From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,can.politics,alt.politics.trump,alt.politics.liberalism,alt.politics.democrats,alt.politics.usa.republican
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 18:33:19 -0500
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
On Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:02:58 -0700, Alan says...
> >> "can't work AT ALL"?
> >
> > Find us that quote.
Failed again.
> > If you're playing the bullshit liberal semantics game.
>
> You're playing your bullshit game of snipping that which would make you
> look stupid.
Umm... no... it makes YOU look stupid.
Why can't YOU function without everyone having to leave ALL the quoting(>) in?
If I snipped pertinent information, just re-post it, lazy liberal.
If you need it all... I have it, but if you want me to re-post everything, ya
gotta stop sucking dick.
LOL
OK... since this is soooo fucking easy for me...
Homework assignment: find the passage(s) that make me "look stupid".
=====
Subject: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.11 (GRC)
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2024 22:28:33 -0500
Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
We're at a time of deeply ambitious plans for clean energy growth. Two of the
U.S.'s largest states by population, California and New York, have both
mandated that power companies get fully 50 percent of their electricity from
renewable sources by the year 2030.
Only, there's a problem: Because of the particular nature of clean energy
sources like solar and wind, you can't simply add them to the grid in large
volumes and think that's the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of
electricity generation are "intermittent" - solar fluctuates with weather and
the daily cycle, wind fluctuates with the wind - there has to be some means of
continuing to provide electricity even when they go dark. And the more
renewables you have, the bigger this problem can be.
Now, a new study suggests that at least so far, solving that problem has
ironically involved more fossil fuels - and more particularly, installing a
large number of fast-ramping natural gas plants, which can fill in quickly
whenever renewable generation slips.
The new research, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau
of Economic Research, was conducted by Elena Verdolini of the Euro-
Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in
Milan, Italy, along with colleagues from Syracuse University and the French
Economic Observatory.
In the study, the researchers took a broad look at the erection of wind, solar,
and other renewable energy plants (not including large hydropower or biomass
projects) across 26 countries that are members of an international council
known as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the
period between the year 1990 and 2013. And they found a surprisingly tight
relationship between renewables on the one hand, and gas on the other.
"All other things equal, a 1% percent increase in the share of fast reacting
fossil technologies is associated with a 0.88% percent increase in renewable
generation capacity in the long term," the study reports. Again, this is over
26 separate countries, and more than two decades.
"Our paper calls attention to the fact that renewables and fast-reacting fossil
technologies appear as highly complementary and that they should be jointly
installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable
supply," the paper adds.
The type of "fast-reacting fossil technologies" being referred to here is
natural gas plants that fire up quickly. For example, General Electric and EDF
Energy currently feature a natural gas plant in France that "is capable of
reaching full power in less than 30 minutes." Full power, in this case, means
rapidly adding over 600 megawatts, or million watts, of electricity to the
grid.
"This allows partners to respond quickly to grid demand fluctuations,
integrating renewables as necessary," note the companies.
"When people assume that we can switch from fossil fuels to renewables they
assume we can completely switch out of one path, to another path," says
Verdolini. But, she adds, the study suggests otherwise.
Verdolini emphasized this merely describes the past - not necessarily the
future. That's a critical distinction, because the study also notes that if we
reach a time when fast-responding energy storage is prevalent - when, say,
large-scale grid batteries store solar or wind-generated energy and can
discharge it instantaneously when there's a need - then the reliance on gas may
no longer be so prevalent.
Other recent research has suggested that precisely because of this overlap
between fast-firing natural gas plants and grid scale batteries - because they
can play many of the same roles - extremely cheap natural gas prices have
helped the industry out-compete the storage sector and slowed its growth.
Two other researchers contacted for reactions to Verdolini's study largely
agreed with its findings.
"I think policymakers haven't really grasped what 50 percent renewables really
means in a system, without at least cheap batteries available," says
Christopher Knittel, who directs the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy
Research at MIT, and who said he found the study's results quite plausible.
"It's certainly true that as one adds more renewables, the value of flexible
generation increases, and so I would expect to see some correlation as they
found," added Eric Hittinger, an energy system researcher at the Rochester
Institute of Technology who like Knittel was not involved in the study.
Hittinger and Knittel agreed that adding flexible natural gas alongside
renewable projects is not a major climate change concern because the gas plants
wouldn't be running all the time - so it's not like adding coal plants. The
emissions would be real, but considerably more limited. However, they said, the
principal issue is that the research suggests renewable plants are more costly
to build, because of the added backup requirement.
"It's a reality check now," said Knittel of the study. "I think it's
potentially bad news as we start to get higher and higher penetration levels of
renewables."
The study also lends some credence to the widespread description of natural gas
as a so-called "bridge fuel" that allows for a transition into a world of more
renewables, as it is both flexible and also contributes less carbon dioxide
emissions than does coal, per unit of energy generated by burning the fuel.
(Environmentalists like to point out that if there are enough methane leaks
from the process of drilling for and transporting natural gas, this edge could
be canceled out.)
Hittinger also questioned what the correlation found in the study actually
means - does it mean that natural gas spurs on the development of more solar
and wind, or vice versa?
Verdolini said the study implies that the causation occurs with gas plants
being added first, which then makes renewable projects more easy to integrate.
"It's an enabling factor," she said, although she cautioned that the study
cannot fully demonstrate causation.
Verdolini agreed that the findings are something that decision-makers hoping to
add more clean energy to the grid will have to take into account.
"If you have an electric car, you don't need a diesel car in your garage
sitting there," said Verdolini. "But in the case of renewables, it's different,
because if you have renewable electricity and that fails, then you need the
fast acting gas sitting in your garage, so to speak."
=====
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:32:55 -0700
On 2024-06-25 20:28, AlleyCat wrote:
>
> Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
OK.
So what?
=======
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.11 (GRC)
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 23:05:35 -0500
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.
==============================================================================
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:14:42 -0700
On 2024-06-27 21:05, AlleyCat wrote:
>
> 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?
Are you asking...
...or is another unattributed quote?
>
> 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
How is it you jump from "can't work completely on their own" to "can't
work AT ALL"?
==============================================================================
Subject: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.11 (GRC)
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2024 22:28:33 -0500
Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
We're at a time of deeply ambitious plans for clean energy growth. Two of the
U.S.'s largest states by population, California and New York, have both
mandated that power companies get fully 50 percent of their electricity from
renewable sources by the year 2030.
Only, there's a problem: Because of the particular nature of clean energy
sources like solar and wind, you can't simply add them to the grid in large
volumes and think that's the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of
electricity generation are "intermittent" - solar fluctuates with weather and
the daily cycle, wind fluctuates with the wind - there has to be some means of
continuing to provide electricity even when they go dark. And the more
renewables you have, the bigger this problem can be.
Now, a new study suggests that at least so far, solving that problem has
ironically involved more fossil fuels - and more particularly, installing a
large number of fast-ramping natural gas plants, which can fill in quickly
whenever renewable generation slips.
The new research, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau
of Economic Research, was conducted by Elena Verdolini of the Euro-
Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in
Milan, Italy, along with colleagues from Syracuse University and the French
Economic Observatory.
In the study, the researchers took a broad look at the erection of wind, solar,
and other renewable energy plants (not including large hydropower or biomass
projects) across 26 countries that are members of an international council
known as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the
period between the year 1990 and 2013. And they found a surprisingly tight
relationship between renewables on the one hand, and gas on the other.
"All other things equal, a 1% percent increase in the share of fast reacting
fossil technologies is associated with a 0.88% percent increase in renewable
generation capacity in the long term," the study reports. Again, this is over
26 separate countries, and more than two decades.
"Our paper calls attention to the fact that renewables and fast-reacting fossil
technologies appear as highly complementary and that they should be jointly
installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable
supply," the paper adds.
The type of "fast-reacting fossil technologies" being referred to here is
natural gas plants that fire up quickly. For example, General Electric and EDF
Energy currently feature a natural gas plant in France that "is capable of
reaching full power in less than 30 minutes." Full power, in this case, means
rapidly adding over 600 megawatts, or million watts, of electricity to the
grid.
"This allows partners to respond quickly to grid demand fluctuations,
integrating renewables as necessary," note the companies.
"When people assume that we can switch from fossil fuels to renewables they
assume we can completely switch out of one path, to another path," says
Verdolini. But, she adds, the study suggests otherwise.
Verdolini emphasized this merely describes the past - not necessarily the
future. That's a critical distinction, because the study also notes that if we
reach a time when fast-responding energy storage is prevalent - when, say,
large-scale grid batteries store solar or wind-generated energy and can
discharge it instantaneously when there's a need - then the reliance on gas may
no longer be so prevalent.
Other recent research has suggested that precisely because of this overlap
between fast-firing natural gas plants and grid scale batteries - because they
can play many of the same roles - extremely cheap natural gas prices have
helped the industry out-compete the storage sector and slowed its growth.
Two other researchers contacted for reactions to Verdolini's study largely
agreed with its findings.
"I think policymakers haven't really grasped what 50 percent renewables really
means in a system, without at least cheap batteries available," says
Christopher Knittel, who directs the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy
Research at MIT, and who said he found the study's results quite plausible.
"It's certainly true that as one adds more renewables, the value of flexible
generation increases, and so I would expect to see some correlation as they
found," added Eric Hittinger, an energy system researcher at the Rochester
Institute of Technology who like Knittel was not involved in the study.
Hittinger and Knittel agreed that adding flexible natural gas alongside
renewable projects is not a major climate change concern because the gas plants
wouldn't be running all the time - so it's not like adding coal plants. The
emissions would be real, but considerably more limited. However, they said, the
principal issue is that the research suggests renewable plants are more costly
to build, because of the added backup requirement.
"It's a reality check now," said Knittel of the study. "I think it's
potentially bad news as we start to get higher and higher penetration levels of
renewables."
The study also lends some credence to the widespread description of natural gas
as a so-called "bridge fuel" that allows for a transition into a world of more
renewables, as it is both flexible and also contributes less carbon dioxide
emissions than does coal, per unit of energy generated by burning the fuel.
(Environmentalists like to point out that if there are enough methane leaks
from the process of drilling for and transporting natural gas, this edge could
be canceled out.)
Hittinger also questioned what the correlation found in the study actually
means - does it mean that natural gas spurs on the development of more solar
and wind, or vice versa?
Verdolini said the study implies that the causation occurs with gas plants
being added first, which then makes renewable projects more easy to integrate.
"It's an enabling factor," she said, although she cautioned that the study
cannot fully demonstrate causation.
Verdolini agreed that the findings are something that decision-makers hoping to
add more clean energy to the grid will have to take into account.
"If you have an electric car, you don't need a diesel car in your garage
sitting there," said Verdolini. "But in the case of renewables, it's different,
because if you have renewable electricity and that fails, then you need the
fast acting gas sitting in your garage, so to speak."
=====
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:32:55 -0700
On 2024-06-25 20:28, AlleyCat wrote:
>
> Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
OK.
So what?
=======
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.11 (GRC)
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 23:05:35 -0500
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.
==============================================================================
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: Alan <nuh-uh@nope.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:14:42 -0700
On 2024-06-27 21:05, AlleyCat wrote:
>
> 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?
Are you asking...
...or is another unattributed quote?
>
> 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
How is it you jump from "can't work completely on their own" to "can't
work AT ALL"?
==============================================================================
Subject: Re: Turns Out Wind And Solar Have A Secret Friend: Natural Gas
From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
User-Agent: MicroPlanet-Gravity/3.0.11 (GRC)
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 12:57:25 -0500
On Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:14:42 -0700, Alan says...
> "can't work AT ALL"?
Find us that quote.
If you're playing the bullshit liberal semantics game... fuck off. You KNOW
when they said "The Reason Renewable Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because
They Were Never Meant To" means they can't... ALONE.
So find it where *I* said, "they can't work AT ALL."
> How is it you jump from "can't work completely on their own"...
Because they can't.
> to "can't work AT ALL"?
No one said that. You KNOW that's not what he meant. Keep misrepresenting the
truth, liar... people notice. It's too easy to see what you're doing.
It's implied that they can't do it alone... do you ALWAYS need the extra
verbiage to know that? Of course not. You just wanna play your childish
semantics word games to make you feel better about yourself always being wrong.
For you... today... we'll add the extra verbiage, so you don't have an
argument.
=====
Despite Adding 6.2 GW Of New Capacity, US Wind Energy Dropped By 2.1%
The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization, ALL ON THEIR OWN, Is
Because They Were Never Meant To
Better?
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
Euro ($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, ALL ON THEIR OWN, is
because they were never meant to.
One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could POWER MODERN
CIVILIZATION ALL ON THEIR OWN.
Roundmouth.