Renewable energy isn’t renewable, environmentally friendly, inexpensive or reliable. Other than that it is just great–especially for the billionaires sucking down billions in subsidies. Here is an example of how stupid renewable energy is. To make wind turbines work, you need very light materials for the blades that kill millions of birds every year. One of those light materials is balsa wood. Balsa trees grow in the besieged Amazon river basin forests that are threatened by over-development. So of course, there is now lots of legal and illegal logging of balsa trees in those forests, which are supposedly the “lungs of the earth” according to whacked environmentalists. Money always rules, so the environmentalists are easily bought off to not complain about these practices. Climate hysteria currently rules over more rational concerns about protecting natural environments. (WUWT Post)
I work in the area of financial accounting, budgeting, production processing. As such, analysis of costs is my everyday job.
Mark Jacobson’s 100% renewable studies are classic snake oil sales jobs. He makes two significant claims in his studies
A – that electric generation from renewables are less expensive than fossil fuel electric generation, and
B – that his proposed 100% renewable systems passes the every 30 sec stress test which means there is no grid failure.
Using Jacobson’s own tables in his studies (S7 through S13) for gross capacity for each type of generation source, average capacity factor), then using the actual real time capacity factors on a daily basis (hourly basis is preferred) for the EIA web site. The first issue to spot is in order to have sufficient capacity for periods when actual capacity is low, there has to be considerable excess capacity during periods of high actual capacity. Thus actual fixed costs are 4x to 5x (the numerator ) while the denominator should only use the electricity used, Not total electricity which is generated. The commonly used LCOE computation assumes all the electricity generated is used, which is not going to be true when the system required vast amounts of excess capacity.
The second claim is passing the “every 30 second stress test” is also a failure. Again using actual capacity factor form the EIA website on a daily basis, it becomes quite evident that there are several 1-5 day periods during a calendar year that demand exceeds available electric generation by 20%-40%. The February 2021 freeze would have been a 60%-70% shortage across the North American continent for at least 3 days.
(with the caveat that my computation only covered the lower 48 states)