Two green-dream fantasies are heading for a massive and costly collision.
Firstly, they dream of generating all grid power from wind and solar propped up by battery storage (such as lots of giant Tesla batteries [pictured] and pumped hydro).
Secondly, they dream of replacing all petrol, diesel, and gas cars, trucks, and buses with electric vehicles, powered by more batteries.
But wind farms do well if they can average about 35% of their rated capacity, with low predictability, while solar panels average just 25% of their capacity, produced intermittently.
To generate zero-emissions energy for Australia, we would need hills covered with turbines, flats covered with solar panels, the countryside spider-webbed with access roads and transmission lines, and much more hydro.
To stabilize a green energy system without using hydrocarbons will require an eye-watering quantity of batteries, costing as much as 200 times the cost of any wind or solar facility needing backup.
Every home will need a battery in the basement (and sensible ones will also have a diesel in the shed).
Add to this battery bonanza: millions of batteries will be needed to electrify and replace our fleet of gas and diesel vehicles.
No wonder cynical mining companies like BHP are going green — they smell a jackpot from the coming green boom in demand for steel, aluminum, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, cobalt, rare earth minerals, and nuclear fuels.
And no wonder Tesla supports green energy — the total annual output of the world’s biggest battery factory in Nevada would store less than five minutes of annual U.S. electricity demand.
They also see booming demand for electric vehicle batteries. No wonder Tesla shares have gone ballistic (the boom before the crash?).
The carbon dioxide emitted by all the extra mining, transport, manufacture, and disposal of green energy generators and batteries would far exceed the CO2 allegedly saved by the threatened green upheaval.
All Australians rely on trucks to deliver their daily food to towns and cities — in road trains, semi-trailers, refrigerated trucks, and electric trains, almost all powered by diesel, coal, or gas.
If they are all-electric and powered by batteries, where will the electricity come from to recharge all of these batteries? In tomorrow’s Australia, it must come from unreliable wind and solar grid, hydropower, or diesel generators.
Take a look in the video below at a road train taking cattle to market in the Kimberley region in outback Australia.
One truck on its own would bog in the soft sand or in creek crossings, but with a 4WD tractor, four diesel semis, and eight trailers linked in a road train, at least one set of driving wheels is likely to be on solid ground.
In the electric vehicle fantasy world, what weight of batteries would drive this road train, and where would they recharge their batteries?
Even if they focus on forcing electrification of private cars, where does the real power come from every night, when most of them plug into re-charge?
If it is still night, zero electricity will be coming from wind and solar. That leaves coal, gas, batteries, pumped-hydro, rationing, load-shedding or blackouts to close the gap.
Forget energy-wasting nonsense like capture and burial of CO2 and the energy-consuming roundabout of generating and then burning hydrogen.
The zero-emissions delusion is impossible without nuclear power, but this can happen only if people can be reassured on nuclear safety and waste disposal. Are the Greens going to lead that education process?
And if we get global cooling instead of global warming, what will keep us warm on long, still winter nights? Any state or country reaching for these impossible green dreams is destined for blackouts and energy riots on the streets.
It’s time for Australian politicians to stop frolicking with green fairies around the zero-emissions maypole.
Green energy will never power the conversion to electric vehicles. They must remove all barriers and climate taxes on safe, reliable, trusted energy sources — coal, gas, and oil.
We need more reliable cheap power for jobs and industry and more CO2 in the atmosphere to make green plants grow faster with less water.
Viv Forbes has studied geology, physics, chemistry, math, meteorology, cycles, industry economics, and commodity markets.
Read more at American Thinker
This is an accurate summary of the situation.
Wind and solar cannot sustain a technological society. Do the sums. It doesn’t add up.
The urge to power our cities and industry with all this potential green energy converted to electricity draws me to contemplate how primitive, uneducated minds function. the view that high-BTU burnable fuels (they are NOT fossil fuels) can be replaced by wind and solar sources is completely ridiculous. The thinking that this wholesale conversion can be accomplished is similar to early aviation and aerospace pioneers trying to figure out how to drive airplanes and rocket with wood-burning stoves. Had they tried this, perhaps living in a world in which modern fuels could not be produced, mankind would never have left the ground. Nuclear power will eventually have to get the chance it deserves to power our world, but probably not all of it. It is somewhat sobering to think what will take the place of petroleum and coal centuries from now when those resources do become very scarce or way to costly to exploit. Wind and solar simply will never be up to the task.
Society would benefit from an apolitical energy analysis. Identify the best usage of the various forms of energy available to us.
Of all the Green ‘deals’, hydroelectricity is miles ahead of the others. Of all the hydrocarbons available to us, natural gas used as a household fuel is the most efficient. Diesel fuel ,gasoline and kerosene deliver people and products without subsidies. The most prevalent waste of them is frivolous road running.
Battery cars are fine for short hops and commutes, but the world will need fuel tanks for the foreseeable future. Let the suckers prove EV’s user – friendliness with their own money . Don’t expect me to pay for it.
URGENT! Australians – Please Sign the Petition for a Royal Commission into Climate Science
Guest announcement by Mike Jonas, The petition can be signed online at:
https://www.aph.gov.au/petition_list?id=EN1231
Only an Australian resident or citizen can sign, but anyone can forward this message and post it everywhere so more Australians see it. Note that signing is a multi-step process, ending with an email signature confirmation. Alan Kohler (read on) has called for a royal commission to ‘review the evidence’ on Climate and Energy Policies to conduct: […]
Read more of this post
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/19/australians-please-sign-the-petition-for-a-royal-commission-into-climate-science/
Feb 8, 2016 Are Electric Cars Really Green?
Are electric cars greener than conventional gasoline cars? If so, how much greener? What about the CO2 emissions produced during electric cars’ production? And where does the electricity that powers electric cars come from? Environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, examines how environmentally friendly electric cars really are.
https://youtu.be/17xh_VRrnMU
I am often a bit put off by the personal opinions of the privileged here, on either side of the argument. The privileged people seem to forget that most people’s homes are in cities and have neither a basement nor a shed for batteries, barely room for themselves and the essentials for day to day life, those who rent get what the landlord gives them. SO they are made to pay and for, and are totally dependent on, the electricity grid, gas grid, water grid and liquid fuel distribution grid to meet their energy demands 24/7.
THat’s the dominant reality that must be served. And the very idea of replacing either the gas or liquid fuel grid with electricity is so massively disruptive to no actual benefit, as well as massively unaffordable to deliver, with no actual benefit arising from it, it is almost too obscene a dogma to contemplate. The controlled destruction of industrial economies by their delusional masters to satisfy the demonstrably false Malthusian beliefs of the UN IPCC and allied extremists.
Electricity cost 5 times gas and is converted 2/3 as efficiently at CCGT power stations as in heating boilers, with 50% more CO2. Unless nucelar powered. Half charging one 100KWh car every day plus heating with leccy versus gas will need 10 times the current domestic electric energy supply (UK average basis), and trebling of the overhead grid in the UK.
Interesting infrastructure build in itself, as will be the response to being forced to use electricity at 5 times the price of gas to heat their homes. As for the UK generating 1PWh from renewables, 3 times today, forgetaboutit. I doubt the po’ people it hurts most will stand for this. Their gas bill, half the biggest single bill many pay after house tax at £550 pa average, plus £550 for leccy, rising by a factor of c.5 to £2,750 to heat their homes, for no measurable benefit in fact. CEng, CPhys.
Brian, thank you for your view point. I live in a rural area. I often complain that the transportation solutions proposed by the liberals just can’t work out here. What you made me aware of is I have options for using energy that city dweller don’t have.
Here is an insight to the cost of using electric power. Our house uses propane but has the ability to use electric as a supplement for both heating and hot water. When I knew demand would be high I turned on the electric water heater, then forget to turn it off. Running just the hot water beyond what we normally do, double our power bill.
The went bought lots of electric police cars in the UK and they are a total disaster Liberals are delusional and crazy
Los Angeles LAPD purchased a fleet of BMW i30 cars for non-law enforcement usage, a little over a decade ago at the dawn of the neo-EV fad. The fleet has sat almost totally unused, but for a few hundred miles use across the entire fleet, because nobody trusted they could get back to the station house if they should go out in one of them. They still reside in the garage of LAPD downtown station, idly recharging every moment of every day, waiting for the brave office worker to take one out for lunch in Chinatown…
It will be interesting to watch how this fad stalls out. It will.