Tag Archives: Renewable energy

Fossil Fuels Aren’t Going Anywhere, by Irina Slav

Posted on February 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

The economics and limitations of renewable energy sources mean fossil fuels will be around for a long time. From Irina Slav at oilprice.com:

“There is no scenario where hydrocarbons disappear,” the chief executive of Baker Hughes, Lorenzo Simonelli, said during his keynote speech at this year’s annual meeting in the company. Like other executives from the industry, Simonelli acknowledged and welcomed the energy transition, but he noted that a 100-percent renewable energy scenario was simply not possible. There is plenty of evidence this is indeed the case, despite the hopes and ambitions of many environmental advocates.

These hopes and ambitions imagine a world where human activity is powered from electricity only, and this electricity in turn is being generated using only renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower.

Such a world, however, is unrealistic.

Take Germany, for example. The country, which is among the EU members with the most renewable energy capacity, produced very little solar energy since the start of this year. The reason: it’s winter. It is producing solid amounts of wind power, that’s for sure, but it is also generating power from the most despised fossil fuel of all: coal.

At the time of writing its carbon intensity was 264 grams of CO2 equivalent per kWh. That was comparable to the carbon intensity of another poster girl for renewables in Europe, Denmark, which is currently getting most of its energy from wind power.

So, it seems building renewable capacity in itself is not a silver bullet solution to the emissions problem. In fact, if you build it too quickly without adding substantial storage capacity, it could backfire. This was most recently evidenced by a narrow miss of a major blackout in Europe prompted by a minor problem at a Croatian substation that rippled through the continent, highlighting the importance of maintaining the grid at a constant frequency—something renewables cannot do because of their intermittent generation.

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New York can’t buy its way out of blackouts, by David Wojick

Posted on December 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

As the politicians push for ever more “renewable” energy and electric cars, it’s become ever more apparent that their numbers aren’t going to add up. From David Wojick at wattsupwiththat.com:

New York City will soon be home to the world’s biggest utility-scale battery system, designed to back up its growing reliance on intermittent renewables. At 400 MWh this batch of batteries will be more than triple the 129 MWh world leader in Australia.

The City of New York’s director of sustainability (I am not making this title up), Mark Chambers, is ecstatic, bragging: “Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today’s announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale.” (Emphasis added)

In reality the scale here is incredibly insignificant.

In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, the president of Con Edison, New York’s power utility, gushes thus: “Utility scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York’s clean energy future, especially in New York City where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed offshore.”

This puts the Con in Con Edison.

Here is the reality when it comes to the scale needed to reliably back up intermittent renewables. For simplicity let us suppose New York City is 100% wind powered. Including solar in the generating mix makes it more complicated but does not change the unhappy outcome very much.

NYC presently peaks at around 32,000 MW needed to keep the lights on. If Mr. Biden makes all the cars and trucks electric it might be closer to 50,000 MW but let’s stick to reality.

This peak occurs during summer heat waves which are caused by stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs. These highs often last for a week and because they are stagnant there is no wind power generation. Wind turbines require something like sustained winds of 10 mph to move the blades and more like a whistling 30 mph to generate full power. During a Bermuda high folks are happy to get the occasional 5 mph breeze. These huge highs cover many states so it is not like we can get the juice from next door.

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Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investment Is A Huge Mistake, by Cyril Widdershoven

Posted on November 18, 2019 | 2 comments

If renewable energy doesn’t live up to its promoters claims, a lack of fossil fuel investment may be deadly. From Cyril Widdershoven at oilprice.com:

Activist global warming strategies have now caused the European Investment Bank to ban its fossil fuel project funding. After more than a year of internal and external lobbying by several EU member states and an ever-growing list of activist NGO and pressure groups, the EIB has decided to cut its financial support for all new fossil fuel projects by 2021. It will also support €1 trillion of investments in climate action and environmental sustainability. This is meant to force European countries to put an end to new gas-fueled power projects and keep in line with the Paris Agreements and EU CO2 emission targets. EIB VP Andrew McDowell stated to the press that the EIB’s new energy lending policy, seen as a landmark decision, has been approved with “overwhelming” support. He reiterated that it will bar investments or financing for most fossil fuel projects, including those that employ the traditional use of natural gas.

There is still a small loophole for fossil fuel projects, as the EIB funding will still be available for projects that can show they can produce one kilowatt-hour of energy while emitting less than 250g of carbon dioxide. New technologies could therefore be the savior in the end for traditional gas-burning power plants.

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The Globalists Are Openly Admitting To Their Population Control Agenda – And That’s A Bad Sign… by Brandon Smith

Posted on November 16, 2019 | 1 comment

If population is to be controlled, let’s start with the population of globalists. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Eugenics and population control are long time hobbies of the financial elites. In the early 1900’s, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute were deeply involved in promoting Eugenics laws in the US. These laws led to the forced sterilization of over 60,000 American citizens in states like California and thousands of rejected marriage licenses. The Eugenics programs in the US were only a beta test though, as the Rockefellers then transferred their programs over to Germany under Hitler and the Third Reich in the 1930’s, where a true widespread eugenics-based population control program was introduced.

The targets of population reduction were based on ethnic background, but also “mental intelligence” and economic status. The Carnegie Institute even established a “Eugenics Records Office” called Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in 1904, which collected genetic data on millions of Americans and their families with the intent of controlling their numbers and erasing certain traits from the US population. The Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory still exists today and presents itself as a kind of philanthropic endeavor to help humanity.

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Renewable Energy Hits the Wall, by Norman Rogers

Posted on August 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

Large scale wind and solar power makes no economic sense. From Norman Rogers at americanthinker.com:

If the official definitions of renewable energy were logical, renewable energy would be defined as energy that does not emit CO2 and that is not using a resource in danger of running out anytime soon.  But the definitions written into the laws of many states are not logical.  Hydroelectric energy is mostly banned because the environmental movement hates dams.  Nuclear is banned because a hysterical fear of nuclear energy was created by environmental groups.  Both nuclear and hydro don’t emit CO2.  Hydro doesn’t need fuel.  Nuclear fuel is cheap and plentiful.  A large number of prominent global warming activists, such as James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand have declared that nuclear is the only solution for the crisis that they imagine is approaching.

For those of us who don’t take global warming seriously, there is nothing wrong with using coal and natural gas to generate electricity.  The CO2 emitted helps plants to grow better with less water, a great help to agriculture.

In approximately thirty states that mandate renewable energy, the only scalable forms of renewable energy allowed are wind and solar.  California mandates that 60% of its electricity come from renewable energy by 2030.  Nevada mandates 50% by 2030.  There are other types of official renewable energy, but they can’t be easily scaled up.  Examples are geothermal energy, wave energy, and garbage dump methane.

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The G-7 Blues, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on August 26, 2019 | 1 comment

Extended supply lines and the global economy’s dependence on fossil fuels creates an unstable situation prone to dramatic dislocations. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

What’s at stake in all these international confabs like the G-7 are the tenuous supply lines that keep the global game going. The critical ones deliver oil around the world. China imports about 10 million barrels a day to keep its operations going. It produces less than 4 million barrels a day. Only about 15 percent of its imports come from next door in Russia. The rest comes from the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Think: long lines of tanker ships traveling vast distances across the seas, navigating through narrow straits. The Chinese formula is simple: oil in, exports out. It has worked nicely for them in recent decades. Things go on until they don’t.

That game is lubricated by a fabulous stream of debt generated by Chinese banks that ultimately answer to the Communist Party. The party is the Chinese buffer between banking and reality. If the party doesn’t like the distress signals that the banks give off, it just pretends the signals are not coming through, while it does the hokey-pokey with its digital accounting, and things appear sound a while longer.

The US produces just over 12 million barrels of oil a day. About 6.5 million of our production is shale oil. We use nearly 20 million a day. (We’re not “energy independent.”) The shale oil industry is wobbling under the onerous debt load that it has racked up since 2005. About 90 percent of the companies involved in shale oil lose money. The capital costs for drilling, hauling a gazillion truckloads of water and fracking sand to the rig pads, and sucking the oil out, exceed the profit from doing all that. It’s simply all we can do to keep the game going in our corner of the planet, but it’s not a good business model. After you’ve proved conclusively that you can’t make a buck at this using borrowed money, the lenders will quit lending you more money. That’s about where we are now.

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Renewables Are Dead, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on May 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

Some inconvenient physics, from  at theautomaticearth.com:

If I’ve said once that those among us who tout renewable energy should pay more attention to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, I must have said it a hundred times. But I hardly ever get the impression that people understand why. And it seems so obvious. A quote I often use from Herman Daly and Ken Townsend, when I talk about energy, really says it all:

“Erwin Schrodinger (1945) has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment – that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatium as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products.”

Using energy produces waste. Using more energy produces more waste. It doesn’t matter -much- what kind of energy is used, or what kind of waste is produced. The energy WE use produces waste, in a medium of which WE cannot survive. The only way to escape this is to use less energy. And because we have used such an enormous amount of energy the past 100 years, we must use a whole lot less in the next 100.

We use about 100 times more energy per person, and a whole lot more in the west, than our own labor can produce. We use the equivalent of what 500 billion people can produce without the aid of fossil fuel-powered machines. We won’t solve this problem with wind turbines or solar panels. There really is one way only: cut down on energy use.

Because it’s exceedingly rare to see this discussed, even among physicists, who should know better since they know thermodynamics, it’s good to hear it from someone else. An article in Forbes today discusses a May 3 article in German magazine Der Spiegel on the problems with the Energiewende, the country’s drastic turn towards renewables.

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