With global warming the alleged science is
so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really
understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is
different. It’s relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes
of confusing data are needed.
Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green
electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs
about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it
displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies
and fake accounting. (My book, Dumb
Energy, goes into great analytical detail.)
Green electricity is ineffective for preventing climate change.
The climate change alarmists James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger make the
case forcefully inthis
video. Hansen is the most important and most famous scientist warning
against climate change. His followers consider him to be the greatest authority
on the dangers of climate change. He calls wind and solar energy a “grotesque
idea” and a “fantasy.”
It’s true that we won’t run out of wind or sunshine. That doesn’t
mean that wind and sunshine are effective tools for making electricity. They
aren’t. The exhaustion of fossil fuels has been predicted many times. The
current situation is that fossil fuels are in great over supply and the prices
have crashed to low levels. Natural gas, currently the most economical fossil
fuel for generating electricity, is painfully cheap and is being extensively
exported from the United States to other countries. Natural gas from wells, not
served by pipelines to take it to market, is burned or flared to
get rid of it. Only the more valuable oil is kept. Thanks to fracking, we have
plenty of natural gas for the next 100-years.
Promoters of quack medicine sell various pills guaranteed to
improve your memory or your sex life. Green energy is quackery too. It is
promoted by green organizations like the Sierra Club. At one time the Sierra
Club was a harmless club of backpackers and bird watchers. But it was taken
over by ideologues driven by the delusion that modern society is a destructive
fraud that must be rescued by the adoption of green principles. These armchair
green commandos are math handicapped. They regularly propose policies that make
no sense. The green commandos pontificate confidently without real
understanding.
Coal is an excellent fuel for generating electricity. Unlike
natural gas or oil, coal has limited uses other than generating electricity.
The Sierra Club hates coal because it competes successfully against their
beloved green wind and solar. No lie is too outrageous as long as it is useful
for discrediting coal. The Sierra Club uses trick photography to make it look
like coal plants emit clouds of black smoke. The trick is to photograph clean
white clouds of “steam” with the sun behind the plant. That makes the harmless
white clouds look black. The exhaust products are composed of water vapor and
carbon dioxide with very little pollution. As the exhaust mixes with the cool
air, it condenses into a white cloud of clean water droplets commonly called
steam.
In modern coal plants, almost all pollution is scrubbed away
before the exhaust goes into the smokestack.
Residential rooftop solar energy is an uneconomic method for
generating electricity but it sounds convincing to the naïve. Rooftop solar
panels lack economy of scale. These small installations generate electricity
for about three times more per kilowatt hour than the large-scale utility
installations. The homeowner reduces his consumption of grid electricity,
reducing his electric bill. Excess solar electricity is sold back to the
utility, often at a price far higher than the cost of wholesale electricity.
The beauty of this scheme is that if the rules are sufficiently rigged in favor
of the homeowner, it is possible for the homeowner to save money. No one could
complain if the homeowner disconnected from the electric utility. But no one is
disconnecting unless they live off grid. The utility is expected to maintain a
power line to the home and maintain excess generating capacity to take over
supplying electricity if it is cloudy or it is nighttime. The true cost of
maintaining this backup service, exclusive of any electricity sales, is around
$100 per month, but utilities commonly charge only around $10 or $15 a month
for a connection before the first kilowatt hour is sold. Every kilowatt hour of
utility electricity displaced by solar costs the utility gross profit. If the
utility is forced to buy the homeowner’s electricity at retail rates the
utility may end up paying much more than the reasonable wholesale cost of the
electricity. In some places the homeowner is even allowed to bank excess solar
electricity and draw it at a later time. The utility doesn’t have a bank where
it can store electricity. In short, rooftop solar is a scheme of making
everyone else subsidize the homeowner. The homeowner is under the delusion that
he has discovered cheaper electricity. It is cheaper only because everyone else
bears the cost.
The crippling weakness of wind or solar electricity is their
intermittent and erratic nature. A fossil-fuel generating plant can be fired up
as needed and throttled up and down as the consumption of electricity changes.
Wind or solar generates electricity according to the vagaries of the weather.
The grid operators, except in extreme circumstances, are required to accept all
the green electricity presented. In order to do this, fossil-fuel plants have
to seesaw their output to compensate for the erratic wind or solar. Wind and
solar plants can’t replace fossil-fuel plants for the simple reason that at
times the wind and solar plants are not generating electricity. You must have
enough fossil fuel along with hydro and nuclear to carry the full load. The
consequence is that the system has to continue to maintain and pay for its
traditional plants regardless of how much wind and solar is added to the grid.
The only economic contribution of wind or solar is to reduce fuel consumption
in the fossil-fuel plants during times when wind or solar electricity is being
generated. The proper cost comparison is to compare the cost of green
electricity versus the marginal cost (fuel) of operating the fossil-fuel
plants. Natural-gas plants have a fuel cost of about $15 per megawatt hour.
Wind or solar with battery backup costs about $130 per megawatt hour. For grid
stability reasons new wind and solar plants are being equipped with battery
storage, greatly increasing the cost. Without the battery backup wind or solar
electricity costs around $75 per megawatt hour. To be clear, the electricity
supplied by wind or solar at $75 to $130 per megawatt hour (not counting
subsidies) could be generated in existing fossil fuel plants for $15 per
megawatt hour.
Why the various states and the federal government continue to
pursue, mandate, and subsidize green electricity is a mystery best explained by
psychiatrists and students of propaganda.
