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The Greens’ Dishonesty on Solar Energy
Solar energy — mostly, though not exclusively, in the form of photovoltaic panels — has improved vastly in the last twenty years, and will likely become a significant energy source in the future as it becomes more efficient and less expensive. This is for good reason: the Earth receives orders of magnitude more energy in sunlight than we consume from all other sources; everyone has at least some access to sunlight; the technology scales easily; its process is simple, easy to maintain, and requires no fuel; and (as you might have heard) it emits no carbon while generating power. But like every energy resource, these advantages come with significant trade-offs. In this case, start with massive up-front costs, scarcity of some necessary materials, and enormous requirements of space.
But the biggest problem with solar power is that sunlight is intermittent and unreliable. In addition to the daily cycles of night and day, there are also seasonal cycles (especially at higher latitudes), as well as 11-year cycles within the Sun itself, all of which make it extremely difficult to design an electrical grid that relies heavily on solar generation. These predictable problems are further complicated by the chaotic ones posed by weather. In short, relying on solar energy is fine so long as you don’t mind having your source of light, heat, air-conditioning, and all our other modern life-enhancing, life-saving amenities be at the mercy of nature and the clock. There are two potential solutions: Either build a secondary power network as a back-up to the solar one (massively expensive and impractical), or find some way to store excess energy when it’s abundant so that it can be used when in demand. Unfortunately, there is no sensible, economical solution available right now, nor is any on the horizon. And any self-professed environmentalist who doesn’t acknowledge this is either ignorant or dishonest.
There’s no shortage of ways to store energy, though all of them are problematic and — currently — uneconomical. On a residential scale, batteries are expensive and wear out in a few years, hydrogen fuel cells are too inefficient and high-tech, fly-wheels and compressed air containers are dangerous. To make matters worse, none of these scale up well enough to level out solar’s shortcomings on either a regional or national scale. Gravitational energy storage — generally, in the form of pumping water into reservoirs when energy is available and releasing it through a turbine when in demand — does scale up and is in use already, but it’s too expensive, weak, slow, and geographically restricted to work for the purposes solar would require. A similar system involving trains mitigates that last problem, but we’re still talking about very small amounts of energy.
Solar will undoubtedly find a big place in our future, both as a portable energy source, and as a supplement to more reliable technologies. But unless our own anonymous can get the ear of The Powers That Be and his own space program (here’s hoping!), we’re going to need either fossil fuels or nuclear power to carry the base-load requirements of our civilization. Before leftist greens try to science-shame everyone who finds fault with their hysterias, they might try to familiarize themselves with the scientific and engineering challenges staring them straight in the face.
Published in Science & Technology
Couldn’t we just put Western Civilization on hold for awhile until the technology catches up? If it could save the planet, it is worth it, right?
#GreenLogic
I am sure that the governments of the world can solve all these problems with some legislation, taxation and wealth redistribution.
We have to pick just one?
[Emphasis added] Solar-based energy generation technology, in the main, is enormously fuel intensive: it takes a potful of energy to make the solar cells, and that cost can’t be ignored. Certainly, there are relatively cheap solar-based tech, but these take energy to make, too. Even the solar still (which isn’t all that) that’s little more than a hole dug in your yard and covered with a plastic sheet, with a rock in the middle to guide the condensate into your cup, or the solar oven, which benefits from aluminum foil and black paint, take energy to make the plastic sheet, aluminum foil, and paint. The Left’s overt elision of this small factor–even as they bleat about all the other environmental externalities that aren’t being internalized in cost structures–is another aspect of their dishonesty.
Photovoltaics–given an existing setup (the one my wife and I had in Las Cruces was made affordable by OPM in the form of Federal subsidies in vogue at the time)–aren’t all that from a maintenance perspective, either. The cells’ weather protection has to be plussed up (while being kept transparent) to resist hail, for instance, and to resist breakdown from…sunlight. UV in all that southern New Mexico sunlight clouded our photovoltaic array, which greatly reduced the efficiency of our setup.
There is, though, a vast source of solar energy, where the energy/fuel cost of converting that sunlight into useable form is a sunk cost, so the only cost left is that of laying our hands on it: coal, oil, and natural gas. And clathrate methane, if we can find a safe way to get it off the ocean floor. That solar energy has already been stored for us, too, no environmental- or fire-threatening batteries needed.
There’s another source of energy, too, that appears to be independent of insolation needs: nuclear power. Power from fission plants are tried and proved technology, and we even have a fine storage facility for the spent uranium: the Harry Reid Memorial Storage Facility in Yucca Mountain.
Eric Hines
Many of them do acknowledge it, explicitly: they’re happy to see the end of days if it means conversion to their green energy sources.
Eric Hines
Find a solution to that problem and you’ll make Bill Gates look like a piker.
Of course, the immediate solution to the Solar problem is to capture the solar energy above the clouds, so that weather won’t interfere and the energy flow would be predictable and constant. However, anyone who’s seen the Sandra Bullock movie “Gravity” will probably dismiss that idea. (It was kind of scary to think of all the debris from demolished satellites obliterating everything in its orbital path. Adding a bunch of energy-capturing satellites to the atmosphere – where they can break up into millions of high-speed shards – probably won’t sell. BTW – that movie was truly scary.)
I should have been more explicit, but but I meant that the generation process requires no fuel. I agree entirely that the greens have an absurd attitude of thinking that if they are personally generating no carbon at any given moment, then they’re wonderful and pure.
Yes, and totally understood. I meant to contrast them with any kind of turbine generators which has — among other things — lots of moving parts.
Absolutely. That’s why I mentioned it positively.
Apparently, there’s been some relenting from greens regarding nuclear energy, but it’s absurd that it ever really existed. It’s an incredible, useful, and safe technology with massive advantages over other sources and (comparatively) easy-to-manage technical disadvantages.
I think it’s a spinoff of the nuclear freeze movement, which IIUC was heavily influenced by Soviet disinformation. Back when I took organic chem in the early 70s, we used these little NMR machines to check the purity of smallish compounds.
When computing power advanced enough to use the same principle for medical imaging, the “Nuclear”was dropped from “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” for marketing purposes. Nobody wanted to be in a machine called “nuclear” anything.
Thats the staggering thing. Think of all the CO2 emissions saved by nat gas fracking and nuclear. Both of which the lefties largely hate, Its far more that the pittance that wind and solar have amounted to. Solar was pushed even 40 years ago and yet its still not providing large scale energy even in sunny areas, Its just economics.
I saw a study a few years ago, while I was driving a Fusion Hybrid (great car, but I won’t do it again: the trunk capacity cost of the battery pack and the battery pack’s dollar cost premium make hybrids not worth it), I saw a study–not repeated since that I know of so maybe it’s valid, maybe not–that indicated that the carbon footprint of hybrids was greater than that of gasoline cars, and even more so for pure battery cars–and the delta was greater for those electrics that were driven in the northeast. The reason for that was all the energy required for the manufacture of the car and especially the (re)charging of the batteries. In the northeast, all that electricity was generated in coal-fired power plants.
Since then, the coal-based footprints have changed….
It’s still the case, though, that Cuomo, in his infinite Liberal wisdom, won’t allow fracking, so natural gas-fired power plants are hard to come by.
Eric Hines
Realistic preview of what to expect in a Clinton administration.
Tom,
You know that it is the fault of the do nothing Republicans. President Obama has been trying to pass legislation that would repeal the Law of Gravity thus freeing up untold amounts of energy. The Republicans refuse to act on this wise forward thinking progressive policy. Soon, however, the President intends to use his pen & phone to unilaterally circumvent the Law of Gravity by executive order.
That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for hopelessly narcissistic left wing goofballs.
Regards,
Jim
We just make a law that when there is no sun there must be plenty of wind. Those of you who know about these things, what are the latest comparisons of net energy produced by dollar cost of the various alternatives? I was shocked to hear on Econ Talk that just the subsidy for wind is three times the total market price of gas.
I saw a short piece on one guy working on using the same technology used aluminum plants as a storage mechanism. Basically, the electrolysis that is used to pull the aluminum out of the acid solution can be reversed to act as a large battery.
Actually that’s another concept – electrolysis of water to make hydrogen which is then burned in a fuel cell. Actually the hydrolysis is just done by a slightly modified fuel cell run in reverse.
I actually don’t think the storage problem is the killer. The killer is the amount of land and maintenance (cleaning) required to produce each kW of energy. The same goes for wind power. The chaotic forces and environmental conditions incident on windmills makes them age fast, which means they need a lot of maintenance, which costs money.
I remember that article – it compared a Humvee with a Prius. Will see if I can dig it up. It may have even been cited here on R…
Let’s just go Nuke Power and call it good. Why are we wasting time and resources trying to figure this out?
From what I understand, the problem with this method is that the energy losses are substantial at every stage of the process and that you have to figure out how to store H2 and O2 safely. Given the complexity, it’s not worth it.
The barriers are cost (nuclear energy tends to run a bit high) and the dumb politics surrounding safety and disposal (which are a major driver of the latter). We absolutely should be using more fission power, and it’s rather shameful on several levels that we aren’t.
To be clear, nukes can’t address transportation — at least, not without better battery tech — which is a huge portion of the average first worlders’ energy budget. We’d still need fossil fuels for anything that moves, not that that’s a bad thing.
A typical crude oil component is structured like CnH2n+2 where n is greater than 0. Perfectly safely stored. The atmosphere has done a fine job of handling O2. We don’t need any of the other folderol associated with “green” energy sources, which are green only in their costs and subsidies.
Eric Hines
When Lefties call out righties on “hating science”, I wish someone would throw it back on them for their fear of nuclear. They basically shut down the entire industry for years after a minor hiccup in 3 mile island. Germany and Japan are now going thru experiments on going green, while also eliminating nuclear . Guess what, they are now burning more coal.
Btw, if anyone knows any right wing think tanks that do more rigorous studies on the folly of solar, please share.
Minor hiccup, indeed. The hiccup proved that our designed-in safety systems work.
Eric Hines
You would have thought the world had come to an end. In actuality, the journalists who flew from the West Coast to cover the incident received more radiation (naturally) on their flight than they did standing next to the plant while doing their reporting – in addition to proving that the safety systems worked as Mr. Hines noted above.
This did not prevent the industry (NSSS suppliers and utilities) from forming a working group to review and in some cases rewrite plant operating/safety manuals. The cries for more and more safety systems to be added were countered by this group with the reasoned statement that the proposed added features would actually impinge the basic safety systems that had been designed in the first place. More is not necessarily better…
Oh, and Chernobyl. We in the industry knew something like that would happen years before it did, tho did not know when. We knew their design flaws – and the technically arrogant SOBs didn’t even incorporate a containment building into their design. Most, if not all, of the resulting contamination would have not occurred had they had one.
BTW, at the time of the accident, it was strongly suggested we not say these things publicly.
But it’s such a beautiful dream
Here’s an interesting new idea from Taylor Wilson, the teen who created a fusion reactor in his garage (this one is on fission)
P.S. I have a solar system for the entire house, it’s a grid tie system and it does save me on bills.
Barbara,
I’m very glad you made this comment. The Three Mile Island media circus lead to all of the wrong conclusions. The operators of the plant had actually disabled two of the four redundant backup systems and were running in this illegal fashion for years. The nuclear regulatory agency should have been all over this and had ample opportunity to do so. The one backup system left intact worked perfectly and came on automatically bringing the system into control. The idiot operators decided that this just couldn’t actually be happening so they shut off the backup system!
All of this amounts to user error and regulatory malfeasance. Instead, the news media reported that there was a design flaw in the plant and raked the engineering company over the coals. This produced a massive increase in the cost of a plant and no improvement in safety as the very same idiots went back to their idiocy without any disciplinary measures taken against them.
Regards,
Jim
The link in “improved vastly” took me to the EIA renewable generation table, which shows how solar production really took off in the last ten years. I wonder how much of the increase in solar output is explained through the technological improvements of solar cells, as opposed to political and tax favoritism that attracts more companies to solar production.
The issue here is not the worthiness of the technology or even spending government money on the research- it is pretty clear that the technology has a lot of potential benefit and that, just as with other energy technologies, government is and should be heavily involved in funding lots and lots of basic research to make the technology feasible.
The problem is when government gets involved in the deployment of the technology, especially as related to political issues, such as promoting a global warming narrative and protection therefrom.
Photovoltaics has a lot of potential when used correctly- yard LED lamps and calculators have used the first generation versions for years and started because of market demand, not government push.
The problem with photovoltaics for large scale energy applications in places other than the Saraha desert in the daytime is less storage even than energy density. At its best- at this point- it simply does not produce enough power (wattage) per square meter. That is because of basic physics- one electron is released by one photon. If this could be doubled, so that one photon released two electrons, we would be in a far more high potential generation situation where methane generators could be a feasible backup.
The NSF should be completely out of the “get it to market” business, and spending a lot more on energy density generation breakthroughs. That is what makes sense.
Here’s what “reliable” solar output looks like when a thunderstorm moves over the Las Vegas area.
Relying on solar is like driving a very unreliable Prius and asking a friend to follow behind you with a tow truck… just in case. The energy efficiency looks a lot different if you factor in the tow truck (i.e. gas/coal fired generation).
Sure nuclear could solve a lot of problems, but it’s not looking good for nukes in California. San Onofre shut down a few years ago and Diablo Canyon just announced they’re closing. Surprisingly New York is offering subsidies to keep their nukes running.