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Renewables are probably going to "run out of steam", so to speak (that's a little bit of geothermal humor there) far sooner than most proponents think, for a va

Renewables are probably going to "run out of steam", so to speak (that's a little bit of geothermal humor there) far sooner than most proponents think, for a variety of reasons. If you're well-informed on these matters then you already know what I'm talking about. But like so many other things these days, what you generally see in the press and on proponents' web sites is often full of lies and half-truths, so you have to be careful to try and look past those. I understand that renewables costs and storage costs have declined dramatically lately and will probably continue to do so at least for a while longer, but that's only half the story. There are subsidy issues and premature end-of-life issues and reliability/deliverability/supply-demand issues and so on. But the biggest issue has to do with that 25% thing, where in reality you're potentially going to have to massively overbuild your wind and solar if you expect those to deliver as promised.(1) And even then you're probably going to have to deal with storage costs, too, be that battery or pumped hydro or whatever. So any claims that renewables are "super cheap" (cheaper than existing power-generating facilities) right now are basically bogus, if you look at the overall picture. Renewables still have a long way to go to fulfill their promises, in other words, if they ever actually even come close to doing so. I could give you local, real-world examples of this stuff if you want, but I don't want to bore you. Even if you run with the theory that existing power plants can (and maybe should only) be used intermittently as backups for renewables when those can't deliver, now you have another economic problem because that probably puts you back into "peaking rates" territory, and those rates are generally hugely expensive. And you'd have to add those onto the costs of the renewables themselves. To sum up, though, whenever you see a claim that a solar plant or whatever can produce X megawatts at a very low Y cents per KWH, the reality is going to be more like it can only provide a fraction of those megawatts and only at a multiple of those cents per KWH, if it can actually reliably produce much power on a fairly continuous basis at all. Overall you'd probably be much better off to go with more nuclear, but nuclear is still a bad word to a lot of people these days. (Fun fact: One reason why we have so much fossil-fueled power these days to begin with is because there was so much opposition to nuclear back in the day, mostly by the same type of folks who are so opposed to fossil fuels today.) As to anthropogenic global climate change, I think they're making a mountain out of a molehill. There's a whole lot of pertinent stuff that they frankly just choose to ignore, and they've somehow become overly fixated on CO2 as the end-all, be-all of what controls the climate. (This over-fixation notion is not completely true but it's true enough.) And to that end they now point their guns at the fossil fuel companies as evil incarnate, when the truth is more like they're just deep pockets in their eyes. Also, an awful lot of the "data" that they're using to make those claims and produce those dire predictions is mostly just made up, or has other major problems with it. Once again, I could give you local, real-world examples of this stuff if you want. Now let me ask you something. Do I have to be a "true believer" in the Church of Climate Change for you to give any credence to what I have to say about these things? (1) Here is the only article that I ever recall seeing (at least in recent memory) that directly addresses the overbuilding issue. And it, of course, tries to put a positive spin on the whole thing. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-solar-batteries-renewable-energy-california-20190605-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-solar-batteries-renew...

woodandsteel 7y ago
Regarding nuclear, I would love to see one of the new technologies catch on, but there is no way to know at present if and when that might happen. Regarding global climate change, I am quite persuaded it is happening and will have quite destructive consequences. I asked what you believe there because I think those who doubt it are ill-informed and biased, and so I doubt their arguments on renewables. Let me add that among those who disagree that it is urgent we reduce carbon emissions, there is a whole range of positions. These include: the climate is not getting warmer, it might be getting warmer but we don't know, it is getting warmer but we don't know why, it is getting warmer but it has some other cause than carbon emissions, it is getting warmer due to carbon emissions but this is beneficial, not harmful, or it is neither harmful nor beneficial, or it is only mildly harmful. So let me ask what is your particular position, and why do you think the people who hold the other positions I have listed go wrong, like are they ill-informed, or irrational, or motivated by special interests, or what? I agree with you that in considering the price of renewable energy electricity, you have to add in more than just the production it self, including the need for over-building. But those costs are continuing to fall. On the idea of renewables losing steam, are you saying that all the nations that are pushing it due to concern over global climate change plus the other motives I mention, are going to at some point, say in a decade or so, completely reverse course and go back to fossil fuels? Like they will decide that no, the climate is not getting warmer, or it is not due to fossil fuels, or it is not as bad as everyone thought? I am not asking if they should, I am asking if you predict they will.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  > I asked what you believe there because I think those who doubt it are ill-informed and biased, and so I doubt their arguments on renewables. For someone who has no real skin in the game (I'm a computer nerd, data-handling guy by training and trade), I'm probably one of the most well-informed and unbiased folks (at least of my type) out there on the subject of climate change. I've been following it on and off ever since great "Global Cooling" scare the of the 1970s, back when I was just a kid. And, seeing what I've seen out there and knowing what I know now, on any given day lately I'm tempted to just chuck the whole concept of anthropogenic climate change out the window. But then I back off on that because that's probably taking things too far. As far as where I my own thoughts fall on the subject, I would probably best be described as a "lukewarmer", to borrow that term. I believe that the climate has warmed lately, but not nearly as much as is being claimed. That this warming is largely natural and cyclical, and that while man may very well be playing a role in it, his influence on it is not nearly as dramatic as is being claimed. And that to the extent that man does play a role here, this goes beyond any effects that CO2 emissions themselves may have on the situation. It's not just all about the CO2, in other words, and it may in fact have very little to do with CO2. As to where things go wrong, the first problem probably has to do with the fact that an awful lot of the climate-related "data" being bandied about is basically just made up. (I'm not kidding here; you would probably be as appalled as I was to find out the details.) And what isn't just made up is often of remarkably low quality. So there really isn't enough quality data at all, at least not at the present time, to justify making "the sky is falling" pronouncements. But these keep being made anyway, by people who should probably know better, or who at least fall somewhere on the spectrum between ill-informed and plain old dishonest. And I can tell you that from what I've seen lately, an awful lot of the folks who are falling for this stuff hook, line, and sinker - and at least some of the folks who are saying it, too - can probably best be described as irrational. Along those lines, James Hansen, one of the Grand Old Men of climate change science, has of late taken to saying and doing things which make even his own acolytes take pause. But that doesn't stop his name from showing up on research papers such as the following. (I have a lot to say about that paper, too; maybe later.) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018JD029522 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018... And then you have Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old autistic Swedish schoolgirl who of late has been held up as something of an activist paragon in the climate change community. But now that her mother has claimed (or so it would appear) that young Greta can "see" CO2 in the air with her naked eyes (I presume this means all 400ppm, or 0.04%, of it), based on the outrageousness of such a statement I expect that we probably won't be hearing or seeing much more from or about young Greta. As for the future of wind and solar, I don't necessarily expect that they're just going to be abandoned or anything, but I also don't expect that they are ever going to come close to living up to the promises which are being made for them, both physically and economically. Much like coal plants today, I expect that as they reach the end of their useful lives they probably won't just be automatically replaced with like kind, but rather with something else, whatever that may be - probably natural gas, maybe even nuclear. (Once again I can give you local, real-world examples of this type of thing if you want.)

woodandsteel 7y ago

Regarding nuclear, I would love to see one of the new technologies catch on, but there is no way to know at present if and when that might happen. Regarding global climate change, I am quite persuaded it is happening and will have quite destructive consequences. I asked what you believe there because I think those who doubt it are ill-informed and biased, and so I doubt their arguments on renewables. Let me add that among those who disagree that it is urgent we reduce carbon emissions, there is a whole range of positions. These include: the climate is not getting warmer, it might be getting warmer but we don't know, it is getting warmer but we don't know why, it is getting warmer but it has some other cause than carbon emissions, it is getting warmer due to carbon emissions but this is beneficial, not harmful, or it is neither harmful nor beneficial, or it is only mildly harmful. So let me ask what is your particular position, and why do you think the people who hold the other positions I have listed go wrong, like are they ill-informed, or irrational, or motivated by special interests, or what? I agree with you that in considering the price of renewable energy electricity, you have to add in more than just the production it self, including the need for over-building. But those costs are continuing to fall. On the idea of renewables losing steam, are you saying that all the nations that are pushing it due to concern over global climate change plus the other motives I mention, are going to at some point, say in a decade or so, completely reverse course and go back to fossil fuels? Like they will decide that no, the climate is not getting warmer, or it is not due to fossil fuels, or it is not as bad as everyone thought? I am not asking if they should, I am asking if you predict they will.

southern_cross 7y ago
> I asked what you believe there because I think those who doubt it are ill-informed and biased, and so I doubt their arguments on renewables. For someone who has no real skin in the game (I'm a computer nerd, data-handling guy by training and trade), I'm probably one of the most well-informed and unbiased folks (at least of my type) out there on the subject of climate change. I've been following it on and off ever since great "Global Cooling" scare the of the 1970s, back when I was just a kid. And, seeing what I've seen out there and knowing what I know now, on any given day lately I'm tempted to just chuck the whole concept of anthropogenic climate change out the window. But then I back off on that because that's probably taking things too far. As far as where I my own thoughts fall on the subject, I would probably best be described as a "lukewarmer", to borrow that term. I believe that the climate has warmed lately, but not nearly as much as is being claimed. That this warming is largely natural and cyclical, and that while man may very well be playing a role in it, his influence on it is not nearly as dramatic as is being claimed. And that to the extent that man does play a role here, this goes beyond any effects that CO2 emissions themselves may have on the situation. It's not just all about the CO2, in other words, and it may in fact have very little to do with CO2. As to where things go wrong, the first problem probably has to do with the fact that an awful lot of the climate-related "data" being bandied about is basically just made up. (I'm not kidding here; you would probably be as appalled as I was to find out the details.) And what isn't just made up is often of remarkably low quality. So there really isn't enough quality data at all, at least not at the present time, to justify making "the sky is falling" pronouncements. But these keep being made anyway, by people who should probably know better, or who at least fall somewhere on the spectrum between ill-informed and plain old dishonest. And I can tell you that from what I've seen lately, an awful lot of the folks who are falling for this stuff hook, line, and sinker - and at least some of the folks who are saying it, too - can probably best be described as irrational. Along those lines, James Hansen, one of the Grand Old Men of climate change science, has of late taken to saying and doing things which make even his own acolytes take pause. But that doesn't stop his name from showing up on research papers such as the following. (I have a lot to say about that paper, too; maybe later.) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018JD029522 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018... And then you have Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old autistic Swedish schoolgirl who of late has been held up as something of an activist paragon in the climate change community. But now that her mother has claimed (or so it would appear) that young Greta can "see" CO2 in the air with her naked eyes (I presume this means all 400ppm, or 0.04%, of it), based on the outrageousness of such a statement I expect that we probably won't be hearing or seeing much more from or about young Greta. As for the future of wind and solar, I don't necessarily expect that they're just going to be abandoned or anything, but I also don't expect that they are ever going to come close to living up to the promises which are being made for them, both physically and economically. Much like coal plants today, I expect that as they reach the end of their useful lives they probably won't just be automatically replaced with like kind, but rather with something else, whatever that may be - probably natural gas, maybe even nuclear. (Once again I can give you local, real-world examples of this type of thing if you want.)