Reproduced here with permission is this opinion piece on renewable energy, written by a Catholic priest who used to work as an electrical engineer. One of the reasons why the Labor Party lost the recent federal election was that it proposed radical and drastic renewable energy policies. I post it here to learn about this issue.This is a single wind turbine.
These things are absolutely enormous.
There are hundreds of these things dotting the landscape between Vienna and Bratislava. They absolutely dominate their landscape, requiring huge amounts of steel and concrete and other materials to install.
We Catholics are often accused of being naive and gullible. Our enemies claim that they appeal to science ("because science" they say) while claiming that we have an "imaginary friend," or pray to the "flying spaghetti monster" without being able to offer anything scientific or reasonable on the nature of existence or why it is reasonable (or not) to believe that some greater being was involved in creation.
Yet, many of these same people will completely ignore science when it suits them. Indeed, it seems, these days, the left wing progressives are becoming more and more unscientific, embracing causes and ideologies that are completely contrary to settled science, all the while as they mock those who believe in God.
So, make yourself a coffee, and let's look together at the science of the new religion that is "green power"
Let's begin with our Austrian wind turbine. I don't know what its capacity is, but Google suggests 3MW is a good starting point.
For those who may not know, a W is a Watt. M means Million, so 1MW means 1 Million Watts. A Watt is the scientific unit of energy. It means the ability to do Work. On earth all movement requires work, because it is acting against gravity and friction. The exception is when something falls, energy is released as gravity acts on the object. This energy can be harness to do work (ie generate energy somewhere else). This is exactly how hydro-electricity works. But I digress.
The 3MW of our turbine is its maximum energy output. (This is called nameplate output)
It requires a certain wind speed to generate this output.
ie, to generate 3MW continuously, the wind must be blowing favourably 100% of the time.
Every form of energy generation has a nameplate output, and a capacity factor.
The capacity factor is the average amount of energy that is generated, usually given as a percentage.
For land based turbines, its 25%. For ocean based ones, its 50%. (Wind is a lot more consistent on the ocean).
Since the one I saw is land based, that's what we'll work with.
A coal fired power station has a capacity factor of around 50%
Liddel Power Station has a nameplace capacity of 2000MW.
To get the same nameplate output, we would need 667 Turbines!!!!!!
But a coal power station has a capacity factor of 50%, but our wind turbine has a capacity factor of 25%, so we need twice as many turbines.
Ie, we need 1334 turbines to replace one coal fired power station!!!!!!
Did I mention that these things are really big!
What about lifespan?
Best case scenario is around 25 years, although practical experience seems to indicate many of their gearboxes wear out before that.
It's a fallacy to think that wind turbines are a set and forget piece of equipment. Anything mechanical needs maintenance.
(And of course, so do coal fired power stations).
It's hard to say what the retirement age of a coal fired power station is, based on actual shut-downs, because in Australia a significant number of power stations have been closed for political reasons
Energy Council of Australia seems to indicate 35 years. https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/aging-generation-australias-coal-fired-fleet/
However, figures from the same source indicate there are 3 stations in operation that are over 50 years old.
We need to be clear, there is a very big difference between a wind turbine that is shut down because it is simply worn out, and a power station that is closed because of political ideology.
Let's now look at solar.
There's a mob in Newcastle advertising a 12kW system.
Again, this is nameplate output.
Wikipedia indicates a 30% capacity factor.
However as solar panels age, and dust and deposits build up, their efficiency decreases.
So for these calculations we'll go with (a still generous) 25%.
Let's compare this home roof mounted system to our 3MW turbine above.
Capacity Factor is the same.
12kW is 0.012 of a MW.
To get 3MW nameplate capacity, we need 3/0.012=250.
So we would need 250 homes with these solar installation to get the equivelant of 1 Turbine.
Let's now compare that with a 2000MW coal fired power station.
We would need 1334 x 250 = 333500
Yep, that's right. Over three hundred thousand of these things to replace one power station.
OK, you say, no problem - just do it.
Well, all very well in theory, with just a few problems.
Experience of the last 20 years has shown that the quality of those home installations is highly variable.
Let's be generous here. The industry standard seems to be around 20 years lifespan.
Remember in the early 2000s when governments with giving out very attractive rebates for people to install grid connected solar systems.
The only reason people did so was because of the incentives, otherwise there was no way they financially stacked up.
Well guess what. That 20 years isn't that far away.
And guess where all of those solar panels, and the associated electronics is going when they reach the end of their life.
That's right - landfill.
Did I mention that it takes over 300,000 installations to generate the same as a coal fired power station.
That's assuming that they were 12kW systems.
But they weren't.
They were more like 3kW
That's a quarter the capacity.
So if we look at the equivalence to a single coal fired power station, we are now talking 1.2Million installations!
If, in the early 2000s we had installed enough of these things to replace a single coal fire power station, we would be, in the next 5 years or so, preparing to send 1.2 Million of them to the dump!
OK, so this is all rather telling.
However it gets much worse very quickly if we look at what the "green power" cult wants to do with future energy production.
So you might recall that Labor wanted to have all electric cars by 2030.
Now electric cars are all very nice, and they are amazing pieces of technology.
However they need energy. And an awful lot of it.
If you charge up your electric car from a coal fired power station, all it does is move the pollution somewhere else.
Out of sight, out of mind - right!
So the green power cult knows that electric cars aren't green at all unless they are charged by renewables
Let's look at the energy requirements of a typical electric car
Surprisingly, (or not) it's a lot harder than I thought to find real figures as to how much energy is actually required to charge an electric car.
I found this website, which is firmly on the side of charging an electric car from your own solar panels
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/charging-electric-cars/
Let's go with their numbers, and see if they stack up.
The website presents some figures for number of kilometres that can be driven per stored kWH
Let's go for the best figures given, which is a Tesla Model 3, at 7km per kWH
What this means is that if you want to drive for 14km, you need 2kW of energy.
I'm ignoring charge and discharge rates.
Now this is a best case scenario which assumes 100% charging efficiency and that the car is brand new.
As a cars (toxic, difficult to dispose of, and horribly unenvironmentally friendly) battery ages, it loses the ability to hold charge as well as it once did.
Anyway, I'm going to work with a fairly generous figure of 85% efficiency
Now our source website above quotes an average driving distance of 38 kilometres per day, based on Australian statistics.
That's all very well if you are "Mr Average", but what if you aren't.
I used to drive 170kM a day.
What if we go for a more realistic figure like, say 50km per day.
That is still less than 20,000km per year.
For our Tesla 3, assuming our 85% efficiency,
Our 7km becomes 5.95, let's be generous (again) and say 6
ie. To drive 6km, we need 1kW of energy.
To drive 50km, we need 8.3kW of energy.
BUT, this is where our assumptions come crashing down.
And the problem is that they are exactly that - assumptions.
The actual energy required will depend on driving style.
Do you drive like Grandma, or like you stole it?
You will find this reality in our sourced article above too.
"If you buy a car that gets 7 kilometres per kilowatt-hour of battery pack charge and take care to drive reasonably efficiently, then you are likely to get 6.3 kilometres per kilowatt-hour of electricity you charge it with. If you are a bit of a sloppy driver, and I think most of us are, you may only get 5 kilometres per kilowatt-hour."
The reality is, I don't know what the true efficiency will be.
But if we put a 25% premium on the above, our 8.3kW becomes 10.4kW
I'm trying to be pretty transparent about the assumptions here, you can perhaps get an idea that a change in assumptions can make a pretty big difference in the numbers.
I am concerned about the number of assumptions made here. What I am most concerned about is the lack of information I could find on the true amount of power required to put into a typical EV to charge it. I think this is quite telling.
But let's work with the figures we have.
Let's come back to our 12kW solar installation.
12kW is more than 10.4, so all is good, right?
Well, not exactly.
Because remember that 12kW is the nameplate power.
Typically, you will get 25% of that.
If the sun is blazing, and your solar installation is generating everything it can, and you put all of that into your car, it will take less than an hour to charge.
But on average, it will take you 3 and a half hours, again assuming that you put everything into your car.
And this is more realistic anyway, because an Australian mains outlet is rated at 10A, which means you can get 2.4kW per hour out of the outlet.
If you wanted to charge your car at 10kWH, you need a special outlet.
These figures aren't actually that bad, however, there is one REALLY REALLY BIG problem in all of this.
Right now, very few people have electric cars.
If, in a relatively short space of time, we were to replace fossil fuel cars with electric ones, then we have a massive increase on electricity demand
This power has to come from somewhere.
What is the endgame? Eliminate fossils altogether?
I think we've already demonstrated how impractical that is right now, before we add 13 million cars to the grid.
Because demand for electricity is going up, not down, before we even consider electric vehicles.
Let's be really conservative and say it's going to be 8kW per car per day
For 13 million cars, that's 104GW!!!!
That's 104 Thousand Million Watts!!!!!!
And that's excluding larger vehicles like buses and trucks.
Now the math above indicates it is theoretically possible to make these cars zero emissions if everyone has a 12kW solar installation on their roof.
BUT, if we want to eliminate coal altogether, we have to replace existing capacity, as well as ADD that 104GW.
This is a tremendous amount of capacity, and I haven't even considered reliability of supply. (no power from solar at night time)
And, if we say there's one installation per car, that's 13 million solar installations, all of which need to be sent to landfill at the end of their lives.
Or if we look at it in terms of coal fired power stations, that's 52 2000MW power stations required to charge those cars.
Now I'm not saying Electric Vehicles are a bad thing.
But quite frankly, I think the idea of "free" or "green" energy is a fallacy.
This is really a manifestation of our consumer orientated society.
Energy Demand has a cost.
Now even if we did power those cars by coal fired power stations, there are a lot of advantages.
Their would be a huge advantage to public health with vastly reduced emissions in cities.
There would be a hit in terms of a massive upgrade to power distribution infrastructure.
The point is, it isn't all as simple as what the renewables cultists would have us believe.
Every form of energy demand has its pros and cons.
We need to be honest about the science behind all of them, and not allow ideology to set energy policy.
It's the science, stupid!
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