Monday 11 May 2009

It’s not renewable, and it’s barely energy

The definition of so called “renewable energy” can be put very simply:

Renewable energy may be defined as energy produced by means that would be uneconomic without tax breaks and subsidies.  The distinguishing characteristic of so called 'renewable energy' is not that it is renewable, but that it doesn't produce reliable energy. 

In other words, it’s politicised energy – with the emphasis on the “politics” rather than the energy.

Engineer Brian Leyland makes the point again this morning at Muriel Newman’s site:

    The drive for renewable energy in the form of windpower, marine power and the like is driven by a belief that man-made greenhouse gases will cause dangerous global warming, and that large-scale adoption of these technologies will “fight climate change”. To this end, thousands of MW of heavily subsidized wind power capacity are being added worldwide each year.
    In New Zealand we are told that windpower is economic compared to alternatives, that the unpredictable short term fluctuations can easily be covered by our “abundant hydropower” and it helps conserve hydropower storage. Therefore, we are told, we should happily accept destroying iconic landscapes and seriously upsetting people who live nearby. . .
    The truth is, as I will show, that windpower is expensive compared to alternatives, hydropower schemes have no spare capacity to back up windpower in a critical dry year and wind power output is lowest in the late summer and autumn when we need it most.

Or as Alan Jenkins from NZ's Electricity Networks Association said a few years ago:

It's very hard to invest in coal [because of Kyoto], nuclear's a sort of four letter word... hydro is suddenly becoming too hard... what's left? ...we can't do everything on windpower.

Read Leyland’s whole piece here:  Windpower: Foolish Energy – NZ Centre for Political Research.

5 comments:

Jeffrey Perren said...

"The drive for renewable energy in the form of windpower, marine power and the like is driven by a belief that man-made greenhouse gases will cause dangerous global warming"

That nonsense started decades before AGW became the cause du jour. The excuses began with "fighting oil pollution," "combating acid rain," "protecting the ozone layer," and morphed with every passing decade as facts showed that fossil fuels presented none of those problems or technology evolved to solve them.

The underlying motivation, as PC knows better than most, remains what it has always been: an attack on cost-effective energy in order to lower the living standard of individuals and as a means of controlling them, as a means to the ultimate end of transforming society into the viros vision of technology-free Eden. They're the ultimate Luddites.

Peter Cresswell said...

Exactly, Jeff, and it's a great pity Mr Leyland and so many others don't yet grasp that themselves.

AGW is just the excuse du jour for attacking the life-blood of civilisation.

This is at the heart of what George Reisman rightly identifies as The Toxicity of Environmentalism.

"The reason that one after another of the environmentalists' claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims, the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists' tender mercies. The claims rest on unsupported conjectures and wild leaps of imagination from scintillas of fact to arbitrary conclusions, by means of evasion and the drawing of invalid inferences...
"The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one--not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology--had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather--for the next one hundred years!
"It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution...


"If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of people, we shall be safer from the wind and rain, the environmental movement alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement claims. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our health better than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement asserts.
"There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction. Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus speaks the environmental movement.
"All of the insanities of the environmental movement become intelligible when one grasps the nature of the destructive motivation behind them. They are not uttered in the interest of man's life and well-being, but for the purpose of leading him to self-destruction.
" [Emphasis added]

That's the key to his argument. Here's the kernel:

"Such statements [as these from David Graber & Steve McKibben et al hoping for "the extinction of the human species"] represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.
"These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking of only 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement - the "deep ecology," Earth First! wing - they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.
"But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is substantially greater even than parts per hundred. It is certainly at least at the level of several parts per ten. This is obvious from the fact that the mainstream of the environmental movement makes no fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of Messrs. Graber and McKibben.
"

Jeffrey Perren said...

Dr. Reisman should be much wider read. I used to see his articles in the paper from time to time. I'd like to see him writing for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the Orange County Register, and the like again.

A true hero of long standing.

Sus said...

".. an attack on cost-effective energy in order to lower the living standard of individuals and as a means of controlling them .."

Jeff, I've always simplified the very real concept of today's self-styled 'Greenies' being nothing more than yesterday's re-branded Marxists, via their "swapping red cardigans for green ones".

Jeffrey Perren said...

"swapping red cardigans for green ones".

Sus,

Good one, though imho, the Greens are infinitely worse.

At least the Marxists pretended that science, industry, and civilization were good things, so good it was vital to control them "in the name of and for the sake of 'the people'."

Now, the Greens come along and declare that these things are so bad... wait for it... it's vital to control them, "in the name of and for the sake of the planet."

I submit that the shift makes the Greens even more evil and more dangerous (though I grant that making measurements that finely graded is a difficult task).