Enough Already!

We Don't Need Any More Renewable Energy Farms

Feb 08, 2024

I borrowed this gut wrenching picture from Tuco’s Child’s post of Feb 5 - what happened to “where the longhorn cattle feed on the lonely gypsum weed…out where the antelope roam…can we ever get “back in the saddle again”?

Today - wind and solar farm craziness, impossibility of “Net Zero” emissions, more pseudoscience behind renewable energy goals, vast power consumption of huge data centers, including those for bitcoin miners, rise of copper wire and cable theft, hopes for using underground sources of natural hydrogen, schemes for launching giant sunshade screens into space, and more…even a portion of and link to a sermon on the importance of family…

SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY

Renewable wind and solar farms are destabilizing our electric power grid because they can fail to provide energy during times of weather extremes.

It Doesn’t Make Sense to Build any More Renewable Energy Unless Huge Battery Backup is built into the Plan.

But adding enough giant backup batteries will make renewable energy farms even more expensive, and electricity is already high enough to cause a backlash against renewables. See post Feb 1 - Tesla Grid Size Battery Packs

Irina Slav writes about the growing resistance in Europe:

“…we were promised cheaper electricity because wind and solar are the cheapest sources of it. Instead, we got more expensive electricity and the explanation that “It will only be expensive for a little while until we get wind and solar going, and then it will be cheaper…

The energy transition, as envisioned by the EU’s current leadership, is going to cost enormous amounts of money. It is going to cost massive compromises with quality of life for most of the bloc’s population. And the poorest will suffer the most.”

We already have enough intermittent energy from wind and solar farms, at great expense, to completely unbalance our grid system and make it unreliable.

the “science” in the UK was limited to one inadequate study

In the UK, where “Net Zero by 2050” has become government policy, the Daily Sceptic has reported that data was from one windy year. That’s hardly a sensible basis for setting policy.

“The Royal Society analyzed decades of local wind speeds and found the electricity system needed the equivalent of at least a third of green energy to be stored as backup. Such a cost would be astronomical. Now it appears that the Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) fudged the issue by using just one year of high wind data in persuading Members of Parliament in 2019 to donkey-nod through Theresa May’s insane legislative rush to Net Zero by 2050.”

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University wrote a report for the royal society – the report “showed that wind could fall away for days at a time during periods of intense cold dominated by high atmospheric pressure. It also found wind speeds varied between years, all of which is in fact known and has been studied widely by other scientists. The Telegraph has reported on remarks made by Sir Chris after the paper was published in which he noted that the CCC has “conceded privately” that reliance on one year’s data was a “mistake”. It appears that the information given to MPs committing to 2050 Net Zero assumed there would be just seven days when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential electricity output. According to Net Zero Watch that compares with 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.”

artificial intelligence (AI) needs huge data centers

From Energy News Beat Feb 2:

“A recent Bloomberg report details a small patch of northern Virginia, which has been called “data center alley,” which has seen explosive growth in the era of artificial intelligence. This growth has significantly strained the local power grid, leading the power company to temporarily suspend new data center connections in 2022. Of course, this problem has continued, but not without its share of curious solutions, such as the consideration of allowing data centers to run diesel generators (LOL) during power shortages.

This power problem is not limited to Virginia, though, and has been seen across the United States. It is expected that data centers will triple their power consumption over 2022 levels, up to 390 terawatt hours. To handle this incoming surge, power companies are “reconsidering plans to mothball plants that burn fossil fuels, while a few have petitioned regulators for permission to build new gas-powered ones.” While this is an imperfect solution, it will prevent potential rolling black or brownouts across the nation as the power needs increase.

At the World Economic Forum last week, executive of OpenAI and face of ChatGPT Sam Altman was quoted as saying, “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” and that “we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” This also only accounts for AI energy needs, and there also has to be consideration for the growing number of electric vehicles.”

bitcoin miners need huge data centers, too, and they’re driving people crazy

From a Time mag article - “Bitcoin is so energy-intensive because it relies on a process known as proof-of-work. Rather than being overseen by a single watchdog, bitcoin is designed to disperse the responsibility of the network’s integrity to voluntary “miners” around the globe, who prevent tampering through a complex cryptographic process that consumes a vast amount of energy. Over the last few years, Texas has become a global leader in crypto mining because miners can access cheap energy and land there, … Bitcoin miners consume about 2,100 megawatts of the state's power supplies. A bitcoin mining company, ‘Generate Capital’ started operating [a] 300-megawatt facility,… “about an hour southwest of Fort Worth… Initially, many residents were unaware what, exactly, was causing the noise. Shannon Wolf, who lives about 8 miles from the plant, first assumed that the rumble was coming from a nearby train… “It has woken me from a dead sleep before,” she says. The rumble, it turned out, comes from the massive cooling fans that the facility runs to keep their computers from overheating. Data centers, like bitcoin mines, also run massive cooling fans that have drawn the ire of nearby residents.”

Copper theft

From Energy News Beat - “Seattle began installing dozens of EV chargers only for thieves to show up and raid at least eight of the charging cables for copper requiring thousands of dollars worth of repairs. In response, the city is planning to put the chargers high up on poles that can only be lowered by an app. This will cost even more money and in an environment in which brazen copper thieves toppled an FM radio tower in Oklahoma, isn’t likely to deter the criminals.

EV owners who suffered from copper theft while leaving their cars to be charged in public places were told by the Seattle Police Department to “stay with the vehicle if you can while it’s being charged,” Considering that it can take an electric car hours to charge, that’s gonna be a wait.”

underground hydrogen high hopes

I’ve written about the uneconomical production of hydrogen as a fuel – it’s too expensive to become a mainstay, because it takes so much energy to split hydrogen from water.

However, lately there has been quite a media buzz about discoveries of underground deposits of “natural” hydrogen, H2, not tied up with O2 as in water. If these reservoirs of hydrogen are able to be economically extracted without complaints of too much methane being accidentally released in the process, there is real potential as a new energy source. I’ll be watching this closely.

Just what we need – a giant sunshade in space

Forget about producing enough food from farming, unless climate fanatics come to their senses. Between good farmland being lost to solar farms and this kooky new idea, you might not even be able to get enough sun to grow tomatos in your back yard.

I didn’t make this up - some scientists are actually proposing to put a giant sunshade in space to keep the earth from burning up. (Good luck with that - the earth is going to be burned up - but not until God is ready to create a new heaven and a new earth. Read 2Peter.3:10 and Revelation 21:1,5)

“To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Dr. Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun’s light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said.”

Ironically, if the solar shade were ever to actually be put up in space, and if it worked, and shaded the earth, it would reduce the ‘renewable’ electric energy produced by all those expensive solar farms and giant backup batteries. Duh…

solar needs to slow down

Before adding more solar farms or on rooftops, how about slowing down and taking stock of the situation? Solar panels, like wind turbines, are not lasting as long as originally hoped. Recycling is a huge problem and not profitable - it’s just another expense. Some states are classifying solar panels as toxic waste because of some of the compounds in them. The recycling problem is going to keep getting worse, because there are tax incentives and/or subsidies to replace existing panels early, before the end of their lifetime, with new, more efficient panels. We are already generating too much electricity on sunny days, when it’s not needed and mostly is wasted - but no electricity is produced after sundown, when it is often needed, especially during the winter months.

new super, super collider

At over 16 miles in length, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an incredible feat of human engineering - (this pic was posted by techspot.com, but it wasn’t labelled. I presume this is the control center for the 16 mile super collider loop. I’m fascinated by the picture.)

“a new super-collider that's been approved by Cern makes the LHC look small in comparison. With a circumference of over 62 miles, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be four times bigger and six times more powerful than the current particle-smashing machine and cost $23 billion dollars.”

Won’t it be great? I can’t wait (actually, I won’t live long enough - the new super-super won’t be operational until the 2040s) to learn more about Higgs bosons - the particles this is being built to study. I love physics, but I prefer the more practical applications, like the various fields of engineering. When it gets really theoretical, I tend to tune out…

EV insurance twice as high as for regular gas cars in UK

David Blackmon’s Energy Transitions Absurdities reports: “Data from the UK shows that the typical insurance premium for electric vehicles increased to £1,344 ($1707), an increase of 50 percent compared with a year earlier, and double the cost of insurance for combustion engine cars due to higher cost of repairs for electric models. While insurance premiums for all types of cars increased last year, the increase for electric vehicles was bigger both proportionally and in real terms. The cost of insuring a typical internal combustion engine (ICE) car increased from £514 ($653) to £676 ($859), by 31 percent, but was still £668 ($849) less expensive per year than insuring an electric car.”

From Stu Turley’s Energy News Beat Feb 6 “Cobalt, an essential component of EV batteries, is primarily mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in mines owned and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Children as young as four labor in toxic dust, earning just a dollar or two a day. The cobalt is then shipped to China for refining. After all this, only about 5 percent of lithium ion batteries are recycled...Completely ignored in the recent Senate Energy & Natural Resources hearing on Federal Electric Vehicle Incentives is the fact that every EV sold places nearly $50,000 in additional costs on taxpayers. This is according to first-of-its-kind research that a colleague and I have published. That total cost was $21 billion in 2021 — money the taxpayers would certainly prefer to have back.”

So there are at least two kinds of increased expenses caused by subsidized EVs. One is the subsidy itself, that somehow has to be paid for - usually through taxes, sometimes through borrowing which causes inflation - an invisible tax. The other, immediate expense is higher rates for our electric utility bills.

FINANCE and INVESTING

I’m sticking my neck out and going short on stocks of renewable energy companies that are not profitable, while going long on stocks of companies that pay nice dividends to retired guys like me. Selling short is risky, so I use stop loss orders to help alleviate the risk. Also, I’m buying short term (less than 12 months) T-bills from TreasuryDirect for the 5% or so interest. Interest income is taxable, but in my case I have a loss carryover that can be applied to offset any tax.

Enough Already!

We Don't Need Any More Renewable Energy Farms

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