The Folly of Phasing out Fossil Fuels

And the Frantic Search for Alternatives

ESS inc (Energy Storage Systems) iron flow battery plant in Wilsonville, Oregon

..subsidized hoaxes and pipe dreams, like room temp superconductors and nuclear fusion, the limited feasibility of hydrogen fuel, an in-depth look at iron flow batteries, the destructiveness of subsidies and their relationship to investing, and truly scientific evidence of a global flood…

SCIENCE

The demand for more energy, especially ‘clean’ energy, ie, anything but energy from fossil fuels, has become such an obsession globally that all kinds of alternative ideas are being explored, funded by billionaires freaked out by the fear of climate change, and subsidized by governments taken over by elites who are equally freaked out and think we have to do something, right now, or earth will burn up. If done with private money, by honest scientists and innovators who are not doing it just for the money, that wouldn’t be so bad. But when taxpayer money is involved, all kinds of bad characters and insiders want a piece of the action – unfortunately, that’s what happens when money is up for grabs.

Two hoaxes and a pipe dream

There’s no such thing as free energy, and there’s a reason why we rely on fossil fuels – they get the job done more efficiently than any alternative except hydro or nuclear.

Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. MRI imaging is possible because of superconductors.

Superconductors could save a lot of energy - they have amazing physical characteristics, like zero electrical resistance, and are very valuable – but the trouble is that they are also very expensive, because they only work if you first expend the energy it takes to hold them at very low temperatures. I wrote earlier about the latest scam, where some ‘scientists’ claimed to find a material that would superconduct at room temperature, predicting that it had to be a hoax. Sure enough, the material, dubbed LK-99, is not a superconductor. My suspicions were confirmed by a recent update by “The Verge” which has been following the story. Here’s the link, but you have to read all the way through to learn how many problems there are with the original claim.

Hydrogen fuel is not a hoax, but I call it a pipe dream, because even though hydrogen is a good fuel, it takes a lot of energy to produce it and to transport it, so it’s only economical if the energy to produce it is more or less ‘free’ – like when a wind farm or solar farm is producing more energy than needed at the moment. (Renewables have a habit of doing that - producing when we don’t need it and failing to produce when we do need it) -That’s a pretty hard way to produce anything – when the schedule for getting energy from wind or solaris totally intermittent, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. But the really ironical thing about using hydrogen for fuel is that when hydrogen is burned, ie, oxidized, the end product is H2O vapor, which is much more of a ‘greenhouse’ gas than CO2! So why would someone who is worried about global warming even consider burning hydrogen?

From Energy News Beat Dec.11

“Hydrogen, a source of optimism for blunting the climate impact of heavy industry, doesn’t make financial sense at current rates, Seiple said. Just 7 percent of European hydrogen projects have lined up financing for construction, according to research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Italian energy company Enel abandoned its government-backed green hydrogen project in La Spezia last month.”

Now Kerry wants to subsidize nuclear fusion   

Nuclear fusion is another near impossibility for any practical application at scale, and yet John Kerry, brilliant scientist that he is, thinks we should subsidize the dream-like attempt to use it for an alternative to what we know works – like oil or gas or coal. I wrote about nuclear fusion and hydrogen here.

The search for the perfect battery

EVs, and intermittent, unreliable and uncontrollable energy like wind and solar, have necessitated an all out search for better batteries. In the case of electric vehicles, weight is very important. In the case of wind farms and solar farms, capacity is important.

Lithium batteries, used in most EVs, are still very heavy, plus they are expensive and have a quite limited lifetime. Often advertised as good for 10 years, as far as practical use is concerned, it’s more like 7 or 8 years for most drivers. All batteries deteriorate, and so their usefulness goes down every year.  That puts them at quite a disadvantage compared to ICE (internal combustion engines) vehicles. Also, the lithium batteries can catch on fire, a fire which is extremely hard to put out. For that reason, ships and insurance companies are getting very wary of them.

Batteries for large capacity for storage are another challenge. I looked at ESSinc, a startup practically in my back yard in Wilsonville, Oregon.

The company’s website says “ESS batteries are comprised of earth-abundant iron, salt and water, not hazardous chemicals or costly rare-earth metals, making them environmentally benign to produce and the easiest-to-permit storage technology in the world. Iron flow batteries have no fire, chemical or explosive risk, eliminating the need for fire suppression, secondary containment and hazmat requirements. In addition, ESS solutions are fully recyclable at end-of-life.” sounds good so far…

The units in the picture are described as “The Energy Warehouse™: Designed to serve commercial and industrial customers, this compact unit has an energy storage capacity of 400 kWh and a 25-year design life. It can be configured to provide storage durations of 4 to 12 hours.”

The units in the picture are described as “The Energy Warehouse"™: Designed to serve commercial and industrial customers, this compact unit has an energy storage capacity of 400 kWh and a 25-year design life. It can be configured to provide storage durations of 4 to 12 hours.”

Let’s do some math - consider a 300 MW (MegaWatt) wind or solar farm. A MW is 1000 KW. Let’s be generous and assume the wind or solar farm sees enough sunny and windy days to put out 50% of its maximum rating, or 150 MW. Let’s also assume that output is generated for 6 hours per day, giving us 150MW X 6 hours =900MWh for the whole "farm". So according to my calculations (correct me if I’m wrong), to provide just 4 hours of battery storage backup, it would take 2.5 400kWh units to backup 1 MWh, so it would take 2.5X900 = 2,250 units to backup the whole farm. That sounds absolutely crazy -I must have made a mistake…? How much do those units cost? How much does one of those units weigh? How much does it cost to transport them to the site and install them with a giant crane?"

But you’re not done once the units are installed - they are high maintenance!

"They are an [operations and maintenance] nightmare," said Andy Tang, vice president of energy storage and optimization at Finland-based Wärtsilä Oyj Abp, a globally active lithium-ion system integrator that has collaborated on flow battery pilot projects. "They're very mechanical, right, because the pumps are pumping liquid back and forth, so the O&M actually is very, very, very, very expensive. And the reality is these pumps break and leak all the time, so the systems are down all the time."

…so at this time, trying to stabilize the iffy intermittant electricity produced by renewables by backing them up with iron flow batteries just doesn’t seem even remotely feasible.

I’m trying to educate myself on all the different energy and battery projects out there, and hope to dig a little deeper on the following as I have time:

Vanadium flow batteries (Invinity Energy Systems PLC, a UK-based developer of vanadium flow batteries.) have same issue as lithium – a risk of supply of Vanadium not being sufficient at scale.

Solid state batteries - Panasonic is working on these…

compressed air energy storage and pumped hydroelectric storage - interesting and innovative projects, but apparently just a niche depending on finding suitable locations

FINANCE

Subsidies are usually a bad idea and encourage bad long term investments - remember Solyndra?

Subsidies encourage some, thus picking short term winners. Those not so favored are discouraged, by increasing regulations and taxes, thus picking losers. If a business has to be subsidized to survive, it’s a business that presumably can’t make a profit, either because it’s a bad idea to start with, or because there’s not enough demand for the product or service. When governments start picking winners and losers by fiddling with subsidies and manipulating taxes with loopholes and credits, as a form of central planning, it very seldom works out for the good.

from Energy News Beat Dec.2 “US Commits to Shutting Down Coal Plants…”

“Last month President Biden said that coal plants “all across America” will be shut down, to be replaced with wind and solar. (that’s subsidized wind and solar, of course)

“A move to close down coal plants in the U.S. is already underway as federal clean energy tax credits and regulations make it harder for operators to compete economically.

“A report by the nonpartisan Institute for Energy Economics and Finance Analysis found that 173 coal plants are set to close by 2030 and another 54 by 2040.”

David Blackmon’s “Energy Transition Absurdities” Fri Dec8 - “Under the IRA, the lion’s share of subsidies will be paid to wind and solar developers.  The subsidies will not expire until electric industry carbon emissions fall by at least 75% below 2005 levels, after which they will gradually decrease.  Even the most optimistic forecasts prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that this will not occur until at least 2046.  Thus, the subsidies for wind and solar will continue unabated for decades.  (Emphasis mine. Let’s hope Congress comes to their senses and puts a stop to it, but don’t hold your breath.) In total, the subsidies will far exceed what the U.S. government spent in today’s dollars to combat the Great Depression.

“The single largest subsidy is the federal investment tax credit (ITC).  Most wind and solar projects will be able to claim a minimum 30% ITC, plus be eligible for an additional 10% credit if the projects rely on domestic manufacturing for components.  ...”

10% is considered a decent profit for a business. Why ever give a 30 or 40% subsidy to any business? No wonder everybody and their brother is lining up to get in the renewables business - it’s like free money.

Mon Dec4 Jim Rickards on EVs

“…government subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs). They are not free, not productive, and they will never be paid back. A new study shows that total taxpayer subsidies for each EV produced in the U.S. are $50,000. That comes to $22 billion per year, not including the $7,500 per vehicle tax credit for certain EVs. Not only do EVs make no sense financially, but they are also failures mechanically. The advertised mileage of 300 miles per charge works out to about 130 miles once real-world road conditions are taken into account. The heating system on an internal combustion engine simply distributes engine heat into the car, which costs almost nothing to do. Heat in an EV comes from the battery, which runs the battery down even faster. The 20-minute “rapid charge” stations turn out to take several hours because you end up being the fifth or sixth car in line. Batteries have to be replaced after about eight years at a cost of $20,000 each, which makes the resale value of the EV zero, because who wants to buy a used car and then write a $20,000 check for a new battery? The entire effort is a scam driven by elites who know less about real climate science than you and I.”

“Where the green subsidy provisions in the IRA came with an official congressional budget office price tag of $369 billion over 10 years, some estimates are that their real cost to the federal budget could well exceed $1 trillion.”

and from “Energy News Beat” - Dec 19 -

“Germany on Saturday effectively ended electric vehicle subsidies immediately. Tesla already is losing Model 3 subsidies in France and the U.S. Electric vehicle subsidies are ending in Germany abruptly, the government announced Saturday”

obviously, Germany’s terrible misallocation of government funds in the area of energy is catching up with them - the subsidies not only are not sustainable; they have been going haphazardly down the wrong road, destroying a former industrial giant in the process

FAITH

Zion National Park - sedimentary layers

From Creation.com  - 49 min youtube video “Join fluvial geomorphologist, Dr Ron Neller, for a fascinating discussion of the evidence that, over a 30-year period, eventually led him to conclude that there has, indeed, been a global flood on Earth—as the Bible describes.”

Intro to full video: “If there really was a global flood—as the Bible has always said—then there should be abundant evidence of that fact, right?"

But what would that evidence look like?

And who could be better placed to ‘see’ such evidence than a scientist who studies the way that floods and flowing water shapes landscapes?”

37 sec sampler about sedimentary layers -

30 sec sampler about fossil formation -