The terrifying scale of the green revolution
Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy will restore our personal and community independence. According to this, by investing in green technology, Britain will gain freedom from coal barons and gouging sheikhs, and deliver a grass-roots, democratic energy system. Ed Miliband played into this on Friday when he blamed the energy price cap being raised on the ‘failed energy policy we inherited, which has left our country at the mercy of international gas markets controlled by dictators.’
Others believe green energy represents the free spirit and harmony with nature. ‘What would you rather have in your neighbourhood?’, I remember being asked in 2005. ‘A little wind turbine swirling gently in the breeze, or a nuclear power station and pylons?’
The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed
As it is turning out, and particularly so now that Ed Miliband is back in charge of energy policy after 14 years in the wilderness, the green transition means armies of gargantuan wind turbines on land and sea; great blue-black mirror of solar panels glazing over thousands of acres of farmland; a neurotic spider’s web of grid cables criss-crossing the country; and dozens and dozens of whining substations and vast Area 51-like compounds of shipping-container sized lithium-ion batteries.
As if that were not bad enough, it transpires that in spite of all this green industrialisation we will still require nuclear and conventional gas turbine power stations. We may not use them as much, but reliability is an issue with wind and solar, and therefore generators are needed to guarantee security of supply at times when the British weather fails to deliver. ‘Who knew, except everyone?’ as the Americans say.
Still, the sheer immensity of low carbon industrialisation is coming as an unwelcome shock to those who only a few years ago would have at least passively supported wind and solar development.
There was clearly a profound misunderstanding about the physical character of renewable energy power systems. But no one should in fact be surprised. The physics of renewable energy are inescapable.
While there is a substantial quantity of energy in the wind, the thermodynamic quality of that energy is very low. It is for this reason that there are no organisms that derive their metabolic energy from wind, an extraordinary fact given its widespread availability at unthreatening temperatures. Wind energy is simply too chaotic to support life.
Solar radiation is somewhat better. Indeed, outside the earth’s atmosphere it is of fairly high quality. But on the surface of the planet and seen from the perspective of a leaf or a photovoltaic cell it is hindered by atmospheric interference, clouds and airborne dust, and critically by the rotation of the earth. Plants do derive energy from sunshine, but they are relatively simple organisms, and they do not move rapidly or have complex nervous systems.
Some aspects of these simple facts about wind and solar energy flows are intuitively obvious but the critical implications tend to escape even those well versed in physics.
The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.
A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 Megawatts (MW) Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just about fit into Middlesex). It is one of many major wind installations that the government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently produce about 15 Gigawatts (GW) of operational offshore wind power. To meet this quadrupling of capacity, we would need around 30 more Sophia Offshore wind farms.
The Sophia will use the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 MW. It has three blades 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes. The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.
The overall height of the turbine is 252m, only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard. It foundations will, according to Sophia’s own publicity, be 80 to 90m in length and weigh 1,200 to 1,400 tonnes each. The total weight of each turbine – blades, nacelle, tower and foundations – is likely to be nudging towards 3,000 tonnes.
Sofia will use 100 of these structures, so we can estimate that the wind farm alone accounts for about 300,000 tonnes of industrial equipment, mostly steel, some concrete, and fibre-glass reinforced epoxy in the blades. (For reference, a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier weighs a mere 65,000 tonnes.) And this is before we have taken into account the offshore substations and the cables connecting each turbine and the shoreline.
Multiply all this by 30 to meet the government’s offshore wind targets, and you arrive at nine million tons of industrial equipment for the additional offshore installations alone. For scale, recall that the UK’s total annual production of steel is only six million tons, and you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of Ed Miliband’s plans for the country. This Wind and Sun King makes Louis XIV lookhumble.
The total manufacturing mass involved in Sophia is difficult for anyone outside the project to calculate, but the order of magnitude is clear: it’s huge, and regardless of your views on its beauty, it’s certainly not going to be cheap. Sophia states that its total capital cost is in the region of £3 billion, a great deal for an asset exposed to the North Sea and likely to have a short economic lifetime.
Onshore wind farms weigh less than Sophia’s marine leviathans but are of broadly similar dimensions. The Vestas V136 4.2 MW, for example, has blades of 76m and hub heights up to 166m, giving a total overall height of over 240m. The Eiffel Tower is only 60 meters taller. These are the sorts of devices that Ed Miliband now thinks acceptable next to rural dwellings.
But relative to their size, these wind farms do not produce much energy. Sophia, for example, will produce around six Terawatt hours (TWh) per year, according to the company’s website. Although this is unlikely to be maintained over the entire lifetime of the windfarm, this is still only equivalent to about 2 per cent of total annual UK demand for electricity. Given the sheer size of Sophia that really isn’t very much – only around 0.01 TWh per square kilometre.
Solar, as predicted from theory, is slightly better, but still abysmal. Mr Miliband recently overruled the recommendations of his own planning inspectors to consent to a 500 MW photovoltaic installation on 2,500 acres (10 square kilometres) of Suffolk farmland near Newmarket. It is about 15 miles long, and comprises around one million solar panels. In spite of the site’s gross magnitude, it will generate only about 0.5 TWh of electrical energy per year. This is a very poor exchange for the energy or food that could be otherwise grown on the land.
For comparison, consider the Sizewell B nuclear power station, also in Suffolk, and running since 1995. The site occupies a land area of about 0.5 square kilometres, less than a thousandth of Sophia’s area. Still, Sizewell B generates more energy, as much as 10 TWh a year. It is, very roughly, 1,500 times more productive than the Sophia wind farm, and 300 times more productive than the Sunnica solar farm when it comes to space. On this land use basis, Sizewell C, now under construction, can plausibly claim to be 1,000 times more productive than solar and 3,000 times more so than onshore wind.
That is typical for conventional power stations: they are small and highly productive compared to renewables. Correcting the severe physical defects of wind and solar generation requires capital equipment on the grandest of scales, and as a result the adoption of renewables results in a low productivity system which is intrinsically expensive and resource hungry compared to the fossil and nuclear alternatives.
Moreover, most of the extraction, conversion and delivery of renewables is at present manufactured by a fossil-fuelled global economy – primarily in Asia and in particular China.
But if, as the government seems to want, green equipment is produced domestically, then the costs will rise dramatically. In this case, is not even clear that there would enough of an energy return to justify the costs of a wind or solar project. The profit margin would be very thin, or even non-existent. At best, the renewable energy sector would not only be the largest consumer of its own energy output, but encompass the bulk of the British economy. Those owning green energy businesses would possess levels of relative wealth and power not seen since the gentry and aristocracy of the pre-coal economies of Europe. One imagines that this would be politically extremely controversial.
So, there is more to the industrial dystopia of wind turbines and solar farms than mere aesthetics and a counterproductive climate policy.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/the-terrifying-scale-of-the-green-revolution/
**************************************************Is there nothing the BBC won’t blame on climate change?
Since global warming first entered the public consciousness, it has been hard to avoid the impression that the BBC is more interested in persuading us to take ‘climate action’, than informing us about what might be happening with the planet.
The corporation’s bias has only worsened over the years. In 2010, the BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, launched a review of the ‘impartiality and accuracy of BBC science coverage’. A panel of supposed experts concluded that the science on climate change was now so clear that the state broadcaster no longer needed to grant sceptical voices equal airtime.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC interpreted this advice as meaning that dissenters should be heard very rarely indeed. Today, climate naysaying is all but absent from the BBC’s output. The Beeb has abandoned any pretence that climate is still a complex, hotly debated issue. Where public discussion ought to be, we now have a wave of propaganda.
This was led chiefly by the man at the head of the BBC’s climate output, Roger Harrabin, who was its energy and environment analyst from 2004 to 2022. Harrabin’s only qualification for the role was a fervent faith in the inevitability of climate catastrophe and a Cambridge MA in English.
Needless to say, Harrabin’s lack of actual scientific knowledge led to some less-than-accurate reporting. Harrabin spread wildly misleading information about fracking, and in 2018 criticised the government for not forcing people to stop eating meat. ‘The battle over climate change’, he wrote, ‘will have to get personal’.
Harrabin was gradually replaced by Justin Rowlatt, whose PPE degree makes him marginally more qualified than his predecessor. But he is, if anything, even more fervent in his environmentalist faith. The quality of the BBC’s environment output has, as a result, got even worse.
A flavour of the problem can be had by reading ‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’, Paul Homewood’s annual review of the BBC’s climate coverage, published last week by Net Zero Watch, of which I am director. This covers more than 30 of the most egregious errors in the BBC’s climate reporting throughout 2023. Some of which are so absurd as to be comical.
Last year, the BBC bizarrely tried to blame climate change for causing a crocodile to bite a woman in Indonesia. A drought, the story goes, forced the woman to walk to the village watering hole instead of the one outside her home. The crocodile then attacked her en route. The major problem with this, as Homewood points out, is that droughts haven’t really got much worse in Indonesia, regardless of climate change. In fact, rainfall has been increasing there since 1950.
Similarly laughable was the claim that it’ll soon be too hot to grow hops in Kent. According to a 2023 article, climate change is threatening to ‘call time’ on the ‘Great British pint’. The BBC neglects to mention that the world’s main producer of hops, Ethiopia, is a tad bit warmer than Kent.
Examples like these abound. The BBC says that ‘aircraft turbulence is worsening with climate change’. But according to the US National Transportation Safety Board, there has been no increase in severe turbulence accidents since 1989. The BBC claims hurricanes are becoming more powerful. But the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is no evidence that this is the case. The BBC went as far as to argue that a train derailment in Scotland in 2020, which killed three people, was the fault of a landslip caused by climate change. Aberdeen’s High Court subsequently ruled that it was caused by an incorrectly installed and poorly maintained drainage system.
‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’ only covers errors related to the climate itself, but the BBC’s coverage of climate policy, Net Zero and the energy transition is just as poor. In particular, the BBC repeatedly fails to question the mantra of ‘cheap renewables’. Remarkably, after years of renewables driving electricity prices ever upwards, the BBC still expects us to believe that deploying some more wind farms will bring them down again.
For two decades, environment correspondents have been able to ignore such awkward questions. But those times are coming to an end. The money to pay for Net Zero has all but run out and those competing demands for what little remains are becoming very insistent indeed. Meanwhile, housing and the welfare system are screaming for funds. Even our roads are in desperate need of repair.
We are hurtling towards an economic precipice. If we do hit rock bottom, people will surely ask how it was that nobody foresaw these problems. Why, they will ask, did nobody say anything? People did, of course. But the BBC, along with most of the mainstream media, has made sure the sceptical voices are never heard. Clearly, activism has almost entirely replaced journalism
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/23/is-there-nothing-the-bbc-wont-blame-on-climate-change/
********************************************A Critical Examination of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) Initiative
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, a collaborative effort among various research institutions, claims to offer scientifically rigorous assessments of the role human-induced climate change plays in individual weather events.
Their work is often touted as groundbreaking, providing what they assert is concrete evidence linking specific weather phenomena—such as heatwaves, droughts, and storms—to anthropogenic climate change.
However, a closer examination reveals significant flaws in their methodology, conflicts of interest, and an overarching agenda that raises serious questions about the scientific integrity of their work.
The Science Behind Climate Systems: Chaos and Uncertainty
At the heart of any critique of the WWA’s methodology is a fundamental understanding of climate science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, states unequivocally in its 2001 Third Assessment Report.
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
This statement highlights the inherent complexity and unpredictability of the climate system, which is influenced by a myriad of factors, both natural and anthropogenic.
Given this complexity, the notion that any organization can accurately attribute the strength or occurrence of a specific weather event to human activity is, at best, highly speculative and, at worst, pseudoscientific.
The WWA’s attribution studies often involve running climate models with and without human influences, then comparing the results to determine the likelihood that a given event was caused or intensified by anthropogenic factors.
However, this approach fails to account for the chaotic nature of the climate system, where small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes.
Methodological Flaws and Questionable Assumptions
The WWA’s methodology relies heavily on climate models that are notoriously sensitive to initial conditions and often require significant assumptions to function.
**************************************************
The sun is setting the renewables ‘superpower’ fantasy of the Australian Left
Renewable energy superpower status is supposedly in Australia’s grasp now the government has given Mike Cannon-Brookes the green light to export solar power to Singapore.
Tanya Plibersek announced environmental approval for the tech billionaire’s eccentric proposal last week, taking a swipe at Peter Dutton’s “expensive nuclear fantasy that may never happen”.
By contrast, the Environment Minister would have us believe Cannon-Brookes’s plan to siliconise the NT Outback is a done deal. All that’s left to do is raise $35bn in capital, install 120 square kilometres of solar panels, build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin, and lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.
The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate, and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
There is increasing evidence the US has reached the point of peak renewables, as the pool of private investors shrinks and winning community approval becomes harder. Research by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory showed roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar applications submitted over the past five years were cancelled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.
Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood says Australia's largest solar farm to date has been given the “green light” by the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek.
The US Department of Energy says the national electricity network needs to grow by 57 per cent by 2035, the equivalent of approximately 21,000 km a year. Last year’s total was around 200 km, down from just over 1000 in 2022.
Meanwhile, the challenges of grid synchronisation and storage remain unresolved, and the technical problems for offshore wind turbines, in particular, are mounting. Last week, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova announced an investigation into a blade failure in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the UK. It is the third blade failure this year.
In July, a newly installed blade crumbled at the Vineyard Wind offshore plant, creating debris that washed up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At 107 metres long and weighing 55 tonnes, they are the most enormous blades deployed commercially. The failure of three in quick succession suggests the quest to increase output by installing ever-larger blades has reached its natural limits.
Yet the imperative of expanding generating capacity is hardening. The principal driving force is not electric vehicles but the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. AI requires at least 10 times the power of conventional computing programs.
In the US, data centres account for about 2.5 per cent of power and demand could rise to 7.5 per cent by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. In Ireland, data processing and storage use 12 per cent of electricity produced, forcing the authorities to limit the number of connections to the grid.
Silicon Valley has long abandoned the notion it can be powered by silicon photovoltaic panels while burying stray emissions in the Amazon forests.
In April, the tech giant Amazon paid the best part of $1bn ($US650m) for a sizeable block of land next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station. It will be the site for a data centre powered by up to 480MW of carbon-free electricity delivered reliably around the clocky.
Shares in US nuclear power companies such as Consolidated Energy, Talem and Vistra have soared by between 80 per cent and 180 per cent in the past year. So-called green energy stocks, on the other hand, are static or falling, while coal is making an unexpected comeback.
In May, the Financial Times reported that the retirement dates for coal-fired power stations are being pushed back as operators become concerned about grid security. Allianz Energy has delayed the conversion of its Wisconsin plant from coal to gas for three years to 2028. Ohio-based FirstEnergy announced in February that it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing “resource adequacy concerns”.
The effect of AI on electricity demand was largely unanticipated at the beginning of the decade. AI chips will undoubtedly become more efficient, but there is no telling how much further the demand for AI will grow since the technology is in its infancy. Nor can we begin to guess what other power-hungry forms of technology might be developed by 2050.
What we do know, however, is that if Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble. That’s the target the Australian Energy Market Operator has set in its updated blueprint for the great electricity transition.
As Chris Bowen points out, that’s going to take a lot solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hour s just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labor government is less than a tenth of that.
One of the hallmarks of the anointed is an unwavering conviction in the integrity of their analysis and the effectiveness of their proposed solutions. They feel no need to hedge their bets by factoring in contingency arrangements should their predictions turn out to be wrong. Nothing in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan indicates its experts have given any thought to scaling up electricity production in line with actual demand, which may well be considerably higher than they’ve anticipated.
If they had, they would have to acknowledge that there are limits to the renewable energy frontier determined by energy density, the demand for land and the requirement for firming. The silicification of northern Australia cannot continue forever, nor can we expect to rely on China for most of the hardware and pretend there are no geopolitical consequences.
As for our nuclear-phobic Prime Minister’s dream of turning Australia into the Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, while simultaneously sitting at the cutting edge of quantum computing, forget it. In 2006, as the shadow minister for the environment, Anthony Albanese gave a speech at the Swansea RSL on avoiding dangerous climate change.
“Why on Earth would we want to take the big health and economic risk of nuclear energy when we have a ready-made power source hovering peacefully in the sky every day?” he asked.
If Albanese doesn’t know the answer to that question 18 years later, he probably never will.
***************************************
All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment