As we have come to expect, their predicament just reflects their general lack of thought. They fell for the "clean air, clean water, think of the children" rhetoric but I bet not one of them has tried to work out what it would mean if the world went the way they think they want us to.
For instance, how much land will their "renewable" solutions take up? It will not be a trrivial amount. Will they be happy with that amount of habitat loss? I bet they don't know.
Here is a starter to get an idea. Pictures are from Google Maps. The power station in the bottom left hand corner is Drax in the UK and the rest of the picture is copies of the Ivanpah solar plant in the Nevada desert that would produce the same output over a year. Each set of three mirrors takes up six square miles so one power station needs 180 square miles of mirrors - in a desert. We do not have a sunny desert in the UK so you can multiply that by at least two.
Now think how many power stations the UK has and how much land you would need to replace them. Then start thinking aboiut storage ...
This is not rocket science. We can spot the issues now. Let's all agree a solution before we plunge headlong into "Net Zero" and mandating electric cars.
Don't forget that solar only works from late morning through early evening, and UK has lots of cloudy days. How many batteries will be required to store that energy for use when the solar isn't producing?
I compared total annual energy outputs of both systems to do the comparison so nighttime is already factored in. Most comparisons in the media use maximul rated output so that would be like saying that I can get to a town 120 miles away in one hour because my car does 120 mph. Nice in theory but road conditions and speed limits would make that impossible.
Also, Ivanpah uses gas to get it started in the morning. Apparently, the system cools down overnight! Who knew? I have assumed that is genuine solar output so the results are actually worse than they appear in my comprison.
Storage is a whole nother issue. The (once) coal-fired power station can be ramped up and down to suit demand while the solar power plant produces energy when the sun shines - needed or not. I did once try to work out how many batteries would be required to make a wind farm solution acceptable for the US and I did not get an answer in batteries. The answer came out as multiples of Tesla GigaFactories!
According to my notes, about 4,000 GigaFactories of batteries would be required to save one day's worth of US energy consumption (not just electricity). The factory I used as the basis was the production after four years of construction. It all takes raw materials so are we just replacing one mining operation with another one that will also run out one day and pollute?
Another missing issue that the enthusiasts gloss over is maintenance. It is rather like painting a large metal road bridge. As soon as you have finished you need to start again at the other end, and that applies to turbines, solar panels, mirrors and batteries. Maybe thousands of items would need to be replaced every day, for ever, even with a 30 year lifetime per unit.
We literally need to mine minerals for hundreds of years at 2019 rates to get enough material to just build the current gen renewables enough to replace hydrocarbons.
And that's assuming that there's enough of the stuff in the ground in the first place.
As we have come to expect, their predicament just reflects their general lack of thought. They fell for the "clean air, clean water, think of the children" rhetoric but I bet not one of them has tried to work out what it would mean if the world went the way they think they want us to.
For instance, how much land will their "renewable" solutions take up? It will not be a trrivial amount. Will they be happy with that amount of habitat loss? I bet they don't know.
Here is a starter to get an idea. Pictures are from Google Maps. The power station in the bottom left hand corner is Drax in the UK and the rest of the picture is copies of the Ivanpah solar plant in the Nevada desert that would produce the same output over a year. Each set of three mirrors takes up six square miles so one power station needs 180 square miles of mirrors - in a desert. We do not have a sunny desert in the UK so you can multiply that by at least two.
Now think how many power stations the UK has and how much land you would need to replace them. Then start thinking aboiut storage ...
This is not rocket science. We can spot the issues now. Let's all agree a solution before we plunge headlong into "Net Zero" and mandating electric cars.
Don't forget that solar only works from late morning through early evening, and UK has lots of cloudy days. How many batteries will be required to store that energy for use when the solar isn't producing?
I compared total annual energy outputs of both systems to do the comparison so nighttime is already factored in. Most comparisons in the media use maximul rated output so that would be like saying that I can get to a town 120 miles away in one hour because my car does 120 mph. Nice in theory but road conditions and speed limits would make that impossible.
Also, Ivanpah uses gas to get it started in the morning. Apparently, the system cools down overnight! Who knew? I have assumed that is genuine solar output so the results are actually worse than they appear in my comprison.
Storage is a whole nother issue. The (once) coal-fired power station can be ramped up and down to suit demand while the solar power plant produces energy when the sun shines - needed or not. I did once try to work out how many batteries would be required to make a wind farm solution acceptable for the US and I did not get an answer in batteries. The answer came out as multiples of Tesla GigaFactories!
According to my notes, about 4,000 GigaFactories of batteries would be required to save one day's worth of US energy consumption (not just electricity). The factory I used as the basis was the production after four years of construction. It all takes raw materials so are we just replacing one mining operation with another one that will also run out one day and pollute?
Another missing issue that the enthusiasts gloss over is maintenance. It is rather like painting a large metal road bridge. As soon as you have finished you need to start again at the other end, and that applies to turbines, solar panels, mirrors and batteries. Maybe thousands of items would need to be replaced every day, for ever, even with a 30 year lifetime per unit.
We literally need to mine minerals for hundreds of years at 2019 rates to get enough material to just build the current gen renewables enough to replace hydrocarbons.
And that's assuming that there's enough of the stuff in the ground in the first place.
Very good way to encapsulate the perspective of all this. Simply bringing to the table the foresight that the o'l lefty mantra annihilates.