Wind and solar are parasites on the grid
The unpopular truth about electricity and the future of energy
It seems that wind and solar power can only survive as parasites on the more efficient conventional generators. Lars Schernikau and William Smith have explained this unpopular truth in a slim and elegant book that demolishes some of the most cherished beliefs of the climate and energy warriors in the alternative universe.
It is a scholarly tour de force, combining the depth and detail of a doctoral thesis with crystal clear writing. This is a rare combination. People who don’t need the full story can get what they need to know from the beautifully illustrated 24-minute video produced to promote the revised edition.
First, they demolish the green fantasy that we can survive with less power by practising demand-management while we replace hydrocarbons with so-called renewables. The rise of new forms of energy is a history of addition, not substitution. First, in the west, we supplemented wood with coal, then oil, then nuclear power, and lately with wind and solar (the unreliables). Unfortunately, susidised and mandated wind and solar only achieved prominence by mistake, because the wind farmers and the politicians neglected to check the reliability of the wind supply.
The recent Western experiment with ‘carbon mitigation’ policies will be seen as a potentially catastrophic aberration in the history of the Western world. Look out for my next book, How wind droughts almost destroyed Western Civilisation as we know it.
The destructiveness of the war on CO2 (plant food) can be seen in the very visible impact of climate mitigation policies compared with hypothetical harms in a dystopian future based on radical misrepresentation of ‘the science’. See the first chapter of Triggerwarming by Champion and Grimshaw for a catalogue of environmental, economic, and social harms caused by the ‘decarbonisation’ program.
The centrepiece of The Unpopular Truth is the game-changing analysis of the full cost of electricity (FCOE), to explain that the so-called renewables are a drain on the net energy balance of the industrialised world. They are energy stealers, incapable of making an independent living, leaning on more efficient providers like spoiled children who never leave home.
The authors surveyed more than 100 government agencies, universities, think tanks, and an alphabet soup of national and international bodies without finding any that were counting all the costs of wind and solar power. Practically all of these bodies are on board with Net Zero and the indicator of choice is the LCOE, the Levelised Cost of Electricity which makes wind and solar appear to be very cheap.
In Australia the LCOE is the gold standard for the Australian government and all the usual suspects in the alternative universe. Politicians and their staff don’t have time to go into details, so they endorse the GenCost/LCOE story and then they can’t understand why power keeps getting more expensive as more wind and solar penetrate the grid.
The author’s unpopular story can be summed up in three statements.
Present and future energy requirements far outstrip Net Zero pathways and possible ‘renewable’ generation.
The lack of viable long-term grid-scale storage.
There is a disconnect between the installed capacity of unreliable energy and generated electricity due to the ten factors that account for the full cost of energy (FCOE.) These are building, cost of fuel, operating, transportation, balancing, storage, backup, cost to the environment, decommissioning and disposal, and the land occupied.
They point out that another index, the energy return on investment (eROI) picks up many of the ten factors and it is vastly more informative than the LCOE because it measures the efficiency of energy systems.
Large numbers indicate high efficiency and nuclear power scores around 70 compared with coal near 30 while most wind and solar systems score below five.
That is the cut-off figure between systems that are sustainable and systems that are not efficient enough to survive independently. These figures will be fine-tuned but the tendency is clear.
A state (like South Australia) or country where the energy supply is moving towards domination by wind and solar will eventually suffer from energy starvation and it will have to depend on more efficient sources of power, at home or abroad. South Australia imports coal power practically every night, despite burning gas. Australia depends on coal power in China to make the energy-intensive components of our imported wind turbines and solar panels.
They write:
The wind and solar based ‘energy transition’ can only reduce global net energy efficiencies because it requires more complex energy systems and increase storage conversion and transmission losses.
Looking forward they see no future for the Net Zero program due to the energy efficiency problem and other shortcomings including the short lifetime of the equipment and the astronomical demand for minerals.
Finally, they look at the way governments are treating the three main objectives of energy policy: security of supply, affordability and environmental protection. They conclude that Net Zero programs focus simplistically on reducing CO2 emissions, blind to the harm inflicted by ‘climate mitigation’ policies, while the two primary objectives are undermined at the same time. A veritable trifecta of failure.
Clearly the transition to unreliable energy is not going to happen, it is just a matter of how many more trillions will be spent making power more expensive and less reliable before the Wind and Solar Titanic does a U-turn.
This piece first appeared in The Australian Spectator on line.
24 reasons to subscribe to The Australian Spectator. A series of pieces on the parallel universes in climate and energy policy.
Good stuff, Rafe. You sense the scam is falling apart, but the blob is huge and invested and desperate to keep face, but they're going to drop a gazillion of our dollarydoos before they're stopped.
Great summary of the sham claims of ‘renewables’ to replace conventional power plants and provide 24/7 on demand electricity. It has been blindingly obvious that the weather dependent intermittency of wind and solar was an Achilles heel. Obvious since the late 1990s, when the Howard government first mandated their use (at 2%, since ramped up by subsequent higher targets and exceptionally generous publicly funded subsidies).
One minor query: why have the experts on electricity in Australia been so reluctant to call out this nonsense? The state and federal governments established The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to manage the national power grid independent of the companies that owned the generators and transmission and distribution networks. The expertise housed therein ought to have been able to provide fearless advice on the limited potential for wind and solar to substitute for normal power plants. But they have not (at least not publicly - anecdotal evidence of rational scepticism in their ranks is plentiful). Does the 60% majority government ownership of AEMO cow its employees?