Wind and solar
electricity are renewable energy. How nice to pluck energy out of
the air and the sky.
It's a scam. Big
money men and screwball dreamers, otherwise called environmentalists, are
behind the scam.
Apparently,
it has not dawned on the believers in the scam that solar does not work at
night, and wind works only when the wind is blowing. The core
characteristic of wind and solar is that they are erratic sources of
electricity. The supply is randomly intermittent. Who in
Hell thinks this dumb energy is a good way to supply electricity?
The
wind and solar promoters, in order to accommodate their dumb energy, demand
that the electric grid be re-engineered to become a "smart"
grid. Perhaps the idea is that if the grid is smart enough, the dumb
energy will be canceled by the smart grid. That's actually what the
smart grid people have in mind. The smart grid is supposed to be
agile enough to fill in the gaps when the wind or solar is playing hooky.
The
intellectual mind values an elegant theory over a messy reality. The
result is tension between ivory tower thinkers and practical men working in the
trenches of the economy. The practical men easily see the weaknesses
in abstract theories, weaknesses that are invisible to the ivory tower
thinkers. But the practical men are not equipped to assert or defend
their reality in political, media, or academic circles. If they try,
they are patronized and ignored. A seductive theory trumps
pedestrian and annoying facts in the intellectual mind. For this
reason, ridiculously impracticable renewable energy finds wide support in
academic, environmental, and government circles – circles populated by thinkers
accustomed to mobilizing the power of the state to promote impractical ideas
with the taxpayers' money. For these thinkers, evidence that
contradicts their beliefs must be bad evidence.
In
the supposedly hard-headed Wall Street Journal, Russell Gold writes that
"global investment in wind and solar energy is outshining fossil
fuels." He claims that Alberta is getting subsidy-free wind
electricity for $37 a megawatt-hour. That's $28
U.S. Since real subsidy-free wind electricity costs about $10
Canadian, something is wrong here. What's wrong is that the media
have lost their minds. Five minutes with Google is enough to
discover that Albertan electricity is indeed subsidized. What we
have here is a mania and a suspension of critical judgment. No lie
about renewable energy is too big to be believed, even by the Wall Street
Journal. There are 600 comments to the Journal
article. The commentators, evidently practical men, point out the
errors and fallacies in the article.
In
the U.S., it is hard to keep track of all the subsidies for renewable
energy. I'd be surprised if it is very different in
Canada. Some subsidies are blatant, like a $24-per-megawatt-hour
payment from the federal treasury for the production of wind electricity, or a
30% tax credit for the construction of a solar energy farm. Some subsidies
are buried in accounting complexities like rapid depreciation that allows for
complicated tax gimmicks that effectively take money from the federal treasury
and give it to renewable energy investors. Then there are renewable
portfolio laws in 30 states setting goals for renewable energy. The
result is that wind and solar installations get long-term guaranteed markets at
high prices for their electricity. Grid operators are required to
accept all wind and solar electricity offered unless they, more or less,
declare an emergency.
Assuming
a windy or a sunny place, wind or solar electricity costs around $70 a
megawatt-hour to produce. Even though no fuel is used, the capital
cost spread over the electricity produced makes the renewable energy more expensive
than using fossil fuel. With natural gas, you can produce
electricity for around $50 per megawatt-hour. Those numbers are the
cost at the plant fence – not a fair comparison. It's not a fair
comparison because when you build a wind or solar plant, you don't get to take
away the natural gas plant. It's still there to back up the wind or
solar. Wind or solar is an add-on to the grid, not a real part of
the grid. All the wind or solar does that is useful is to save some
fuel at the backup plant, usually a natural gas plant, during moments when the
wind or solar is actually generating electricity. That fuel for a
gas plant costs about $20 per megawatt-hour. So wind or solar costs
$70 per megawatt-hour in order to save $20's worth of fuel per megawatt-hour. The net loss to the economy is $70
minus $20, or $50 for every megawatt-hour of wind or solar electricity
produced. That $50 has to come from someplace. That loss
to the economy is a subsidy. Someone has to pay for it. It
comes from blatant subsidies, sneaky subsidies, and higher prices for
electricity.
Some
advocates of renewable energy claim that the extra cost is worth it, because
wind and solar don't emit CO2, thus helping in the fight against global
warming. There are numerous holes in that argument. The
bulk of the CO2 emissions are from Asia, where they burn an ever increasing
amount of carbon-rich coal to generate electricity. U.S. CO2
emissions have been declining due to the substitution of natural gas for coal. Spending
fantastic sums to decrease U.S. emissions will have a very minor effect unless
something is done about Asia. The bigger picture is that there has
been little global warming during the last 20 years in the face of rapidly
increasing CO2 emissions. The obvious conclusion is that the global
warming scare is more propaganda than substance. Of course, the
scientific organizations with huge budgets based on the scary prospect of
global warming can't let it go because they would lose the justification for
their big budgets. Did you ever hear of a scientific organization
shrinking because the problem it was formed to solve does not, after all,
exist? If you really want to seriously reduce CO2 emissions, the
solution is nuclear power. The sincerest believers in global
warming, like James Hansen and Stewart Brand, are advocating nuclear power.
Environmental
groups, particularly the Sierra Club, run scare campaigns against fossil
fuels. Everything they don't like either causes cancer or does
something bad to children. They don't like coal; they don't like
nuclear. They even don't like hydro if a dam is
involved. The environmental outfits relentlessly spread scare
propaganda. They promote the basically useless wind and solar. They
pretend and perhaps actually believe that wind and solar represent some sort of
energy salvation. They are modern-day crackpots and snake oil
salesmen.
Norman Rogers writes often about energy and environmental
issues. He has websites climateviews.com and dumbenergy.com.
