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On Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:32:55 -0700,  Alan says...  

> 
> On 2024-06-25 20:28, AlleyCat wrote:
> > 
> > Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
> 
> OK.
 
> So what?

Why does solar and wind NEED Natural Gas?

Despite Adding 6.2 GW Of New Capacity, US Wind Energy Dropped By 2.1%

The Reason Renewable Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never 
Meant To

Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany's renewables energy 
transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world. 

"Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring 
electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the 
fossil age and build clean grids from the outset," thanks to the Energiewende, 
wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.

With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions 
into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.

But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its 
phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction 
commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in 
order to get at the coal underneath it.

After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace, 
criticized Germany, journalists came to the country's defense. "Germany has 
fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so 
ambitious," one of them argued last summer.

"If the rest of the world made just half Germany's effort, the future for our 
planet would look less bleak," she wrote. "So Germany, don't give up. And also: 
Thank you."

But Germany didn't just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have 
flat-lined since 2009.

Now comes a major article in the country's largest newsweekly magazine, Der 
Spiegel, titled, "A Botched Job in Germany" ("Murks in Germany"). The 
magazine's cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical 
transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.

"The Energiewende - the biggest political project since reunification - 
threatens to fail," write Der Spiegel's Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan 
Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story.

Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany ?32 billion 
($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German 
countryside.

"The politicians fear citizen resistance" Der Spiegel reports. "There is hardly 
a wind energy project that is not fought."

In response, politicians sometimes order "electrical lines be buried 
underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer."

As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is 
slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 
2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were 
added in 2017.

Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make 
the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons 
to believe the opposite will be the case.

https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-
images/michaelshellenberger/files/2019/05/fig3-share-energy-sources-gross-
german-power-production-2018-1200x848.jpg?format=jpg&width=960

It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of 
electricity from today's 35%... to 100% between 2025-2050

It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of 
electricity from today's 35%... AG Energiebinlanzen

Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany "?3.4 trillion 
($3.8 trillion)," or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to 
increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.

Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its 
electricity. And as much of Germany's renewable electricity comes from biomass, 
which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from 
solar.

Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been 
built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. 
"A large part of the energy used is lost," the reporters note of a much-hyped 
hydrogen gas project, "and the efficiency is below 40%... No viable business 
model can be developed from this."

Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 
will start coming to an end next year. "The wind power boom is over," Der 
Spiegel concludes.

All of which raises a question: if renewables can't cheaply power Germany, one 
of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how 
could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to 
"leapfrog" fossil fuels?

The Question of Technology

The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from 
a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th 
Century, Martin Heidegger.

In his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning of Technology," Heidegger condemned 
the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.

The use of "modern technology," he wrote, "puts to nature the unreasonable 
demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such... Air 
is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield 
uranium... to yield atomic energy."

The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to 
unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating 
the natural environment, and praised windmills because they "do not unlock 
energy in order to store it."

These weren't just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been 
useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to 
industrialize.

In the US, Heidegger's views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. 
Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to 
bring modern civilization "into harmony with the ecosphere."

The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into 
agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic 
Environment.

Bookchin admitted his proposal "conjures up an image of cultural isolation and 
social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies 
of the medieval and ancient worlds."

But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech 
luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and 
wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were 
profitable aside from subsidies.

Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization 
could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars.

Journalists reported breathlessly on the cost declines in batteries, imagining 
a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be 
"disrupted."

But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive 
and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than 
nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, 
to produce the same amount of energy.

Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more 
devastating.

The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-
meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds. 
Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.

"It's one of the three worst sites for a wind farm that I've seen in Africa in 
terms of its potential to kill threatened birds," a biologist explained.

In response, the wind farm's developers have done what Europeans have long done 
in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the 
doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project.

Kenya won't be able to "leapfrog" fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the 
contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of 
electricity and make Kenya's slow climb out of poverty even slower.

Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the 
Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes 
and local communities.

Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized 
as more authentic and "grounded" than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize 
their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.

Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related 
infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. "It's our gift 
to the world," a renewables advocate told The Times.

Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent 
on renewables would redeem them. "Germans would then at last feel that they 
have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in 
the 21st," noted a reporter.

Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely 
"botched," but it wasn't. The transition to renewables was doomed because 
modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to 
return to pre-modern life.

The reason renewables can't power modern civilization is because they were 
never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they 
could. 

=====

June:

Avalanches Strand Dozens In Chile

Utah's Snowiest Two-Year Period On Record

Canada Hit With Extremes

Swiss Glacier Recovery

Ski Season Delays In S. America After Record Snow

Coldest Start To Winter In Decades For Parts Of Australia

Polar Blast Hits Australian Alps

Montana's Record Lows and Snows

Fresh Snowfall Hits Northwestern Peaks

Cold Records Fall In Montana And Alberta

Frosts Hit The Aussie Tropics

Queensland Freeze Breaks 32-Year Record

Record Cold British Columbia

New Study Identifies Antarctica's Record Winter Cold

More Monster Snowfalls Hit South America

Eastern Aussies Shiver

Unusual Summer Cold And Snow To Sweep America

Feet Of June Snow Hit Fonna, Norway As Europe Turns Blue

Eastern Australia Shivers

Record June Snow In The Alps

Summer In Japan Arrives a Little Late

Europe Chills

It Was A Cold May For Many
Heavy Snow Hits Northeast Iceland
UK Enduring A Historically Cold June
Frosts on June 11
Summer Snow In Northern India
50 Billion Tons Of Snow Has Fallen On Greenland So Far In June
Snowstorm In Himalayas Kills At Least 9
Snow Hits Parts of South Africa For First Time In 40 Years
Scotland Sees Snow
Global Temperature Drop (of COURSE... Hunga Tonga's Water Vapour!)
Warnings Issued In South Africa For "Disruptive Cold And Snow"
Coldest May Lows In 70-Years Hit Wagnerite, Australia
Argentina Abnormally Cold
Almost 7-Feet of June Snow Traps Hikers In German Alps
Snow Set For Scotland
Rare Frost Advisories In Ontario
It's Snowing In Northern India
Spring Freeze "Sharply Reduces" Russia's Wheat Harvest
Summer Skiing In Europe After Record-Breaking Spring Snow
Record Cold Strikes Japan
Frigid Streak At The South Pole
Low Olive Harvest In Greece Due To 'Weather Shifts'
Greenland's Record Ice Gains
Colder-Than-Average May In Europe
South America Freezes
U.S. Ski Industry Reports 5th-Best Season On Record
"Deep, Drifting Snow" Keeps Beartooth Closed
The Suess de Vries Cycle
Spring Anomalies From BC To SoCal
Winter Prolonged In Alaska
Australia's Cold And Snow
Chile's Weather Agency Got It Dead Wrong As South America Freezes
Spring Anomalies From BC To SoCal
Record May Cold Hits South Australia
Latest Snowfall In Decades At Snoqualmie
Frozen Turkey