Fossil Fuels are a Hell of a Lot More Sustainable Than Wind and Solar

[Anonymous]

To solve the reliability crisis we must understand and reverse the four policies turning America's grid into a Third-World grid:





1) rewarding unreliable electricity



2) imposing ruinous Environmental Protection Agency rules on power plants



3) criminalizing nuclear



4) forcing electric vehicle use



Grid-destroying policy 1: Rewarding unreliable electricity





Governments need to stop rewarding unreliable electricity by a) pricing unreliable electricity with no cost penalty, b) subsidizing unreliable generators, and c) mandating significant percentages of unreliables.



Stop pricing unreliable electricity with no cost penalty





In every area of life we pay far more for a reliable service than for an unreliable one. But in electricity, unfair rules make utilities pay the same prices for unreliable solar/wind electricity as they do for reliables.



Grids need to recognize that unreliable electricity is fundamentally different and far less valuable (sometimes it's even a burden) than reliable electricity, and pay for unreliable electricity (or not) accordingly.



One way to stop vastly overpaying for unreliable electricity is: require all generators to meet certain reliability standards.

[Anonymous]

100% agreed. On top of that, today, I see Gavin Newsom on TV asking his Californians to turn down their AC and refrain from running big machinery etcetera. What about when everyone has electric cars? Where is all that power going to come from, eh?

At the same time he announces no new internal combustion engine vehicle sales after 2035. Aint that ironic.

I dont think the carmakers will realistically meet that deadline in the infrastructure will be in place by that date.



Even if they get gradually phased out, therell stll be gas stations around by then.



At best theyll be 50% electric by 2035.



Sure they might be able to produce that many cars by that date, but will the fuelling stations and renewable power supply be there?



Theyll need a lotta fuckin new dam construction  courtesy of Northern Canada.

[Anonymous]

Aint a snowball's chance in hell Canada or the US will ever get even close to an all electric fleet. Hell, we will be dang lucky to keep the lights on in twelve years.

[Anonymous]

Wacky California.



https://twitter.com/ogwausa/status/1567346139590017024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1567346139590017024%7Ctwgr%5E3949746d1473678545a5b66187c6d74614ea1024%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theblaze.com%2Fnews%2Foil-gas-workers-association-tweet-power-california



"Get somebody to bring you 5 gallons of wind turbine," the Oil & Gas Workers Association quipped back to  KABC-TV.

[Anonymous]

Aint that the truth.

[Oerdin]

[Oerdin]

This is so damn true.

[Anonymous]

The petrochemical industry has given us better lives.

[Anonymous]

This is so damn true.

Yep

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

As energy demand rises head in the sand left wing ideologues are eacserbating the problem by wasting more taxpayer money on unreliable and unutainable wind and solar.



US Power Grid Needs Trillions in Upgrades to Accommodate Renewable Energy Demands



In August, California announced the end of fossil fuel-powered car sales by 2035, prompting green energy advocates to celebrate.



However, flex alerts followed the announcement just days later, asking Golden State residents to avoid charging their electric vehicles during peak hours. Lack of compliance with the measure meant widespread blackouts due to the additional strain on the electrical grid.



The ironic turn of events underscores a massive problem facing renewable energy as demands for green technologies continue taxing the antiquated U.S. power grid.



Even using nuclear energy as a crutch, the cost of upgrades needed amounts to $4 trillion, according to a WoodMac estimate. Without nuclear power, that price tag bumps up another half a trillion dollars.



Another tally suggests the cost of electrical grid upgrades could be as high as $7 trillion.



In May, the administration of President Joe Biden announced a $2.5 billion investment to modernize and upgrade the nation's electrical system as part of the Building a Better Grid Initiative.



The spending package totals $20 billion but represents just a fraction of what's needed to achieve Biden's green energy goals.



"The electric grid is not currently designed to accommodate large amounts of renewable energy," Alan Duncan told The Epoch Times. Duncan is the founder of Solar Panels Network USA, and is well acquainted with power grid challenges.



One factor is the way the grid is structured and dispatches energy.



Another is that renewable sources aren't currently considered reliable.



Intermittent Supply Spells Trouble

"This is because it's intermittent, and it can be impacted by several factors, including weather conditions," Duncan said.



Illustrating this, millions of Texans suffered power outages during a brutal winter storm in February 2021. Subsequently, the subzero tempest triggered a heated debate within the energy community about how fragile renewables are within the context of severe weather incidents.



This is despite the Lone Star state government spending more than $80 billion of federal subsidies over the course of a decade. Moreover, roughly $1.5 billion per year is also spent on state subsidies for renewable energy.



Regardless of how much money is being thrown at it, insiders maintain renewables haven't caught up to the reality of powering a country like the United States.



Much of this has to do with the narrative surrounding green energy. For many, the concept of totally renewable power means going fully electric. However, this is an ill-fated approach, according to some.



Yet there's opposition to using supplemental energies like natural gas and nuclear power amid the conversion phase.



Paradoxically, much of this comes from environmentalists, who cling to an "all or nothing" vision for green energy.



Much of the government legislation has also been built around this narrative, which Murphy says stacks the deck against true and lasting decarbonization.



And to decarbonize, he says more power plants are needed.



"We don't have enough generating capacity as they're trying to shut power plants down. Those plants are 50 years old," Murphy said.



There's also the peak hour demand issue, which has been a major stumbling block for renewables up to this point.



Supply Versus Demand

Demand wildly exceeds the supply capacity on the renewables front. Globally speaking, available green energy sources was estimated to grow by 35 gigawatts between 2021 and 2022. Though at the same time, power demands were forecasted to hit 100 gigawatts.



That means more flex alerts and blackouts aren't just possible, but likely.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-power-grid-needs-trillions-in-upgrades-to-accommodate-renewable-energy-demands_4745231.html?utm_source=morningbriefnoe-ai&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2022-09-22-ai-28&est=thpkuxn5V2ijF2%2BNvOkFsgxjzElLGbVOKz5QKNA%2B9OIOPKGNg3m6f3JSy9nKn8UW8g%3D%3D

[DKG]

Nancy Pelosi has claimed that the "planet is on the ballot" during the midterm elections. ac_toofunny

[Oerdin]

They will lie and say anything.  Just like the Democrat shill on MSNBC declared the country will become a fascist dictatorship if Democrats don't win and Republicans will arrest and kill your children.



The left's failure is so complete they are now willing to spew any lie in order to fear monger and distract from their many failures.

[Herman]

We all here the bullshit about how cheap wind and solar are and yet countries that use it the most of the highest electricity bills. Wind and solar aint cheap and here is why.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/04/23/if-solar-and-wind-are-so-cheap-why-are-they-making-electricity-more-expensive/?sh=5acf43841dc6

The media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.



And yet that's not what's happening. In fact, it's the opposite.



Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.



And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.



Electricity prices increased by:



51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;

24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;

over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?



The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.



The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.



In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.



The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don't need it, and not enough when they do.



Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment's notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.



And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.



Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.



In 2017, the share of electricity coming from wind and solar was 53 percent in Denmark, 26 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in California. Denmark and Germany have the first and second most expensive electricity in Europe.



By reporting on the declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines but not on how they increase electricity prices, journalists are — intentionally or unintentionally — misleading policymakers and the public about those two technologies. 



The Los Angeles Times last year reported that California's electricity prices were rising, but failed to connect the price rise to renewables, provoking a sharp rebuttal from UC Berkeley economist James Bushnell. 



"The story of how California's electric system got to its current state is a long and gory one," Bushnell wrote, but "the dominant policy driver in the electricity sector has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation."



This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn't because they don't know how to report critically on energy — they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources — but rather because they don't want to.



That could — and should — change. Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.



A good start would be for them to investigate why, if solar and wind are so cheap, they are making electricity so expensive.

[Herman]

Unreliability, lower wind speeds, inefficient use of natural gas to back up wind and solar and storage are what makes wind and solar so expensive.



https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-true-cost-of-renewable-energy/

Over the past decade the National Grid has succeeded in virtually ending coal power in Britain. The proportion of our electricity generated by coal fell from 29.5 per cent in 2011 to just 2.1 per cent in 2021. Most of the coal power has been replaced by wind and solar (up from 5.2 per cent in 2011 to 24.6 per cent in 2021) and by 'thermal renewables' – the filthy business of burning wood pellets made from trees in North America – which is up from 3.6 per cent in 2011 to 12.9 per cent in 2021.



What the electricity industry has not managed to do is to wean us off gas. We are pretty much where we were a decade ago, with gas accounting for 39.9 per cent of generation in 2021 compared with 39.8 per cent in 2011. This matters not just because it has exposed consumers to high wholesale gas prices in recent months, but because the government's path to net zero involves eradicating all fossil fuels and ensuring a carbon-free electricity supply by 2035.



It costs three or four times more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place



Indeed, the price we are paying for gas-generated electricity is even higher than it need be at present because of the way we are now using it. We use gas-fuelled power to plug the gaps when intermittent wind and solar can't deliver the goods. Over the summer everyone from Boris Johnson to Extinction Rebellion was parroting the figure that wind power costs 'nine times' less than that of gas power. But this is a false comparison. The figure comes from an analysis by the pressure group Carbon Brief comparing the long-term, guaranteed, index-linked prices paid to renewable energy firms with the 'day ahead' prices which have to be paid to owners of gas power stations to fire them up for a few hours to make up a shortfall in supply. It is like comparing the cost of a season ticket on the train to the price of hailing an Uber in the rush hour on the day of a rail strike.



How many times this year have you heard advocates of green energy decrying the fact that consumers have been ripped off by our failure to shift to renewables even more quickly? Yet we really don't have an alternative to gas to make up for shortfalls in wind and solar. We could try to store renewable energy, but storage, in the form of batteries, say, or pumped-storage hydro-electric stations or some other emerging technology, is incredibly expensive. It costs around three or four times more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place.



If we are going to get anywhere near de-carbonising the electricity grid, we will have to invest in energy storage, at huge cost. At present we have the capacity to store less than an hour's worth of the country's electricity demand, yet in winter conditions can be both windless and overcast for days at a time. The grid was built to transport electricity generated in coal plants close to where it was consumed. Wind and solar farms tend to be distributed in more remote locations, by contrast, so the grid itself will have to be reconfigured, again at huge cost. We are also going to need a massive increase in overall generation capacity as road vehicles and central heating systems are forced to switch to electric power. A switch to renewable energy will be very far from cheap.



And at the moment, we are going in the wrong direction. Overall generation capacity available to the National Grid actually fell from 77.9 GW in 2019 to 76.6 GW in 2021. Moreover, wind and solar farms are not performing in the way which was hoped. Last year alone, the available generation capacity of wind power grew by 5.3 per cent and solar by 2.8 per cent. Yet the amount of electricity actually generated by wind, wave and solar plunged by 9.3 per cent, largely on account of low wind speeds. This is a problem which the wind industry has yet to grasp: there is a long-term declining trend in wind speeds over the UK – and indeed throughout most of the world. This is an aspect of climate change which gets little coverage, perhaps because it conflicts with the lazy and incorrect narrative, perpetuated by the former chairman of the Environment Agency among others, that Britain is facing more 'violent' weather.