Why Running the Country on Renewables and Batteries is a Grotesque Fraud
The father of global warming, James Hansen said that running the country on renewables is a grotesque idea. He meant wind and solar. But Nuclear and Hydro are really renewables too, although most advocates of global warming arbitrarily eliminate them from their list of approved renewables.
My definition of renewables is logical and follows.
Renewables are sources of energy (usually electricity) that satisfy two criteria:
The fuel won’t run out for at least 100 years.
They don’t emit carbon dioxide (CO2).
The advocates of renewables are usually vague about how big the fuel supply has to be, but 100 years is about as far into the future that we can speculate about without entering the realm of science fiction. Some traditional renewables, such as geothermal energy or land fill methane, run out of fuel in less than 100 years. Geothermal gets energy from underground hot rocks that not surprisingly cool if you keep taking energy from them. Land fill methane comes from decomposition of garbage in landfills. That has to run out too.
There are many sources of renewables. The most practicable that are scalable, in order from most practicable to least practicable are:
-Nuclear – banned by the environmental movement -Hydro – banned by the environmental movement -Wind -Solar
The advocates of renewables always strike out nuclear and hydro because they are prisoners of environmental mythology. Nuclear is cast out because the environmental movement lived on an anti-nuclear scare during the 70’s and 80’s. They can’t backtrack without looking foolish. Hydro is cast out because the environmental movement hates dams.
Other renewables are: geothermal, biomass, land fill methane, wave energy, algae, etc. The problem with minor renewables is that they are not scalable. The potential energy available is limited.
Wind and solar generate electricity depending on the weather. Wind energy suffers from a cube law, meaning that if the wind speed is cut by 10% the electricity output is cut by 30%. At times the wind becomes very weak for extended periods, even for wind farms spread over large areas. Solar stops working if a cloud blocks the sun. It doesn’t work at night and output drops in the late afternoon when energy demand often peaks. If too much solar capacity is added to a grid, it becomes necessary to curtail solar generation in the middle of the day. In theory, storage of electricity could be used to smooth out wind and solar. The problem is that to run 100% on solar or wind one would have to store weeks’ worth of electricity demand. That would require a battery impracticably expensive by many orders of magnitude. In my book, Dumb Energy, I worked out the cost of batteries to smooth out the Texas wind system. It turned out to cost 15 times as much for the batteries as for all the thousands of wind turbines.
Batteries have been used to move excessive solar power from the middle of the day to the early evening. The problem is that the batteries more or less double the cost of the solar installation and further, the batteries have to be replaced about every 5 years. Such a system still must be backed up by a full fleet of fossil fuel plants, because a single cloudy day will run the batteries flat.
Wind or solar require an 80% subsidy and they don’t replace any fossil fuel plants. The fossil fuel plants have to be there for when the wind or solar is not working or the battery is flat. There are other schemes for storing renewable power, such as pumped storage, but they all suffer from expense and impracticability.
Hydro is limited in scalability because there are only so many rivers and sites for dams. Hydro currently supplies about 8% of U.S. electricity and the potential for expansion is limited to certain regions and is limited.
Nuclear is the real solution to reducing CO2 emissions and the most sophisticated advocates of global warming alarmism know that and speak out in favor of nuclear.