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Dumb Energy: Tilting at Windmills
re: dumb energy
re: Mercedes eSprinter, GM EV Trucks: Science Fair Projects Requiring Fantasy Infrastructure Buildout
Windmills kill millions of birds including endangered species and they appear to be killing dolphins and whales, with unknown and potentially disastrous effects on all manner of sea life. Windmills also scar vast areas of land or water, as I can attest to driving through the western US. All that might be OK if they made sense, which they do not.
The Inadequacy of Wind Power
by Wade Elllison, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
...energy of the wind is that of the moving air.... such energy is 1⁄2Mv^2, where M is the mass of air and v the speed. The mass of air reaching each square metre of the area swept by the turbine blade in a second is M = ρv, where ρ is the density of air: about 1.2 kg per cubic metre. So, the maximum power that the turbine can deliver is 1⁄2ρv^3 watts per square metre.
If the wind speed is 10 metres per second (about 20 mph) the power is 600 watts per square metre at 100% efficiency.2 That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 million watts) by wind would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area – that should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists.
But the performance of wind is much worse than that, as a look at the simple formula shows. Because the power carried by the wind depends on the third power of the wind speed, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of 8. Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up 8 times, and as a result the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.
...Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that.
...With general energy shortages, the war in Europe, high prices and the likelihood of failures in electricity supply, many popular scientific presumptions underlying energy policy should be questioned. Wind power fails on every count.
WIND: “Hinkley Point C” is a 3.3 GW nuclear power plant—reliable, green, compact, it keeps the lights on 24X365. Nuclear power is the only non-fantasy energy solution for humanity.
Whether the climate hysteria has any justification at all, the only future for humanity is nuclear power. Everything else (solar, wind) is intellectual fraud—they cannot and never will supply power when needed, let alone at the scale needed to support a decent quality of life, which means low cost and dependable 24X7 output.
Here in California, the propaganda on “savings” from green power and impending end-of-humanity doom are at hysterical levels. The lies about “savings” rely on consumers not actually checking their power bill, ignoring the steep costs involved (cost is 50% to 75% higher than claimed, ignores massively unaffordable conversion costs, and ignores escalating prices and more and more frequent black/brownouts).
Unlike my rich green-virtue-signalling neighbors, neither I nor most Californians can afford an $60K Tesla with $5K high-amp home charger along with $24K solar installation, $5K breaker box upgrade, $30K electric heating conversion, $6K heat-pump water heater, $3K stove replacement, etc. The cost difference approaches an order of magnitude vs an incredibly efficient clean-burning 1.5L gasoline-engine car along with natural gas heating. The dumb energy electric car is beyond stupid: they are rarely if ever driven far enough to even break even on its outrageous energy cost (twice that of a conventional car with far higher resource requirements), making electric cars a guaranteed losing proposition. And then 5-7 years in, a $20K battery pack replacement, electronic failures, and into the landfill she goes. Green is the new brown.
'Green' is a massive browning of quality of life, bank accounts, and the environment. Anyone who actually cares about the future should be putting all their efforts into "Gen 4" nuclear power solutions.
Electrification increases fossil fuel usage
To heat air or water for homes, the most efficient approach is to burn natural gas in the home, capturing 98% of the energy as hot air or hot water. The morons running California tell us we should instead burn natural gas in a power plant at a 40% loss of thermal energy in order to convert that gas into electricity, losing additional energy in transmission, in order to heat air/water within homes. This approach is going to increase the burning of natural gas by 67% for heating (via electricity) air and water in the home, sending both electric and gas rates soaring in the winter, when solar and wind are worth jack shit.
Baseline load
The sun does not shine at night and the wind rarely blows. This effectively means power that doubles or triples in cost, because all those fossil fuel plants are required when the 'green' sources are unavailable. And even when available, grid instability is a major technical problem due to gyrating energy production by those 'green' sources.
See also
Hidden Impact of Massive Solar Farms: Residents and Wildlife Affected, Aquifers Threatened
Biden's Solar Push Is Destroying the Desert and Releasing Stored Carbon
Dumb Energy, by Normal Rogers @AMAZON and the ongoing dumster fire of delusional predictions:
As Climate Experts Warn of Looming Catastrophe, Past Bad Predictions Hurt Their Message
Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020
WSJ: The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists
Residents in Blue States Pay Much More for Electricity Than in Red States
