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The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
This is a very good read though it is very long but well worth reading. It is a comprehensive critique of why “renewables” are never going to work as currently thought of in terms of revolutionizing energy use (solar, wind, batteries). It explains that there are definite obstacles based in physics to how efficient current technologies can be and will not be capable of revolutionizing energy. It does not argue that the quest is futile. It does argue that where government funding is centered will not achieve the desired results.
From the executive summary:
“A movement has been growing for decades to replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It began with the fear that we were running out of oil. That fear has since migrated to the belief that, because of climate change and other environmental concerns, society can no longer tolerate burning oil, natural gas, and coal—all of which have turned out to be abundant.
So far, wind, solar, and batteries—the favored alternatives to hydrocarbons—provide about 2% of the world’s energy and 3% of America’s. Nonetheless, a bold new claim has gained popularity: that we’re on the cusp of a tech-driven energy revolution that not only can, but inevitably will, rapidly replace all hydrocarbons.
This “new energy economy” rests on the belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power and battery storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in computing and communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing efficiency. But this core analogy glosses over profound differences, grounded in physics, between systems that produce energy and those that produce information.
In the world of people, cars, planes, and factories, increases in consumption, speed, or carrying capacity cause hardware to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics—not clever software.
This paper highlights the physics of energy to illustrate why there is no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a “new energy economy.”
Published in Environment
Kinda misses the point of the New Green Deal if you misinterpret the word “replace” as if you mean something of equivalent efficacy and value. You could, for example, “replace” the First Amendment with a policy of a bullet to the back of the head for expressing unwelcome ideas.
The goal is to “replace” not just SUVs but personal mobility and non-collective modes of transportation. The need to ration and assign energy use from grossly inadequate sources is a feature, not a bug. If we have to leave our darkened homes to go to the community hall to watch television, somebody else gets to pick the channel. If we only have internet access in the people’s computing centers, it is far easier to protect us from undesirable content.
No serious, sentient adult with minimal math and reading skills believes that wind and solar can replace gasoline, coal and nuclear power. It is about posturing and hoping that one’s professed policy preferences are never actually implemented and/or if they were to be implemented, to be among the favored recipients of the greatly reduced energy supply.
California’s refusal to build any new storage reservoirs to boost capacity over the past 40 years has led to the current shortages, where the progressive state government’s answer has been to simply adjust state water right priorities, taking allocations away from rural farmers and directing it towards the cities, mainly along the coast. That of course also happens to be where most of the state’s progressive voters live, and were something like the Green New Deal to pass, that’s what you’d also see in the Golden State and elsewhere. Power allocations would be directed towards the urban centers, while the rural areas and the people living there would be first to see not simply rolling, but long term power outages (i.e. — that night illumination map of North Korea that’s been posted for years showing only Pyonyang lit up would be a feature, not a bug for the environmental left in America).
A large area of such old oil fields are in central California. Joe Shell ran against Nixon in the 1962 GOP primary and I voted for him and attended some of his events. He moved to Bakersfield and was involved in that oil industry. Bakersfield is the capito\l of red California. Joe was a driving force there.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bakersfield/obituary.aspx?pid=107273816
Victor Davis Hanson recognizes the role of Bakersfield as that capitol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgmR_5Hi2fw
Worth watching and thinking about Bakersfield as that capitol.
Yikes!😬😬😬
(and thank you for the explanation 🙂)
A link would be useful here.
If this is indeed true, then insurance companies should be avoiding solar-equipped buildings like the plague.
There are also good reasons to want legislators to have some substantive knowledge of the things their laws are being written about. In legislation about agriculture or manufacturing, for example, it would be useful to have some legislators involved who have actually had something to do with those industries.
Also, there are a lot of non-lawyers who have considerable experience in drafting contract language for final review and wordsmithing by attorneys. Business contracts, from what I have seen, are not usually written from the ground up by the lawyers, who are too overloaded and too disconnected from the subject matter to do so.
Just look up “solar panel firefighters” in any search engine.
The insurance companies aren’t avoiding solar panel equipped houses – they’re just upping the rates to cover them.
Thanks. Found an interesting piece here:
https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-attack/articles/solar-safety-for-firefighters-the-myths-and-the-facts-ioFp2MGuWg0KgCa5/
Maybe homes & buildings with these systems should be required to have an outside plaque identifying exactly what is in there.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?
In 2018, about 4,178 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or 4.18 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States.1 About 63% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases). About 20% was from nuclear energy, and about 17% was from renewable energy sources. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that an additional 30 billion kWh of electricity generation was from small-scale solar photovoltaic systems in 2018.2
Furthermore:
So, just ballparking the math here, if 59 nuke plants are generating 20% of our total electricity, then logically if we build another 240 of them, we could have 100% of our electricity come from reliable baseload generators with zero carbon emissions. [I would guess we could actually get away with many fewer of them than because most of the existing plants are quite old and I’m assuming we’ve come up with more efficient plant designs since then.]
That’s a green new deal I could get behind.
And yet, the greenies are opposed to nuclear. It’s totally irrational.
I figure if the French can get upwards of 75% of their baseload power from nukes, ‘Muricans should certainly do better!
When it comes to renewables, they’re also opposed (at least on the West Coast) to the only long-standing one that is something of a constant, hydroelectric, because big dams are bad.
Which is why I would like to blow up the Hetch Hetchy dam that supplies San Francisco with its water. Never happen.