated with the goal of enforcing a nationally-mandated energy rationing program. One which is completely legal under existing law and which would be highly resistant to any lawsuits brought against it.
The Biden Administration already has all the legal authority it needs to go just as far and as fast as it might want to go in quickly reducing America’s GHG emissions. But will Biden use that authority?
Prior to 2020, the risk of political blowback was the primary obstacle keeping any climate activist president from using the full power of the Executive Branch to quickly reduce America’s GHG emissions.
But with what has been seen in the 2020 election and its immediate aftermath, any risk of political blowback from moving fast and furious on climate change issues has now been completely eliminated.
It will be a true communism: Everybody will get as much as they need. (Everybody’s need will be determined by the elites). Similarities to slavery are striking.
Under communism, everything is owned by the state.
Including the people.
Actually under Communism the “collective” is supposed to own everything, there will be no “state”.
In practice there has never been a nation that actually ever transitioned to true communism. Not the Soviet Union, not China, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not anywhere. Once the state has grown large enough to nationalize the economy, thus requiring a huge Bureaucratic Hegemony, no further evolution ever occurs. It would require the Bureaucratic Hegemony to release power to the collective and that will *never* happen.
The Dems are gradually building a huge Bureaucratic Hegemony here in the US. Trump tried to cut this back and the “deep state” finally found a way to get rid of him.
The Bureaucratic Hegemony here is definitely moving us toward Socialism. The BH is a true psuedo-biologic entity. As such its primary drive is for survival – and that means growing larger and larger.
I’m truly afraid that the BH is so entrenched today that *no* elected polity will ever be able to control the polity known as the Bureaucratic Hegemony.
I keep saying this, because it’s so obvious: require the Greenies and ecohippies and their money-grabbing pals to reduce their very own CO2 emissions by using rebreather equipment 24 hours per day, 365.25 days per year. No exceptions.
If they do that, their own CO2 load into the atmosphere will be substantially reduced. Perhaps I should include a requirement that they also wear equipment to capture their very own personal methane exhalations, because methane is also a greenhouse gas but does have its industrial uses.
I don’t actually think the energy/climate debate is about energy. It’s about scaring people batshit crazy so they’ll comply with what experts tell them. This involves destroying constructive public involvement and participation in society. Because “experts” don’t like being questioned, or held to account. So it boils down to destroying society.
I think that the better route would be small nuclear reactors servicing limited regions rather than giant ones servicing huge swathes of land. I think SA has such a reactor and were trying to flog it to other African countries to supply their electricity needs. If anyone can see whether this is a feasable idea I would be interested. Either way nuclear is the only viable option to oil/gas/coal for electricity generation. We will still need hydrocarbons for a huge variety of products though ranging from transport, fertilizers, agriculture, clothing, manufaturing etc. Zero carbon is an asinine idea and is predicated on the unproven hypothesis (NOT theory which in real science has a vey different level of meaning) that CO2 is the main forcer of global temperature rise
Small reactors still have the same licensing problems, the same maintenance costs, the same regulation cost, etc. Small reactors really don’t buy you anything except an increase in inefficiency.
Tim Gorman: “Small reactors still have the same licensing problems, the same maintenance costs, the same regulation cost, etc. Small reactors really don’t buy you anything except an increase in inefficiency.”
What you say here may have been true thirty years ago. But it isn’t true today, not in America anyway. The deterioration of America’s industrial base in general has had a profound effect on the economics of all large-scale technology projects, not just nuclear projects.
Building smaller size reactor units in larger numbers allows the same production team to stay active more or less continuously, rather than having to stand down when a reactor unit is finished and then having to wait years in some cases to ramp up for the next reactor project.
In any case, public opinion will never allow a nuclear reactor project to be done with any less rigor and any less attention to detail than what the NRC now requires. Projects which succeed accept this basic reality and do everything in their power to do the job right the first time.
Beta,
Because of the long licensing fights those production teams will still wind up standing down most of the time. You won’t save anything there. You’ll still wind up waiting years for the next small reactor project to be approved. You simply won’t get those larger numbers of small reactors. Being “smaller” won’t change anything.
Tim Gorman: “Beta, Because of the long licensing fights those production teams will still wind up standing down most of the time. You won’t save anything there. You’ll still wind up waiting years for the next small reactor project to be approved. You simply won’t get those larger numbers of small reactors. Being “smaller” won’t change anything.”
That is not the case. Once the initial safety reviews are completed for a specific reactor design, and once the combined construction & operating license for the first plant site is approved, the foundation is then in place to build subsequent plants on a cookie cutter basis.
The approach that past experience proves will work is to do what NuScale, Fluor, and UAMPS are doing with their Idaho project and that is to get all of the technical, the engineering, the project planning, and the regulatory pieces put into place well ahead of the very first concrete pour at the very first plant site.
NuScale and Fluor are now working hard to reduce their 12-unit SMR capital cost from roughly $5,000 per kw to $3,500 per kw. Compare that figure with Vogtle 3 & 4’s current cost projection of roughly $14,000 per kw for two AP1000’s.
Don’t be so naive.
Every installation will be different, even if it’s only in the environmental impact statement that goes along with it. Each of these will have to be individually reviewed. And each will be litigated endlessly by the not-in-my-backyard people objecting to the licensing of each site.
We had a nuke plant built about 50 miles from us a number of years ago. Standard design, no nuke regulatory problems, It took longer to get it licensed than it did to build it and get it operational. I don’t care how big the plant will be, each and every one of them will go through the same hassles this plant went through!
I read a science fiction story one time where they ran a big wire from the Earth to a geosynchronous satellite and used the resultant electrical charge to run things.
That might be more impossible.
I wonder how much a 23,000 mile long cable would weigh?
Actually the satellite would have to be a lot higher than geo-synchronous orbit, since it’s orbital velocity would have to be faster than needed to maintain it’s orbit so that it can support the weight of the cable.
Biden Administration Sued for Halting Oil and Gas Leasing on Federal Lands
“The Biden administration was sued Wednesday over its executive order to halt oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.
The lawsuit (pdf) was filed in the U.S. District Court in Wyoming by the Western Energy Alliance, a group representing fossil fuel producers on federal lands. They say President Joe Biden exceeded his authority with the recent order.”
Litigation will be the legacy of the Biden “administration”.
Willis,
Good article, but it doesn’t give a perspective on how much investment must occur to get hydrocarbon production. The base hydrocarbon decline is 10-15% per year, and by 2050, the base production will be minimal. So, to maintain current levels of oil and gas production will take tens of thousands of development wells and numerous new field discoveries. The task is pretty daunting, but we have a successful efficient industry in place that can probably result in the higher production by 2050 if the investments are made.
So, I think it would be appropriate to compare a basket of nuclear/wind/solar/hydro/bio… development with zero oil/gas/coal investment to a scenario with oil/gas/coal investment.
Also, technology may change the future energy picture completely. The directional drilling and fracture technology has completely changed the oil and gas industry over 15 years. Who knows, fusion may provide abundant, inexpensive, reliable electricity by 2050. Ha ha ho ho hee hee, ok maybe not fusion but maybe something else.
Thanks, Rel. Not clear what you mean by the “base hydrocarbon decline” or “base production”. As Figure 1 shows, the global consumption of fossil fuels has increased every year right up to the present … where is the “decline”?
Per the BP Statistical Review of World Energy:
Oil proved reserves in 2009 were 1531.8 billion barrels. In 2019 they were 1733.9 billion bbls. That’s 50 years of production at current rates, with reserves increasing despite continued production.
Coal proved reserves in 2019 were 1,070 billion tonnes, which is 132 years worth at the current production rate. BP doesn’t have earlier coal reserves figures.
Gas reserves in 2009 were 170.5 trillion m3. In 2019 they were 198.9 trillion m3. That’s 50 years of production at current rates, with reserves increasing despite continued production.
And yes, new energy sources may come into existence … or they may not. My analysis is about what we know, not about what might possibly happen.
But if you want to get into maybe’s, consider that Japan is already experimenting with energy from methane clathrates, AKA methane hydrates, which are the world’s largest natural gas reserves … and are totally untouched.
w.
An excellent post Willis that brings much need perspective to the discussion. I’d still like to know what the plan is for fueling thousands of jumbo jets around the world every day by 2050. Or are they planning for us to have electrically powered personal transporters by then?
The Jumbo jets have been retired, now you have the Dreamliner’s flying.
How optimistic of you to think that the new green deal includes plans to have the mere plebs flying.
Only the apparatchiks and senior party officials will be accorded that privilege, you, get back to tending your mule and potato patch. The county bus will drop by every Wednesday so that you can go to town to hawk your green organic veggies. Grown from your own organic toilet.
Thank you Willis for an insightful look at the disconnect our political class has with reality and basic math.
Only legitimate nuclear reactor is molten lead salted with nuclear fuel powder. It is inherently safe, at least 10 times cheaper, can be built in months, each can produce tens of times more power, and it is safe enough to use small scale like ships and central plants.
I think that the targets are easily achievable, if adjustments are used where appropriate (flights to selected conferences can be adjusted to be net carbon absorbing, for example).
The Dems have to do this they have to save the planet by bankrupting the country, destroy the economy. https://nypost.com/2021/01/27/kerry-zero-emissions-wont-make-difference-in-climate-change/ Which already been stated before for this non crisis. They just want our money and reduce the US to a third world country after we are drained dry.
Per the calculation we need to cover all of Europe, west of the Ural river, with solar panels to supply the world with energy (~2.5m km2). Meaning no room for humans, trees or wildlife. Just a humongous silicon desert.
If you don’t have yours yet “You better hurry up and order one. Our limited supply will very soon be gone.” PS 1968 or thereabouts.
Willis,
Excellent quantitative introduction to the core of the problem. However, with your commitment to “focus,” you didn’t mention a related two-pronged problem.
For a build-out of this magnitude, it will require ramping up mining, manufacturing, transportation, and construction. All of these will require energy above what a simple extrapolation would suggest. It will also ramp up CO2 production, which is the opposite of what is trying to be accomplished!
Whether mining occurs here or overseas, the same amount of energy and CO2 production will occur. Biden has also decreed “Buy American,” so that will make it more difficult to depend on countries overseas to supply us with the necessary raw materials. In the USA, it typically takes 1 to 3 decades to go through the permitting process to open a new major mine. What is Biden going to do about that?
The trucks with 8-foot+ diameter wheels that carry the ore
allalmost exclusively run on diesel fuel. They could be electrified. However, replacing them with electric trucks will be yet another demand on resources! The old trucks will have to be scrapped, and new ones designed and built, putting a further strain on critical natural resources for batteries and motors.In the chain of events from locating, securing, and preparing a mine site, to the blasting, transportation out of the mine, crushing, screening, and specialized processes of benificiating the ore, it then has to move on to being smelted, refined, and finally fabricated. All these steps require energy that currently isn’t being consumed at the same rate. There will almost certainly be new sources of CO2, such as when carbonate ores are being smelted, and stepped up emission of CO2 for equipment that can’t be run off electricity.
Once the raw materials are produced, then new plants will either have to be built, or old ones re-fitted, to manufacture the specialized products to be produced. Another source of potential CO2, and certainly another load on the electrical grid.
Those new products, windmills, solar panels, and new trucks and chemicals, will then have to be transported from the factories to the installation sites, by the newly manufactured, battery-powered trucks. (Big-rigs that have yet to be designed.)
With the mental capacity of someone who couldn’t even teach teachers, I don’t think that Biden has a clue about the immensity of what he is proposing, and how complicated such a transition is, nor the financial impact on the economy and the standard of living of people in the interim.
Even as we contemplate putting the country on a ‘war-time’ footing to revolutionize our energy supply, a proposed copper mine in Arizona is running into opposition because it is on Indian reservation land. Maybe in thirty years this mine will finally start producing.
It was never about climate or the environment. It has always been about destroying Western economies to leave people desperate to be ‘saved’ by socialism.
John “Lurch” Kerry sez oil and gas workers “can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/john-kerry-oil-gas-workers-lose-jobs-bidens-war-energy-go-make-solar-panels-video/
Kerry is still an idiot, nothing has changed.
Meanwhile Quid Pro Joe is already backtracking away from the fracking ban, sort of.
And….what do we use to produce the hundred’s of thousand products made from oil.
@Willis – we don’t need those nuclear plants, battery storage will save us!
We only have to build one equivalent of the old World Trade Center every 42 or 43 days, in which we install 420,000 Powerwall2 units per day, at a cost of $3.15 trillion dollars (per day, units only, not including wiring, “gateways,” and illegal labor).
Simple!
The solution is obvious – they’re going to ration how much energy we’re allowed to use… or start pruning the population. Either way, freedom and individual liberty are a thing of the past, “unaffordable luxuries that must be eliminated if we’re to survive”. Evil by any other name…
Embrace the power of ‘AND’….
Elite obsession about overpopulation and environmental footprints has been an open book since the Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ and the Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth’.
Aggressive efforts to limit population growth have failed ( in the Elite’s minds ).
You choke off energy and you choke off population.
The New Feudalism will be access to energy and access to digital services, which will define who is a New Aristocrat and who survives in Neo-Serfdom.
Others have mentioned this analogy and it seems to best suit. The future trajectory will very much look like the world of ‘The Hunger Games’.
Willis,
You ignore the most obvious path they will likely go down – just ration the amount of energy all the common people use (you know, not the elite Hollywood actors or D.C. politicians, just all the rest).
You also ignore the mandates for impossible things like only electric vehicles by 2035 which might put a tiny strain on the electric grid.
So no matter how ridiculous you make their goals seem, they are actually even more ridiculous than that.
Maybe that’s why the great reset is popular?
” vehicles will be electric” means you will not have vehicle.
‘for the all-too-frequent times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.’
Well they aren’t actually all that frequent in very many parts of the world…
Those parts of the world where there is sufficient sun or sufficient wind a majority of the time can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Thanks, griff. The sun doesn’t shine half the time.
And the reason that the capacity factor for wind turbines sited in the windiest spots is only 35% or so is … yep, you guessed it. 65% of the time the wind isn’t strong enough for the turbines to generate anywhere near nameplate capacity. Wind turbines require a wind of 7.5 – 9 mph (12-14 kmph) to even start generating.
Next, winds are generally weaker at night, when solar output is zero. See here for a discussion of the reasons
Net result? Times “when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing” are indeed all too frequent.
Finally, note that these results are in the most favorable areas for wind turbines. But we’re talking about 3,000 2MW units per day. From here, wind turbines require about 3/4 of an acre per megawatt. Over the period from now to 2050, we’d need about 75,000 square mi (190,000 square km) to house all the turbines … so we will use up the good wind sites very quickly.
Best regards,
w.
PS—In passing, for all of these unit conversions let me recommend the marvelous website called “Unit Juggler“.
Griff, right now Germany is in exactly the situation you say rarely happens:
More here.
w.
Seriously Griff, this is the best you can do? How about disputing Willis’s figures with your own calculations?
Rockwa, just as you are, Griff is perfectly free to question, challenge, or expound upon relevant topics of his choice. That’s what he questioned … so that’s what I answered. Please let it go.
w.
Unfortunately Willis, you and others with pretty obvious credentials let Griff and his ilk get off way too lightly. That is partly why the alarmists are smashing the debate. If you think you can play fair and win, you are dreaming.
Thanks, Rockwa. I answered Griff directly and with plenty of facts and links. Do I think I can “play fair and win”?
Perhaps not … but I’m quite clear that if I don’t play fair I lose. And if I engage in personal abuse, when all Griff did was make a claim, I definitely lose.
w.
This does not change the general conclusion, but …
This figure is low by a factor of 10 to 20 and maybe more.
The article said:
” … Per the NREL, actual delivery from grid-scale solar panel installations on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 8.3 watts per square metre depending on location …”
I calculated the figure based on my own rules of thumb and got a result of 83 W/m^2/hr 8764 hours of the year. That happened to be exactly 10 x the quoted figure (the exact coincidence is a coincidence 🙂 ). I used 2 kWh/m^2/day which is the daily winter mean in my city (Auckland NZ) and lower than places where you build LARGE solar farms. Our annual mean is about 4 kWh/m^2/day so 20 x the quoted figure.
Note the proposed Australian solar farm intended to send power over 8000 km to Singapore.
North Africa to London or Moscow is closer. Negev Desert to London is closer.
This proposed system is 10 GW – you’d only need to build one and lay an 8000 km cable every 5 days 🙂 ! – or one a month to power the US. (!)
Using the NREL data from their report at https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf
and using their 3.5 acres/ GWh/year average rate gives about 28 W/m^2/hr 365/24 (E&OE)
ie 3.5 x the cited rate and rather lower than my rate. [Other interpretations no doubt can be applied].
Russell
Russell, my calculations look like this:
1 GWh/year / (8766 hrs/yr) =
114,077 watts continuous per 3.4 acres =
33,552 watts continuous / acre
1 acre = 4046.9 m2
33,552 watts/acre / (4046.9 m2 / acre) = 8.3 watts/m2
If there’s an error in that, please let me know.
w.
Weather Dependent Renewables Productivity: what do the numbers mean?
Productivity, (or Capacity factor), is the percentage ratio of actual power output to the Nameplate rating of a power generator. The percentages below are the 2019 measured productivity percentages of Weather Dependent Renewable technologies in the UK. In comparison with the productivity percentages used in this post these UK / European measured values are a great deal less optimistic.
Conventional generation technologies are available 24/7 and are dispatchable according to demand except for periods of routine maintenance.
UK productivity percentages: Renewable Energy Foundation data
· Onshore Wind 24.0%
· Offshore Wind 31.4%
· Solar PV on grid 10.2%
· UK Combined Renewables 21.7%
· Conventional generation 90%
What do the productivity numbers mean? Think about electricity generation as an ordinary business. It provides a product which should be of consistent high quality and which is vital to all the other businesses of the Nation.
· but on average more than half of the labour force only turn up on 1 day in 5: the day they choose to arrive is unpredictable.
· quite often, even if they do turn up, they walk out when they feel like it in the middle of the shift.
· but the unions insist that if they do turn up, they have to be employed, laying off the guys that do work full-time and cutting the pay of those full-time guys.
· and worse than that, almost a quarter of the work force only turn up 1 day in 10.
· and those ones usually arrive on days when they are not likely to be needed but they still have to be paid in full.
· anyway, they always go home by the evening, the time of peak demand, and they don’t like working much at all in the winter when they might be needed.
· these workers get tired quickly and retire and need replacement a third of the way through a normal working lifetime.
· the unions also insist that they are payed about 10 times as much as the ordinary productive workers. Quite often they are paid not to work at all.
· and when these guys do arrive, they cause difficulties with quality assurance, severe industrial disruption and they, at a whim, can suddenly close down production altogether. If they do manage that there is major economic damage across the Nation.
· when there is a real breakdown, these guys can’t help to reinstate the service.
But apart from the personal professional pride and the responsibility as managers to providing a good quality of service, in the end the extra costs don’t really matter, either the Government, (or rather the Taxpayer), picks up the tab or the extra costs are just passed the costs on the customers: the customers don’t have any real choice because there is a virtual monopoly for the supply of the product.
This is the scale of business problems faced by power supply managers that the decision to opt for trying to collect dilute and irregularly intermittent energy from the environment and calling it “Renewable”. These problems can only get worse as the policy makers insist that more and more Weather Dependent Renewables are used in the power industry.
An excellent way to undermine Western economies is to render their power generation unreliable and expensive. That objective of Green thinking is progressively being achieved by government policy throughout the Western world.
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/uk-eu28-renewables-productivity/
“I sincerely hope that everyone can see that any of those alternatives are not just impossible. They are pie-in-the-sky, flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible”.
Well, it is possible if we want to make the world look like the darkest of the 3rd world countries, which would solve another problem – over population since those of us in the developed countries are basically fat, dumb, and happy – and have no idea how to survive in an energy-free world – which is where we would end up.
Great article btw, matches what Pielke Jr. wrote.
Great post, thanks Willis.
I can’t find the World Energy Organisation on Google. Do you have a link please?
My bad, it’s the World Energy Council. I’ll fix the head post.
w.
Thanks Willis
It isn’t a real goal. As only a few have stated the green new deal is about changing the world economic system. This is the idea that we should be debating. We have taken the bait and are investigating and talking about something they know is only a decoy.
Climate Change is all B.S.
What are you worried about? All we need to do is science harder and we’ll be fine!
Thank you for clearly stating what I’ve been trying to tell my Lefty friends for years about their carbon free energy production fantasies. If you enjoy the fruits of living in a high energy culture you need high energy plants to provide the power.
They don’t get it.
Willis,
Very telling message to make a global point on the electrification of the globe without hydrocarbons. Could you do something similar for the US as Mr Biden although interested in global affairs, has made a call to arms to electrify the US more or less by 2035? What would need to be done here following a similar format in your post?
As I mentioned in the head post, just divide all the numbers by 6 to get the relevant figures for the US.
w.
One comment on your logic. If we could move off fossil fuels, the bulk energy demand should fall somewhat due to the thermodynamic inefficiencies in the fossil fuel usage chain as compared to an electrified chain – IF the electrical sourcing is also very efficient.
For example, a gasoline powered car gets valuable work out of perhaps 35% of the fuel energy consumed. An electric car gets a much better number, so if the electrical source is highly fuel efficient, the total energy demand falls for the same work being done. On the other hand, if the electricity is produced from fossil fuels via say combined cycle power plants, it is only 50% efficient, times the efficiency of the electricity system and car, and you end up not far from the same place.
Displacing natural gas from home heating is even worse, because a modern furnace is >90% efficient. There is little room for entropy avoidance left, so almost no power source is “green enough” to actually make the energy demand lower.
The problem with your analysis is that it leaves out much more than it includes.
Yes, comparing plug to wheel of an electric vs fuel cap to wheel on a car does make the electric look more efficient.
The problem that you are ignoring is the problem of generating the electricity in the first place. Since we are comparing to fossil fuels, we’ll use a fossil fuel power plant. The best of them might get 60% efficient, most don’t get near that much. I’ll use 50% as an average.
Of the electric energy that’s generated, on average 10% of it will be lost due to resistance in the lines and conversion inefficiencies whenever the voltage levels are kicked up or down.
The next problem is getting that energy into and then out of the battery. You lose another 20% there.
When all the factors are considered, electrics would be lucky to be as efficient as an ICE vehicle.
If you can only use from 80% to 20% of the battery capacity in order to make it last then you’ve already lost 40% of the possible capacity of the battery. So be careful of the efficiency of electric cars. In addition high and low temperatures severely discount the energy available from the battery, an additional hit to its efficiency.
Assuming half the 22 TW comes from coal-fired power plants (from the graph it looks like about half the capacity exists) then we need ~1 GW per day additional capacity, which is 2 typical power plants. This doesn’t sound all that much better.
Clearly, we need a plan to meet the energy needs of future generations and it should be sustainable.
I notice nobody talks about the fact that all living things including humans, exhale CO2 every second they are alive ! It may not add up to much but worth letting everyone know they are adding to the problem they think is SO TOXIC !!!!
Storage of energy is essential with solar and wind, nuclear cannot be throttled quickly to adjust so it is only useful for base load unless some output is stored.
Various storage schemes are about, for whatever source of energy. Including weights lifted by a tower crane, water reservoir uphill of course, batteries as the US military planned to install at a base in HI, bladders in Lake Ontario, ….
Hydro-electric generation of course comes from huge water reservoirs, relatively rapid response.
But today much of the power above base load comes from thermal plants of varying speed, natural gas fueled turbines are good – slower response ones have heat recovery steam turbine system, fast recovery ones no heat recovery so less efficient. In Alberta, NG fueled generation is being placed closer to point of use than traditional thermal plants. (Drive west of Edmonton on H16 toward Jasper and you may find a lake with a power plant on the side opposite a park, there’s coal in the area. And good coal southwest of Calgary, with much export via rail to a port near Vancouver BC.)
Nothing new about wind and batteries of course, I lived in a house that had a windmill and big glass batteries. Powered lights and refrigerator, but heating was by wood heaters and stove which also provided hot water. I don’t remember how washing machine was powered – likely 2-cycle motor running on gasoline, drying of clothes was on outdoor lines. (The wind energy system was 32 vdc, IIRC.) Owner of the house paid for it by working in the oil patch. The area was fairly windy.
A crazy situation a few years ago was that the monopoly electric utility of the BC government was buying coal-generated power from AB during times when it was cheap, keeping water in its dams, then selling electricity from its dams at high price at other times.
So eco-minded people in BC did not realize they were using electricity generated from coal.
Problem popped up later of being snared in big lawsuit in California where it sold electricity to.
I like the debunking calcs here:
https://achemistinlangley.net/2018/11/27/revisiting-100-wind-water-and-sunlight-for-canada-an-ill-advised-approach-to-fight-climate-change/
Wonderful, bloody wonderful! I’ve spent varying portions of every day since December 28th 2020, trying to accurately calculate the ‘green’ energy requirement so that it’s ‘GO’ on January 1st 2050!
I must admit, the research took me for ever, it’s become an obsession, it’s driving me absolutely crazy, and then, I find it all on one page, already done and probably more accurate than mine would have been! AArrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!
But, thank you!
Thanks Willis. What you have done is show that we really do need to be transitioning to renewable energy today because fossil fuels will run out eventually and it’ll take many decades to transition so we can’t wait until the last minute.
We can’t wait until they decline and market forces push towards renewables either. It will be much too late by then.
What we need to do is transition for the right reasons and not place emphasis on reducing fossil fuel use because of climate concerns and crazy schemes like carbon capture and storage but rather place emphasis on renewables where their use make sense.
We have literally hundreds of years of fossil fuels left. There is NO reason to move from them to intermittent, unreliable, expensive renewables that destroy stability.
Where is it that “renewables make sense”? In California, PGE buys fossil fuel electricity for 4.5¢ per kWh and pays 12.2¢ per kWh for solar and wind … which means they can’t even keep the lights on, and time-of-use pricing is as much as 80¢ per kWh to the consumer.
Does that makes sense to you? Renewables don’t make sense anywhere.
When fossil fuels do run out in a hundred years or so, long before they do fossil prices will increase, and the market will take care of it without the intervention of subsidies and do-gooders …
w.
Lets say you’re right and fossil fuels do last another hundred years then to transition by then requires your deployment calculation in time x 3. So in other words about two 2.1GW Nuclear power station every week or so. Is that happening?
Similarly you can factor in the solar deployment to a quite high deployment rate even with x3 time.
Secondly re: “When fossil fuels do run out in a hundred years or so, long before they do fossil prices will increase, and the market will take care of it without the intervention of subsidies and do-gooders”
When the cost of fossil fuels increases, those increases flow on to everything downstream because energy underlies everything we do. For those reasons, I dont think renewable energy sources can ever be cheaper than fossil fuel equivalents on a cost/energy basis while the fossil fuels are necessary in their construction. In fact in time, it’ll be worse.
agree let the market and mr.
greedy capitalist take care of the issue.
we will move toward electric more in the future.
i hope nuclear because that is what makes sense.
and use the extra nuke power to make hydrogen.
use the hydrogen as the battery and then sell any extra hydrogen for fuel cell use.
just let the market take care of things.
nuclear is the way to go if just remove politics and environmentalist from the equation.
France runs 70% nuclear and has been for 30-50 years, never hear about it because environmentalist do not want to talk about what works and what makes sense.
So in total:
10,950 nuclear power plants OR
32,850,000 wind turbines OR
1,051,200 acres of Earth covered in solar panels
Hey just look around at everything that is made from oil and figure that into the equation! No clothing. No cars. No TVs, And the list goes on forever! I harken back to some movie: Stupid is as Stupid does.
I think you missed something, Willis.
>Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year
>divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity.
That 22 TW is an average power. But generating plants, transmission facilities, transformers, circuit interrupters, and all that stuff, must be sized for the PEAK demand.
Most distribution systems in the US have a peak to average (PtA) ratio of around 1.6 to 1.7. Except for the New England ISO which is running around 1.8. Some systems in Australia have an annual PtA ratio around 2.3. I expect Arizona would run that high taken in isolation, which, of course, it never is.
Take 1.7 as an estimated overall PtA ratio, you need to meet a peak demand of 22 * 1.7 terrawatts or 37.4 TW.
But no power system can survive with generation equal to demand. so add 15% for reserves. So you need peak generation of 43 TW. So roughly double all the rest of your numbers as to what needs to be built.
15% is a bit high for reserves. Most ISOs plan for 6% to 10%. CalISO, for example, wants 3% spinning reserves plus another 3% in rapid start reserve. This, however, doesn’t include additional long-start reserves that would be called into service when a generating plant is down for an extended period or for scheduled maintenance.
True, pls. My main reason for not including the question of peak energy was that I like to keep my claims fully defensible. If I get too near the exact number someone will challenge me for being too high, and claim that if I’m 2% over the whole thing is wrong, wrong, wrong …
So I decided to just use the average.
I didn’t include the fact that nuclear doesn’t like to be ramped up and down so we’d need some currently unavailable fast-response non-fossil generating capability …
I also didn’t include the energy needed to build the plants, or the energy to rebuild the grid, or the need to replace worn-out wind turbines and solar panels, for the same reason.
Defensibility.
My best regards to you, thanks for the more accurate information.
w.
pls, upon reflection I’ve updated my head post to reflect the undeniable fact that I’d only calculated average power, but we need peak power. I’d have given you credit in the head post, but you’re posting anonymously … it’s one of the problems with not signing your own name to your work. You can’t get credit for your good ideas.
My thanks to you,
w.
The generation IV molten salt reactors in the licensing phase right now in several countries can easily load follow.
Thanks, Greg, always more to learn, good to know. More info here.
w.
There are civilizations in the Amazon jungle, Borneo and other areas that have their fossil fuel consumption under control.
Are they to be the model for we the people?
And all this impossibility to do nothing since CO2 is not the problem, possibly not even a problem. The removal of SO2 to stop acid rain has resulted in previously reflected solar energy to stream in for decades with eventual warming effects. Money to be spent on these stupid ‘stop CO2’ efforts should be redirected towards finding a proper solution to warming. NASA suggested injecting SO2 into the atmosphere, but that idea flopped because of acid rain; however, their suggesting such an action is tacit admission that removal of SO2 is the basic cause of warming.
The size of the problem of storing enough electricity for a week:
<I>http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
Excerpts:
Running a 2 TW electrified country for 7 days requires 336 billion kWh of storage.
A 12 V battery rated at 200 A-h (amp-hours) of charge capacity stores 2400 W-h (watt-hours: just multiply voltage and charge capacity), or 2.4 kWh. Large lead-acid batteries occupy a volume of 0.013 cubic meters (13 liters) per kWh of storage, weigh 25 kg/kWh (55 lb/kWh), and contain about 15 kg of lead per kWh of storage.
Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side.
This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 Billion Tons) of lead.
A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) [0.08 Billion tons] of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt [0.007 Billion Tons] in the U.S.
A note in the report indicates … the estimated (undiscovered) lead resources of the world at 1.5 billion tons. [ only 30% of what the US alone would need] </I>
This was posted in a comment in a 2013 WUWT post from Willis:
<b>Getting Energy from the Energy Store</b>
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/29/getting-energy-from-the-energy-store/
If it’s a lead-acid battery just how much acid would be required and how would you handle leaks. If it’s a lithium ion battery, how much lithium? And how hot would it get during charging and discharging?
what i still can not believe is how much left wing environmentalist LOVE lithium batteries and solar panels both of which are terrible poison for the environment. millions of tons of this toxic trash will end up in land fills.
i am a right wing conservative and believe in what works and makes sense and is good for the environment. i actually do what i can and what makes sense to conserve. my idiot left wing friends and some family do some of the most dumb and wasteful stuff, talk talk talk talk no action.
and then drive there huge SUV 600 miles every weekend to what ever protest is going on. i tell them stay home and you will save the environment,
and while youre at tell al gore to stay home and save 900,000 gallons of jet fuel.
What this should clarify for all of us is that the intent of the global warming & anti-carbon fuel malarkey is to destroy our current energy and economic infrastructure. The stated goals are absolutely impossible, but along the way, they CAN more effectively steal and distribute wealth and grind humanity’s face into the mud.
Willis, thanks for the interesting article. With respect to your added comment about the figures not including energy required to replace gas for space and water heating in homes, I think you may be double counting as the main figures you quote are for TOTAL PRIMARY energy consumption which would include energy consumption of these uses. Of course there would be additional costs for home owners to replace their gas appliances but this may not be all that much extra as many of these appliances would need to be renewed in any event due to wear and tear or obsolescence.
Peter, thanks for the thought. I’d say I’m not double-counting. If anything I’m under-counting. The extension of current use is an extension of the current “business as usual” scenario.
But “business as usual” doesn’t include the costs in time, energy, and money for putting in bigger transformers, power lines, power panels, 240V lines to new 240V stoves, electric furnaces, and water heaters.
I converted my own house, which I built, to a duplex a few years ago so my daughter and her family could live with us. I’d have to scrap two water heaters, two stoves, and two gas furnaces and replace them with electric. To do that I’d have to rewire the whole house and increase the amperage of our electric service.
And that doesn’t include the fact that electric stoves etc. are LESS efficient than gas for heating.
One way you burn the gas and use ~ 100% of the heat.
The other way you burn the gas to make electricity. With best-case combined cycle gas power plants you just threw away 40+% of the energy, leaving 60%. Of that about 12% gets lost in transmission, leaving only about half the energy you get if you just burned the gas to make your dinner.
Like I said … I’m under-counting.
Thanks for the interesting question,
w.
I wish people would stop referring to hydrocarbons as ‘fossile fuels.’ It’s impossible to get fuel from a fossile.