Reposted from The NoTricksZone
By Kenneth Richard on 15. July 2021
A new study warns that “a massive expansion of impervious surfaces” is an inevitable consequence of having electric vehicles reach a 40% share of citizens’ driving needs. A land area the size of Croatia (in the European Union) or West Virginia (in the United States) must be completely covered with wind turbines to meet EV-charging energy demands for 4 of every 10 vehicles.
The already-weak power capacity of wind turbines, 0.5 We m² on average, will only continue to diminish as more wind farms are added to the landscape (Miller and Keith, 2018).
Consequently, the land area that must be devoted to the erection of wind turbines to meet the ever-growing energy needs of Earth’s citizens is harrowing.
Consider the US. Electricity generation only accounts for 17% of the US’s primary energy consumption. For wind energy to supply all the electricity needs for US citizens, a land area the size of California – 12 percent of the contiguous US – must be cleared to make way for wind farms (Miller and Keith, 2018). Again, that’s to meet just 1/6th of Americans’ energy needs.
Image Source: Miller and Keith, 2018
In Scotland, 14 million CO2-absorbing trees were recently chopped down to make way for wind farms. This way the Scottish government can ironically claim they’re doing their part to reduce CO2 emissions.
And now a new study documents how much more land must be converted to impervious surface so that new wind farms can supply the electricity to charge an exponentially-growing number of EVs in the coming decades.
“In order to run 40% of their vehicles with electricity, the EU should devote over 5000 km² of land (twice the size of Luxembourg) to photovoltaic panels or almost 56,000 km² (about the size of Croatia) to wind turbines, whereas the US should devote over 6000 km² (roughly the size of Delaware) to solar or almost 70,000 km² (more than the area of West Virginia) to wind.”
Image Source: Orsi, 2021
Put another way, an average EU or US city will need to expand its urbanized area by 0.2 to 4 km² due to dramatically rising number of EVs using low-density wind and solar energy to supply electricity.
And this is green?
So … all land is equal in its wind generating capacity? Correct me if I’m wrong, but every existing wind tower has been specifically located where the maximum wind blows due to geographic and at atmospheric conditions? So … every new square hectares of land for new windmills will be increasingly less suitable for maximum wind generation? Show me that little variable in the “green” equation?
Yes
Here in alberta we have situated turbines on most of the best sites, giving us ALMOST 30% capacity factor over the year
It’s all downhill from here
And it doesn’t matter how many we build, we have days on end where there is no wind anywhere.
During the February polar vortex, before it headed to Texas we had over a week with functional zero wind and solar, zero, with average temp of -35c
Thanks to gold old coal and gas no one died.
There is nothing we can do about week long dead patches
They happen
“There is nothing we can do about week long dead patches”
That’s right.
What that means is we have to have fossil-fueled, or nuclear-fueled 100 percent backup for the electrical grid to cover for when the windmills and solar panels don’t produce.
What that means is we should scrap the windmills and industrial solar panels and go with fossil-fueled, or nuclear-fueled powerplants, or both, for our electrical needs. There’s no good reason for creating duplicate power production systems.
We would be better off trying to power the world with Solar Power Satellites, than with windmills and ground-based solar. And,imo, Solar Power Satellites would be cheaper, faster and better than trying to implement the powering of the world with wind and ground-based solar.
A transition from fossil fuels to nuclear fuels is the only rational way for the world to go. And they don’t need to get in a hurry replacing fossil fuels because there is no evidence that CO2 is doing anything the alarmists claim it is doing. There is no need to regulate CO2. We can take our time in the transition.
Cmon Pat, a week at -35c is going to bother you? A mere 168 hours? Aren’t your houses insulated?
Reliability of power generation from such a crushingly large installation of wind turbines will also likely decline, as more turbines are installed. There is no good news.
Yes, and then those windmills will all have to be replaced about every 20 years.
Even if they are only retrofit every 25 years (a best case scenario where many components are reused), it’s still a boondoggle that rapes the wilderness and gives us unreliable power at ten times what we have historically paid.
The windmills that are put in sub-optimum locations will be spinning less often, so they might last longer.
I think we have already seen the next step which is the argument that less and less people should be allowed to own vehicles
This is the answer to the crap renewable power conundrum
Cut demand
Noting that
They say that PV solar would require about 10% of the area that Wind Turbines would.
PV installations in Northern Africa with DC cable feeds could supply more tha this much energy “with relative ease.
Note the proposed Australia – Singapore DC link which is deemed competitively economic compared with alternatives and an existing longer DC link in service in China. Links of similare maximum length would serve most of Europe from Africa and eg PV sources in the Negev desert would serve much of Europe and areas further East.
Even if the Australia – Singapore lonlk fails to eventuate (as may well happen) the fact that it is being pursued suggests that such things are matginally viable or better. From memoryt losses are around 1% and voltages around 1 million V.
Its possible to imagine a glogal East West DC loop that allows energy supply to “follow the sun” across a reasonable portion of the world. ***IF*** such links are genuinely viable economically (as the Chinese installation suggests may be the case) then they could change the balance and perceptions of energy sourcing.
And may not 🙂
So the area of the Earth that is underneath the sunlight must power the areas of Earth that are in darkness.
It would seem that this would necessitate the building of many more solar panel farms. Enough, at a particular spot, to supply all those in sunlight and those in darkness as the Earth turns.
The longer the line, the more it costs to build, the more it costs to maintain, and the more electricity is lost in transmission.
The Australia-Singapore link seems to be vanishing into the Aussie outback. One of the companies that proposed this is now trying an alternative proposal to generate hydrogen from renewables. They have already been knocked back for another proposal to build a hydrogen plant close to a pristine beach that’s used by migratory birds.
“….land must be converted to impervious surface so that new wind farms can supply the electricity…” Why? Farming is done under the turbines.
Most good locations to place windmills are already utilized in the USA. Therefore, this is still an optimistic estimate since the site will have poorer winds on average than currently. Offshore has better locations but much greater costs.
That will persuade those who want it to go ahead and do it. Distributing an area a bit larger than West Virginia over North America (go ahead, throw Canada into your calculation) and the EU would not be very noticeable, if at all. On the other hand, in central IL I cannot drive in any direction for an hour and not see at least 1 and usually 2 wind farms – from 15 miles away.
This is the area needed to replace 40% of cars with EV’s. Obviously replacing 100% of cars would be in the ballpark of 2.5 times greater.
Energy used for transportation is far from the biggest source of demand in the US. Add to that converting all forms of heating to electricity, and you would have to increase the amount of land listed in the article by a factor 10 to 20.
Beyond that, as Rud has calculated, the numbers given in the article are small by a factor of around 8.
Furthermore, by the time you have devoted 80 to 160 W. Virginia’s to wind mills, many of the locations aren’t going to by just sub-optimal, many of them will be marginal at best. So the average utilization factor will start to drop well below the generous 30% used by Rud.