I am SO glad I have access to you dear polymaths, because just this morning I was ranting elsewhere about the Brit’s’ announcement that they intend to try blocking out the sun (an idea I remember Bill Gates talked about a decade or so ago, which I thought—hoped— had been rejected. I mean CTFO!!! Screw round with the relationship between Earth and its source of all life???)
But then after that I came across some stuff about the Spain-Portugal recent blackout, happening just a week or so after they were bragging about relying almost totally on renewables, mos’ly solar. (yes, @Gavin I saw your piece bout the Earth’s magnetic fields, yet another variable.)
Here’s my question:
How on God’s green Earth, (as people used to say) can the Warmists possibly be supporting:
on the one hand, increased, nay, exclusive, reliance on solar power for all energy on Earth—
And on the other hand, a scheme to WEAKEN the sun?
How, if you can tell me, are those two concepts NOT completely contradictory?
The rotation of the Earth does a good job of 100% weakening the Sun for an annual average of 12 hours per day. One might think this would be a problem for Greenies – even more of a problem than the Brits deliberately weakening the Sun (as if the Sun was anything more than an occasional visitor to drab rain-soaked England!).
All the analyses from the Usual Suspects completely ignore the huge costs of providing stable reliable power when the Sun is not in the skies. They assume that existing legacy fossil & nuclear plants will always be there to provide the necessary back-up – but those power sources will have to be replaced over time. That means Greenies want us to pay twice for power, building two separate systems, only one of which could provide reliable 24/7 power. The usual media stories about “Renewable” power being cheaper than “Reliable” power are patently false.
Yes, and I mean who would care if the Brits only wanted to block the sun from their benighted island, but I think the idea that they can “control” whatever they spew into the atmosphere is patently erroneous.
I’m going to Iceland soon, and I read a speech by one of their prime ministers wherein he said, we have all these volcanoes, but…we can’t figure out how to aim them.
But you don’t answer my question: how can it not be mutually contradictory to want to increase dependence on solar power, while also trying to weaken the power of solar rays?
That is a good question! Without any evidence, let me suggest a possible explanation of the obvious contradiction – we are looking at the beginnings of a serious schism in the Church (Mosque?) of the Holy Religion of Global Warming.
One group are in the Yes We Can! camp. They believe we simply have to buy enough solar panels from China and asserted global warming will come to a screeching halt.
Another group are in the Maybe We Can Not! camp. They have doubts they will be able to stop the evil influence of fossil fuels, belching cows, and breathing politicians. Thus they are proposing blocking the sun as an alternative way to save the Earth from the catastrophe lurking right around the corner.
Maybe this irreconcilable schism could be leveraged by outsiders who follow actual science? By alternately supporting one faction and then the other, we could put the Greenies at each others throats, then sit back and enjoy the show.
This is exactly what I’m wondering: how would people who “follow actual science” as you put it, reconcile these 2 seemingly contradictory policies? CAN it be done?
Everything they say is a lie. Often so self-contradictory that is is, in effect, performance art.
Consider them telling us it will be cheap and create lots of jobs. That would only occur if it created very low-productivity jobs to replace higher productivity jobs.
This analysis ignores the use of storage. In principle, it’s possible to store energy harvested from the sun during the day using batteries or by pumping water uphill during the day and recovering it hydroelectrically at night. Furthermore, there are so-called renewable sources that do not suffer from the intermittency of wind and solar: hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal.
This is not to say that these are necessarily practical right now or cost effective. However, the claim that nuclear and fossil-fuel plants “will always” require legacy plants is false. Furthermore, the electric grid has always required excess capacity to handle fluctuations in demand. It’s not as if capacity was ever exactly matched to the load. A system with enhanced storage would be more robust in handling load fluctuations.
The notion that there is an inherent contradiction is false because it fails to account for the magnitude of the dimming effect required. The proposed reductions in solar flux are only 1% or 2%. This would have a negligible effect on the efficiency of solar energy plants. This is the problem with glib arguments like this is that they fail to be quantitative at all. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own.
None of this is meant to imply that dimming the sun is a good idea. It’s a terrible idea to solve a non-existent problem. The most worrisome element is the hubris: that these guys think they are smart enough to meddle with something as fundamental as amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the Earth’s surface. Be very careful when you mess with Mother Nature.
I fear you misunderstood – which can happen. All the economic analysis which claim that solar panels (bought from China) are the cheapest sources of electric power ignore the cost of storage to which you allude.
Short term, small scale “renewables”, ignoring the storage/backup cost is not an awful assumption – because we have already paid for “reliable” sources which provide the 24/7 power that so-called “renewables” cannot. But if we adopt large-scale “renewables” and do it for years, those fossil & nuclear plants will have to be renewed. And that huge expense is ignored by the Usual Suspects.
Storage is technologically possible, albeit economically inefficient. Again, the people who tout “renewables” ignore the very high costs (and risks) of energy storage. Apparently, since the start of the nuclear power age, about three orders of magnitude more humans have died from the collapse of “renewable” hydro-electric dams than from nuclear accidents. Stored energy in any form is dangerous and has to be treated with great caution!
My beef is that the proponents of “renewables” put lipstick on that pig and lie to everybody by ignoring the high costs of storage/backup that would be necessary to go fully “renewable”.
Fair enough, though the phrasing “how can it not” makes the question seem rhetorical. Unfortunately, I’ve seen several make exactly this argument as if it were some kind of gotcha to own the libs. The trouble is that using specious reasoning makes it easy to dismiss the person putting forth the argument as an innumerate fool instead of having to face the fact that it is a terrible idea for other reasons.
I remember the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. According to the article linked above, it led to “a reduction in the normal amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by roughly 10%.” It also resulted some beautiful sunsets for several months after. While I don’t have any pictures of those, the wonderful book Sunsets, Twilights, and Evening Skies by astronomers Aden & Marjorie Meinel has some pictures of the skies of El Chichón, which erupted in 1982. These skies lasted for months after the eruption, which was in late March through early April.
Nevertheless, you doubled down on the claim that storage methods are impractical, see below.
I have seen no evidence that storage is impractical. It may be so today, or not, but that doesn’t mean it will always be. Same goes for the risks. For example, the following argument is specious.
There have been ~5000 nuclear plant deaths, mostly from Chernobyl but there were only hundreds of others. Not counting war casualties (Dambusters!) hydroelectric dam failures caused about 50,000 deaths, dominated by two incidents in Third-World-level countries (China 1975, India 1979). Thus, there’s no “three order of magnitude” gap: 50,000/5,000 is one order of magnitude.
More important, about half a million have been killed over 20 years by emissions from coal-fired plants in the US and many times that number globally over a longer period. This doesn’t include the many coal miners who died (about 20,000 in West Virginia alone). Thus, fossil fuels win the death contest by more than one order of magnitude, probably two.
A more careful analysis would account for the differing amount of energy produced by the various methods, which would narrow the gap between hydropower and fossil fuels. That is left as an exercise for the reader. More to the point: just because prior practices were poor and resulted in accidents doesn’t mean it must always be so. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the saying goes.
Heritage has some material on this, and I’ve done some simple calculations, too. Many assume proper storage would be a modest adder to green power, or maybe even double the cost. But that is simply not true–the cost of battery storage to cover a few days of dark, calm conditions is a couple orders of magnitude on top of the green power $$. Yes, 50x or more. Which makes a complete conventional fuel burning power plant a cheaper backup than any significant capacity battery storage.
The calculations get even worse when trying to size the storage to level the output across an entire year.
(And if you have to build a complete fuel-burning plant as backup, at max capacity, why bother building any green power in the first place?)
For the left, that’s a feature not a bug. They arbitrarily attribute a 100% duty cycle to their favored power sources. They do not factor in the cost of back up. That is one of the reasons why they treat battery power has a separate source category. That partially lets them play games with pricing. Rather than treat it as a combined cost, they overvalue the power, produced by solar and wind at off-peak times to make them look more efficient, but devalue it as an input to the battery To make the battery look more efficient.
Similarly, the more solar and wind, the lower the duty cycle attributed to fossil fuel back up. Thus the greater the falsely claimed cost advantage.
A neglected issue is that they falsely act as if they only have to replace current electrical generation capacity. But their actual plans require replacing all energy use, including burning of fuel in vehicles, burning of fuel in heating, burning of fuel in industrial furnaces…
I would fix the entire power ecosystem by eliminating the market for power in short time blocks. Keep the market, but make its smallest contract unit a full day. Make power producers bid on supplying power or standby power for an entire day, noon to noon, perhaps.
Then start phasing out the green power producer credits.
Only the most exotically useful green power plants will survive a fair competition.
This is tiresome! I don’t want to lower the tone on the late John Walker’s site, but either this is rather poor reading comprehension or deliberate strawmaning.
No-one on this site has claimed that electric energy storage is impractical. The fact is that large scale electrical energy storage is economically infeasible, except in a few fortunate situations, eg pumped storage in a mountainous rainy country like Norway.
The Usual Suspects hide the problem by simply excluding costs of back-up power or the very high costs of large scale storage. But those costs are real, and someone will have to pay them.
Good point. However, this reasoning does not apply to hydroelectric power, which has storage built in. The Greens are always against new dams because it might give some fish a case of the sads but they’re a great, albeit limited, way to increase capacity. Nukes are the real answer but the Greens hate those too. It’s almost as if the Greens hate humanity.
