Isn’t it glorious that wind and solar power have all but vanquished beastly fossil fuels?
Surely the fate of the Liddell coal-fired power station confirms that renewables and fossil fuels are mortal enemies. The Australian, May 22:
AGL plans to convert the Liddell site to a renewables hub with mooted developments including new solar generation, batteries, pumped hydro and conversion of the coal generators to “synchronous condensers” that help stabilise the electricity grid against volatility in demand or supply.
And the victors in the struggle are bound to be sun and wind power, aren’t they? Academics Andrew Blakers and Matthew Stocks in The Conversation, April 6:
Solar photovoltaic and wind power are rapidly getting cheaper and more abundant — so much so that they are on track to entirely supplant fossil fuels worldwide within two decades, with the time frame depending mostly on politics … The reality is that the rising tide of solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy offers our only realistic chance of avoiding dangerous climate change … it is very hard to envision any timely response to climate change that does not involve PV and wind doing most of the heavy lifting.
Think again. Michael Shellenberger, president of the California-based Environmental Progress lobby, Forbes, May 15:
Privately, many climate and energy experts admit that the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to decarbonise energy supplies is with nuclear power … yet many of the same experts proclaim publicly, “We need a clean energy mix!” — one that includes solar and wind. Why? The reason has nothing to do with technology, engineering or economics and everything to do with politics … Solar and wind are more popular than nuclear — by a lot.
But it’s hard to suppress the case for nuclear. More Shellenberger:
My cognitive dissonance worsened the more I learned about past energy transitions. Humankind has never transitioned to energy sources that are more costly, less reliable and have a larger environmental footprint than the incumbent — and yet that’s precisely what adding large amounts of solar and wind to the grid requires. Moreover, past energy transitions delivered both decarbonisation and “dematerialisation” — less material throughput per unit of energy … Places like France and Sweden have a few large (nuclear) power plants connected to cities by a few transmission lines. Material throughput is very low.
Popular renewables and old fossil fuels are friends, not enemies. Solar and wind lock in the old fossils:
The cognitive dissonance between my private beliefs and public position worsened as it became clear that, had France tried to decarbonise using a “clean energy mix” that included solar and wind, it would have had to increase oil or gas-burning in order to maintain electric reliability.
And, no, batteries aren’t the answer :
Solar and wind are unreliable over months and years, not just hours. That means unfathomable quantities of electricity would need to be stored over months or years … It would take 696 storage centres the size of Tesla’s in Australia to provide just four hours of backup power for (the grid) — and cost $50 billion. Cambridge’s David MacKay understood this problem all too well … “There is this appalling delusion people have,” he said, “that we can take this thing (solar) that is currently producing 1 per cent of our electricity and we can just scale it up.”
Shellenberger signs off:
Would you be surprised to learn that the oil and natural gas companies are perfectly aware that solar and wind lock in their main product? That’s why they are only all too happy to invest in and promote solar and wind.