It’s easy to feel pessimistic about the climate. But we’ve got two big things on our side
Bill McKibben
One is the astonishing fall in the cost of renewable energy. The other is the huge growth in the citizens’ movements demanding action
So the action being demanded has already happened and we’re done!
What can be done is being done. I enjoy making that point to the environmentalists that I meet, though they do not like it.
Question for Tim: Given the current reserves and resources of various materials available for mining, how much faster could we go? I mean we can only build wind farms and batteries if we have the materials. To go faster would we not have to open more mines and develop them into resources and reserves?
Surely, it doesn’t matter how many windmills or solar farms get built… The wind doesn’t blow consistently and as far as I’m aware it still tends to get dark at night (and those idiots who come out with “it’s always light somewhere on the planet” obviously have never heard of “transmission losses”).
The reality of “storage” has not even reached the “joke” stage yet, and the greenies crap their panties at the thought of “nookular”, so it’s still a case of “what will we do on still winter nights” (apart from freeze in the dark)?
The green revolution – ahem – isn’t currently limited by mineral or metal availability. If it were you’d see people not building stuff because steel/Al/Ge/Ga etc were too expensive. And you don’t.
But what if Bill McKibben is a fknidiot?
The other is the huge growth in the citizens’ movements demanding action
We’ve now got the Monarch and the next two in line demanding action. So I’m now a republican; if the ridiculous twats won’t stay out of politics (whilst lining their pockets) then we can fuck them off into the bin of history and rejoice at our reduced carbon footprint.
One is the astonishing fall in the cost of renewable energy.
As reflected in everyone’s energy bills.
@PJF
One’d thought Brenda had more sense. Senility or PR flak?
Bingo, PJF. What planet does this McKibben character live on?
It’s easy to feel pessimistic about the climate. But we’ve got two big things on our side… One is the astonishing fall in the cost of renewable energy. The other is the huge growth in the citizens’ movements demanding action
I call Bullshit on both counts.
Get your generators and blankets ready. A stationary high front over Europe this winter could trigger power cuts here. That might concentrate minds. Or just trigger demands we build more windmills that won’t turn in those conditions.
If unreliables are getting cheaper why the subsidies? Because the subsidies are the reason unreliables are cheaper than they were. Not cheaper than actual useful power sources.
Piss on all Greenfreaks. And I hope Brenda is being mis-reported. Surely she doesn’t listen to Jug-Ears. Maybe Phil’s absence is enabling Juggo to poison her mind.
In Dom’s (Cummings) recent newsletter (on Substack), he announced that he’s sold all his shares and bought a generator, like “everyone I know”. I think that’s a bit extreme, but he’s got a point.
Where do I get these astonishingly cheap renewables?
“it’s always light somewhere on the planet”
Soon to be heading to Dawson City in the Yukon and currently daylight time is decreasing at about 6mins a day and will drop to just under 4 hours on the shortest day….your going to have to travel a long way to find any working solar power and we humans do seem to have made our way into some areas that are fairly inhospitable.
And the river ices up enough to drive over in the winter so I guess hydro isn’t a great option and not too sure how well windmills work at -40
‘The green revolution – ahem – isn’t currently limited by mineral or metal availability.’
But Tim, this is only because the Green Revolution hasn’t taken place yet. Once it has, we won’t really be able to make anything more sophisticated than a stone axe.
The present rise in gas prices has nothing to do with green energy and everything to do with Russian gas.
The Iaea report that the whole life levelised cost of new solar is less than the marginal cost of running a coal plant. Wind is close behind with new windmills being bigger than the London Eye.
As other commentards have said storage and transmission remain a challenge but the free market is well on the way to solving in.
In the UK our greatest challenge is space heating which uses gas. As Tim points out insulating our Victorian housing stock is often value destroying.
Government has to decide how the UK will move away from gas. This will be politically difficult/impossible and I am sure will be a fertile ground for comments in future.
“The Iaea report that the whole life levelised cost of new solar is less than the marginal cost of running a coal plant. Wind is close behind with new windmills being bigger than the London Eye.”
My arse!
storage and transmission remain a challenge but the free market is well on the way to solving it
In the immortal words of Lt Cmdr Montgomery Scott: “I cannae change the laws o’ physics, Captain!” It’s this type of magical thinking that has got us into the current mess. Pious hopes are not enough.
On the energy storage thing, I do wonder why nobody seems to consider good old lead/acid. It doesn’t have to be a million car batteries joined together with jump leads. Big tanks with lead plates hanging them would work just as well. It’s not as if mass is a problem if you’re doing grid storage. And maintenance would be easy. There’s no necessity to remake entire cells. Just pull plates out when they’ve degraded, drop new in, recycle the lead. H2SO4 is probably less nasty than some of the chemicals associated with Li. A kW/H for automotive use is about half the cost of Li. In a static application, much smaller fraction.
Li tech is around high storage density/mass+volume for mobile power. Not a factor in a static application. Too easy?
@BiS
A good idea, I think the reason that battery storage farms are Li-based is recycling failed EV batteries (Tesla build many of them). But they’re not a solution to grid-based storage – you’d need thousands of the largest current example (in S Australia, ~200MWh) to support the UK grid (~22TW) through 4 cold, windless, February days.