The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states.
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
3 comments:
Reminds me of that law of thermodynamics, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"
Remember also that silver, gold, and rare earth minerals used to manufacture solar panels are purchased by the "green energy" companies at a fraction of their free market value. The vast subsidies to "green energy" companies go largely to subsidize their purchase of precious metals.
Which means that companies like Solyndra basically have a license to print money--now. But they'll never, EVER be able to manufacture this stuff economically if the welfare checks stop coming from Uncle Sugar. Hell, they can't do it NOW, even with billion dollar Medicare checks underwritten by the American taxpayer.
This is, by the way, why the greenies all love this stuff. It's a bottomless money pit into which the politicians can pour unlimited trillions of dollars to demonstrate their ideological purity and devotion to the "environmentalist" cause, all without producing one single goddamned solitary useful thing or one single watt-hour of energy for the nation's power grid.
If any of this stuff actually worked the greenies would be against it.
"Giving society cheap abundant energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun." Paul Ehrlich, 1974
This is why Germany has notified that 'We're going to stop the subsidies'; their electricity prices are insane, largely because of them, and people are screaming too loud for them to ignore it anymore.
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