The clean, green energy illusion, electricity reality, and baseless political ideology

Then there is the matter of transmission. Decentralised facilities, made necessary because of the hectares of solar panels and wind turbines, due to the diffuse nature of the energy captured, necessitate a lot of transmission, especially when located far from the points of consumption. This incurs more costs together with energy loss in long distance transmission increasing costs again. The transmission lines will cost us but the contractors and their financiers will be the beneficiaries.

Vulnerability

Solar arrays are vulnerable to expensive hail damage as has been experienced a number of times in the US. Also strong wind events can wreak havoc with wind turbines. This is a difficult to estimate, but very real cost and risk. Weather damage potential is far less for centralized facilities like gas, coal and nuclear that are not subject to extensive, vulnerable, open areas, while solar arrays and wind turbines are. Energy infrastructure is critical to society both in peace and war time. Solar arrays and wind turbines are vulnerable to both weather events and military aggression.

Material Intensity

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are inherently low in energy density, meaning they require significantly more physical infrastructure, including their inherent redundancy, to produce the same amount of electricity as fossil fuels or nuclear power. For example, a one-gigawatt (GW) wind farm needs hundreds of turbines, spread over vast areas of land, and demands large quantities of materials such as steel, copper, and rare earth elements. A nuclear plant of the same capacity requires about 10 per cent of the steel and concrete needed for a comparable wind farm.

All energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. This requires the mining and processing of millions of tonnes of raw material. There have been estimates that compared to fossil fuels, solar and wind facilities require, on average a 10-fold increase in materials mined and processed to produce the same amount of energy. This is largely due to the facilities covering a large surface area (such as solar arrays and wind turbine active areas) needed to capture diffuse energy and the associated equipment to transform the electricity to a useable form and its transmission to the points of consumption.

The totality of all these observations suggest that the equipment required to produce electricity in a form required by industry and households from diffuse sources such as solar and wind must inevitably be very expensive due to the extensive hardware required. Also renewables proponents never mention the fossil fuel energy used to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines, no so clean and green.

These facilities come from output from mines, they do not magically appear to give clean energy, so they are not as clean and green as it first appears. This observation tarnishes the gloss of the clean, green energy revolution. The clean, green energy revolution is an illusion.

Storage

Those who do not think that economic large-scale battery storage of electricity is a huge challenge should look at the electrochemistry behind the well-established (for small applications) lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery which is currently favoured for upscale development. Lithium is the third element in the Periodic Table, and has the smallest available cation. Li-ion batteries depend on the migration of Li cations backwards and forwards (charge and discharge) through a permeable membrane, reacting to an electrical potential. The economics of this depend on the concentration and speed of the cations across the membrane as well as the area of the membrane. The battery economics problem is an inconvenient truth for those who see storage as the answer to all-intermittent renewables electricity utilities. It is a formidable technological challenge that should not be trivialized or ignored.

It is arrogant and ridiculous to think that humankind can trump Nature. It is this sort of arrogance that leads to baseless, wisdom-free ideology. We are dependent on Nature, it will not change for us. Nuclear fusion would be the holy grail for electricity generation. Scientists have been working on this since WW2 and we are not there yet, if ever. The same applies to large-scale battery storage. It is a gross error to consider that the rapid progress in digital technologies will necessarily be repeated in the economic large-scale battery area because there are issues, not easily seen, that are fundamentally different. Developments in microchip technology have nothing to do with large-scale energy technology, except for control purposes. Microchip technology is not energy-intensive.

Storing energy has risks too. With increasing prevalence of Li-ion batteries, fire risk from them has been more prevalent, particularly with e-scooters. Keeping energy in a 'box' is not dissimilar to making a bomb without intentionally having a detonator. Energy stored in coal can spontaneously combust under certain conditions, as past sailors in wooden ships could tell us if they were with us now.