The giga and terra scam of offshore wind energy

The latest “renewable, sustainable” energy claims show the IEA belongs in an insane asylum

Paul Driessen

Can anti-fossil fuel policies based on climate crisis alarmism possibly get any more insane than this?

In what might be described as a pre-Halloween trick of ginormous proportions, the International Energy Agency (IEA) now asserts that “renewable, sustainable” energy output will explode over the next two decades. Certainly for onshore wind and solar energy – but especially for offshore wind, says the IEA.

“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol noted. But “wind farms” constructed closer than 37 miles from coastlines around the world, where waters are less than 60 meters (197 feet) deep, could generate 36,000 terawatt-hours (36 million gigawatt-hours or 36 billion megawatt-hours) of electricity a year, he assures us. That’s well above the current global demand of 23,000 terawatt hours, Birol and a new IEA report say.

In fact, the potential for offshore wind energy is so great, the IEA asserts, that 20 years from now the industry will be 15 times bigger than in 2019 – and will attract $1 trillion a year in investments (riding the coat tails of government mandates and subsidies). The boom will result from lower costs per megawatt, larger turbines, and technological developments like floating platforms for turbines, says the IEA.

Wind “farms”? Like some cute, rustic Old McDonald family farm? Are you kidding me? These would be massive offshore electricity factories, with thousands, even millions, of turbines and blades towering 500-700 feet above the waves. Only a certifiable lunatic, congenital liar, complete true believer, would-be global overseer or campaign-cash-hungry politician could possibly repeat this IEA hype – or call these wind energy factories renewable, sustainable or eco-friendly.

They all clearly need yet another bucket of icy cold energy reality dumped over their heads – in addition to this one, this one and this one. If the world buys into this crazy scheme, we all belong in straitjackets.

As I have said many times, wind and sunshine may be free, renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, lands, raw materials and dead birds required to harness this widely dispersed, intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not.

A single 1.8-MW onshore wind turbine requires over 1,000 tons of steel, copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, zinc, molybdenum, petroleum-based composites, reinforced concrete and other raw materials. A 3-MW version requires 1,550 tons of these non-renewable materials.

By my rough calculations (here and here), replacing just the USA’s current electricity generation, backup coal and natural gas power plants, gasoline-powered vehicles, factory furnaces, and other fossil fuel uses with wind turbines and backup batteries would require: some 14 million 1.8-MW onshore turbines, sprawling across some 1.8 billion acres, some 15 billion tons of raw materials, thousands of new or expanded mines worldwide, and thousands of mostly fossil fuel-powered factories working 24/7/365 in various foreign countries (since we won’t allow them in the USA) to manufacture all this equipment.

Those overseas mines now “employ” tens of thousands of fathers, mothers and children – at slave wages.

Can you imagine what it would take to build, install and maintain 36 billion megawatt-hours of offshore wind turbines ... in 20 to 200 feet of water ... many on floating platforms big and strong enough to support monstrous 600-foot-tall turbines ... in the face of winds, waves, salt spray, storms and hurricanes?

The impacts on terra firma ... and terra aqua ... would be monumental, intolerable and unsustainable.

Moreover, a new study – by the company that has built more offshore industrial wind facilities than any other on Earth – has found that offshore turbines and facilities actually generate much less electricity than previously calculated, expected or claimed! That’s because every turbine slows wind speeds for every other turbine. Of course, that means even more turbines, floating platforms and raw materials. Using 3, 9 or 10-MW turbines would mean fewer of the beasts, of course, but larger towers, bases and platforms.

More turbines will mean countless seagoing birds will get slaughtered and left to sink uncounted and unaccountable beneath the waves. The growing jungle of fixed and floating turbines will severely interfere with surface and submarine ship traffic, while constant vibration noises from the towers will impair whale and other marine mammals’ sonar navigation systems. Visual pollution will be significant. And there’d be thousands of miles of submarine cables bringing electricity to onshore transmission lines.

Maps depicting the USA’s best wind resource areas show that they are concentrated down the middle of the continent – right along migratory flyways for monarch butterflies, geese, endangered whooping cranes and other airborne species; along the Pacific Coast; and along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Coastal states, especially their big urban areas, tend to be hotbeds of climate anxiety and wind-solar activism. Indeed, many Democrat Green New Deal governors and legislators have mandated 80-100% “clean, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly” energy by 2040 or 2050. California, Oregon and Washington in the West ... and Maine, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia in the East ... are notable examples. So the IEA’s love affair with offshore wind energy is certainly understandable. Of course, Blue State Great Lakes would also be excellent candidates for fixed and floating turbines.

Pacific Ocean waters typically get deep very quickly. So thousands of huge floating platforms would be needed there, although Puget Sound is also windy and could be partially denuded for turbines, as they’ve done in West Virginia’s mountains. California prefers to import its electricity from neighboring states, rather than generating its own power. However, as Margaret Thatcher might say, pretty soon you run out of other people’s energy. So homegrown wind energy will soon be essential – and inland Golden State and Middle America voters would almost certainly support putting turbines straight offshore from Al Gore’s $9-million mansion in Montecito and the Obamas’ $15-million cottage in Rancho Mirage.

When it comes to actually implementing these ambitious “renewable energy goals,” resistance and delays grow exponentially. A Massachusetts wind project for 170 offshore wind turbines was originally proposed around 2001. It’s now down to 130 3.6-MW behemoth turbines, with the US Interior Department delaying permits yet again, pending “further study.” The reaction of coastal residents to the reality of endless thousands of turbines could well turn into Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Forever.

Actual electricity output is rarely as advertised. It often hits 20% or lower, depending on locations – and fails completely on the hottest and coldest days, when electricity is most urgently needed. During the July 2006 California heat wave, turbines generated only 5% of nameplate capacity. In Texas, wind capacity factors are generally 9% to 12% (or even down to 4% or zero) during torrid summer months. Offshore, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they’d be as idle as a fleet of painted turbines upon a painted ocean.

Actual wind turbine electricity output declines by 16% per decade of operation – and worse than that offshore, because of storms and salt spray. Removing obsolete offshore turbines requires huge derrick barges and near-perfect weather. Costs and difficulties multiply with turbine size, increasing distance from shore, and whether concrete bases and electrical cables must be removed and seabeds returned to their original condition, as is required today for offshore oil and gas operations.

Cutting up 300-foot (or taller) towers and 200-foot (or longer) blades from offshore turbines, and hauling the sections to onshore landfills and scrap yards, is no piece of cake. Recycling blades is also difficult, because they are made from fiberglass, carbon fibers and petroleum resins; burning blades releases hazardous dust and toxic gases, and so is (or should be) prohibited.

Dismantling and disposal costs could easily reach millions of dollars per offshore turbine, and many billions for every industrial-scale wind “farm.” But wind energy operators should not be allowed to simply leave their derelicts behind, as they have done with smaller turbines in Hawaii and California.

Bottom line: From any economic, environmental, raw materials or energy perspective, offshore wind energy is simply unsustainable. It’s time for politicians, environmentalists and industry promoters to stop selling offshore wind (and onshore wind and solar power) as magic pixie dust to replace fossil fuels.

Via email





What is a Nuclear Microreactor?

Nuclear is getting smaller… and it’s opening up some big opportunities for the industry. A handful of microreactor designs are under development in the United States and they could be ready to roll out within the next decade.

These plug-and-play reactors will be small enough to transport by truck and could help solve energy challenges in a number of areas, ranging from remote commercial or residential locations to military bases.

Microreactors are not defined by their fuel form or coolant. Instead, they have three main features:

1.Factory fabricated: All components of a microreactor would be fully assembled in a factory and shipped out to location. This eliminates difficulties associated with large-scale construction, reduces capital costs and would help get the reactor up and running quickly.

2.Transportable: Smaller unit designs will make microreactors very transportable. This would make it easy for vendors to ship the entire reactor by truck, shipping vessel, airplane or railcar.

3.Self-regulating: Simple and responsive design concepts will allow microreactors to self-regulate. They won’t require a large number of specialized operators and would utilize passive safety systems that prevent any potential for overheating or reactor meltdown.

Benefits

Microreactor designs vary, but most would be able to produce 1-20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power. They can be used to generate clean and reliable electricity for commercial use or for non-electric applications such as district heating, water desalination and hydrogen fuel production.

Other benefits include:

Seamless integration with renewables within microgrids

Can be used for emergency response to help restore power to areas hit by natural disasters

A longer core life, operating for up to 10 years without refueling

Can be quickly removed from sites and exchanged for new ones.

Most designs will require fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 that’s not currently used in today’s reactors, although some may benefit from use of high temperature moderating materials that would reduce fuel enrichment requirements while maintaining the small system size.

The U.S. Department of Energy supports a variety of advanced reactor designs, including gas, liquid metal, molten salt and heat pipe-cooled concepts. American microreactor developers are currently focused on gas and heat pipe-cooled designs that could debut as early as the mid-2020s.

SOURCE 




Bernie Sanders’ Perpetual Motion Green New Deal

One time, as I was riding in an Uber from the airport, the driver began explaining perpetual motion.

Even though we were in a motor vehicle which needed regular infusions of gasoline to keep going, the driver, who was a devotee of ancient Egyptian technology, claimed that the pyramids were really generators, that modern technology had been stolen by the white man, and that free energy was real.

He also had a video of a perpetual motion machine powered by a bicycle chain. “It generates energy by sliding down,” my driver assured me. “And then it gets pulled up by its own weight. It’s real simple.”

I never got around to asking him why he didn’t use the perpetual motion bicycle chain to power his car.

But now, Senator Bernie Sanders has announced his own perpetual motion energy plan.

In Bernie’s new Green New Deal, 20 million new jobs will be created to fight, what the elderly socialist claims is, a “climate crisis”. These jobs will be "good paying, union jobs" in "energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants", not to mention the eternal New Deal fantasy of government work camps under a "a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp".

And this perpetual motion plan will pay for itself by, among other things, "collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan."

The bicycle chain slides down. And then gets pulled up. And creates 20 million jobs. It’s real simple.

Bernie’s plan calls for spending a mere $16.3 trillion (also known as most our national debt) and that will create 20 million union jobs in such booming sectors as sealing windows and coding (when the coders have been unionized, all our software will work as well as all other union sectors), and then the income tax from those 20 million jobs will help cover that $16.3 trillion. Presumably with some tax hikes.

But it’s okay. We’ll just pay the workers more so they can afford to pay the higher taxes. It’s real simple.

Much like my Uber driver’s perpetual motion machine, the energy will be free.

First, Bernie will “ban the imports and exports of fossil fuels”. There will also be bans on fracking, coal mining and offshore drilling. And he’ll also “ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground by stopping the permitting and building of new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure.”

You wouldn’t want those fossil fuels escaping the ground and sustaining human civilization.

Then, President Bernie will use the SEC to force "financial institutions, universities, insurance corporations" to divest from oil and gas and buy "clean energy bonds". Those “clean energy bonds” will be subsidizing the failed “renewables” strategy that doesn’t work, but will now have been mandated.

Federal pension funds will also be forced to throw away the futures of their workers in the same way.

By 2030, the entire country’s electricity and transportation grid will be powered by “100 percent renewable energy.” Which is to say you’ll spend a lot of time sitting around in the dark.

But the whole thing will pay for itself “through litigation, fees, and taxes” on the fossil fuel industry.

First Bernie will bankrupt the energy industry and then pay for everything by taxing the industry he bankrupted. The bicycle chain goes up and then it goes down. Which part of that don’t you understand?

At least the energy will be free. Or virtually free.

Bernie’s Green New Deal proposal claims that, “after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.”

Operators are standing by to take your call.

Bernie promises to “end greed in our own energy system”. Goodbye Edison, vamoose Tesla. There’ll be no more profiteering from the infinite free energy generated by the Green New Deal. Forget energy greed. And the energy grid. There’ll be neither greed nor grid in the Green New Deal.

How will this free energy work?

Simple. "The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal" will be sold to "cooperatively-owned" utilities that " demonstrate a commitment to the public interest". Ban oil, coal and gas, then force all the financial institutions to subsidize “clean energy” which will be sold to lefty cooperatives.

And they say Communism doesn’t work.

There will be no more “energy greed” because the Green New Deal, whose key pieces of energy infrastructure, windmills and solar panels, are the least reliable ways to produce energy, and only work intermittently when there’s sunlight and wind, will resell its energy to politically correct utilities.

Everything will be subsidized and pay for itself by taxing the oil industry that no longer exists. And forcing everyone to invest their savings and pensions in a boondoggle worthy of Venezuela.

The bicycle chain goes up. The bicycle chain goes down. And you’re really gonna need those bicycles.

As Bernie puts it, "We will move beyond oil toward an electric car." There'll be $2 trillion in grants to buy electric cars. And $681 billion for electric car trade-ins. Then $407 billion to replace all buses with electric buses. And $216 billion to replace trucks with electric trucks. Plus, another $100 billion to “decrease the cost of a new electric vehicle to at most $18,000.”

(It's only money. Taxpayers have lots of it.)

Actual cars will be eliminated through the, "regulation" and "enforcement" of personal vehicles.

But don't worry about the cost of charging your new electric car, built by unionized "indigenous peoples" and "communities of color", because with charging stations everywhere, "drivers will no longer need to worry about where to charge their car or if they can pay for it."

The electricity is "virtually free".

The entire country, including all its vehicles, and long-haul trucks and school buses, and your car, will be dependent on an energy grid run by political apparatchiks who worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and whose power supply varies depending on the weather, and are managed in defiance of economics.

What could possibly go wrong?

Better hang on to your bicycle. You’re going to need it once the blackouts, brownouts and restrictions on power usage kick in. After a while that $2 trillion worth of electric cars will be banned through “regulation and enforcement”, while everyone except seniors will be told to ride bicycles.

The bicycles will be powered by that unique form of renewable energy known as human muscle.

Human ingenuity and folly are the only true sources of renewable energy. Both are infinite. And sometimes it can be hard to tell one from the other. That is why socialism continues to endure. Not because it works, but because there will always be people who want to believe that the bicycle chain can go up and down, and that your trillion-dollar spending plans will be paid for by your fantasies.

Any intelligent adult would see Bernie’s Green New Deal as raving lunacy. Take the plan to subsidize 20 million jobs with income taxes from those 20 million jobs. Or the claim that the Green New Deal can be paid for with taxes on the energy industries it proposes to wipe out. Or a call to spend $150 billion to “decarbonize” shipping and aviation “as soon as possible”. (Just put windmills on the planes.)

Portions of the Green New Deal read like socialist gibberish poorly translated from the original Russian.

“We will establish a ‘take back’ program to require large corporations that produce goods with the materials needed for this clean energy transition to pay to take those goods back from consumers who no longer want them to establish a nation-wide materials recycling program so we can use as many recycled materials as possible to build the renewable energy equipment needed to transform our energy system,” one particular breathless sentence insists.

There’s no room for periods or commas in this excited vision of a world in which consumers eagerly rush to turn over the goods they no longer want so they can be used to construct windmills for free energy.

After the Bernie revolution, the people will have been educated to realize that they no longer need material goods. (Bernie however will have upgraded from three houses to four.) And they’ll rush to turn over all their iPhones and convertibles, while the evil corporations which convinced them that they needed those things will atone by beating their lawnmowers into solar panels and windmills.

This isn’t a political vision. It’s environmentalist messianism. It doesn’t work. But it isn’t really meant to.

My driver didn’t try powering his car with the perpetual motion bicycle chain. The idea of it was what mattered. Once upon a time, American socialists were cranks confined to lecturing students or random people about their magical economics with no real risk of having to put their delusions into practice.

The truly vital thing was the pseudo-religious vision of a remaking the world into a magical place.

We all like believing that wonder can transcend material reality. For religious people, God is the source of wonder. Others, like my driver, find validation in imagining the technological miracles of ancient Egypt. And millions of lefties believe that given total power they could reshape reality to create their vision of a magical world unbounded by the materialism of economics and energy.

In the real world, the only way the bicycle chain keeps going is if your feet are working the pedals. And lefties invariably realize that the only “free energy” doesn’t come from wind or solar.

The only “free energy” with which lefties build their utopias is slave labor.

Ancient Egypt wasn’t powered by magical batteries or lost ancient technologies. It worked because of slave labor.

Communist dictatorships got things done not because they had good ideas, but because they enslaved millions of people.

Bernie proposes bringing back the Civilian Conservation Corps. Perhaps he forgot that Norman Thomas, America’s leading socialist, had called CCC a “system of forced labor”.

Or maybe Bernie remembers all too well.

The bicycle chain rattles. Keep pedaling. It’s the only way to generate power in the Green New Deal.

SOURCE 





German City Destroys 600 Acres Of Forest To Build Wind ‘Farm’

What follows is an example of how German decisionmakers go about protecting the environment: chop down hundreds of acres of forests and pour thousands of tons on concrete reinforced with hundreds of tons of steel on huge beds of gravel, all hauled in by hundreds of truckloads.

Then install skyscraper tall industrial bird-killing monstrosities.

Result: an idyllic forest gets turned into an industrial complex that can be seen and felt from miles away – in order to protect the climate.

It would be a gruesome task to calculate the environmental and CO2 budget for the following described wind park project in the Münsterwald forest near the western Germany city of Aachen.

When finished it will consist of seven 200-meter tall turbines in what once was a natural, forested area and undisturbed biotope.

To get to the site, a “gigantic” swath of forest had to be cut through the heart of the forest. According to the ZDF public television report (see below), “alone here 1000 trees had to be cut down.

And according to chief Rainer Hülsheger of the state association for natural landscape protection: “At least 12,000 square meters of forest needed to be cleared in order to build one wind turbine alone.”

Angry environmentalists say that the forest simply was never even suitable for a wind park to begin with. Yet, the ZDF reports how the forest belongs to the city, and so the revenue-generating project got the green light.

A Threat To Endangered Species

The ZDF report shows the sheer insanity that it takes to install wind turbines in the middle of forests, and how they endanger rare bird species such as the black Stork and red Kite.

Entire Biotope Severely Damaged

For the wind project in Euskirchen, according to the ZDF (2:35): “The planned 24 wind turbines in the so-called Kammerwald cut through an entire biotope system from Rheinland towards Belgium.”

Why are the turbines being installed in the forests? According to Aachen city official Elmar Wiezorek, placing the turbines in fields posed an even greater environmental hazard: “The forest had the least problems.”

But Herbert Klinkenberg of a citizens initiative protecting the wind projects calls it all “a catastrophe.” ZDF sums it up: “Climate protection at the expense of nature.”

SOURCE 




Greenie destruction of lots of power generators wiping out Australia's aluminium producers

Mining giant Rio Tinto says its Australian Aluminium smelters, which employ more than 2,600 workers, are not sustainable at current power prices.

The company runs three smelters in Australia, which are under financial pressure due to the high price of electricity, which makes up about a third of their costs, and the low price of aluminium due to a flood of cheap supply coming from Asian competitors.

The resources minister, Matt Canavan, has recently championed the industry, saying Australia was “one of the best aluminium producers in the world” and claiming it needed a continued supply of “cheap baseload” electricity from coal.

“If we turn our back on coal, you turn out the lights on aluminium, it’s as simple as that,” he told ABC Radio last week.

However, speaking in London on Thursday night, the chief executive of Rio Tinto’s aluminium division, Alf Barrios, issued a blunt warning that current prices from coal-fired power were too high.

He said this was despite “fantastic work” done by the team at the Australian smelter division, Pacific, to improve the performance of the plants.

“However power accounts for about a third of the global cost of the smelters and the smelters at Pacific do lack internationally competitive energy prices, which undermines the viability of these assets,” he said.

“We are working very closely with the power suppliers and the governments to find a solution to this challenge. “I’m not going to speculate on the outcome but clearly the current situation is not sustainable.”

The warning comes after Rio Tinto boss Jean-Sebastian Jacques warned in August that Australian smelters were “on thin ice” and follows the company flagging last week that it might close its New Zealand smelter.

Barrios was speaking to reporters ahead of a quarterly update to investors that listed “low-carbon technology” as a priority for its aluminium business.

The company’s head of economics, Vivek Tulpule, said the profitability of aluminium was “challenged by the quick and cheap expansion of supply to meet growth in demand”.

“This underlines the value of our position in Canada with operating costs in the bottom decile of the cost curve supported by hydro power which will become increasingly important in a carbon-constrained world,” he said.

SOURCE 

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