Now Can We Have Our $150B Back?

... and maybe a million or so of the birds slaughtered by wind turbines, too?

Time Magazine's "Hero of the Environment," Michael Shellenberger, penned a staggeringly dimwitted piece on Quillette called Why Renewables Can't Save The Planet. He could have saved about 17 years of wasted time if he'd been reading Steven den Beste in 2002.

Mike's forehead-slappers are too numerous to mention here, so I'll grab some lowlights at random.

Mikey (2019):

The first (problem) was around land use. Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land. That, along with the fact that solar and wind farms require long new transmissions lines, and are opposed by local communities and conservationists trying to preserve wildlife, particularly birds.

Steven (2002):

Those advocating this kind of thing don't realize the size of the problem.

In 1998, the State of California consumed 13.496 billion gallons of gasoline. A gallon of gasoline yields about 130 million joules. So when you do all the math, you end up with about 1.755 * 10^18 joules, which is an impressively large number.

One anti-solar-power advocacy site gives the "yearly average" solar power density in Albuquerque as 240 watts per m2. (That appears to be a 24-hour average; another site says that it's 700 watts in daylight.) Then presuming that southern California is similar, each square meter of mirrors would be struck by 7.573 billion joules per year.

So if you assume 100% conversion, you'd need 231.7 million square meters of collection mirrors to make this work. 231 square kilometers.

Mikey:

Another challenge was the intermittent nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.

Steven:

In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2)

Mikey:

Happily, there were a lot of people working on solutions. One solution was to convert California’s dams into big batteries. The idea was that, when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing, you could pump water uphill, store it for later, and then run it over the turbines to make electricity when you needed it.

Me:

Umm, pump the water uphill from... where? It's like this idiot has never seen a river. One of the chief characteristics of a river is that it flows. As in the water goes bye-bye. It's not like our reservoirs empty into other reservoirs. Assuming you can solve that issue, what happens to the environment downstream as you jerk the flow into the river shut by pumping the water backwards for a while? I'd expect the rivers to go full-empty-full-empty-full-empty with a 12-hour cycle. I suspect the fish and birds and other critters haven't evolved to deal with that.

The thing goes on and on and on like that. Reading it, you realize just how dim our cultural leaders are. I won't accuse legit engineers of being dumb. I'll bet that when some of them had to attend meetings with Mikey, they wanted to slit their wrists.

No, Mike wasn't an engineer, he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, err, Environment. He had the ear of Barack Hussein Obama and Time Magazine and all kinds of other Important People and Deep Thinkers. They even spent $150B (detailed in his article) on these idiocies during Obama's term.

God help us.

This drawing clearly shows how you can pump water uphill and still keep the flow going.