The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.
So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?
Let’s consider the latest from Germany. According to Statista here, Germany consumed 511.59 TWh of electricity in 2021 (latest year given, although the numbers have recently changed very little from year to year). Divide by 8760 (number of hours in a year) and you learn that Germany’s average usage of electricity is 58.3 GW. So, can you just build 58.3 GW of wind and solar generators to supply Germany with electricity? more
If it needs subsidies, it was never feasible to start with.
Well duh!
We were being overwhelmed with solar proposals. Front porch at dinner time, texts and emails all day long, calls from the utility company, and junk mail. They decided to leave us alone when I pointed out the fact that if solar penciled out we’d be knocking their doors down instead of them pestering the livin’ shit out of us.
Certainly, owners of coal & oil companies will take hits on their profit margins & don’t forget all those poor birds & whales even the poor fish have to swim around em.
Now I’ll bring up “RNG”, or Renewable Natural Gas. Methane made from landfills, cow shit, food waste. Natural gas goes wholesale ~$3.25 a thousand cubic feet. The feds have decides to supplement the producers of RNG to the tune of 5 to 10 times this amount to produce this gas and add it into the national pipeline system. It is horrible gas. Eat up with undesirable and harmful components that have to be scrubbed out by chemical means before it can be admitted to the gas stream. Which is expensive. And require a whole shitload of instrumentation to quantify or detect if the producer’s scrubbing fails. And most of them don’t make enough gas to come close to the cost or trouble of connecting them to interstate pipelines.
That’s our tax money basically going to speculators and investors making bank on tax money.
None of the guys we know who bought into solar are still bragging or recommending solar. Two neighbors are furious because the companies who were supposed provide warranties went belly up. It took them a few weeks to find a repair service. They will never recoup their losses. The smartest of the two decided against an EV.
^^^^Fly-by-night companies in EVERY business. One has to do your homework. Bad remodeling contractors, bad used car salesman, bad appliances salesman ….the list can go on forever.
No Amount Of Subsidies Will Ever Make A Wind/Solar Electricity System Economically Feasible
And no amount of gaslighting will ever make it true that wind and solar will NEVER do ANYTHING to reduce that awful so-called pollutant CO2. The industrial processes to make turbines, blades, solar cells, etc. are hugely dirtier than petrochemical. Claiming otherwise is a filthy (literally) lie.
NEVER. Oops.Yet it will live on, forever & ever & ever & ever, I need the Energizer Bunny…. quick.
Gas lighting. By the turn of the 20th century gas lighting gave way to alternating current. Kerosene lanterns still popular with some campers. Bigger & larger ocean wind farms are coming.
@Anon at 1850 — Your lack of understanding of “gaslighting”, feigned or not, is amusing, although it negates whatever point you were trying to make.
Subsidies and economically feasible are in no way related to reality from the get go.
It improves the economies of the Pedo Joes of this world.
That, and control, is all its really SUPPOSED to do.
Gas & oil is the future. Back in the 19th century. We like things just as they are , the older we get more we hate change. There are no greenhouse gases, the icecaps aren’t melting & any air pollution never hurt nobody. It’s good you support the towelhead’s gas & oil agenda at the latest climate summit. If you like gas so much how about you suck on my tailpipe. Gaslight that.
But they will make the well connected much richer.
In 2020 our state legislature passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act mandating the two largest utilities in the state produce 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045 and 2050, respectively. This, along with government subsidies and loopholes in tariffs, has created a modern day ‘gold rush’ for shady contractors, speculators, and foreign investors to build solar ‘farms’ because the utilities are going to be forced to buy the energy produced. Guess who is going to be forced to pay higher electric rates?
In the meantime actual farmland –especially any that is near a substation– is being taken out of production. The money is flying and the progressives in their urban condos think it’s wonderful. But the farmers and the small towns are being surrounded by a sea of solar panels –and the fire hazard of lithium batteries.
It’s making for some strange political bedfellows, with the progressives who fought the Dominion pipeline now aligning themselves with Dominion against the farmers. In the latest twist, Joel Salatin, local farmer / national PBS celeb, throws down a bit of logic; it’s a good short read:
https://www.thelunaticfarmer.com/blog/11/22/2023/eating-solar-panelsnbsp?fbclid=IwAR2u_5RtQ2mMkyvIXaHAALp5KwaLGzCagQiWR-DhpFctOh2RZj3TS5xdicQ
Sadly, a utility-scale solar facility is proposed for development less than half a mile from our home, and in our viewshed, which, if it goes forward could set the precedent for the adjacent agricultural land. Be vigilant: this is coming to some acreage near you…