Both wind and solar power are voracious land hogs. Wind or solar can need 90 to 100 times more acreage than a natural gas plant to generate the same amount of electricity. And let’s not forget the large swaths of land that will have to be appropriated, and in heavily forested areas clear cut, to build transmission lines that connect solar and wind farms to distribution lines. //

You can't get around the energy density problem; you just can't. Physics is a harsh mistress. And the amount of land - habitat, if you want to put a point on it - required is considerable. //

Eco-activists fuss and scold over the cutting of trees to clear land for housing, commercial development, and raw materials, but apparently it’s just fine to remove trees if they’re replaced by solar panels. //

What we need more of isn't windmills, solar panels, or batteries. We need more nuclear power plants. We need more small modular reactors. We need a decentralized grid powered by splitting atoms. Do you want clean energy? This is clean energy. //

Throughout our history, every major technological advance in power – from animal to machine, from wood to coal to oil to gas – has had one key characteristic in common, and that is increased energy density. Nuclear power represents just such an increase over generating electricity with coal or gas. Solar and wind power run in just the opposite direction, which is why they don’t scale up, and were we to try, as we see here, the cost in land would be massive.

A 2022 paper by Kelly Senecal of Convergent Science and other scientists compares greenhouse gas emissions from plug-in, battery-powered electric vehicles with emissions from hybrid vehicles, which combine internal combustion engines with small battery packs.

The conclusion: Pure plug-in battery-powered vehicles can create more emissions than hybrids and even more than some traditional internal combustion engine vehicles—whose fuel delivery, air delivery, and ignition systems have improved over the past 20 years, increasing overall vehicle gas mileage.

Here’s why. //

Research shows that electricity for battery-powered vehicles is coming from coal and natural gas rather than renewables. //

Seventy percent of the world’s electric batteries are produced in China, and 83% of China’s energy comes from fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The longer the range of the battery, the more carbon is used in the production process. Senecal has calculated that carbon emissions to produce a battery for a Nissan Leaf were equivalent to driving a gasoline-powered BMW 320d for 24,000 miles. For a larger Tesla Model S battery, carbon emissions used in production are equivalent to driving the BMW 320d for 60,000 miles. //

Those concerned about greenhouse gas emissions may also be worried about the negative effects on the environment of mining for battery components. Such mining, which itself creates emissions, disrupts the land in low-income countries, such as cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where abuses of mine workers and significant pollution from mining have been documented by Amnesty International.

Lithium is another crucial component of batteries, and China, Chile, Argentina, and Australia are home to potentially damaging lithium mines, according to the Institute for Energy Research.

Never forget that Ebenezer Scrooge was inspired by Thomas Malthus //

In other words, the underlying reason for the electricity emergency is the lack of natural gas, nuclear, and coal, which can provide reliable electricity in all weather conditions, unlike solar panels and wind turbines.

It’s true that solar panels and wind turbines can still operate in cold weather. There is often still sunlight and wind when it is cold. Snow can be brushed off of solar panels, and it is possible to de-ice frozen wind turbines.

But the sun often doesn’t shine during the hours people most need electricity and wind is not reliable enough to provide electricity during the winter. Right now, PJM is generating very little electricity from wind and has had to resort to burning oil, which is dirtier and less efficient than coal, and far worse than natural gas or nuclear.

Our Vision

Humanity already has the technology to implement a global energy revolution. We can now usher in a post-scarcity era while solving the most intractable problems that threaten life on Earth.
Our Mission

The Science Council for Global Initiatives, Inc. (SCGI) is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to informing the public and policymakers about technologies and strategies that can lead to an energy-rich world. SCGI provides a forum for many of the world's prominent scientists, authors and activists to collaborate and share their knowledge regarding solutions to the world's energy, resource and environmental problems.

Never let a crisis go to waste. This may be one of the least original thoughts ever. It's been attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli, Saul Alinsky, and Rahm Emanuel among others. As Emanuel explained, a crisis ``is an opportunity to do things you could not do before". Trite but true.

The Federal bureaucracy, specifically the NRC and the EPA, present an insurmountable hurdle to the promise of cheap, reliable, pollution-free, nearly CO2 free nuclear power. They are incapable of change. Congressional prodding with pieties such as the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act is slow walked by the NRC and then turned into even more onerous regulation. The ADVANCE Act if passed will have the same fate. Congress suborned by well endowed, wind/solar lobbies is not about to do anything that would make a real difference.

But this will change. Under the present deranged policy of promoting intermittent sources and discouraging dispatchable sources, it is only a matter of time before the nation suffers a string of debilitating brown outs and black outs. Congress will suddenly wake up to the fact that those lobbyists may have oodles of money, but they represent maybe 5% of Americans. The other 95% will be pissed.

The political beasts will be desperate to do something to keep feeding at the public trough. We must be in position to tell them what.

These projects had been cited as proof that….Bidenomics was working. Who could have guessed that high inflation and surging interest rates were not conducive to the completion of vast wind farms? //

The Denmark-based energy firm said its board of directors voted to ax its high-profile Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2 twin projects in response to changing macroeconomic factors, including high inflation, supply chain bottlenecks and rising interest rates. //

Close The Fed | November 3, 2023 at 9:37 am
How the left copes with the cognitive dissonance of despising oil because of oil spills that injure animals yet push windmills that slice and dice birds and kill whales, and solar panels that fry birds, baffles me. //

George S | November 3, 2023 at 10:40 am
What governments dont understand about economics (well they do, but they pretend for the sake of votes from voter ignorance):

If government decrees that each homeowner shall hire two people to dig a hole in their yard in the morning and two people to fill in that hole in the afternoon it creates four full time jobs.

But what’s the catch? The homeowners don’t want holes dug in their yards so they are being forced to pay for services they don’t want. An economy can only grow — and be sustained — if there is a mutual exchange of wealth, where both parties benefit.

Where is the exchange of wealth in building wind farms? That’s why they fail.

But there are four reasons that most Americans prefer to buy cars with internal combustion engines: cost, convenience, climate, and China. //

the Biden administration’s push for EVs is to supposedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in order to produce supplies of batteries for EVs and other components, China is increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. America has 225 coal-fired power plants (which the Biden administration is trying to put out of business), and China has 1,118 (half of all the coal-fired plants in the world). //

Biden says that EVs will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that regulations on tailpipe and power plant emissions reduce global warming. But this is a fantasy. Emissions will not be reduced until the biggest producers of so-called greenhouse gases—China, India, and Russia—reduce their emissions, which they show no signs of doing.