Links tagged “wind”

Bruce M. Everett: "The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide – a benign gas.  In reality, this slight increase in atmospheric CO2concentrations (from 0.03% in the nineteenth century to 0.04% today) has brought nothing but beneficial effects, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance." ...

"In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributes about 2% of total global energy use and solar just over 1%.  Fossil fuels accounted for 84%, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years." ...

"The US private vehicle fleet is currently on the order of 250 million vehicles, of which approximately 1 million or 0.4% are battery electric vehicles.  Electric cars are at present about twice as expensive to produce as comparable gasoline models, and, like renewable power generation, depend on massive subsidies for their viability." ... 

"The world may someday transition away from fossil fuels, but it’s not happening yet.  All we have so far are predictions, wishful thinking and the waste of large amounts of money for a small impact on a non-problem."

David McDermott Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Energy without Conscience: "For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism...What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere." 

"The United States has built a vast infrastructure for generating, transmitting, and consuming it—all almost entirely based on planet-destroying fossil fuels and nuclear power." - "Renewables can provide that plenitude—and already do through wind and solar farms in Texas and California—but not necessarily all the time. The sun shines at us constantly, with more energy that we can possibly use at any moment, but the Earth’s rotation puts us in shadow at nightfall. And wind, of course, can simply stop. As a result, the leading fossil- and nuclear-free sources of energy bounce from feast to famine, raising the possibility of more frequent and longer power cuts. Critics—often supporters of natural gas—say wind and solar power are “not ready.” Renewables, they warn us, pose an “intermittency problem.” ... "For those seriously concerned about climate change, the inverse—the demand for electrical continuity—may be the real problem...We ought to consider enduring much more than six hours of electrical downtime every year for the sake of transitioning more rapidly away from fossil fuels."

Paul Driessen: But our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids provide over 80% of the energy that makes America’s jobs, lives and living standards possible. Locking them in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that are far less apparent, and have (deliberately?) received little media attention. In 2018, America’s fossil fuels generated about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. But almost two-thirds of the nation’s non-exported natural gas served industrial, commercial and residential needs – including factories, hospital emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and tens of millions of US homes. That’s equivalent to another 2.7 billion MWh. The nation’s 65 million cars, light trucks, buses, semi-trailers, motor homes, tractors, backhoes and other vehicles consumed the gasoline and diesel equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh. Altogether, that’s nearly 7.5 billion MWh that the Green New Deal would have to replace by 2035!

Dr. Benny Peiser, the GWPF's director, said: “The PM’s pledge is a gift to the green lobby and a kick in the teeth for ordinary families and businesses who will have to pay a heavy price. Islington will be cheering, but the Red Wall will be spitting."

"This would dramatically alter the role of smart meters, which are currently capable only of sending data on energy use to energy networks...

Similarly, central heating systems could be turned off in homes across a whole area if too many electric vehicles are plugged in to charge at once, for example...

Currently, there's no definition of when networks would be allowed to declare an emergency and therefore gain access to household devices."

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Vijay Jayaraj: "In his recently unveiled $2 Trillion Clean Energy Plan, Biden says that he will “move ambitiously to generate clean, American-made electricity to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.” In other words, he intends to put $2 trillion of irreversible funding into making the American power sector completely devoid of coal, oil, and natural gas, from which America currently generates more than 62 percent of all its electricity. 
Would Biden’s plan usher in a California-like situation in the rest of the country? The answer to that question is yes. Even if Biden implements a proportion of what he has promised, there will be a considerable impact on energy security on a national level."