Time to Stop Pretending Renewables Are Cheap
In the cacophony of voices clamouring for a hasty ‘energy transition’ away from fossil fuels, there are several tropes that are regularly employed by devotees of the Church of Climate. Over the past few decades, these tropes have been weaponised to convince lay people to cede all power to climate bureaucrats to ‘save the planet’. One trope that permeates the mass media and writings by ‘climate experts’ like Michael Mann and Bill McKibben is ‘cheap’ solar and wind energy. This is despite the debunking of the magical thinking of the ‘new’ energy economy by those who understand and respect the laws of physics and economics.
Another trope that has gained traction among green ideologues is the ‘primary energy fallacy’. Social media commentary is peppered with references to this fallacy, frequently invoked to show that fossil fuels need not be replaced ‘one-to-one’ by ‘efficient’ renewable energy. This notion, peddled by advocates of wind and solar power such as Dr Jan Rosenow, Senior Research Associate at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, argues that traditional metrics of primary energy consumption — measuring the raw energy extracted from nature before conversion — systematically underestimate the contributions of renewables.
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Tilak check this out https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-electricity-data
This is all very well, but, with your view of our need for fossil fuels to maintain our civilisation, it clearly makes no sense to set them on fire for the generation of electricity. It doesn’t therefore matter how expensive renewables are for electricity generation, we must, at all costs, save fossil fuels for their necessary application to fields of activity only they can meet for the sustaining of civilisation. You have shot yourself in the foot with your arguments in this article.
That depends on the amounts of hydrocarbons left. There are vast deposits of oil/gas still to be discovered and huge fields (e.g. off the Falklands) not yet producing. Coal is nowhere near running out. We might easily have 100s of years of hydrocarbons still available. By then other innovations will have taken over.
There are also improvements in efficiency to be had certainly with coal plants given the age of the ones we still have. They might not be a decrepit as our steel plants from the 1950s but they probably only make it into the 1960s. While China builds lots of new plants they may well be closing older less efficient and dirtier ones but there never seems to be much mention of this.
We don’t have any coal plants – they were all blown up. Drax was converted to inefficient wood burning – using wood from California.
Fossil fuels are in abundance with huge known reserves, and large areas of unrealised deposits. Advances in technology have resulted in higher levels of extraction, extraction from hitherto inexploitable deposits like shale and tar sands, and reopening of old wells to remove oil that previously was unrecoverable.
The lie that has been circulated is we are running out, will use them all up soon and have nothing – shriek Peak Oil every few years.
“It doesn’t matter how expensive renewables are.” Dear me.
It does matter because electricity drives everything and the higher its cost the less wealth producing activity occurs = we get poorer.
Windmills and solar panels are never going to reliably power a 21st century economy. The solution is nuclear.
And since it is going to take quite a while to develop sufficient nuclear capacity, in the meantime we need to continue using fossil fuels and stop shovelling £billions into the bottomless pit of intermittent, unreliable so-called renewables.
Physical analysis must be the wrong approach.
We need reliable 24/7 energy including electricity. It must be affordable and competitive with other countries’ supplies. Only hydrocarbons can do this with useful support from nuclear.
Nuclear is the most expensive way to make electricity from spinning generation – as or more expensive than wind.
Hinckley Point C has been guaranteed £128 per MWh, inflation linked for lifetime of output. Gas can do it for £60 to £70 per MWh.
Why does everybody think nuclear is cheap of necessary?
Apart from economic considerations, what matters is appropriate use of available resources. You have hinted at this by noting that hydrocarbons are used as manufacturing resources, not just a source of heat. However, there are other sources of useful hydrocarbons via agriculture – such as rape seed oil, or sunflower oil, and other organic techniques such as mixed crops of grass and other things, like clover to capture nitrogen etc. Then there are cattle & sheep etc that graze it.
What is presenting a cost is the transition from old to new, with national grid infrastructure having been established to suit the old system, with old power stations being shut down and with “renewable” sources being elsewhere. Alright, nothing lasts for ever, but there does seem to be a lot of effort to cope with the transition in the short term.
We are currently being lied to again by TPTB with the latest generous reduction in our energy costs of £150 which is nearly totally wiped out by the increase we will see to cover the cost of transmission infrastructure. Ah, say Milibrain and his quango mouthpieces, this is because of a lack of investment in the infrastructure by previous Governments but this is another untruth. Yes, there was underinvestment because the green idiots said it was not worth the cost as we transition, but actually what we are really paying for is a totally duplicate transmission system because green energy doesn’t work with the existing one. So no, the cost has nothing to do with previous underspend and everything to do with future overspend. The ongoing routine maintenance and development of the existing network is a fraction of the waste we are seeing on the new.
The theoretic maximum for energy conversion wind to electricity is 59.3% and for solar 33%. Commercial installations in reality produce far less.
Then there is intermittency which means wind can supply only between 25% and 40% of capacity, depending whether on or off shore, and solar between 11% and 14% in the Northern Hemisphere.
The intermittency cost is that incurred providing fossil fuel back-up and grid balancing to counteract that intermittency.
Only by gross deceit (lies) can unreliables be presented as “cheap”
Everything about the GREEN AGENDA is Pretence. It is a phony planet saving eco socialist scam that hijacked science for political purposes and only exists by endless repetition of evidence free “official science” where no questions can be asked. But in real science you question everything.
The power of their propaganda is such that they have convinced all the countries with the most wind turbines, like Germany and the UK that wind is CHEAP, despite the fact that people can open up their bill when it pops through the door and see they are paying the highest prices in the world. ——To see why our bills are the highest in the world go to the website of Kathryn Porter (Watt-Logic) or read her posts on X
Gold is free. It’s just lying there in the ground.