Renewables - do they have a future?

[BlasterBates]

Interesting article:

http://http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewable s_engineers/

far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms - and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.

[NickyBoy]

Interesting article:

http://http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewable s_engineers/

The same could have been said about any energy source before the technology was available to properly use it. Imagine an industrial-revolution era Britain trying to handle nuclear power.

All technology becomes cheaper and more efficient as time goes on, so unless we kill ourselves off the tech will eventually become sustainable and useful.

The main thing that accelerates efficiency and cheapness gains is usage (experience + necessity breeds innovation). This is why smart countries subsidise these things - they are not doing it to be clean (though that is good PR) they are doing it to gain a developmental edge in future power generation methods that will pay pack any subsidisation costs a thousand fold.

As always the UK has shot itself in the foot and ended the (small) technical lead we had gained by virtually eliminating our renewables subsidisation.

[BlasterBates]

Huge windmill farms will be required to provide the electricity to build new windmill farms

[EternalOptimist]

The same could have been said about any energy source before the technology was available to properly use it. Imagine an industrial-revolution era Britain trying to handle nuclear power.

All technology becomes cheaper and more efficient as time goes on, so unless we kill ourselves off the tech will eventually become sustainable and useful.

The main thing that accelerates efficiency and cheapness gains is usage (experience + necessity breeds innovation). This is why smart countries subsidise these things - they are not doing it to be clean (though that is good PR) they are doing it to gain a developmental edge in future power generation methods that will pay pack any subsidisation costs a thousand fold.

As always the UK has shot itself in the foot and ended the (small) technical lead we had gained by virtually eliminating our renewables subsidisation.

Are you seriously suggesting that the industrial revolution was driven by subsidies ?

If there was any future in these technologies they would be driven by investment and people being prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
Spending other peoples money in persuit of a dream has to be one of the easiest things to do in the world

[wurzel]

Just got a letter from the council yesterday telling me the local quarry is appealing the council's decision to refuse permission to erect four 80 metre turbines. Posted about this here last year.

They chose to wait until the last possible day in the 6 month window to lodge the appeal . Thought we were safe.

By all accounts it is to ensure that the public enquiry happens as far after the General Election as possible when they hope Eric Pickles has gone & Ed Miliband's placeman will apply some pressure. Or something like that.

Edit: Better plug the website while I'm at it...

[wurzel]

This little beauty will be most impressive:

260ft wind turbine to be built by Swansea's Fabian Way | South Wales Evening Post

The scheme had been knocked back by Swansea Council, but Welsh Government-appointed planning inspector Hywel Wyn Jones concluded that the structure would not cause significant harm to the landscape

There you go.

I fear that's what will happen here. There's more than a fighting chance of getting ours rejected with Pickles at the helm but if Labour get in that'll probably be it.

[pjclarke]

Rather than swallowing the Registers spin unchallenged, worth going to the source article

What the two Google engineers are saying is that a switch to renewables alone 'simply won't work' to reduce CO2 to safe levels.

We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.

The Google 'RE<C' project to develop renewable technologies that could compete economically with coal for energy generation failed and was closed down three years ago, so that is not exactly news.

So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.

But they are optimistic, arguing that with sufficient incentives, a new 'disruptive' game-changing technology will emerge

We’re glad that Google tried something ambitious with the RE<C initiative, and we’re proud to have been part of the project. But with 20/20 hindsight, we see that it didn’t go far enough, and that truly disruptive technologies are what our planet needs. To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies. Fortunately, new discoveries are changing the way we think about physics, nanotechnology, and biology all the time. While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible.

I think there are two things wrong with their analysis as presented - firstly they seem to assume no intervention in the coal market, ie no carbon tax. Coal is only 'cheap' because the future costs of the damage CO2 may do a not a part of its cost, they're an externality, which we are passing on to future generations. Secondly I may be wrong but they they don't seem to include nuclear as part of the low-carbon mix ....

So to answer the question nothing here suggests that renewables have no future; the engineers have merely concluded that even under the most optimistic assumption, replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables will not avert dangerous climate change, something we've known for years.

Bizarrely enough, nowhere do these very bright people try and deny the basic scientific conclusions about AGW ....

[BrilloPad]

They have a long term future. In the short term we need lots of coal powered generators and in the medium term lots of nuclear.

[EternalOptimist]

Wind and solar have no future, except as costly sops to the eco-zealots. Even wave power saw another setback this week as a company went down , because they couldnt get more funding

[BlasterBates]

2009 - 4 years to save the planet


...and what happened? ....

CO2 emissions rising even faster than in 2009.....

Doomed........