As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.
And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.” MIT — that’s America’s premier university for matters of science and technology. The Report is 378 pages long, full of lots of detail, charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and technical jargon. It lists as authors some 18 members of the MIT faculty. Surely, if anyone can address this “net zero” energy storage problem competently, these will be the people.
Sorry. This is a product of modern American academia. MIT is as extreme left as any of them.
Having now spent about a week trying to wade through this morass, I am not impressed. The Report is an exercise by genius would-be central planners concocting enormously complex models that just happen to come to the results that the authors are hoping for, while at the same time they avoid ever directly addressing the critical question, namely what is the plan to get through that worst case sun/wind drought. Implicit in every page of the Report is that it is an advocacy document for the proposition that the U.S. should embark full speed ahead on crash “net zero” plans for our multi-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars economy without ever doing any kind of demonstration project to show it can work on any scale no matter how small.
You start to get an idea where this is going at the very beginning, when you come on page romanette v to a list of members of an “Advisory Committee” that appears to have given direction to the project. Members include John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, someone from the Environmental Defense Fund, an “Alternative Energy Research” guy from the Bank of America, an ex-World Bank guy (the World Bank being an organization dedicated to keeping poor countries from having access to energy that works), an environmental bureaucrat from the Massachusetts state government, several people from other alternative energy investors and environmental advocacy groups, and so forth. Clearly, this Report had to come to a pre-determined conclusion that energy storage issues do not pose any major impediment to net zero ambitions.
This being a product of left-wing academia, you can expect the usual touching faith in the ability of the federal government to solve all problems, no matter how intractable, by the magic of spending money out of the infinite federal pile. Thus, early in the Executive Summary, we find a recognition that the only battery storage technology currently being deployed in large amounts in commercial applications — namely Lithium Ion — cannot provide backup for periods longer than about 12 hours:
Li-ion batteries will continue to be a leading technology for EVs and for short-duration storage, but their storage capacity costs are unlikely to fall low enough to enable widespread adoption for long-duration (> 12 hours) electricity system applications.
OK then, what is the technology that will step up for the periods of a week or two that may need to be covered in a world without fossil fuels. From page xv:
To enable economical long-duration energy storage (> 12 hours), the DOE should support research, development, and demonstration to advance alternative electrochemical storage technologies that rely on earth-abundant materials. Cost, lifetime, and manufacturing scale requirements for long-duration energy storage favor the exploration of novel electro-chemical technologies, such as redox-flow and metal-air batteries that use inexpensive charge-storage materials and battery designs that are better suited for long-duration applications.
(Emphasis in original.). The feds will “support research” into “novel technologies,” of course using the infinite money pile, and the technology will magically appear. And what exactly is the technology that will then emerge to rescue us? They have no idea:
While several novel electrochemical technologies have shown promise, remaining knowledge gaps with respect to key scientific, engineering, and manufacturing challenges suggest high value for concerted government support. Innovation in these technologies is being actively pursued in other countries, notably China.
You’ve got to hate those “knowledge gaps,” but clearly all that is needed to fill them is enough federal funding. And you can’t let those Chinese beat us!
Well, how about just using that ubiquitous element hydrogen, easily available through the electrolysis of water? They discuss that too:
[H]ydrogen produced via electrolysis can serve as a low-carbon fuel for industry as well as for electricity generation during periods when VRE [variable renewable energy] generation is low. . . . We support the effort that the DOE is leading to create a national strategy that addresses hydrogen production, transportation, and storage. In particular, the ability of existing natural gas transmission pipelines to carry hydrogen without suffering embrittlement, either at reduced pressures or if hydrogen is blended with natural gas or other compounds, remains an open question that deserves government-supported study by the DOE and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Funny that private investors aren’t putting any real money into this “hydrogen economy” thing. That’s because to get hydrogen out of water is extremely costly, and once you have it, it is inferior to natural gas in every way as a source of energy for the people. It’s less dense, more dangerous, and more difficult to transport and store. But again, throw in some of the infinite pile of federal money and it will all magically work.
Many of the charts and graphs are very complicated and technical, but if you spend some time with them, you start to realize that they are an insult to your intelligence. I’ll give you just one of my favorites, this one from page 191. Here we are considering what the electricity generation system will look like for two regions, the Northeast (New York and New England) and Texas, in various low and no-carbon scenarios. The cutoffs of 0g, 5g, 10g and No Limit at the left refer to how much carbon emissions are allowed per kWh of electricity generated.
Thus at the top right we see what a zero-carbon scenario will look like for Texas. Supposedly, with about a 3 to 4 times overbuild of a system having only wind and solar generation, then we will only need battery storage for about 50% of capacity and about 11 hours duration. Really? Does anybody remember February 2021? Texas’s wind and solar generators produced at less than 10% capacity for days on end. Can a three times overbuild of wind capacity and 12 hours of battery storage solve that? The answer is no. Not even close. And you could get a wind/solar drought of a full week. If you have no fossil fuel backup, you had better have enough storage to cover that.
And if you take some time to study this chart (not saying that I would recommend that) you can find multiple other equally implausible assertions.
Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called “model” to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.
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One only needs to look at the various Wind Turbine power generated graphs available on the internet. The majority of these are in the Prime locations for wind generation, I have seen graphs for ND, WA and TX and others with periods of over two weeks with ZERO to ~ 2 percent of name plate capacity generation. Many with several days in a row with ZERO generation and at the same days/time as several other areas in different states. Does not take a PhD or even a Graduate Student working on his PhD to collect the presently available data for just one year for each of just those available to realize that WIND WILL NOT WORK. Even an HS student could do it. I was taught in grade school that 10 times zero is zero, 100 times zero is zero and 1 million times zero is zero. Do those at MIT know this. I have a decent Weather station. Anemometer is at 35 ft. House is at 1200ft. in one of the best areas in Nebraska for Wind Power, according to the internet maps. Many days, stretching to over two weeks without the wind speed going above 12 MPH. This spring we went through three periods of 3 -4 days with wind speed over 25 and gusts to over 50 mph. each of these bracketed by less than 5 mph. From what I have read, I sure would not want to be the dispatcher for the grid on those days. As a test engineer at the power plant I had to call the dispatcher 1/2 hour before I started the Main Feedwater Pumps for maintenance tests. That is about the same change in load as one 2 MW wind turbine shutting down. But with 50 wind turbines all within sight of each other when one WT is in the doldrums all fifty are.
I was a test engineer at nuke plants. The last test before the plant is declared commercial is tripping the turbine from 100% power.
On two occasions the dispatcher said hell no. The irony is that a plant that could not be ordered on line was preventing grid collapse. The first time was a severe winter storm at midnight.
The second time, it was a record hot day at noon. I had a lot more experience but my suggestion to do it at midnight was not considered.
“and demonstration to advance alternative electrochemical storage technologies that rely on earth-abundant materials.”
Are they going to try to make coal ?
Sorry guys, someone beat you to it !
After reading the first paragraph of the ES, I noted that each statement was misleading to the point of being a ‘material false statement’. In the nuclear world, 10 CFR50 calls this a serious felony.
So I did a word search for the word ‘safety’. Second to last sentence of the ES says they will do it later.
There is a proven technology for net zero. It requires nuke plants to be over built and under utilized. Been doing in France for 30 years.
Regulations that make commercial nuclear expensive, now apply to everything energy related. Storing energy is very dangerous. In the EIS process alternatives such as nuclear power must be considered.
It is a mute point anyway. There will never be significant excess power. Apparently they do not teach calculus at MIT. At some point in the future, wind turbines and solar panels will fail at a rate equal to or greater than the rate they can be built.
I really hate to be pedantic, but I am doing it because I like you, and if I had spinach in my teeth at a party, I would be mad if no one told me:
Moot vs. Mute (grammar.com)
Lessee… They know they need storage. They know what’s available won’t work. They have their fingers crossed that someone, somewhere will come up with some sort of solution. They have no clue what the available storage will cost and ven less clue, were it possible, what the hopium-based-as-yet-to-be-dreamed-of storage will cost or what it might be.
So… full steam ahead!
I’m sure the same thing made sense to some long extinct civilization on another planet. That’s probably why the aren’t picking up our calls.
There already is a global debt problem, in the USA Medicare and social security heading towards bankruptcy. We don’t have the money to pay for this green fantasy.
Nope. The U.S. is broke. But “we’ll gladly pay you next Tuesday for a hamburger today.” (h/t ‘Wimpy’)
Read a very interesting learned discussion in a decidedly left wind technical discussion board that clearly stated, with evidence that there just isn’t enough rare earth metals being produced to manufacture the EV’s needed. They didn’t discuss the wind turbines, solar systems etc.
Of that produced, China through it’s belt and road policy has locked up 80% of that produced world wide, and is using it for it’s own domestic market.
The short discussion makes the MIT paper look foolish.
Let’s do a rough bar napkin calculation on the cost of US battery storage for one week.
US households: 122 million
Cost for 1 week power backup using 5 x Tesla Powerwalls: $40,000
Residential grid use of total power consumption: 16%
Average lifespan of a Tesla Powerwall: 10 years
(122,000,000 x $40,000)/.16= $30.5 trillion….
So the cost just for 1 week nationwide battery storage (excluding construction cost of a 100% wind/solar grid) would be about $30.5 trillion, which would only last about 10 years before needing to be replaced, or $305 trillion just for battery storage backup for a century at current consumption..
I don’t think so…
Leftists suck at math and logic.
Hey there Samurai –
Power storage costs are dropping dramatically, just like the costs of wind and solar power generation have done over the last few decades. Mass solar PV power is now 20x lower cost than it was some 20 years ago. We are now on a similar pricing curve decline with power storage.
Let’s consider a reasonable cost learning curve estimate, that power storage costs going forward decrease not by 20x, like solar PV did, but by 10x, and it takes 30 years to get there, not just 20.
Thus by around 2050, which is a typical goal for a “net zero” utility grid timeframe, your $30 trillion cost over a ten year period has now become a cost of $3 trillion over that same time frame, or $300 billion a year.
That’s fewer dollars than we waste every year on useless implements of war that we don’t need and never use.
Who sucks at math and logic?
You do.
MGC-san:
“Who sucks at math and logic?”
Apparently you do…
Look. If Leftists were actually concerned that CAGW was an “existential threat” (eye roll), the ONLY viable option would be to keep all existing hydro and nuclear plants, and simply build 50 additional Palo-Verde scale nuclear plants which would only cost $600 billion (50 nukes x $12 billion/plant), and they’d last about 50 years.
So, $600 billion vs. $150 trillion ($30 trillion x 5 decades) just for wind/solar battery backup for 50 years, PLUS the insane cost of building an expensive, intermittent, unreliable, unstable and diffuse wind and solar power plant infrastructure that would need to be replaced every 15~20 years….
Which is mo’ bedda?
Fukushima
MGC-san:
1 person died during the Fukushima incident and 6 others exposed to extremely high levels of radiation during during the accident have developed cancer…
Leftists suck at math, logic and ethics…
Total costs of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe will likely reach $200 billion.
Who sucks at math, logic, and ethics?
Power storage costs are dropping dramatically? Which ones? As this thread has already advised, Lithium Carbonate prices have increased by 419% in the last year. So exactly which storage cost has dramatically decreased? Your whole argument is based around the claim that storage costs will decrease, yet you fail to show any evidence of this occurring. If this was true for all new products, by now we would be driving around in $500 cars and using $50 mobiles.
Lithium ion battery pack costs have fallen 85% over the past decade, and another 60% drop in prices is expected over the coming decade. Costs of other types of electricity storage are following similar trajectories.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs/
That article about projected falls in battery prices is dated and now looks comically deluded. The increased demand for the raw materials used in batteries will inevitably cause those raw materials to soar in price; this has already been seen over the last year. My forecast for battery prices over the next decade is a substantial rise in price.
As an example of what lies ahead, Tesla is raising prices steadily purely due to the increased costs of the raw materials used in electric cars. As electric car sales increase, this can only get worse.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-raises-prices-some-china-made-vehicles-2022-03-15/
re: “My forecast for battery prices over the next decade is a substantial rise in price”.
Living-in-the-past naysayers said the exact same kinds of things about solar PV. A similar shortage and pricing increase occurred around 2005-2008 with raw materials for solar photovoltaics, when that technology really began growing in earnest. That price rise was only temporary and the price learning curve soon continued its dramatic downward plunge.
It is likely that the same thing will happen with these battery packs. The increase in pricing is already bringing several new raw material suppliers into the market.
Moreover, for utility scale electrical storage, Li ion is not the only game in town.
I’m guessing that with regard to battery pricing, the “comically deluded” will turn out to be folks like Bill Toland and other so-called “skeptics” … just like they’ve been all these years already with regard to global warming and climate change.
Your understanding of economics rivals your understanding of climate science.
In addition, after the system has completely discharged the batteries, there better not be another long lull for several weeks while the batteries are recharged.
If the batteries ever do go to zero, the whole system will crash unless there is immediately thereafter a very sunny and windy day, because otherwise it will be impossible to charge them up with enough energy for a long night during the course of one day.
Not that it will ever come to that.
There is zero chance of grid scale storage of power in the next couple of decades, no matter what. Even if we are only talking about all the stuff we presently use electricity for. We could never even build enough car batteries in the next few decades. Even if they were opening new mines every day, instead of blocking all of them and putting in place decades long moratoriums.
Excess electricity at utility scale generation can’t be magically dumped – it actually costs money.
PSEUDO SCIENCE ALERT! Aruga, Aruga! Hypersonic BS Incoming.
OR: Who peer reviewed that then?
It seems MIT models use a different data set, or perhaps new statistical mathematics or laws of physics, to that which I researched the facts of, or was taught for my degree? That I now apply on my Scientific calculator. Obviously I need a sentient consensual science model whose outcome I can programme. None of that inconvenient deterministic reality you have to prove. The MIT paper appears to end up saying the lack of any physically credible way to do what they say needs doing can all be explained by Moogles, to paraphrase Feynman on why you can’t prove a vague theory wrong, or right.
OR, do it old style, under the constraints of the laws of physics and the properties of matter. Like this….. call out results summarised below.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3274611
I offer my old fashioned science, the applied costed physics of an electrical engineer and MBA’s costed assessment of battery storage, and indeed pumped storage as a UK BTW (irrelevant we have nowhere to build the giant lakes at top and bottom at the scale required). Pumping the Irish Sea into Windermere may be unacceptable, as it’s currently being re-wilded by the woke. Not very green.
nb: Peter Lang has done solar plus pumped storage for OZ, BTW. Just as daft, but Ozzie daft. Let’s blow up the coal fired power stations that work when we need them, and rely on windmills that don’t when the wind don’t blow, and back up the whole mess with overpriced batteries chareged from other states coal fired power that give us minutes of grid support on a hot day? Oh Yeah!
I USE LIMITING CONDITION OF 100% RENEWABLES PLUS BATTERY BACKUP, NO GAS BACKUP. BUT THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE TO CALCULATE AND VALIDATE FOR ANY ENERGY MIX (i.e. a proportion of renewables without gas backup that is less than 100%)
ANS: It would require a continuing capital expenditure of £50B pa to supply and replace the batteries necessary to deliver 1TWh of backup,
This is if spread over the batteries expected life, so a much larger initial cost, £200 Billion for 4 year life lead acid, or £400 Billion for 8 year Li-Ion. Such a phasing is reasonable as the grid would not go all renewable all at once……….. or ever, as I suggest. Because it can’t work in science fact.
Only nuclear energy can replace and exceed fossil energy, because renewable energy is too diffuse and intermittent to generate the total energy needed, when needed, and in fact need 100% gas backup at scale in the real world. Better to just use the gas all the time, save the money wasted on renewables, and spend MUCH LESS MONEY PER UNIT ENERGY GENERATED on deploying nuclear – that will generates electrical energy 24/7 for 60 years.
Put another way. If the goal is to minimise cumulative fossil fuel generation, hence CO2 emissions – if they really mattered – diverting capital into the dead end of expensive renewables is actually a regressive waste compared to building nuclear that needs no renewable offset.. And, per David MacKay’s last public words, If you can meet max demand with nuclear, you don’t need renewables.
THis only works if the real agenda is limiting Western energy use, by making it more expensive and rationed by law, hence reversing economic development, which is totally reliant on energy use per capita, so requires cheap plentiful energy, not expensive rationed energy. Less is less.
…….. but subsidising what doesn’t work by law does make easy subsidy fortunes for lobbyists and their banks, and rich elite investors, at the expense of the energy poverty of the governed.
Go figure, MIT.
Nuclear can deliver all the electrical energy we need now or in any imaginable future,many many times today’s use, to a 10Billion global developed population, at the lowest cost per unit energy (IEA). We know how to synthesise primary fuels from that energy, with the lowest resource use per unit energy generated, so most cheaply and most sustainably.
The basic physics point is fundamental. You need more intense dispatchable energy, weak intermittent energy simply can’t, Less is less.
Adding hugely expensive storage to renewables just makes a bad idea MUCH worse, compared to building nuclear that just works.
Go figure, MIT. Do some real engineering. Not models. Do the maths. LIke this:
1 TWh is an average day’s energy for the current UK grid, without any electrification of heat and transport (that would be a rough trebling of electrical energy demand if imposed at scale, as clueless politicians think is good for us).
Yes, such conditions happen regularly in UK winters. And elsewhere in Europe,Canada, Siberia, Texas even? No wind and no serious sunlight at 50 deg N – that can last for a week or more. So that needs more than 7TWh, because its a period of highest demand and 7TWh is an average daily demand. So we would really, really need at least 7TWh reserve if we were all renewable w/o gas backup..
That will cost £350 Billion pa in continuing battery replacement cost, or a Zero day CAPEX of £1.4 Trillion for Lead acid or £2.8 Trillion for Li-ion. In fact more for Li-IOn because prices have risen since i did my simple sums. All the numbers are in the paper. Not hard sums.
This is either half or all the annual GDP of the UK, depending on battery type.
No more energy is generated for this.
This capital cost of the first year’s amortisation of one week’s battery backup for renewable energy is £350 Billion.
£350 Billion would build over 70 GW of new nuclear capacity.
More than enough to run the UK grid at present demand levels for 60 years.Nothing else required except the relatively marginal OPEX, similar to renewable OPEX levels. What to do?
And that would leave the rest of the un amortised CAPEX, over £1 Trillion if Lead acid, over £2.4 Trillion of Li Ion as a stranded asset.
Total malfeasance by any government on any measure.
UK GDP is £2.7Trillion pa.
There is an absolutely no joined up common sense in trying to replace fossil use with renewables and battery backup, or pumped storage. Not enough energy when needed, 24/7. Simply a stupid waste of massive amounts of public money that can better be used replacing fossil directly and ASAP with nuclear. Having any renewables on the grid without gas backup during that process is economic suicide in overt fact. And increases cumulative CO2 emissions. BUt enriches rich insiders at the energy poverty of the governed, who have no say in what is done in their name, based on a fabric of overt and very disprovable lies. THat are grounded in a lie that the supposed solution would do nothing to change if it was true.
You really can’t make it up. That’s their job. Especially when there is easy money to be made for crony profit by law.
MIT get 0/10 for Engineering Reality and Economics 101: The key underlying energy factors are energy density and intermittency. The best nuclear solution and the inferiority and inadequacy. of renewables cannot be changed significantly by technology or subsidy. The only way to impose renewables is to make what works more expensive by law – to distort markets regressively to profit insiders at the public’s energy poverty expense, by law.
Does MIT have any technologists who understand physics and engineering? Seems not. Gonna need a better University.
The unchangeable problem of storage is that what is stored is a low density form of energy, chemical energy in a battery or gravitational potential energy in pumped storage. Both require a relatively HUGE amounts of physical resource to store a small amount of energy, compared to the molecular and nuclear binding energies of fossil and nuclear fuels,
e.g. Lead acid batteries would be roughly 1 BIllion cubic feet for 1 Day’s !TWh = 27 Megatonnes of batteries. 5 Megatonnes of Li-Ion. Roughly. A lotta batteries.
Both approaches are self evidently delusional, when added to the already excessive lifetime cost per unit energy of short lived and resource intensive wind farms per unit energy generated.
Not a rational fiscal choice versus nuclear at any scale. Which planet is MIT located on?
At least lead acid is closed cycle recyclable. Li-IOn isn’t, and uses expensive CO2 intensive processes to extract and manufacture, as well as slave child labour at massive environmental damage. etc. .These simple facts seemed to have passed the blinkered and narrow approach of MIT academics by.
Simple fact. There are no credible solutions to replacing fossil fuel use at the increasing levels of energy use required to remain a developed economy, never mind progress, except with massively more intense, controllable to meet demand, on demand, sustainable nuclear energy.
Renewable energy is a great get rich quick scheme if subsidised with public $BiIlions by climate action law, until legislators suddenly “discover ” it is far too expensive and doesn’t scale. Which they know now, but the rackets created in the name of climate change, that they really do nothing to help versus no easy money nuclear, are just too tempting. Can’t get hogs from trough that still has food in it.
There are overtly no practical engineers at the most basic level involved in this futile number wangling by MIT academics. It doesn’t need more than the backs of a few envelopes and some well known facts of energy density and real world costing. A triumph of delusional hope over real physical laws engineers know. This is MIT? Can’t be. Next they’ll open a department of Sociology.
Discussing the impossible is meaningless if the laws of physics already show it cannot be done as they claim. Faith can’t change physics. Science discovers the laws of nature. It doesn’t create them. The science says NO.
Only nuclear power can save the developed world, when the fossil fuel finally runs out, not yet as the reserves are still being discovered, against a growing rate of demand by increasingly developed economies, however. or is made a reserve fuel, for WEF and other Elites use only, under Agenda 21 driven laws.
NB: Science and engineering have already synthesised intense liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 and water vapour in pilot plants, using solar generated electrical energy, could be 24/7 nuclear. Sustainable liquid fuels. So you can still fuel your GS 5 after the oil has gone, and plastics, using cheap plentiful nuclear energy and the atmosphere as a feedstock. We have the technology. (Chemical reactions are reversible by reversing the energy flow. Real science engineers can do, even chemists, etc.)
In haste. E&OE Comment welcome.
PS Spot the mistake in my pumped storage calculations. Peter Lang’s is better. But storing renewable energy is still a totally dumb idea, on sheer cost and physical scale alone. Nuclear is a much better and progressive, not regressive, replacement for fossil fuels – on every measure. Just is.
The MIT exercise is grounded in an overt delusion as regards the fundamental facts and physics, easy to calculate on the back of an envelope with the simple data and using basic laws of physics. A pointless paper at High SCool physics level.
Who peer reviewed that then?
Hello, Mr. Catt. People who propose solutions to Climate Change have a ready, get-out-of-reality card, and this is, that which has not been invented soon will be, because we want it so badly. A common argument they cite is, look at the explosion in knowledge about computer technology. Yes, but you can’t transfer that marvelous phenomenon to other problems. Most of the technology we needed to generate electricity from wind turbines existed with the invention of alternating current. Windmills have been in practical existence for over a thousand years. There really isn’t a lot of untapped knowledge to be had about wind turbines, and there hasn’t been for a hundred years.
And yet we are being told that the output of wind turbines can be dramatically increased if we just think really, really hard about how to do this.
“the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California”
Don’t forget Taxachusetts, a one party state like no other.
“an environmental bureaucrat from the Massachusetts state government”
Oh yuh, Undersecretary of Energy, Massachusetts Office of Energy
and Environmental Affairs, Judy Chang.
She’s in charge of the save the Earth from CO2 thing for Mass. and has put on a number of YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/MassEEA/videos where all the climatistas in Mass. get to post comments demanding that the state work harder to save the planet. The state is an infinitesimal part of the planet, but its net zero will save the Earth! I used to constantly argue and fight with the state bureaucrats who I refer to as burros- but I finally gave up.
Should bring in tons of grant money.
The author of this article sounds an awful lot like so many other living-in-the-past naysayers who we’ve heard from over and over and over again before. A woefully shortsighted example that will undoubtedly join the list of other laughable head-in-the-sand failures such as these:
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” William Preece, British Post Office, 1876.
“Heavier than air flying machines are physically impossible”. Lord Kelvin, British Mathematician and Physicist, 1895.
“The automobile is a fad, a novelty. Horses are here to stay.” The President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company; 1903.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946
“There is practically no chance satellites will ever improve telephone, television or radio reception within the United States.” T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
“Global climates can be expected to cool over the next 25-30 years” Don Easterbrook, 2008
Don Easterbrook could yet be proven true.
Holy grasping at straws, Batman!
Are you operating under the impression that such an assemblage of past comments proves anything at all about what other pronouncements may or may not be true?
Are you implying that because people have said things that turned out to be false, that some other unrelated thing is also predictably false?
How about trying this: Go into a court of law, and argue someone is guilty (or innocent), and use as your evidence a bunch of cases involving other matters and other people from the past, and what subsequently turned out to be the case years later vs what one person said or thought at the time.
I do not think what you are doing here even rises to the level of a logical fallacy.
It just makes no sense and is a complete non sequitur.
MGC is a very poor quality troll. Not even up to Griff’s standard.
re: “poor quality troll”
Translation: a rational, well informed person who refuses to toe the anti-science “skeptical” propaganda party line.
Nicholas –
Those examples are, of course, not “proof”, but they do show that being on the naysayer side (or would “denier side” be an even better descriptor?) is so often laughably wrong.
That is especially the case here, because the learning curve required to meet the technology goals that this author deems “impossible” is already well established. The author has failed to adequately consider learning curve progress.
If the already existing learning curve continues, and there is every reason to believe that it will, then these “impossible” goals will in fact end up being met.
University faculties are fairly reliable places to find examples of obvious (to sensible people) folly. How could this be? Why are IQ geniuses so prone to misunderstanding the real world?
I tend to be wary of anyone with a PhD, simply because he has been insulated by his intelligence from most people. A man who acquires a PhD in any discipline (including a Liberal Art) has been privileged since childhood. School, which is often a tedious and frightening place to average children) was for him a source of amusement and daily praise. He is told that he is a special and a very good boy by most of the adults who teach and train him, and so acquires an ego that might predispose him to narcissism.
And of course, he really is very, very smart. Unfortunately, he will also have a well-developed imagination and, if he is a utopian (as so many university professors tend to be), he will sometimes latch onto a utopian ideal (such as, we can live in prosperous societies without cheap and abundant sources of reliable energy) that he will compulsively defend even when less gifted people realize that he’s utterly divorced from reality.
If you think this is a logical or typical or reasonable set of assumptions and conclusions, I suggest you go into the field of climate science…you will do great.
Just say a bunch of stuff, add appropriate keywords sprinkled in like salt and pepper, and stand back and soak in the praise and money.
It will not mean anything you say comports with reality, or is true in even a single specific instance, but it is only about having a narrative that the average head-nodder can follow along with, anyhow.
Once upon a time, getting into a place like MIT was largely based on the ability to do well on standardized tests…on any type of test really, as compared to the general population.
And that correlates well with IQ, since IQ tests are of course standardized tests intended to measure how well a person does on tests as compared to the general population.
But that was only for students, even then.
Teachers, professors, instructors, are selected and hired and retained based on a somewhat or totally different set of criteria.
So they may or not tend to be people with high IQ. But what they had was definitely expertise and a strong working knowledge of some subset of information or procedure.
But none of those things is necessarily true any more, at all.
Some people are admitted on the basis of test scores, but many more are not, because that leads to lack of diversity. Too many of the same kind of people tend to do well on things like tests and in classes on difficult subjects of a technical or mathematical nature.
And for hiring, as opposed to student admissions, the changes are far greater.
I would not assume that people who are at any place of so-called higher education in the year 2022 are all geniuses, no matter what degree program they may or may not have completed. There is simply no longer any sort of correlation, if there ever was one.
Getting a PhD is not an IQ test, and I do not think it ever has been, although there was surely at some time a level of correlation since IQ predicts life success and various types of attainment. Does not guarantee anything, but is well correlated. Well, was…who knows now?
Being on a faculty at a University these days has nothing to do with measured intelligence per se, and although there is likely some residual correlation due to past practices, it cannot be taken as even likely, let alone a certainty.
But even more germane to the subject in hand is that no one who publishes about any topic related to ClimateScience™, and especially anything directly bearing on pork barrel political policies like how to waste the next few tens of trillions of gubbmint payola, ought to be taken to be speaking frankly or honestly, or even to be saying what they really think.
Besides, one way to interpret this entire charade of a report from MIT, is that it is a very carefully veiled exercise in ass-covering, since it clearly spells out the fact that grid scale storage is impossible using any currently available technology or methodology.
Ten years from now, they will be able to point to this and break out the weaselly language where they state that nothing we have right now, and specifically Li-Ion batteries, are not suitable and will not allow for grid scale power storage.
“Being on a faculty at a University these days has nothing to do with measured intelligence”
Of course, you have data to back up this utterly preposterous claim, right?
Not.
Just another typical “experts are all wrong, I’m right because I say so” WUWT folly.
A typical WUWT folly, all based on false assumption after false assumption after false assumption.