Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
It is called the U.S. Climate Alliance, and while making electricity more costly may not be the goal, it is the certain outcome of their goal, which is to end fossil fuel use.
The 23 members of the Alliance are basically those states with Democrat governors. This is not quite true, as one member has a Republican governor and two states with Democrat governors are not members. It is close enough that we can think of it as the Democrat governors organized to end fossil fuel use.
It is called the U.S. Climate Alliance, and while making electricity more costly may not be the goal, it is the certain outcome of their goal, which is to end fossil fuel use.
The 23 members of the Alliance are basically those states with Democrat governors. This is not quite true, as one member has a Republican governor and two states with Democrat governors are not members. It is close enough that we can think of it as the Democrat governors organized to end fossil fuel use.
The fundamental goal is clearly stated on their home page:
“Alliance members are committed to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
What is deeply ironic is that the Democrats are widely running on a platform of affordable electricity which is often simply termed “affordability.” The reality is that the standard steps for reducing fossil fuel use all work to drive up the cost of electricity.
There are four different technologies involved in cutting fossil fuel use. Here is a quick look at how each drives up the cost of electricity.
First is intermittent wind and solar power. Here is problem is that grid reliability requires that reliable generation must always be available, all the way up to peak need. When wind and solar are producing energy this reliable generation stands idle which is very expensive. There may be fuel savings, but these are not the biggest cost, which is the mortgage payments.
Third is electric vehicles which cut fossil fuel use in transportation. These greatly increase the need for electricity which means building a lot more reliable generation that will then be made inefficient and expensive with more intermittent wind and solar power. In addition, expensive upgrades to the local distribution system may be needed to supply adequate electricity for charging, even for a small number of EVs.
Fourth is utility funded energy efficiency projects which many Alliance States mandate. These supposedly reduce costs in the long run but are very expensive up front. For example, if a project pays for itself in 20 years, then it initially costs twenty times the annual savings. These costs are typically paid by the ratepayers.
The Climate Alliance states are heavily promoting all four of these very expensive technologies because this is how fossil fuel use is reduced in accordance with the Paris Agreement. All the member states have “Clean electricity standards” and 19 have “100% clean electricity goals.” Many have “energy storage goals” as well and massive efficiency programs.
The Alliance website even has a searchable “Policy Database” that contains numerous state laws and executive orders mandating the use of these expensive technologies to reduce fossil fuel use.
The Climate Alliance states are basically what are called the Blue States. Taken together these expensive policies may well explain a lot of the Blue State electricity cost increases which far exceed the Red State increases. See the “Blue States, High Rates” website for more information.
There have been a number of studies of the cost increases but I have not seen one that looks at all four of these big expense factors. Some will be hard to get good data on, so the cost impact is well hidden.
The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and our special guest Lois Perry, director of Heartland UK/Europe, will cover some of the breaking and crazy climate news of the week from around the world.
Losing the 2000 election was the best thing to happen to Al Gore. He has since become insanely wealthy and admired around the world by peddling climate alarmism. Hollywood gave him an Oscar for his fictitious documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and (like Michael Mann) he claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his environmental activism.
Yet despite trillions of dollars in propaganda, there’s a sign that Gore’s message of doom is in big trouble: He gave a TED Talk attacking “climate realists” by name. That’s BIG, folks—it shows that the truth, the data, and reality are winning.
The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and our special guest Lois Perry, director of Heartland UK/Europe, will cover some of the breaking and crazy climate news of the week from around the world.
Antarctica is gaining ice, defying the predictions of climate doomers. A BBC presenter is worried that climate scientists might be a monolithic ideological bloc. An environmental protection charity in Scotland is finally pushing back against wind power because of how it kills threatened bird species. And a “controlled burn” by our government betters turned into a raging inferno at the Grand Canyon that destroyed a historic building.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, and X—we’ll answer the questions you leave for our panel in the chat!
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things’ Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things’ Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.
What they don’t say is that all this was unmistakably obvious for a decade or more, that thousands of engineers and scientists have been telling the world this would happen, and that Reuters wouldn’t report them, not even when they had a Nobel prize.
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Why now? Because reality is making Reuters look stupid — it’s not the reality of high costs or blackouts, but the reality that Trump won, and set fire to the “transition” fantasy by dumping Paris, dropping subsidies, opening gas fields, and installing a corporate energy CEO as the US Energy Secretary. Chris Wright and JD Vance are dropping truth bombs in speeches that can’t be ignored. Word is spreading fast, and if Reuters don’t report this, they risk being turned into the same irrelevant wreckage the US mainstream media channels already are. As the US economy ramps up, other countries will have to let go of their green delusions in order to keep up. The game changed. There’s no point upping the ante in the UN-poker game if the main player has played a Royal Flush.
Even the graph! An actual graph!
Source Reuters and Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2024
Two graphs!
Presumably the owners of Reuters have sold out of their renewable stocks. (Readers here read about this trend in October 2023.)
Source: Reuters, and S&P | P.Thal Larsen.
So this is arse-covering, forgive the language, but this is also an escape clause for allies and believers
The owners of Reuters (whoever they are) — are presumably part of The Blob, since they have covered up its failures for decades, and gave millions to Hillary. This article is also an escape clause for allies and a warning to jump ship. It’s full of excuses — we were misled by an era of low interest rates; we had good intentions; we didn’t realize China made all our stuff with coal, you know, and Energy transitions take a very long time. What a shock!
The way Edward Chancellor writes, anyone could have got this wrong. Even the oil giants made mistakes, you know, and are now looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business. Never is there any question that say, National Energy Managers ought to have done their homework, or that Energy Ministers should have done due diligence before recklessly trying to transform electricity grids based on what Al Gore and a teenage girl told them to do:
Not long ago, investors worried that traditional energy companies would be left with “stranded assets” – oil and gas fields abandoned as demand for fossil fuels dried up. Yet earlier this month Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab announced a near-$1 billion writedown for its investment in a wind project off the New Jersey coast. BP (BP.L), opens new tab is scrapping targets for increasing generation of renewable energy and cutting oil and gas production. As Lees writes, “across the sector, oil majors that shifted their portfolios to green energy are now realising their mistake and are looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business.”
The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.The energy expert Vaclav Smil has likened the costs of the planned energy transition to those incurred by a nation fighting total war for decades on end. The era of zero interest rates created a sense that the supply of capital was infinite and its cost negligible. Rising interest rates dispelled that illusion. The economics of wind and solar power, with their large upfront investment costs and relatively low operating expenses, have been upended. Wood Mackenzie calculates that every 2 percentage point increase in the risk-free rate raises the levelised cost of renewable electricity by around 20%.
I’ve always said there will come a day when everyone says “I was always a skeptic”
This is the start of that normalization. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of the end in the energy battle.
But it’s not even the start of the science battle. They’re still “believers” of big-gov bad-science. The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels….
What the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable Ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
A recent post at The Nation titled “Climate Change Is the Real National Security Threat” claims that climate change is the reason hurricanes Helene and Milton were so damaging and that it is the premier national security threat to the United States. This is nonsense. Not only is there no evidence supporting the idea that climate change is “supercharging” hurricanes, but contrary to The Nation’s assertions, mass migration and unrest are also not being caused by climate change.
Silhouette of soldier with sniper rifle standing under scorching sun in the mountains
By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
A recent post at The Nation titled “Climate Change Is the Real National Security Threat” claims that climate change is the reason hurricanes Helene and Milton were so damaging and that it is the premier national security threat to the United States. This is nonsense. Not only is there no evidence supporting the idea that climate change is “supercharging” hurricanes, but contrary to The Nation’s assertions, mass migration and unrest are also not being caused by climate change.
The Nation begins by describing the usual threat assessment reports given to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). This report covers a range of international threats like our enemies abroad, international conflicts etc., but The Nation highlights and amplifies a section in the report which cites climate change is a threat.
The Nation writes:
“…in a section on “transnational issues,” are we told that climate change also poses a risk to US security, by triggering mass migrations and unrest overseas. Missing from the DNI’s warning, however, is the threat that climate change poses to our country—to our lives, communities, and vital infrastructure. Now, in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, this oversight should be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest intelligence failures ever.”
The Nation claims that “while we’ve spent trillions of dollars on the ostensible effort to defend our country and our allies from hostile nations, we’ve done pitifully little to protect ourselves or others from the destructive forces of climate change.” This claim is ironic since federal, state, and local governments have spent trillions of dollars on green energy boondoggles, climate related subsidies, and implementing and enforcing climate restrictions over the past couple of decades. This fact is conveniently ignored by The Nation and the numerous climate grifters, who keep demanding ever more money and power.
This is an especially grotesque amount of money spent because there is no evidence that the money being spent or the restrictions imposed on people’s freedom have had or will have any impact on climate change; or that climate change, based on the impacts so far, is a problem warranting government action to prevent it at all.
For instance, the DNI report claims that climate change triggers mass migrations and unrest overseas. This is false. So-called “climate refugees” have not materialized in over a hundred years of climate change, even as alarmists claimed that nations would be displaced due to rising seas. As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Climate Refugees, nearly all the nations that are commonly listed as at risk due to crop failures have actually seen increasing crop yields during this allegedly dangerous period. Data show that deaths due to climate and weather-related disasters have actually declined over the past few decades. (See figure below)
Figure 1: Source: Nima Yaghmaei et al., The Human Cost of Disasters: An Overview of the Last 20 Years (2000-2019), U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, October 13, 2020, https://www.undrr.org/media/48008/download
Bad weather can cause unrest, but it doesn’t mean climate change is the cause of any bad weather or weather related unrest abroad. As discussed in more than 70 posts at Climate Realism addressing similar claims, in the countries where mass emigration has occurred in recent years, it has been driven by war, civil strife, and political unrest, and economic conditions unrelated to changing climate conditions in the form of long term trends in worsening weather or agricultural or economic decline.
The Nation’s claim that hurricanes Helene and Milton were made more destructive because of climate change equally lacks any basis in scientific fact or data. The magazine writes: “[t]he destructive powers of Helene and Milton were vastly amplified by the effects of climate change,” because of rising water temperatures due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which then created “the energy that transforms ordinary hurricanes into superstorms like Helene and Milton.” This is false. Climate Realism has debunked similar claims made by various mainstream media outlets that climate change caused or contributed to Hurricanes Helene and Milton in multiple posts, here, here, here, and here, as a few examples.
While warm waters do contribute to hurricane formation, this has always been the case. However, the majority of this year’s warming is known and widely reported to have been driven by a natural El Niño event in the Pacific. It is notable that The Nation neglected to mention this fact, when other outlets, for instance, the typically-alarmist BBC acknowledged it. Warm water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for hurricane strength and formation. In a recent Climate Realism post, here, the South China Morning Post admits that, in addition to warm waters, factors such as wind shear and favorable regional circulation patterns contribute to or prevent the formation of cyclones.
Data show that hurricanes have not been getting more extreme amid the modest warming of the past century, as discussed dozens of times at Climate Realism. This fact is backed up by hurricane records that have been reported even by outlets like CBS.
Weather resilience is worthy of planning for and funding and critical for national security, but what The Nation is asking for is not that. They are asking for societal restructuring based on the false premise that current and future weather can and needs to be changed by human efforts, otherwise, the magazine implies, U.S. national security is at risk. No one should fall for this falsehood. The U.S. does face a variety of national security threats; climate change is not among them, much less it being the most important threat security threat the nation faces. Quite simply, the claim that climate change poses a national security threat to the United States is, in the words President-elect Trump uses to describe climate change itself, “a hoax.”
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – NOVEMBER 30: Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber (C), President of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference, attends the opening session of the conference shortly after he was confirmed COP28 president on November 30, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The COP28, which is running from November 30 through December 12, is bringing together stakeholders, including international heads of state and other leaders, scientists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples representatives, activists and others to discuss and agree on the implementation of global measures towards mitigating the effects of climate change. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
As regular readers know, I have been tracking the U.N. development of the so-called “loss and damage” issue for several years. This has been a very dangerous concept.
As promoted by the extreme alarmists, it contemplates America and other developed countries paying trillions of dollars in reparations to developing countries for the supposed damages due to climate change we have caused. There have been future damage estimates as high as $400 trillion.
At COP 27 last year, an official loss and damage fund was launched but with no specific nature. That chore was left to today’s COP 28, and it has now been done, at least a very important little bit.
Happily, the official COP decision on the loss and damage fund has now been made, and it appears harmless. I sigh with relief.
Contributions to the fund are completely voluntary. There is no claim of reparation, obligation, compensation, nothing like that. It is simply a mechanism for rendering foreign aid for natural disasters. The agreement says this: “…funding arrangements, including a fund, for responding to loss and damage are based on cooperation and facilitation and do not involve liability or compensation.”
Of course, the alarmists are going to continue to describe it as a reparation fund, but that is just the usual hype. There is no there there.
Given that the US foreign aid budget runs around $30 billion a year, there should be no problem running a bit of that through the loss and damage fund, if and when it finally gears up. Initial contributions from various countries are running between $100 million and $10 million, which is almost nothing. My understanding is the US is kicking in a trivial $17.5 million. I suspect the US Government spends that much a year on unused airplane tickets.
Nor is this $100 million a year just a single donation. The UN’s flagship Green Fund only gets about $9 billion every five years, which is just $2 billion a year. If loss and damage do that well it is still insignificant compared to the $400 trillion hype. So, for now the loss and damage threat has simply ceased to exist. It consists of voluntary peanuts.
Mind you, one big fight lies ahead, but America and the other developed countries may have little to do with it. The monster question is, who gets these peanuts?
Pretty much every country gets bad weather, which is what loss and damage funds are supposed to cover. Taken together, the developing countries’s losses and damages are huge compared to the likely funding. So, who is going to get what little there is?
The COP decision is perfectly silent on the substance of this fundamental question. But we do have a procedure of sorts.
First, there will be created a Board to oversee the fund, which should be a contentious process in itself. Then, the Board is supposed to develop the rules, which at some point have to include who qualifies to get funded for their losses and/or damages.
However, what the Board decides is then subject to the approval of the next COP, which is likely to be where the real fight happens. Given that every country that is not going to get funded can veto giving some other country funding, this could be a protracted process. It might even be unresolvable.
In fact, we have a bit of a model for an impasse. The next COP is supposed to be in Eastern Europe, but no agreement on where can be reached because every possibility has been vetoed to date.
I am not making this up. Getting every Eastern European country to agree on who, instead of them, should get the enormous cash flow of 70,000 two-week visitors may not be possible. This one-shot COP income may well exceed all the loss and damage funding. It would be hilarious if COP 29 did not occur for this reason.
In any case, the news is great. The extremely dangerous loss and damage issue has been rendered harmless. It might even be paralyzed. One can hope, and time will tell.
Robert Lyman exposes the freakish math swirling around Dubai COP this fortnight in his Financial Post article COP28 by the (very big) numbers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
This weekend’s climate meeting will discuss trillions of dollars. No one will mention its chance of success is zero.
Neuroscience tells us the human brain is very bad at interpreting large numbers. Most people know that million, billion and trillion are all big numbers but can’t really understand what the difference between them is. Answer: it’s big. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years, which is a lot more than 12 days.
Our cognitive difficulties with large numbers will be a problem when reading the news from the COP28 climate conference that convenes in Dubai on Thursday.
The conference has a wide-ranging agenda. It also will be attended by a large number of people — over 70,000 at last count. There’s the first large-number problem for COP28. How does a group of 70,000 people possibly discuss anything in a coherent way?
The organizers have identified five themes on which they would like to see agreementamong the almost 190 governments that will be represented. When you’re talking governments, 190 is yet another brain-challenging number.
To oversimplify, there are four main themes:
♦ how to accelerate all countries’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so as to meet a proposed 2050 “net-zero” target (zero not being a large number); ♦ how to induce wealthier countries to give much more money to poorer countries to help them both mitigate and adapt to climate change; ♦ how to persuade all countries to phase out production of fossil fuels by 2050; and, finally, ♦ how to increase the UN’s role as central coordinator and global regulator of climate efforts.
Most discussions behind closed doors will be about money. Rich countries are now paying about US$70 billion in climate aid, mostly to help finance GHG emissions reduction. The developing countries want this raised to at least US$1.4 trillion per year by 2026, 20 times higher. Twenty is not actually that large a number, except when talking about multiplying already very big dollar amounts by it. Developing countries have also demanded that funding for adaptation rise to at least US$600 billion per year. At last year’s COP27 in Egypt, they got agreement in principle for a new fund to pay for the “loss and damages” they will incur from adverse weather events they attribute to the historic GHG emissions of the industrialized countries, though no dollar amounts were agreed to. Finally, developing countries are pushing for a new Global Biodiversity Fund, to which developed countries would donate a mere US$20 billion per year.
Round numbers: rich countries would be on the hook for US$2 trillion per year. If allocations were based on GDP, Canada would owe three per cent of the total — or US$60 billion per year. In Canadian dollars, that’s roughly 78 billion CAN$. There are about 16 million households in Canada so (do the math) each household would owe $4,875. Per year. That’s a number the average person can easily understand. He or she can also understand there is absolutely no way the Canadian public or voters in any other OECD country would ever agree to such a thing. Not even if they didn’t know (but they do) that China, producer of 30 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions, not only would not be contributing but might well qualify as a recipient.
The previous 27 COPs (for Conference of the Parties) have all promoted ever-more ambitious emissions reductions. But since the first COP global emissions have risen 60 per cent, driven by developing countries’ relentless efforts to achieve more economic development for their burgeoning populations. There is no evidence that trend will change.
China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and others all see fossil fuel production as key to their economic development and energy security. They are unlikely to commit to production declines even if a few OECD countries do.
The United Nations secretariat will lobby hard at COP28 to expand the role of existing institutions, including even more climate summits to place even more political pressure on leaders, and they may succeed in this (though many of us feel just one a year is already more than enough). How difficult can it be to convince tens of thousands of climate stakeholders to travel to exotic conference locales each year? Especially if the general public cannot grasp the numbers they’re playing with.
Yes, those are trillions of dollars in the projection.
This weekend the media in general will report in glowing terms on the energy and enthusiasm of conference participants, especially those representing environmental NGOs. The communiqué will note every new commitment made yet entirely ignore that the probability the entire process will meet its objectives is a very, very small number not significantly different from zero.
Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this).
Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed. Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified. The electricity sector – generation, transmission and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use fossil fuels. I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering, and recently retired as Professor of Technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.
At the moment the USA uses on average 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuel either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity. Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 per cent, while electric motors are more than 90 per cent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 per cent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level. Let’s assume that replacing today’s fossil-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this. I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.
Next we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s. But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 per cent of the size of the present grid for the heat task.
So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 per cent bigger than its present size. We also need to work on the buildings. US building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, much of it is not. All of it would need to be, for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit programme the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.
We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production. These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel. Now let’s get the power grid decarbonised and make it 60 per cent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones. We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.
The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents. Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps (A) current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A. The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago, when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance. In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A. The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100-A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing. The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.
As 60 per cent of the current electrical generation is fossil fuelled, we need to close all the fossil stations down and increase the remaining, non-fossil generation capacity four times over. There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far carbon capture doesn’t exist outside fossil fuel production. Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level) and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent. So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing the insulated buildings and the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world. Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.
Now let’s think about intermittency. Sometimes there is no wind and no sunshine, and our largely renewables-driven grid will have no power. Current hydropower storage would run a net-zero grid in the USA for a few hours; current battery capacity could do so for a few minutes. Net-zero advocates often suggest simply building huge amounts of battery storage, but the costs of this are colossal: 80 times as much as the power plants, hundreds of trillions of dollars. And indeed this is simply fantasy as the necessary minerals are not available in anything like the required amounts. If prices climbed, more reserves would become economic – but the prices are already impossibly high.
Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers. The UK engineering firm Atkins estimates that a $1-billion project in the electrical sector over 30 years needs 24 or more professional, graduate engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople for the whole period. Scaling up these figures for the $12 trillion of electricity sector projects just described, we will need 300,000 professional electrical engineers and 1.2 million skilled tradespeople, full time, for the 30 years to 2050 on just this part of the net-zero project. Based on the budget, we might expect the buildings retrofit sector to need a similar workforce of roughly three million people. This is a combined workforce roughly the size of the entire existing construction sector.
Now let’s think about materials. A 600-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) needs 300 tonnes of high-performance steels. We would need 360 5-MW wind turbines, each running at an optimistic average 33 per cent efficiency (and a major energy storage facility alongside which we are just ignoring as it would be impossibly expensive) to achieve the same continuous 600-MW supply. In fact, since the life of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGT turbines, we would actually need more than 720 of them. The mass of the nacelle (the turbine at the top of the tower) for a 5-MW wind turbine is comparable to that of a CCGT. Furthermore, the mass of concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the mass of concrete for the foundations of each individual onshore wind turbine, and much smaller than the concrete and ballast for each offshore one. We are going to need enormous amounts of high-energy materials such as steel and concrete: something like a thousand times as much as we need to build CCGT or nuclear powerplants, and renewed more frequently. This vast requirement is probably going to affect prices, both of materials and energy – and not in a good way – but for now we’ll just assume costs remain at something like current levels.
So we can see that the infrastructure parts of the net-zero project which are theoretically possible would cost comfortably in excess of $35 trillion and would require a dedicated and highly skilled workforce comparable to that of the construction sector as well as enormous amounts of materials. Net zero would also require several things which today are completely impossible: scalable non-fossil energy storage, very high temperature electrical industrial processes, serious electrical aviation and shipping. There would also be the matter of decarbonising agriculture. These things, if they can even be achieved, would multiply the cost at least several times over, to more than $100 trillion.
So the real cost of net-zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050. There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living. The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood. The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big picture engineering realities is despicable. People need to know the realities of net zero.
Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA. He is a trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The bottom line is that there is no scientific proof that wind energy saves any consequential amount of CO2 — and plenty of evidence that wind energy is not a good solution to a claimed catastrophic threat (that requires a large, short-term change).
The proponents of Climate Change insist that we are facing an imminent existential threat to our very existence. To prevent this catastrophe they assert that we must make immediate, impactful changes — particularly regarding our energy policies.
The primary solution advocated by the major Climate Change advocates (e.g., the IPCC and the scientists comprising the so-called 97% consensus) is industrial wind energy.
The fundamental question is: if we accept the Climate Change contention and then spend Trillions of dollars to assiduously implement their wind energy solution, will the existential threat be extinguished in the short time-table they say we have?
The answer is an unequivocal NO, for at least the following six (6) reasons:
1 – There is no scientific proof that wind energy saves any consequential CO2.
Industrial wind energy has been around now for over 20 years, so there is plenty of empirical data available. However, if we ask for scientific proof that wind energy actually saves a meaningful amount of CO2, what wind proponents provide are “studies” based on computer models. There are two major problems with that non-answer:
a) Computer models are appropriate for when there is no actual data available. However, since there are 200,000+ operating wind turbines on the planet, there is an enormous amount of real-world data about exactly how much CO2 is really being saved. So why would empirical data be hidden, and computer models put forward instead? Because that data evidently is not favorable to the wind industry lobby, as it shows little CO2 being saved.
b) The other reason that wind marketers love computer models, is that they can easily hide important assumptions in the code. For example, one of their favorite tricks is to compare wind energy produced CO2 to coal produced CO2. The problem is that this is a straw man comparison. If we are going to add 1 GW of new electrical energy generation, the comparison should be between what the likely options are today — not what they were before. In other words, compare wind to nuclear or gas, not coal.
A second serious problem with models, is that wind-generated CO2 is not accurately calculated in the computer models put forth by wind lobbyists. E.g., they typically do not take into account all the manufacturing and assembly generated CO2 (e.g. 2± million pounds of concrete per turbine). E.g., they usually do not take into account the CO2 produced by the gas generator that is typically paired with each wind project (see #2 below). Etc.
2 – There is good evidence that wind energy can produce more CO2 than gas.
This non-intuitive reality is based on the fact that there is no such thing on the Grid as Wind energy by itself. What typically exists is a Wind+Gas package. (See “a” below.)
There are two very different types of Gas electricity generators (Single-Cycle and CombinedCycle). Briefly, they differ in three major ways (cost, response time, and CO2 generated).
Most of the time (because of cost and response time), Wind is paired with Single-Cycle Gas — so the Wind+Gas package is Wind+Gas (Single-Cycle).
The kicker is to be aware that analyses done by independent experts have concluded that: Wind+Gas (Single-Cycle) can produce more CO2 than Gas (Combined-Cycle)! (See “b” below.) a) Sample references regarding the Wind+Gas package:
3 – There are quality studies that conclude that wind turbines add to global warming. The reasons for this unsuspected outcome are a bit complex, and range from “increased boundary layer mixing” to “altered large-scale atmospheric flow.” Some sample studies that have come to such conclusions are:
4 – Several studies conclude that turbines affect local meteorological conditions. This is related to the prior item but is more on a local level. One consequence of these influences is that crop production can be adversely affected. Some sample studies that have concluded that local weather is affected are:
5 – Multiple studies show that turbine performance drops steadily with age. This shouldn’t really be a surprise. Such a decline is attributable to some of the mechanical parts of the turbine wearing down, to increased resistance built up on turbine blades. Some sample studies that have analyzed this performance decline are:
6 – Several studies demonstrate the diminishing returns of adding more Turbines. Electricity is generated by wind turbines extracting (converting) energy from solar-generated wind. However, put simply, there quickly comes a point where adding more turbines results in a lower amount of electricity generated per turbine. The mechanics are explained in a variety of studies, and some sample studies are:
The bottom line is that there is no scientific proof that wind energy saves any consequential amount of CO2 — and plenty of evidence that wind energy is not a good solution to a claimed catastrophic threat (that requires a large, short-term change). What does it say about the “experts” who propose an illegitimate solution? It either means that: a) they are not real experts, or b) they are pushing an undeclared agenda. All this should be no surprise as (regarding the global warming issue) we have left the security of genuine Science, and are now sinking into the quagmire of political science.
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