Why Renewable Energy Wont Work by Gary Novak Lyrics
Why Renewable Energy Won't Work
Renewable energy is a fake concept promoted by incompetents as a power mongering tool. The lower classes pay the heaviest price, as the cost of electricity increases by a factor of 10 when renewables max out at 15% of electricity.
No one can get past 15% renewables as solar and wind because of the disruptive influences and expensive infrastructure. Electricity costs ten times normal at 15% solar and wind. The lower classes pay a heavy price.
The hardware for renewable energy costs more than it is worth and wastes resources which pollute and clutter the environment, while extremely long lines are required costing and destroying as much as the generating sources. Transmission lines would need to be increased by factors of tens of thousands for 100% renewables, while doubling the lines is not socially tolerable.
Coal and natural gas generators are located near cities to eliminate long lines, while solar and wind cannot avoid long lines. Long lines cost as much as all other expenses combined. And they require up to 50% loss of energy in the lines.
Energy loss is designed into long lines, because every percent change in efficiency is an equal percent change in mass of metal in the lines. To reduce line loss from 50% to 25% would require two lines instead of one. The diameter of the lines is not optional, because it must be optimized for strength.
Yet, fakes say renewable energy is approaching the cost of coal. It's totally contrived fraud. To promote renewable energy, laws require every watt produced by solar and wind to be paid for, while some other source has to adapt to the fluctuations. It means some other company, often a coal generator, has to eat the loss making coal more expensive than it would otherwise be.
Australia has 21% renewables, and it created unsolvable problems. So they are going to buy batteries to solve the problem—about like they are going to pay the green Martians 600% of their gross revenue to solve the problem.
insulatorTransmission lines are 2 million volts in the U.S. because of the long distance for moving large amounts of energy. The wires must hang from 3 foot long insulators, because 2 million volts will arc from surface to surface. One million volts would require twice as many lines. The resulting mess cannot go underground. It has to clutter the environment. And to replace previous energy with renewables, the transmission mess would have to cover the surface of the earth destroying environments and wasting expensive metals.
Renewable doesn't mean unlimited supply. Wind and solar are too dilute. Most wind is too slow; most solar is too dark.
Why did the Germans build their windmills over the ocean, when lines going south are too expensive and environmentally damaging? Because there isn't enough wind in the south.
The surface of the earth would have to be covered with electrical wires to produce 100% renewables, if there were enough solar and wind to do so. Linearized electrons have to be surrounded by huge amounts of metal, while length of lines must be thousands of times greater than usual due to spread-out sources.
The know-nothings who promote renewable energy assume electricity is more efficient than other sources of energy. Electricity is immensely less efficient than other sources of energy, as electrical energy is lost to heat every time it is touched including loss in lines.
Electricity is a specialty product which will not scale up to the transportation level. A massive increase in infrastructure and electric lines would be required. There is no space for it—within cities or the countryside.
No cost benefit analysis, let alone energy efficiency analysis, is being done for wind and solar. Instead, fake claims show up as so-called parity. A square inch of something does something similar to coal, which is called parity. Add the other 90% of the cost and it's total fraud.
The whole mentality of renewables is to build until someone stops paying for it. At around 15% of the electricity, insurmountable problems develop, and then developers look for some other dupes to sucker in.
It never ends, because industry gets paid cost-plus by taxpayers. The more waste, fraud and abuse, the more profit they make.
Bureaucrats require by law that electric motors must get 96% efficiency creating big expectations for electrifying the transportation system. Nothing could be more ludicrous than 96% efficiency in the applications of electricity. Anyone who has ever seen a copper wire should know that.
There is a physical barrier preventing any transformation of energy into kinetic energy from getting more than 40% efficiency including electric motors. Real engineers have been working with this barrier for more than a hundred years requiring fans and cooling mechanisms with motors including electrical ones.
Electricity wastes about 88% of its energy before doing what other sources of energy do, because two energy transformations are needed with electricity instead of the usual one—a transformation at the electrical generator and a transformation within the motor—each losing more than half of the energy to heat.
Here are some of the losses with electrical energy: Electrical generators salvage a maximum of 40% of the energy that goes into them. Short transmission lines have 20% loss built in, long lines have 50% (35% loss average). High voltage transformers have (claimed) 90% efficiency, household level transformers have 50% efficiency. That's 0.40 x 0.65 x 0.90 x 0.50 = 0.117 = 12% of electrical energy recovered (88% loss) before getting to end use, where 25% is typically salvaged. That's 3% of the starting energy being converted into the kinetic energy of motion with an electric motor, plus other losses in regulating and converting. (12% x 25% = 3%)
In 2015 the amount of electricity used in the US was 4.14 peta watt hours (PWH). The amount of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) used was 24.8 PWH. Dividing shows a ratio of 6.0. This means that replacing fossil fuels with electricity would superficially require an increase in electrical infrastructure by a factor of 6.
But it's infinitely worse. Something like 12% of the energy is salvaged in getting electricity to the source. It means 50 times as much electrical energy as presently exists must be used to replace fossil fuels. That's 6 ÷ 12% = 50.
In addition to the efficiency problem is an increase in transmission lines, which would be between a factor of 9,000 and infinity. Wind and solar must be located hundreds of miles away from end use. When covering the total U.S. instead of the show-peace examples near the source, there would often be 1,000 mile lines instead of the one mile lines from generating plants to cities. With wind and utility solar, transmission lines cost as much as infrastructure. If the entire U.S. were covered, transmission lines would cost more than all other expenses associated with the production of electricity.
The Problem
The stated goal is to produce 100% carbon free, renewable energy and power self-driving, electric vehicles with it.
The result is physically impossible, but promoters are not saying there are boundaries or what they would be. They need to absolutize to 100% to avoid an explanation of complexities at a lower percent which they have no ability to evaluate.
Renewables
The simple facts:
1) Solar is going nowhere, because it is only used in the South West.
2) Windmills are going nowhere, because each one costs a fortune, and long lines cost even more.
3) Neither are going anywhere, because disruptive variations cannot be managed, and they waste resources trying.
4) Renewable doesn't mean unlimited supply. The low hanging fruit is gone already.
5) Solar and wind are very dilute. Concentrating dilute energy is very inefficient. It takes huge amounts of metal. Electrons have to be surrounded by a lot of metal or chemicals.
6) You couldn't cover the planet with enough wires to make it work. The electrical infrastructure would have to be multiplied by several thousand to produce 100% renewable energy, even if it were possible. There wouldn't be enough space between transmission towers for anything else.
The Fracking Problem
Solar only gets sun power for a few hours per day. It must have 100% back up for most of the day. The back up is said to require natural gas electric turbine generators, because only they can be started and stopped easily. But natural gas is only available through fracking or imports. Before fracking, there was a shortage of natural gas. Fracking is expensive and only exists while OPEC is doing Americans the favor of holding oil prices artificially high. With oil producers increasing output in Iran, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, OPEC is not easily holding the price up. When the price of oil drops, fracking stops, the energy moguls will be building coal plants like there was no tomorrow and solar will be unusable.
The Efficiency Problem
Electricity is very inefficient, because it is lost to heat in every device and wire. As stated above, the amount of energy from fossil fuels is six times electricity, while electricity is said to produce more CO2. It means electricity is less than one sixth as efficient as fossil fuels based on the amount of CO2 produced at the present mix (with no significant electric vehicles).
Even if renewables could get rid of the CO2, they would produce overwhelming clutter—in fact, so much clutter than no one gets past 15% wind or solar, even without electric vehicles adding to it.
Break Time
If these statements don't look credible because too many persons are saying the opposite, we need to take a look at the difference. First and foremost, who are these other persons? They are activists and journalists who have never studied an iota of science or engineering.
They are assuming there will be an electric take-over of the energy and transportation systems, because scientists have improved the chemistry of solar cells. That doesn't wash. Scientists have improved the fabric of shoes, which is about as relevant.
The contrivers are omitting the fact that long transmission lines cost more than producing the energy, while solar energy would have to be shipped from the southwest to the other forty five states to get where they claim energy is going. Wind energy would also have to be shipped long distance.
Skipping over the transmission lines, in addition to back up systems, shows the ignorance and contrivance of the promoters of the cause. Real scientists and engineers used to explain the absurdities, but activists flushed them down the drain and substituted in their ignorant claims.
Causes seem to do that in the minds of persons who have not learned the discipline of correct evaluation. It includes too many scientists, so you can always find a few to promote any cause, while journalists determine which ones prevail and how much lying to do about the percent who are on their side.
There are a lot of ignorant scientists who should have never been scientists. Journalists and activists bring them to the surface and suppress the others. That doesn't mean activists have science on their side.
Electrical Wiring Problem
Non-technically minded persons don't understand the electrical wiring problem. Electrons require a lot of metal around them. Electrical wiring is strung everywhere, but out of sight. And that's just for household trivia. It has to be multiplied by tens of thousands for 100% renewable. Actually, everything hits infinity before getting there, so exact numbers don't exist. The numbers become self-contradictory, physical impossibilities around 30% renewables as solar and wind.
Right now, there is an extreme shortage of grid scale transmission lines, because they cost too much. The problem is a national security threat, but the government will not require the problem to be solved, because the public would be up in arms over the environmental damage and clutter. That's before electric vehicles.
You say, these aren't the numbers we are getting. Before the numbers are relevant, there has to be reliable standards of communication. The communication standards for everything related to this subject would be criminal in a dictatorship. The methods of presentation scream fraud. It's like going into a bank with a ski mask and gun.
It's not a problem of disagreement; disagreements can be resolved; it's about fraud. The fraud is in walling off claims from any possibility of being investigated while adding authority which cannot be disputed. Factual data like miles of wire are skipped over being replaced by fake physics on efficiencies which supposedly take care of everything, so you don't need to know the specifics.
Batteries Are Useless
Electric utilities require constant voltage. Batteries do not function at constant voltage, which means they are useless for electric utilities.
The only way to keep voltage constant with batteries is to have the same amount of power going in and out. Any difference changes the voltage.
Computer chips will function at 1.3 volts while supplied by 5 volt batteries. This range allows battery voltage to go up and down between charges while regulating the supply at 1.3 volts. Commercial utilities cannot allow voltage to change.
To hold the output voltage constant while battery voltage drops requires voltage regulators which waste a lot of energy.
Battery Voltage
With small devices, over-voltage is used with the battery but a lot of energy is wasted as heat on the regulatory circuits. Utilities cannot waste that much energy.
One of the problems with batteries is that they are physically unsuitable for large scale energy applications, because electrons require too much space and mass in chemical storage. Chiseling at battery improvements can never get close to large scale requirements.
Social Criticism Problem
Social criticism gets more and more difficult, as the subject matter gets more and more unreal. Getting unreal is how criticism is evaded. The more unreal, the more impossible criticism becomes.
For this reason, social fantasies are going off the charts. A group of connected fantasies are being contrived around global warming, renewable energy, carbon free electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles and going to Mars.
To criticize such fantasies requires mowing down a lot of developed verbiage. Doing so is not allowed. All criticism must be superficial and trivial.
The problem is that the contrivers get by with it. Significant social criticism is not being allowed, while contrivers get more and more unreal.
The specific examples of how this works are very clear. Renewable energy is a contrived absurdity, as demonstrated in Europe, where Germany is building new coal plants, and England is building a new nuclear reactor, because their economies cannot survive more renewables. They have 25% renewables (15% solar and wind), while the price of their electricity is 8 to 10 times what it costs with coal.
Solar and wind require too much infrastructure
Solar energy can never be relevant on a large scale for two major reasons. One: Solar will never be used on a significant scale outside southwestern US, where there is low overcast and bad weather. Two: Six hours per day of high intensity radiation (one fourth of the time) will never be significant. Backup systems gain almost nothing but more expense from solar disruption for six hours per day.
Increasing the time by turning with the sun increase the required surface area proportionately, while less light gets through the longer path through the atmosphere. This means there must be more space between each collector to avoid shadowing from another collector.
Wind power has similar problems. Wind can stop blowing for days at a time. A backup system of 100% is required. Having that system sit around unused is extremely wasteful. Wind changes so fast that backup systems need to be always on.
Transmission lines are required for wind and utility-scale solar. Transmission lines generally cost as much or more than the production costs for the energy, and they lose energy along the lines.
For short lines, a minimum of 20% loss is built in; for longer lines it is 50%. The reason is because there is resistance in the metal which creates heat as a loss of energy. To reduce the resistance by half requires twice as much metal. To reduce loss from 20% to 10% would require two lines instead of one. To reduce loss on long lines from 50% to 25% would require two long lines instead of one.
This is why there is a shortage of transmission lines in the US. The distances that must be covered are too large. It's a losing battle between energy loss and massive lines. It doesn't pay. Explanations of Energy Loss
The metals which make transmission lines expensive are refined with coke, which comes from coal.
Energy storage systems which convert to other forms of energy lose about 60% transforming in, and another 60% transforming back to electricity. Salvaging 40% of 40% is 16% recoverable.
This means, energy storage systems such as pumping water into a reservoir can never recover more than 16% of the energy being stored. And there are additional loses in handling the energy.
Environmental damage and human disturbance are usually unacceptable for both solar and wind energy, even on a small scale. Scaling up would be prohibitive.
Solar and wind run into a barrier around 15% of electrical power. The 36% wind energy in Iowa is not an exception. The lines are connected to a larger area which reduces the real average, while much of the energy goes into ethanol production. With only 5.6% of the electrical generation from natural gas, what does Iowa do when the wind stops? It shows that the wind energy which is used for normal electrical purposes is a small part of the surrounding systems which it is integrated into—certainly a lot less than 15%.
Soak the Rate Payers
All of this expensive garbage is being glamorized as endless development with no end in sight. Supposedly, the proof is in he pudding—a pudding of jobs, jobs, jobs and free energy.
The real pudding is bankruptcy for the consumers who have to pay for it, particularly the lower classes. No one asked the lower classes if they want to pay an additional $200-300 per month to reduce the temperature 0.7°C. Energy companies used to bitch about the expense, but they have since learned that there is more money in waste, fraud and abuse than in real products. Governments now allow them to pass on the expenses to the consumers; so the more waste in the process, the higher the profits. There is no end until the public gets tired of paying for the expensive destructivity.
About twenty years ago, the British told their consumers that they could blanket the island with windmills for renewable energy. After getting 15% of their energy that way, they could not go any farther and decided to add nuclear power. But the consumers were already soaked for all they would tolerate. So England is trying to get someone besides the consumers to pay for the nuclear energy on a contract basis—and failing. They can't get investors to pay for it.
Cost-Plus
Renewable energy exists for one reason only: cost-plus. Nine percent of waste, fraud and abuse is a lot more profit than 9% of efficiency.
The larger a windmill is, the less efficient it is, because the stand is 90% of the cost (including more than a hundred truckloads of concrete at the base). Yet windmills keep getting larger, because there is a lot more profit in the cost-plus of waste, fraud and abuse than in efficiency.
How Renewables Are Rationalized
The waste, fraud and abuse of so-called renewable types of energy is mixed in with normal energy infrastructure making the resulting inefficiency invisible to the unwary, while the result is lied about.
Government laws require that renewables must be allowed onto the lines with no obstructions, while other sources of energy must eat the difference. This means coal plants must shut down their generators while wind and solar feed into the infrastructure.
But coal burners cannot be started and stopped so easily. So they continue to burn coal while not producing electricity—fraud required by law to promote renewables.
The net effect is that wind and solar add no real energy to infrastructure. What renewables put in must be subtracted elsewhere, while the source of energy is not diminished by adding renewables.
Supposedly, natural gas electric generators can be shut down while renewables are feeding energy into the lines, but even they lose a lot of energy being turned on and off, while the cost of the hardware is added to the system resulting in no net gain in combining the systems.
This is why the cost of electricity goes up by a factor of three in California and ten in Europe due to renewables. Renewables add no net energy to the system, while they add expense for the consumers.
This is also why the British are building nuclear reactors like there was no tomorrow. Ten years ago, they were going to solve everyone's problems by carpeting the island with windmills. After building all the windmills anyone can take, they got nothing out of it and need other sources of energy.
Communication Fraud
One of the most disgusting things about renewable energy and other social fantasies is the fraudulent communication used for promoting the causes. Numbers will be used to promote the cause, while there is no meaning to the numbers and they do not lead to the conclusions. None of the available statistics will provide enough information for proper evaluation, while they are used to promote the cause. Statistics will often mention generating "capacity," while the actual amount produced is 20% of capacity on average. Often, there is no indication of whether the numbers are capacity or actual amount produced. Percents are often given with no indication of what is being compared. There has to be a denominator with percents, but it often is not given.
For example, South Dakota is near the top of the list for percent wind energy but near the bottom of the list for actual wind energy produced. Percent can be high when there is nothing in the denominator. Iowa is the sales pitch at 30% wind energy, but a large amount goes to Illinois, where it is mixed with other energy. No numbers are given which can be used to indicate what is actually happening. It's an insult to human rationality to force such garbage onto us through fraudulent communication. The intent is to create servitude to frauds as a method of dominating by incompetents who cannot produce rationality.
Renewable energy is a fake concept promoted by incompetents as a power mongering tool. The lower classes pay the heaviest price, as the cost of electricity increases by a factor of 10 when renewables max out at 15% of electricity.
No one can get past 15% renewables as solar and wind because of the disruptive influences and expensive infrastructure. Electricity costs ten times normal at 15% solar and wind. The lower classes pay a heavy price.
The hardware for renewable energy costs more than it is worth and wastes resources which pollute and clutter the environment, while extremely long lines are required costing and destroying as much as the generating sources. Transmission lines would need to be increased by factors of tens of thousands for 100% renewables, while doubling the lines is not socially tolerable.
Coal and natural gas generators are located near cities to eliminate long lines, while solar and wind cannot avoid long lines. Long lines cost as much as all other expenses combined. And they require up to 50% loss of energy in the lines.
Energy loss is designed into long lines, because every percent change in efficiency is an equal percent change in mass of metal in the lines. To reduce line loss from 50% to 25% would require two lines instead of one. The diameter of the lines is not optional, because it must be optimized for strength.
Yet, fakes say renewable energy is approaching the cost of coal. It's totally contrived fraud. To promote renewable energy, laws require every watt produced by solar and wind to be paid for, while some other source has to adapt to the fluctuations. It means some other company, often a coal generator, has to eat the loss making coal more expensive than it would otherwise be.
Australia has 21% renewables, and it created unsolvable problems. So they are going to buy batteries to solve the problem—about like they are going to pay the green Martians 600% of their gross revenue to solve the problem.
insulatorTransmission lines are 2 million volts in the U.S. because of the long distance for moving large amounts of energy. The wires must hang from 3 foot long insulators, because 2 million volts will arc from surface to surface. One million volts would require twice as many lines. The resulting mess cannot go underground. It has to clutter the environment. And to replace previous energy with renewables, the transmission mess would have to cover the surface of the earth destroying environments and wasting expensive metals.
Renewable doesn't mean unlimited supply. Wind and solar are too dilute. Most wind is too slow; most solar is too dark.
Why did the Germans build their windmills over the ocean, when lines going south are too expensive and environmentally damaging? Because there isn't enough wind in the south.
The surface of the earth would have to be covered with electrical wires to produce 100% renewables, if there were enough solar and wind to do so. Linearized electrons have to be surrounded by huge amounts of metal, while length of lines must be thousands of times greater than usual due to spread-out sources.
The know-nothings who promote renewable energy assume electricity is more efficient than other sources of energy. Electricity is immensely less efficient than other sources of energy, as electrical energy is lost to heat every time it is touched including loss in lines.
Electricity is a specialty product which will not scale up to the transportation level. A massive increase in infrastructure and electric lines would be required. There is no space for it—within cities or the countryside.
No cost benefit analysis, let alone energy efficiency analysis, is being done for wind and solar. Instead, fake claims show up as so-called parity. A square inch of something does something similar to coal, which is called parity. Add the other 90% of the cost and it's total fraud.
The whole mentality of renewables is to build until someone stops paying for it. At around 15% of the electricity, insurmountable problems develop, and then developers look for some other dupes to sucker in.
It never ends, because industry gets paid cost-plus by taxpayers. The more waste, fraud and abuse, the more profit they make.
Bureaucrats require by law that electric motors must get 96% efficiency creating big expectations for electrifying the transportation system. Nothing could be more ludicrous than 96% efficiency in the applications of electricity. Anyone who has ever seen a copper wire should know that.
There is a physical barrier preventing any transformation of energy into kinetic energy from getting more than 40% efficiency including electric motors. Real engineers have been working with this barrier for more than a hundred years requiring fans and cooling mechanisms with motors including electrical ones.
Electricity wastes about 88% of its energy before doing what other sources of energy do, because two energy transformations are needed with electricity instead of the usual one—a transformation at the electrical generator and a transformation within the motor—each losing more than half of the energy to heat.
Here are some of the losses with electrical energy: Electrical generators salvage a maximum of 40% of the energy that goes into them. Short transmission lines have 20% loss built in, long lines have 50% (35% loss average). High voltage transformers have (claimed) 90% efficiency, household level transformers have 50% efficiency. That's 0.40 x 0.65 x 0.90 x 0.50 = 0.117 = 12% of electrical energy recovered (88% loss) before getting to end use, where 25% is typically salvaged. That's 3% of the starting energy being converted into the kinetic energy of motion with an electric motor, plus other losses in regulating and converting. (12% x 25% = 3%)
In 2015 the amount of electricity used in the US was 4.14 peta watt hours (PWH). The amount of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) used was 24.8 PWH. Dividing shows a ratio of 6.0. This means that replacing fossil fuels with electricity would superficially require an increase in electrical infrastructure by a factor of 6.
But it's infinitely worse. Something like 12% of the energy is salvaged in getting electricity to the source. It means 50 times as much electrical energy as presently exists must be used to replace fossil fuels. That's 6 ÷ 12% = 50.
In addition to the efficiency problem is an increase in transmission lines, which would be between a factor of 9,000 and infinity. Wind and solar must be located hundreds of miles away from end use. When covering the total U.S. instead of the show-peace examples near the source, there would often be 1,000 mile lines instead of the one mile lines from generating plants to cities. With wind and utility solar, transmission lines cost as much as infrastructure. If the entire U.S. were covered, transmission lines would cost more than all other expenses associated with the production of electricity.
The Problem
The stated goal is to produce 100% carbon free, renewable energy and power self-driving, electric vehicles with it.
The result is physically impossible, but promoters are not saying there are boundaries or what they would be. They need to absolutize to 100% to avoid an explanation of complexities at a lower percent which they have no ability to evaluate.
Renewables
The simple facts:
1) Solar is going nowhere, because it is only used in the South West.
2) Windmills are going nowhere, because each one costs a fortune, and long lines cost even more.
3) Neither are going anywhere, because disruptive variations cannot be managed, and they waste resources trying.
4) Renewable doesn't mean unlimited supply. The low hanging fruit is gone already.
5) Solar and wind are very dilute. Concentrating dilute energy is very inefficient. It takes huge amounts of metal. Electrons have to be surrounded by a lot of metal or chemicals.
6) You couldn't cover the planet with enough wires to make it work. The electrical infrastructure would have to be multiplied by several thousand to produce 100% renewable energy, even if it were possible. There wouldn't be enough space between transmission towers for anything else.
The Fracking Problem
Solar only gets sun power for a few hours per day. It must have 100% back up for most of the day. The back up is said to require natural gas electric turbine generators, because only they can be started and stopped easily. But natural gas is only available through fracking or imports. Before fracking, there was a shortage of natural gas. Fracking is expensive and only exists while OPEC is doing Americans the favor of holding oil prices artificially high. With oil producers increasing output in Iran, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, OPEC is not easily holding the price up. When the price of oil drops, fracking stops, the energy moguls will be building coal plants like there was no tomorrow and solar will be unusable.
The Efficiency Problem
Electricity is very inefficient, because it is lost to heat in every device and wire. As stated above, the amount of energy from fossil fuels is six times electricity, while electricity is said to produce more CO2. It means electricity is less than one sixth as efficient as fossil fuels based on the amount of CO2 produced at the present mix (with no significant electric vehicles).
Even if renewables could get rid of the CO2, they would produce overwhelming clutter—in fact, so much clutter than no one gets past 15% wind or solar, even without electric vehicles adding to it.
Break Time
If these statements don't look credible because too many persons are saying the opposite, we need to take a look at the difference. First and foremost, who are these other persons? They are activists and journalists who have never studied an iota of science or engineering.
They are assuming there will be an electric take-over of the energy and transportation systems, because scientists have improved the chemistry of solar cells. That doesn't wash. Scientists have improved the fabric of shoes, which is about as relevant.
The contrivers are omitting the fact that long transmission lines cost more than producing the energy, while solar energy would have to be shipped from the southwest to the other forty five states to get where they claim energy is going. Wind energy would also have to be shipped long distance.
Skipping over the transmission lines, in addition to back up systems, shows the ignorance and contrivance of the promoters of the cause. Real scientists and engineers used to explain the absurdities, but activists flushed them down the drain and substituted in their ignorant claims.
Causes seem to do that in the minds of persons who have not learned the discipline of correct evaluation. It includes too many scientists, so you can always find a few to promote any cause, while journalists determine which ones prevail and how much lying to do about the percent who are on their side.
There are a lot of ignorant scientists who should have never been scientists. Journalists and activists bring them to the surface and suppress the others. That doesn't mean activists have science on their side.
Electrical Wiring Problem
Non-technically minded persons don't understand the electrical wiring problem. Electrons require a lot of metal around them. Electrical wiring is strung everywhere, but out of sight. And that's just for household trivia. It has to be multiplied by tens of thousands for 100% renewable. Actually, everything hits infinity before getting there, so exact numbers don't exist. The numbers become self-contradictory, physical impossibilities around 30% renewables as solar and wind.
Right now, there is an extreme shortage of grid scale transmission lines, because they cost too much. The problem is a national security threat, but the government will not require the problem to be solved, because the public would be up in arms over the environmental damage and clutter. That's before electric vehicles.
You say, these aren't the numbers we are getting. Before the numbers are relevant, there has to be reliable standards of communication. The communication standards for everything related to this subject would be criminal in a dictatorship. The methods of presentation scream fraud. It's like going into a bank with a ski mask and gun.
It's not a problem of disagreement; disagreements can be resolved; it's about fraud. The fraud is in walling off claims from any possibility of being investigated while adding authority which cannot be disputed. Factual data like miles of wire are skipped over being replaced by fake physics on efficiencies which supposedly take care of everything, so you don't need to know the specifics.
Batteries Are Useless
Electric utilities require constant voltage. Batteries do not function at constant voltage, which means they are useless for electric utilities.
The only way to keep voltage constant with batteries is to have the same amount of power going in and out. Any difference changes the voltage.
Computer chips will function at 1.3 volts while supplied by 5 volt batteries. This range allows battery voltage to go up and down between charges while regulating the supply at 1.3 volts. Commercial utilities cannot allow voltage to change.
To hold the output voltage constant while battery voltage drops requires voltage regulators which waste a lot of energy.
Battery Voltage
With small devices, over-voltage is used with the battery but a lot of energy is wasted as heat on the regulatory circuits. Utilities cannot waste that much energy.
One of the problems with batteries is that they are physically unsuitable for large scale energy applications, because electrons require too much space and mass in chemical storage. Chiseling at battery improvements can never get close to large scale requirements.
Social Criticism Problem
Social criticism gets more and more difficult, as the subject matter gets more and more unreal. Getting unreal is how criticism is evaded. The more unreal, the more impossible criticism becomes.
For this reason, social fantasies are going off the charts. A group of connected fantasies are being contrived around global warming, renewable energy, carbon free electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles and going to Mars.
To criticize such fantasies requires mowing down a lot of developed verbiage. Doing so is not allowed. All criticism must be superficial and trivial.
The problem is that the contrivers get by with it. Significant social criticism is not being allowed, while contrivers get more and more unreal.
The specific examples of how this works are very clear. Renewable energy is a contrived absurdity, as demonstrated in Europe, where Germany is building new coal plants, and England is building a new nuclear reactor, because their economies cannot survive more renewables. They have 25% renewables (15% solar and wind), while the price of their electricity is 8 to 10 times what it costs with coal.
Solar and wind require too much infrastructure
Solar energy can never be relevant on a large scale for two major reasons. One: Solar will never be used on a significant scale outside southwestern US, where there is low overcast and bad weather. Two: Six hours per day of high intensity radiation (one fourth of the time) will never be significant. Backup systems gain almost nothing but more expense from solar disruption for six hours per day.
Increasing the time by turning with the sun increase the required surface area proportionately, while less light gets through the longer path through the atmosphere. This means there must be more space between each collector to avoid shadowing from another collector.
Wind power has similar problems. Wind can stop blowing for days at a time. A backup system of 100% is required. Having that system sit around unused is extremely wasteful. Wind changes so fast that backup systems need to be always on.
Transmission lines are required for wind and utility-scale solar. Transmission lines generally cost as much or more than the production costs for the energy, and they lose energy along the lines.
For short lines, a minimum of 20% loss is built in; for longer lines it is 50%. The reason is because there is resistance in the metal which creates heat as a loss of energy. To reduce the resistance by half requires twice as much metal. To reduce loss from 20% to 10% would require two lines instead of one. To reduce loss on long lines from 50% to 25% would require two long lines instead of one.
This is why there is a shortage of transmission lines in the US. The distances that must be covered are too large. It's a losing battle between energy loss and massive lines. It doesn't pay. Explanations of Energy Loss
The metals which make transmission lines expensive are refined with coke, which comes from coal.
Energy storage systems which convert to other forms of energy lose about 60% transforming in, and another 60% transforming back to electricity. Salvaging 40% of 40% is 16% recoverable.
This means, energy storage systems such as pumping water into a reservoir can never recover more than 16% of the energy being stored. And there are additional loses in handling the energy.
Environmental damage and human disturbance are usually unacceptable for both solar and wind energy, even on a small scale. Scaling up would be prohibitive.
Solar and wind run into a barrier around 15% of electrical power. The 36% wind energy in Iowa is not an exception. The lines are connected to a larger area which reduces the real average, while much of the energy goes into ethanol production. With only 5.6% of the electrical generation from natural gas, what does Iowa do when the wind stops? It shows that the wind energy which is used for normal electrical purposes is a small part of the surrounding systems which it is integrated into—certainly a lot less than 15%.
Soak the Rate Payers
All of this expensive garbage is being glamorized as endless development with no end in sight. Supposedly, the proof is in he pudding—a pudding of jobs, jobs, jobs and free energy.
The real pudding is bankruptcy for the consumers who have to pay for it, particularly the lower classes. No one asked the lower classes if they want to pay an additional $200-300 per month to reduce the temperature 0.7°C. Energy companies used to bitch about the expense, but they have since learned that there is more money in waste, fraud and abuse than in real products. Governments now allow them to pass on the expenses to the consumers; so the more waste in the process, the higher the profits. There is no end until the public gets tired of paying for the expensive destructivity.
About twenty years ago, the British told their consumers that they could blanket the island with windmills for renewable energy. After getting 15% of their energy that way, they could not go any farther and decided to add nuclear power. But the consumers were already soaked for all they would tolerate. So England is trying to get someone besides the consumers to pay for the nuclear energy on a contract basis—and failing. They can't get investors to pay for it.
Cost-Plus
Renewable energy exists for one reason only: cost-plus. Nine percent of waste, fraud and abuse is a lot more profit than 9% of efficiency.
The larger a windmill is, the less efficient it is, because the stand is 90% of the cost (including more than a hundred truckloads of concrete at the base). Yet windmills keep getting larger, because there is a lot more profit in the cost-plus of waste, fraud and abuse than in efficiency.
How Renewables Are Rationalized
The waste, fraud and abuse of so-called renewable types of energy is mixed in with normal energy infrastructure making the resulting inefficiency invisible to the unwary, while the result is lied about.
Government laws require that renewables must be allowed onto the lines with no obstructions, while other sources of energy must eat the difference. This means coal plants must shut down their generators while wind and solar feed into the infrastructure.
But coal burners cannot be started and stopped so easily. So they continue to burn coal while not producing electricity—fraud required by law to promote renewables.
The net effect is that wind and solar add no real energy to infrastructure. What renewables put in must be subtracted elsewhere, while the source of energy is not diminished by adding renewables.
Supposedly, natural gas electric generators can be shut down while renewables are feeding energy into the lines, but even they lose a lot of energy being turned on and off, while the cost of the hardware is added to the system resulting in no net gain in combining the systems.
This is why the cost of electricity goes up by a factor of three in California and ten in Europe due to renewables. Renewables add no net energy to the system, while they add expense for the consumers.
This is also why the British are building nuclear reactors like there was no tomorrow. Ten years ago, they were going to solve everyone's problems by carpeting the island with windmills. After building all the windmills anyone can take, they got nothing out of it and need other sources of energy.
Communication Fraud
One of the most disgusting things about renewable energy and other social fantasies is the fraudulent communication used for promoting the causes. Numbers will be used to promote the cause, while there is no meaning to the numbers and they do not lead to the conclusions. None of the available statistics will provide enough information for proper evaluation, while they are used to promote the cause. Statistics will often mention generating "capacity," while the actual amount produced is 20% of capacity on average. Often, there is no indication of whether the numbers are capacity or actual amount produced. Percents are often given with no indication of what is being compared. There has to be a denominator with percents, but it often is not given.
For example, South Dakota is near the top of the list for percent wind energy but near the bottom of the list for actual wind energy produced. Percent can be high when there is nothing in the denominator. Iowa is the sales pitch at 30% wind energy, but a large amount goes to Illinois, where it is mixed with other energy. No numbers are given which can be used to indicate what is actually happening. It's an insult to human rationality to force such garbage onto us through fraudulent communication. The intent is to create servitude to frauds as a method of dominating by incompetents who cannot produce rationality.