The folly of wind and solar as energy sources

[Anonymous]

Solar and wind cannot produce cheap, reliable energy.



How Germany embraced solar and wind and ended up in energy poverty



Let's take a look at this in practice. Germany is considered by some to be the best success story in the world of effective solar and wind use, and you'll often hear that they get a large percentage of their energy from solar and wind.



You can see here on this chart how this claim was made and why it's not accurate.

https://info.industrialprogress.com/hs-fs/hubfs/email5.jpg?width=1070&upscale=true&name=email5.jpg">



First of all, this is just a chart of electricity. Solar and wind are only producing electricity and half of Germany's energy needs also include fuel and heating. So solar and wind never contribute half as much to Germany's energy needs as this chart would imply.



But that's not the biggest problem. What you notice here is that there's certain days and times where there are large spikes, but there are also periods where there's relatively little. What that means is that you can't rely on solar and wind ever. You always have to have an infrastructure that can produce all of your electricity independent of the solar and wind because you can always go a long period with very little solar and wind.



So then why are the solar and wind necessary? Well, you could argue that they're not and that adding them onto the grid will impose a lot of costs.



In Germany, electricity prices have more than doubled since 2000 when solar and wind started receiving massive subsidies and favorable regulations, and their electricity prices are three to four times what we would pay in the U.S. (Because of its low reliability, solar, and wind energy options require an alternative backup—one that's cheap, plentiful, and reliable—to make it work, thus creating a more expensive and inefficient process.)



Nuclear and hydro



Fossil fuels are not the only reliable sources. There are two others that don't generate CO2 that are significant and are more limited, but still significant contributors. Those are hydroelectric energy and nuclear energy.



Hydroelectric energy can be quite affordable over time, but it's limited to locations where you have the right physical situation to produce hydroelectric power.



energyclarity2.1



Nuclear is more interesting because nuclear doesn't have the problems of hydro but it's been very restricted throughout history so today in the vast majority of cases it's considerably more expensive than say electricity from natural gas. This may change in the future and one thing we'll discuss under policy is how we need to have the right policies so that all energy technologies can grow and flourish, if indeed the creators of those technologies can do it.

[Frood]

They need to move towards smaller and more fortified nuclear builds for say a town, village, or city in order to mitigate the severity of accidents.



The tech is out there for it but it's not as profitable.



I love solar for remote locations... but it's not worth doing beyond a household or business. A 150-250 watt solar panel with a regulator and 120-130 AGM battery is adequate enough to keep a 40-60 litre fridge going 24/7, plenty of LED lighting, and charge accessories... in a reasonably sunny environment.



...but people love their air con, microwaves, big washers, and the rest.

[Anonymous]

SMR's. Small modular reactors.

[Anonymous]

Solar is fine for small scale.

[cc]

Solar is fine for small scale.

Definitely so for remote areas with no power  .. or for  end of the line remote areas who are always last on the list for repair when things go wrong on the main grid

[Anonymous]

Solar is fine for small scale.

Definitely so for remote areas with no power  .. or for  end of the line remote areas who are always last on the list for repair when things go wrong on the main grid

Exactly cc.

[Anonymous]

The ESG divestment movement poses as a long-range, financially savvy, and moral movement. In reality it is a short-range, financially ruinous, and deeply immoral movement that perpetuates poverty in the poorest places and threatens the security of the free world.

Over the last 5-10 years, "ESG"--standing for Environmental Social Governance--has gone from an acronym that virtually no one knew or cared about, to a cultishly-embraced top priority of financial regulators, markets, and institutions around the world.

The preposterous financial pretense of "ESG investing" is that the promoters of it have so accurately identified universal norms of long-term value creation--Environmental norms, Social norms, and Governance norms--that imposing those norms on every company is justified.

In reality, ESG was a movement cooked up at the UN--not exactly a leading expert in profitable investment--to impose moral and political agendas, largely left-wing ones, on institutions that would not adopt them if left to their own devices.

The number one practical meaning of ESG today is: divest from fossil fuels in every way possible, and associate yourself with "renewable" solar and wind in every way possible. That's why I call it the "ESG divestment movement."

Modern ESG's obsession with unreliable "renewable" solar and wind, reflects its political nature. Any serious concern about CO2 emissions means embracing the only proven, reliable, globally scalable source of non-carbon energy: nuclear. But most ESG does not embrace nuclear.

Divesting from fossil fuels is immoral because:

1. The world needs much more energy.

2. Fossil fuels are the only way to provide most of that energy for the foreseeable future.

3. Any problems associated with CO2 pale in comparison to problems of energy deprivation.



Since the oil and gas industry began in the second half of the 19th century, global life expectancy has doubled, extreme poverty has plummeted, and human liberty has grown tremendously. The timing here is no coincidence.



Unfortunately, many people still lack access to life-enhancing modern energy, which presents the most pressing global energy challenge.

[Anonymous]

Solar is the most polluting source of energy.



Dark Side To Solar? More Reports Tie Panel Production To Toxic Pollution

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/?sh=25fe2a575fe5">https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... fe2a575fe5">https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/?sh=25fe2a575fe5



A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world's leading energy analysts thought. "The economics of solar," write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe's leading business schools, and Serasu Duranof the University of Calgary, will "darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."



Conventional wisdom today holds that the world will quadruple the number of solar panels in the world over the next decade. "And that's not even taking into consideration the further impact of possible new regulations and incentives launched by the green-friendly Biden administration," Atasu, Wassenhove, and Duran write in HBR.



But the volume of solar panel waste will destroy the economics of solar even with the subsidies, they say. "By 2035," write the three economists, "discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection."



The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.  



"If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model," they write, solar panels "can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates."



The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.



"Alarming as they are," they write, "these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger."



What about recycling? It's not worth the expense, note the HBR authors. "While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material," they note. As a result, it costs 10 to 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.



The problem is the sheer quantity of the hazardous waste, which far exceeds the waste produced by iPhones, laptops, and other electronics. The volume of waste expected from the solar industry, found a team of Indian researchers in 2020, was far higher than from other electronics.



"The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness," conclude the HBR authors. "If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 (NREL's estimated ceiling for the U.S. residential market) alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031."



It's not just solar. "The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies," they write. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled – a lag that automakers are racing to rectify as sales figures for electric cars continue to rise as much as 40% year-on-year."



But the toxic nature of solar panels makes their environmental impacts worse than just the quantity of waste. Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents. Hence, they are classified as hazardous waste. The authors note that this classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc."



Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.



IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, "describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat." IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn't even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames.



IRENA wasn't the only organization that put out rose-tinted forecasts to greenwash solar. For years, the solar industry and its spokespersons have claimed that panels only "degrade" — reduce how much electricity they produce — at a rate of 0.5% per year.



But new research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed. And that report came on the heels of a separate report which found that solar panels have been suffering a rising failure rate even before entering service. "One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects, an increase from one in five last year," noted an industry reporter. The "majority of failures were prior to testing, straight from the box."

[Anonymous]

From the same article.



But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their "fuel," sunlight. Low power densities must, for inherently physical reasons, induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs.



Even as the cost of solar panels has come down, the cost of producing reliable grid electricity with solar panels has risen, due to their weather-dependent nature, something that became evident in 2018, was recognized by University of Chicago economists in 2019, and was further supported by spiraling costs in renewables-heavy Germany and California in 2020.



The new research on the coming solar waste crisis, along with rising blackouts from renewables, reinforces the inherent flaws in solar and other forms of renewable energy. Over-relying on solar panels, and underestimating the need for nuclear and natural gas, resulted in California's blackouts last summer. It's now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar's costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.



And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.



The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called "genocide."



Today, many companies, including Facebook, Google GOOG +0.4%, and Microsoft MSFT +1.1%, buy immense quantities of solar panels with no awareness of their impact. "I tried to bring up this issue [of solar waste] when I worked at Microsoft," said a former employee. "I was told 'That's not the problem we're trying to solve.'"



The Guardian reporter claimed, "it's valid to note that end-of-life solar panel recycling and disposal is an issue that we'll have to address smartly, but unlike climate change, it's not a big or urgent concern," but the Harvard Business Review study shows that this was never the case.



The idea that humankind should turn our gaze away from urgent problems like genocide, toxic waste, and land use impacts because they complicate longer-term concerns is precisely the kind of unsustainable thinking that allowed the world to become dependent on toxic solar genocide panels in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Solar is the most polluting source of energy.



Dark Side To Solar? More Reports Tie Panel Production To Toxic Pollution

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/?sh=25fe2a575fe5">https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... fe2a575fe5">https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar---including-that-its-clean-and-cheap---was-wrong/?sh=25fe2a575fe5



A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world's leading energy analysts thought. "The economics of solar," write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe's leading business schools, and Serasu Duranof the University of Calgary, will "darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."



Conventional wisdom today holds that the world will quadruple the number of solar panels in the world over the next decade. "And that's not even taking into consideration the further impact of possible new regulations and incentives launched by the green-friendly Biden administration," Atasu, Wassenhove, and Duran write in HBR.



But the volume of solar panel waste will destroy the economics of solar even with the subsidies, they say. "By 2035," write the three economists, "discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection."



The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.  



"If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model," they write, solar panels "can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates."



The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.



"Alarming as they are," they write, "these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger."



What about recycling? It's not worth the expense, note the HBR authors. "While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material," they note. As a result, it costs 10 to 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.



The problem is the sheer quantity of the hazardous waste, which far exceeds the waste produced by iPhones, laptops, and other electronics. The volume of waste expected from the solar industry, found a team of Indian researchers in 2020, was far higher than from other electronics.



"The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness," conclude the HBR authors. "If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 (NREL's estimated ceiling for the U.S. residential market) alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031."



It's not just solar. "The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies," they write. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled – a lag that automakers are racing to rectify as sales figures for electric cars continue to rise as much as 40% year-on-year."



But the toxic nature of solar panels makes their environmental impacts worse than just the quantity of waste. Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents. Hence, they are classified as hazardous waste. The authors note that this classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc."



Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.



IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, "describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat." IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn't even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames.



IRENA wasn't the only organization that put out rose-tinted forecasts to greenwash solar. For years, the solar industry and its spokespersons have claimed that panels only "degrade" — reduce how much electricity they produce — at a rate of 0.5% per year.



But new research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed. And that report came on the heels of a separate report which found that solar panels have been suffering a rising failure rate even before entering service. "One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects, an increase from one in five last year," noted an industry reporter. The "majority of failures were prior to testing, straight from the box."

Wind and solar are not renewable/sustainable, environmentally friendly, and they cannot compete with abundant diffuse energy sources like gas/hydro/nuclear without massive taxpayer cash grabs.

[Anonymous]

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/ ... 1117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481

[Anonymous]

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/ ... 1117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481

Alex Epstein provides a teasure trove of inconvenient facts about energy.

[Anonymous]

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/ ... 1117076481">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1414989251117076481

All the information the media and governments give us about wind and solar is positive....it's as if it's perfect.

[Anonymous]

I remember Jack Mintz did an indepth look at whether Canada routinely suibsidizes fossil fuel production. He could find no evidence to support such claims.



There is no fossil-fuel subsidy pot of gold

Much of the assumed fossil fuel subsidies anti-oil activists claim exist are either not there, or take the form of consumer subsidies that don't exist in Canada



Some supporters of renewable energy argue that taking supposedly massive current subsidies to oil and gas and switching them over to renewables will help make renewables cost-effective for legions of new consumers. Is that true?



Professor Emeritus Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, that belief is mistaken. As Smil noted in 2018, ignoring energy density by moving to all-renewable sources of energy could require countries to "devote 100 or even 1000 times more land area to energy production than today... [which] could have enormous negative impacts on agriculture, biodiversity, and environmental quality."



Second, in many cases estimates of subsidies to the fossil fuel industry worldwide depend on dubious assumptions. In 2011, economists Kenneth McKenzie and Jack Mintz noted that measuring fossil fuel subsidies was a "tricky art." They spotted numerous methodological errors in existing measures, including inappropriately adding up individual tax expenditures and royalty relief items without accounting for critical interactions between taxes and royalties — a mistake akin to arguing that people's behaviour would not change if the top marginal rate of personal income tax rose from 25 to 75 per cent.



Another example: In 2017, University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick found numerous problems with the International Monetary Fund's estimate that US$5.6 trillion was being spent subsidizing energy worldwide. In addition to not taking account of the behavioural effects of changes in tax expenditures, the estimate counted non-tolled roads as a subsidy, among other errors. As McKitrick argued, it "clouds the subsidy discussion if we arbitrarily select one type of public good and call it a subsidy without applying the same reasoning to all other public goods."



Even with subsidy estimates that may be closer to reality, the have-your-subsidized-renewable-cake-and-fewer-fossil-fuel subsidies-too scenario runs into the political problem of who currently benefits from subsidies. For example, the OECD's estimate of $178.2 billion in oil and gas subsidies in 2019 judges that $34.2 billion or 19 per cent went to producers, while another $18.3 billion, or 10 per cent, went to fossil fuel development without directly benefiting individual producers.



But by far the largest share — fully $125.5 billion or 70 per cent — went to consumers. That's usually in the form of below-market prices for gasoline in countries such as Venezuela and Iran, where per litre prices were recently about 25 cents and 75 cents (Canadian) respectively.



Large consumer subsidies of this sort mostly do not exist in Canada. Our subsidies are usually either one-offs, such as when the federal government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline, or tax concessions for innovation, research and development, often on environmental problems.



That suggests countless billions of dollars will not flow seamlessly and painlessly to the renewables sector from the oil and gas sector, because much of the assumed fossil fuel subsidies that anti-oil activists claim exist are either not there, or take the form of consumer subsidies that lower gasoline prices in countries such as Iran and Venezuela, but not in Canada.



There is no "pot of gold" — whether black gold or regular gold — from which to divert future trillions of dollars to green/renewable subsidies. Subsidies to these energy forms will have to be paid for with taxes or additional government debt.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-there-is-no-fossil-fuel-subsidy-pot-of-gold?fbclid=IwAR0je9fhfXlMnedMQELtxzwK5hx-AfMWHy3xXnnfh7tp_xyoLfdVoYCXLoM">https://financialpost.com/opinion/opini ... fdVoYCXLoM">https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-there-is-no-fossil-fuel-subsidy-pot-of-gold?fbclid=IwAR0je9fhfXlMnedMQELtxzwK5hx-AfMWHy3xXnnfh7tp_xyoLfdVoYCXLoM

[Anonymous]

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1417886497475203073?s=20">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/ ... 03073?s=20">https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1417886497475203073?s=20