The idea that windmills
and solar panels can replace
coal, oil, and gas was always
imaginary.
The notion of 100% renewable
energy is a leftist fantasy.
The "elephant in the room"
is the low density
of the energy available per acre,
both for wind, and solar.
In June the Wall Street Journal
had a huge feature article
headlined:
“Plugging In the Wind”,
sorry, full article at the link below, requires a subscription:
actually a review of
a recently published book:
“Adapted from ‘SUPERPOWER:
One Man’s Quest to Transform
American Energy"
a book by the
Wall Street Journal reporter
Russell Gold
Mr. Gold falsely claims
renewable energy sources
now provide the cheapest
power in windy and sunny
parts of the country.
Some areas succeeded
in getting generation from
renewables, up to 30%
of their total electricity
supply,
But the result has been
an approximate tripling
in the price of electricity
for their consumers.
No areas have reached 50%.
Gold focuses on the West
Texas and Oklahoma panhandle,
where the wind allegedly blows
very reliably all the time.
Except that's not true.
Even in very windy areas,
the availability of wind power
swings wildly back and forth
from full generation,
to next-to-nothing,
just like everyplace else.
Here is a web site with hourly
wind power generation
data from Texas, provided by
the Texas grid operator, ERCOT:
Here's a graph I found from 2014,
I imagine the wind would not be
much different in 2019;
The sun isn’t always shining and
the wind isn’t always blowing.
On a big enough grid,
that’s not an issue,
Mr. Gold claims,
because there's
always wind
somewhere,
and the clouds
don’t cover
the entire U.S.
“Clouds don’t cover
the entire U.S.”
is a strange statement,
having nothing to do
with the lack of sunshine
at night, and less
sunshine in the winter
than in the summer.
In 2015, Roger Andrews
studied nine countries:
Belgium, the Czech Republic,
Denmark, Finland, France,
Ireland, Germany, Spain
and the UK.
All were trying to generate
large amounts of power
from the wind, and had good
hour-by-hour data.
The nine countries cover
an area of 1,250 miles
from east to west,
and 2,000 miles
from north to south.
Combining data from all nine
countries did NOT smooth out the
levels of wind power generation !
The aggregated generation
still swings wildly from hour
to hour and day to day.
And there's much more
wind generation in the winter
than in the summer.
Generating electricity by wind
and sun is a random process.
It doesn't matter how many
windmills and photovoltaic cells
you have on line because the
sum of random processes
is also a random process.
The electrical output will
still be fluctuating
and intermittent.
Is Mr. Gold dreaming about
interconnecting the eastern
and western hemispheres
of the earth (for day and night)
and the northern and
southern hemispheres
(for winter and summer) ?
One thing harder to site
than an oil pipeline is an
electric transmission line.
Too many landowners,
too many jurisdictions
and too many federally
funded environmental
lawyers.
Building more transmission lines
also ignores electrical resistance.
You lose about 1% per 100 miles.
Even the most efficient
transmission lines (HVDC)
lose around 3%
of their electricity
per 1,000 km (620 miles).
Solar panels in the Sahara desert
would lose 12% of their energy
getting the energy to Germany.
The wind reliably doesn't blow
when it is very hot or very cold,
precisely when power needs
for heating and A/C are greatest.
Solar doesn't work at night (which is
over 2/3 of the day during winters
in Northern Europe).
Solar doesn't work when panels
are covered in snow, and efficiency
is greatly reduced when panels
are covered by dust.
Stories about Tesla car batteries
exploding, and causing big fires,
do not make huge battery
storage facilities very popular
with local residents.
The Wall Street Journal should be
embarrassed by this article.
Facts no longer matter.