Matt Ridley. May 15, 2017. Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy. Even after 30 years of huge subsidies, it provides about zero energy. The Spectator.
The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.
You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.
Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
[One critic suggested I should have used the BP numbers instead, which show wind achieving 1.2% in 2014 rather than 0.46%. I chose not to do so mainly because that number is arrived at by falsely exaggerating the actual output of wind farms threefold in order to take into account that wind farms do not waste two-thirds of their energy as heat; also the source is an oil company, which would have given green blobbers a excuse to dismiss it, whereas the IEA is unimpleachable But it’s still a very small number, so it makes little difference.]
Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.
Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to 
be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. [para corrected from original.]
Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.
The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.
MacKay, former chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said in the final interview before his tragic death last year that the idea that renewable energy could power the UK is an “appalling delusion” — for this reason, that there is not enough land.
Damn the Matrix 
I have a huge problem with this. Matt Ridley is a climate sceptic of the first order and, behind the scenes, an advocate for the coal industry. His objection to wind energy is mainly about countryside aesthetics rather than global sustainability.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-respond-to-matt-ridleys-climate-change-claims
A real pity because his earlier writings on philosophy and human history (The Red Queen) were great scientific reads.
I know what you mean. I guess the important point is if the numbers are correct. I placed a comment at the base of this thread,to see if an engineering professor had any opinion on that. I don’t know if he will reply.
https://theconversation.com/solar-pv-and-wind-are-on-track-to-replace-all-coal-oil-and-gas-within-two-decades-94033
I’ve never been fussed one way or the other regarding aesthetics, but I’ve recently started to realise that were we to build the millions of required turbines to ‘do the job’, we would very quickly turn the planet into one mightily ugly pin prick of a place…….
It never ceases to amaze me how differing opinions people can have on these subjects….. it reminded me of Hansen and Monbiot being so pro-nuclear…….
Yes, Mike. I was particularly annoyed with Ridley because he’s not dumb, but is in the same denial camp as Lord Moncton (who is dumb). I do have a problem with quoting claimed change sceptics, even if some of Ridley’s dumping on wind energy is justified.
Matt Ridley is also the aristocrat who helped demutualise a 147-year-old building society to make it into a for-profit business, which then as chairman he proceeded to run it into insolvency. The first bankrupt UK bank in over a century.
Ridley-bashers: Be very careful of assuming that criticisms of wind power are automatically biased because of the source. Many of think wind power is already a disaster. We’re seriously concerned with the aesthetic ruin of scenery, the noise and bird & bat deaths. The lousy real-world economics of wind power just adds merit to that.
There are indeed global warming deniers who are anti wind power, but I consider them useful idiots. Ridley isn’t a hard-denier, nor is he an idiot. And the Spectator also has this article on the madness of developing rural lands with no respect for their inhabitants, which the wind business is notorious for: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/why-cant-country-views-be-protected-from-wind-turbines/
The math is on Ridley’s side because wind is basically real-time solar energy and is extremely weak compared to the dense accumulation of the sun’s energy in ancient biomass over millions of years. Direct solar (PV) is even weaker per unit area than wind but it can at least have a small footprint if done right.
Some of you must have seen this graphic, based on older wind turbine capacity, but still relatively accurate: http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/slide2-1024×765.png
Critiques of Mark Jacobson’s “3.8 million large wind turbines” scheme (i.e. covering the habitable world with energy sprawl) echo what Ridley wrote. Jacobson stooped to sue his critics for $10 million, which is more of a PT. Barnum move than something an honest scientist would do. He dropped the suit after realizing his folly, but he persists with the original folly, and too many politicians are parroting it, e.g. Bernie Sanders.
http://bit.do/blight_for_naught
Silence, there is a problem with cavorting with climate deniers to make a case when you can make that case very well without them harming the integrity of your position. Ridley is like Bjorn Lomborg, who feigns not being a denier but then does everything possible to undermine policy focus on climate change. Where people come from in their heads is vitally important.
There is significant cultural issue in Britain in that the notion of countryside is very big and not having wild lands to protect, rural landscapes are very important to many Britains. This is all very understandable and laudable but it has led many to get so furious with wind farms invading the countryside that they side with the coal lobby. This is where the dysjunct has occurred, because even these folk are hooked on outmoded ideas of having to sustain endless growth and keeping the economy going gangbusters to satisfy consumer desires.
It’s not only Ridley occurring this space. But it’s not a space we ought to be in. We should be better than that.
I think Ridley and others are very useful for at least mentioning wind power’s shortfalls, whereas the quasi-greens won’t say anything bad about it except to mumble some bogus scheme to save bats and birds (when cornered on the topic). When “environmentalists” must excuse the deaths of wildlife, you know something’s rotten in Windmark.
Whether or not a wind power critic is a weak or strong climate denier, they tell truths that are usually masked with happy farmer propaganda showing wind turbines the size of dandelions. Robert Bryce is one of the more balanced ones but he’s very anti-wind: https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+bryce+wind+energy
Yet another reminder of what’s at stake, if one claims to be saving the planet from human industry:
http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wind+farm+mountain (the wind bid’ness says you ain’t seen nothin’ yet)
http://bit.do/blight_for_naught
But no chance he would go to jail for such a thing, eh!!!
It’s overdue for the arithmetic to figure in renewables concepts. If you look at the Cubic Mile of Oil and equivalents concept[ see Wiki] we need about 3 CuM now.
1CuM is just petroleum, the rest being coal, gas and renewables. Still today
renewables are but a tiny fraction. IMO it wouldn’t even match the amount of paint required to paint a CuM container.
Even to just consider matching the current growth in the world economy it doesn’t compute. Hydro would require 200 dams the same size as China’s 3 Gorges dam, within 50 years. Billions of solar panels. None of these structures are sourced from thin air.
We have to add to today’s coal etc consumption while we build them, thus ratcheting up consumption and largely for machines that will hardly pay for themselves, let alone provide sufficient spare energy to be useful.
It’s just a dream.
The wikipedia article is great for getting an idea of the scale of the construction required. The article I linked to above is delusional ,IMO,because to have an industrial civilisation functioning on 100% PV,hydro and wind in 20 years not only requires the construction of the
energy generating infrastructure ,it also requires the construction of a different energy-using infrastructure as well. Alice Freidemann,for example,has shown that lithium semitrailers have a very small load
capacity over longer distances. Is it possible to have industrial agriculture
not using fossil fuels? Not at present,and almost certainly not in 20 years
either. How much would atmospheric CO2 increase while all that construction occurs? Then in thirty or forty years it all has to be replaced.
William Catton was right. We are too deeply into overshoot to escape
without a bottleneck event this century.
We live an age of specialisation,and each specialist thinks that if he/she
can solve this/that problem,this civilisation can continue. We are now in
the Anthropocene,with multiple converging crises. The fundamental
systemic flaws of this civilisation will become more obvious as this century
unfolds. Xraymike has done a good overview here:
This guy could benefit from a basic introduction to systems engineering. He doesn’t seem to understand that it is the grid that needs to be reliable, not the individual plants feeding power into it. And he seems limited to linear thinking, where the future trajectory is just a projection based on current practices, without various factors converging to produce new efficiencies and technologies under dynamics which are invariably nonlinear.
There is no point adding up numbers when the presumptions underlying them are simplistic and naïve.
Ah, but it’s the renewables that will make the grid unreliable. And we’ve pretty well reached maximum turbine efficiency.
Here’s another interesting article….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
The pollution at Baotou is from the processing of rare earth ores. Most new large-scale wind turbines are inverter-excited do not use rare earth magnets. Solar PV does not use rare earths at all.
The rare earth minerals are extremely useful for many purposes among them glassmaking, telescopes, cameras, microscopes, windows, transparent balconies, welding masks, fridge magnets, toys, purse clasps, electric motors (including those in Tesla’s newest Model 3 car and the truck, but not those in its older model S and model X cars), electric generators (of all flavours: petrol and diesel gensets as well as a minority of wind generators), dyes, radiation dosimetry, radiography, radiotherapy, microwave transmitters and waveguides, lighting phosphors (in both fluorescent and LED lights, as well as some display screens), ceramics, knife blades, alloys, jet engine turbine blades, gas turbine blades, petrol engine exhaust catalytic converters, catalysts in oil refining, neutron moderators in nuclear reactor control rods, mantles for gas lamps, and NiMH batteries (not lithium batteries).
I bought myself a middling-fancy bottle of American whiskey a couple of months ago. The cardboard box came with a rare earth magnet clasp. Any other cardboard box closes by friction or sticky tape, but not this one.
Please don’t go blaming wind turbines specifically for something which they don’t specifically require, but which has applications in every industry you can imagine, including frivolous ones.
A brief comment on the life cycle analysis of wind turbines – in this case 2MW turbines circa 2014 in the USA. A study by Haapala & Prempeeda from Oregon State Uni concluded that in respect of the Energy payback from the source material through production to demolition and recycling was 5-6 months. About 78% of the energy use was in the manufacturing, transport and construction. The indications are the current turbines are becoming more efficient.
IWTs are both ugly and impractical, yet their defenders act like anyone who’s against them must be a global warming denier, directly or by proxy. You get into an endless loop with wind pushers, trying to explain that IWTs won’t replace fossil fuels and are therefore not worth the blight. They stick with parroted denials on both counts. The aspect of the planet they most want to save is the man-made one, and of course “green” profits.
A lot of civil engineers are apathetic about preservation since their jobs depend on altering nature. Wind turbines allow them to gloat over the sheer size of their projects while ignoring the pitiful energy-per-acre ratio. Before wind power took off, I was never aware how many “environmentalists” lacked a broad view of human impact. It’s not a good sign.
http://bit.do/iwt_ugly_noisy_lethal_futile (bumper sticker image)
Well…, we seem to be bordering on allying ourselves with Joe Hockey syndrome here if we boil the case of wind farms down to aesthetics. The focus should be on their practicality. Catastrophic climate change isn’t very pretty at all. Nor are coal mines. If this is an aesthetics race I would side with pv panels, if anything. But they have a much lower net energy return than does wind.
To be rigorous this debate should be about ERoEI. And at the end of that we would come to a realisation that the environmental movement’s push to fight this energy issue out on a supply basis (“renewables can beat the pants off coal”) has almost eliminated the energy conservation ethic that used to underpin the movement’s ethics.
This radical philosophical departure was brought home to me quite starkly recently by a good green colleague of mine who has deduced that saving an amount of energy (compared to generating the same amount) is much too hard and messy. “Much easier to just chuck in a new wind farm and be done with it!” he now says. And he means it.
Prof Charles Hall recently wrote about the real net energy return of solar pv here. I haven’t seen a similar authoritative on wind, but it does have better characteristics. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-05-27/the-real-eroi-of-photovoltaic-systems-professor-hall-weighs-in/
Meanwhile there are no end of blokes who say we can easily solve the world’s energy problems with this or that fandangled invention and you can see at a glance that they would be a net energy sink. The problem here is that few people are trained in physics and energy, so magic rules.
Everything that isn’t a primary energy source is a net energy sink. So what?
I think hat means Net Energy Return doesn’t matter. If it’s a net negative user, it’s negative. So what! A bit like ignoring the Laws of thermodynamics.
Chris wrote: “Well…, we seem to be bordering on allying ourselves with Joe Hockey syndrome here if we boil the case of wind farms down to aesthetics. The focus should be on their practicality.”
No, I completely disagree with you. What is the point of “saving” the planet if it becomes an industrial park around every corner? The sheer number of wind turbines required (for schemes that won’t really work) is insane, and I’ve seen little evidence that offshore “farms” can really be hidden from view at a practical cost.
If you persist in claiming everything’s got to be about human utility, have a look at the work of Paul Kingsnorth and older narratives, including Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. James Lovelock, who came up with the Gaia concept, caught flack in 2013 for calling wind turbines “monuments of a failed civilisation.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9847324/Wind-farms-could-become-monuments-of-a-failed-civilisation-top-environmentalist-claims.html
I think those people are much wiser than green-tech nerds who just get off on tower heights and megawatts. They’re far too caught up in economic growthism, i.e. “we can save the planet and make a bunch of money!” Many of them seem to think the world is just a big video game and nature is “cool background fractals.” We really need more hippies and fewer techies.
Your “practicality” mindset is precisely why we’re in this climate jam, you know. It’s only practical in a vague way that ignores big pieces of reality. Lack of respect for nature and the build, build, build (or drill, baby, drill) attitude is the very thing we need to stop doing. Wind power is just more of the same, re-branded as green.
http://bit.do/false_progress
Hi Silence. “Everything’s got to be about human utility.” That’s definitely not my position. I’ve been dealing with these issues from before you were born and question most of what society does in the name of sustainability. I also appreciate this website for the good education work it is doing on these fundamental arguments.
But I won’t step into the camp that says (or implies) that renewables are so bad we may as well burn the planet. In challenging why we don’t have to go to such ridiculous lengths – all of that industrial production concrete, roading, pylon networks etc – to provide 1 percent of the world’s energy, we just need to ask one question: “What would it have taken to reduce energy consumption by that 1 percent?”
I do challenge opposition to renewables that’s made just on aesthetic grounds, because that falls right into the denialists’ camp and the pro fossil fuels lobby. Ridley basically argues that we don’t have a problem to solve. I don’t think that’s your scene and it’s not mine. We should be well beyond that.
Chris Harries wrote: “…“Everything’s got to be about human utility.” That’s definitely not my position. I’ve been dealing with these issues from before you were born and question most of what society does in the name of sustainability.”
Well, I was born in the early 60’s so you never know! My fundamental disagreement with you is that aesthetics aren’t the primary issue.
Think about the meaning of life and the importance of being able to escape urban areas on vacation, or in daily living. Wind power is the biggest form of urban sprawl ever invented, especially because it’s “filling in” scenery that other developments haven’t. When you combine that with its pragmatic limits, why even bother trying it?
I assume you’ve seen studies like Jacobson & Delucchi (2009) which calculated a need for 3.8 million large wind turbines, globally. When I saw that number I knew it was a big mistake and couldn’t imagine how anyone would see it as green. I can’t go along with a herd mentality of “we must meet these needs somehow.” I’d rather leave nature alone as much as possible from here on out. It’s been gouged, cut and poked at for long enough. Think of what we’d do if aliens landed and put weird tripods all over the place, even if they didn’t cause instant death (you know the famous book). Sitting back and allowing it from our own species isn’t much brighter.
Solar PV is much weaker than an IWT, per unit, but also much smaller and flatter. I think solar should get almost all subsidies now directed toward wind power, with utility companies leasing panels to every possible building owner. They could pay back the non-subsidized cost on their monthly bills and spare the world a future of bleak industrial landscapes. It’s been shown that wind turbines don’t get dismantled easily, so the more built, the bigger the lingering mess when it’s realized what a waste they are.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=abandoned+wind+turbines
http://bit.do/false_progress
Silence, I pre-date you by about 15 years. That doesn’t make me smarter or better, but I’m just not new to the energy game. I respect your hostility to wind generators and wonder what got you to that point, but you will find that for various reasons people are antagonistic to one energy sources or another and for good reasons. Again, this comes down to the hard reality that every energy resources has ecological, aesthetic and social justice implications.
I distance myself from energy supply advocacy of any sort because the first priority of society should be to power down, not power up. Also society should not be doing whatever it can to meet energy demand, because most of that energy demand is not for humanity’s basic needs but luxuries.
Silence… if you walk instead of drive… if you’d decline to fly in planes… if you eat mostly plant-based foods… if you mend things rather than buy new things…. then good on you and you can decry wind farms. Go for it. For the most part citizens create the energy and resource demands that then cause them heartache.
I think we are nearly on the same page, except that I won’t fall into the trap of siding with climate change denial in order to support my campaigning.
This is a reply to Respect Silence.
‘We really need more hippies and fewer techies’ That is the most profound comment on this thread. We are all immersed in the dominant ontology or worldview of industrial civilisation,which has
almost obliterated or marginalised the societies which had different
ontologies. The ontology of the Australian Aborigines,for example,
is one of the reasons why it existed for 60,000 years and still existed in a vibrantly exuberant ecosystem before European invasion,and industrial civilisation will last around 300 years and leave a wasteland in its wake. Not all human cultures had a rapacious approach to the Earth. Wade Davis is worth reading for
anyone interested in this. Phillipe Descola’s ‘Beyond Nature and
Culture’ is another,though I haven’t read it as yet.
There is no hope of changing the ontology of this civilisation,of course. Will another ontology become the prevailing one on the Earth in the future? None of us will ever know.
Chris Harries wrote:
“I think that means Net Energy Return doesn’t matter. If it’s a net negative user, it’s negative. So what! A bit like ignoring the Laws of thermodynamics.”
It’s acknowledging the second law. Entropy increases. All *use* of energy loses energy (not from the universe, but from its useful form).
Thermodynamics tells us that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant. We humans can neither produce nor destroy energy, we can only harness what we find for our own purposes.
We don’t have a primary energy industry for its own sake, we have it for the sake of providing energy to desirable processes which are energy sinks. The net energy of civilisation as a whole is exactly zero.
In terms of “solve the world’s energy problems with this or that fandangled invention”, the only purpose to them is avoiding the pollution and depletion issues that come from using fossil fuels. Whether the fangangle works on the supply side and is net energy positive like a wind turbine, or on the demand side and is net energy negative like an electric truck, the point is not really the ERoEI, it’s the avoided pollution and depletion as opposed to the fossil fuel status quo.
Matt Ridley *is* a global warming denier, and so are the majority of vocal detractors of wind turbines.
I think this is true. Few people delve into energy economics. Most opposition to wind and solar comes from the conservative side of politics. That doesn’t detract from the need for real questioning on the limits of renewables all the same. In thinking land there are plenty of good analysts who do do that.
But it does make it hard to separate the sheep from the goats.
Wind power supplied over 4% of all electricity generated on Earth in 2016. Solar PV contributed over 1%. These numbers are relatively small but they are not “about zero”. They’re also very much larger than they were a year or two before: these two technologies have become the cheapest form of new electricity generation, and are dominating new installations whether subsidised or not.
Logistic curves describe population dynamics and adoption of new technology. The logistic curve of the adoption of intermittent renewable energy sources for electricity generation is just taking off, as are the logistic curves for the efficient electrification of several applications for fossil fuels.
But not of total energy. Ridley’s 1 percent of total global energy is probably correct, but even double that and it’s not a big number. Flies in the face of those folk who say renewables have almost won the energy battle.
If push comes to shove I prefer wind over many of the hydro schemes being pushed, that have a much higher footprint overall. https://phys.org/news/2017-06-hydroelectric-jeopardize-amazon-future.html
But this leads us into the bigger argument about covering all of our coastal hills with thousands of wind turbines, our coastal estuaries with tidal machines, our rivers with dams and so forth without questioning society’s real needs for energy, and whilst subordinating demand management. Poor supply is sexy, even in environmental circles.
Chris Harries wrote: “If push comes to shove I prefer wind over many of the hydro schemes being pushed, that have a much higher footprint overall.”
You need to clearly define “footprint” in terms of wind vs. hydro. Lakes are at least something nature can create. Hydro kills fish while wind kills birds & bats. You don’t see anti-dam activists trivializing the plight of salmon but the wind crowd is constantly making glib excuses for its bird & bat carnage, which defies environmental ethics. They also act as if wind power won’t expand and those death-rates will remain static. It’s just a form of lying by omission.
The pro-wind lobby pushes the strange concept of “footprint” as just the land or ocean where wind towers touch down, which completely ignores the issue of their vertical blight along with access roads and noise. ANWR drilling advocates used the same ruse (“2,000 acres” of oil rigs covering a 1.5 million acre spread) but with wind it’s considered honest data. Why?
This is the true wind power footprint: http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wind+farm+mountain
I’m not pro-hydro but I’d rather see more rivers dammed than valleys and mountaintops spiked by wind turbines, and infrasound being forced over every hill and dale. And I’d rather see a lot more contraception and economic downsizing than either.
http://bit.do/windschmerz
In campaigning against wind farms I don’t think it’s wise to downplay the ecological impact of dam construction, where entire ecological habitats are drowned and in many poorer countries thousands of humans communities have, and are, are being displaced. This has been a huge issue in India and new dams along the Mekong are right now threatening the livelihoods and cultural traditions of many people in SE Asia and Brazil. You may not see these opposition movements but they are incredibly stressful for those who are impacted.
In addition, the drowning of thousands of hectares of forests, with their peaty, carbon rich, soils results in much more than removing those forests from the carbon cycle. Eventual rotting of those millions of tonnes of carbon brings methane to the surface and this has very powerful negative climate effects.
Nor is it wise to focus too much on a tit-for-tat battle over which technology is worse than another. If society demands enormous quantities of energy then all of the energy supply choices result in impacts. As they say, ‘there is no free lunch in energy supply’.
The main problem all of us face is that without applying the brakes on energy consumption then choice isn’t an issue. Trying to satiate never ending economic growth means we would have to have all of them, nuclear energy thrown in as well, with each group either clamouring for those technologies to be built while others campaign against the ones that affect themselves or which they deem to be harmful. This applies to all choices.
Only when we firstly address society’s basic energy needs should we be making comparisons about preferred technologies to fill those needs. Most people are now saying no fossil fuels and a majority say no to nuclear. This doesn’t leave a lot of choices remaining. Every energy supply option becomes an invidious choice for one person or another, depending on each person’s experiences and perspectives. This is the universal human predicament that we face.
> But not of total energy
Almost half of “total energy” is used for electricity generation, and most (ultimately all, if necessary) of the applications where we use non-electric energy can be electrified. This is no obstacle.
> renewables have almost won the energy battle.
Renewables have won on price in the electricity sector and now represent a majority market share of new electricity generation. Technology adoption follows logistic curves. There is no barrier to renewables taking over the vast majority of the electricity business, and electricity taking over the majority of the energy business. Saying “already won” or “almost won” is forward-looking optimism, but not entirely without justification.
> the bigger argument about covering all of our coastal hills with thousands of wind turbines, our coastal estuaries with tidal machines, our rivers with dams and so forth
I don’t expect all that much growth in renewable generation to come from tidal or new hydro; mostly it will be solar with a large but minority fraction from wind. Wind will only continue to predominate in the cooler and upper temperate latitudes where solar energy is more diffuse and seasonal. Wind power might only represent 4% of electricity generation globally, but it’s already 11% in the UK (37.5 out of a total 338 TWh in 2016) and 15% in Germany (100 out of 654 TWh in 2017). Wind generation will probably double twice more or even three times in those countries (mostly offshore, I expect), but we will likely not see it making more than one third of electric power in sunnier latitudes.
Well, what are we all worried about then? Problems all solved.
In time you will find out that the jigsaws don’t fit into each other as neatly as is being portrayed. Biggest hurdle is the time factor, knowing that we’ve already gone past several tipping points and as most climate scientists believe that system change is now irreversible.
Yet we still believe in pressing the accelerator hard while not touching the brakes.
You have to remember that electricity is only 20% of total energy use, so 5% of 20% = 1%……. and most of the stuff we do cannot run on electricity.
> electricity is only 20% of total energy use
Electricity *generation* is not 20% of energy use, it’s 48% of primary energy use. Every kWh of electricity generation from non-fuel sources is not just 3600 kilojoules of fuel use abated, but something more like 9000 kJ, accounting for waste heat. Ridley even concedes this point above, though he pretends that it doesn’t make a difference.
> most of the stuff we do cannot run on electricity.
Electricity won’t run our brains or grow our food for us, no, but for *most* of the energy applications we use fossil fuels for, electricity is applicable, and sometimes it’s better. We use fossil fuels today because they are cheap (and because the electricity would have come from fossil fuels anyway), not because they are the only possible means way.
Much fossil fuel use is simply to heat buildings and stoves and furnaces. Electricity can do that better: significantly more efficiently for gentle heat using heat pumps, or at comparable efficiency for higher temperatures, perhaps somewhat better due to the absence of heat loss via exhausts and intakes.
Much fossil fuel use is to move vehicles around on the ground using internal combustion engines. With catenaries and/or modern batteries, electricity can do that more efficiently.
Even metallurgy can be done with the direct use of electricity in place of the fossil fuel energy input: this is the norm with aluminium and it has been demonstrated at lab scale with other metals. (We probably can’t do ferrous metallurgy with no carbon at all; but then carbon doesn’t have to come from fossil fuels: Brazil’s large steel industry is run mostly on charcoal from contemporary wood, not on coal from prehistoric wood).
Electricity commands an ever-growing share of the stuff we do. There are a few applications where electricity really is inferior to direct use of fuel, or where the difficulty of storing electric potential in high densities is a handicap; in those cases, it’s actually possible to synthesise fuels identical to fossil fuel from readily available raw materials using electric energy. Some energy is wasted in the process, just as it is currently wasted to turn fuel energy into electricity.
Say we converted say 50 percent of current energy that is supplied by oil (mainly transportation) to electricity, this substantially enlarges the electricity slice of the energy pie that would need to be provided for and would require a truly massive tooling up of manufacturing plant. A full conversion of the world’s car fleet to EVs in a short time frame is not feasible without resorting to nuclear energy, if that’s your thing.
There is also a variety of other industrial processes where conversion to electricity is not technically or practically feasible because it is the carbon that is needed for reduction purposes or for the end-products that contain carbon. Also very high temperature industrial processes.
This never ending array of hard limits will keep challenging us, even if one-by-one we try to argue that every single limit can be easily overcome – as some do. At some point anyone who has en ecological bone in their body will have to come to terms with the notion of what Gandhi called ‘enoughness’. To champion the case of heedless growth at this historic juncture, while humanity is undergoing this looming predicament, is tantamount to championing civilisation’s demise.
Jonathan Maddox wrote: “Much fossil fuel use is to move vehicles around on the ground using internal combustion engines. With catenaries and/or modern batteries, electricity can do that more efficiently.”
With all due respect, people who wax eloquent about “100% renewables” are in serious denial about the ability of batteries or onboard solar panels to move ships, planes, trains, semi trucks, power heat-intensive factory processes, mining scoops, logging, farm equipment, etc. Do you ever think it through beyond a “we can do this!” surface level?
Wind turbine construction itself is a prime example:
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wind+farm+construction
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wind+turbines+trucking
Tesla promises an electric semi truck but it’s a pragmatic joke without a major fossil fuel component, like gas turbines. Climbing any sort of grade with a practical load will wipe out a battery bank in no time, unless it’s only short runs. Truckers can’t be expected to hop just 100 or 200 miles between loads in ideal flat terrain or depend on battery swaps or many hours of charging needed for big batteries. Try to pull even a 50-car railroad train up any sort of grade with batteries, keeping in mind that trains often exceed a mile in length. Train wheels roll easier than rubber on the flats, but on the slightest grade they want to roll backward with a vengeance. You need a powerful diesel-electric drive for that, not batteries.
There’s also the matter of countless critical products made from petroleum, including fertilizers that modern high-yield agriculture couldn’t exist without. Oil-based agriculture props up most “feeding the world is only a matter of distribution” fallacies, entwined with overpopulation denial.
https://www.google.com/search?q=products+made+from+petroleum
Getting back to wind turbines, even if one doesn’t find it profoundly bleak to lose all that scenery to spiky, noisy, red-lit, sporadic power plants (e.g. https://goo.gl/maps/HYWA9GajZ752) the SCALE of what fossil fuels do is far bigger than you seem to grasp. Wind power is just making the planet uglier as it continues to warm. Promoting it as a planet-saver is misguided on many levels.
http://bit.do/blight_for_naught
Respect Silence writes:
“…serious denial about the ability of batteries or onboard solar panels to move ships, planes, trains, semi trucks, power heat-intensive factory processes, mining scoops, logging, farm equipment, etc.”
Trains and mining scoops can and do already run by catenary electric power. Heat-intensive factory processes are as often as not electrically powered: arc furnaces and aluminium smelters, to name two. “Batteries and onboard solar panels” don’t enter into the equation. Solar panels can be, and are, part of the mix of grid power which drives these vehicles and processes.
A few ships, trains and semi trucks are already battery powered. So are a few planes, even. It’s a new world. Today’s batteries already work quite well, albeit for limited loads and limited range. For longer range, a more dense energy carrier is still required: in a fossil fuel free world, that energy carrier might be a better battery, or it might be liquid fuel made from plants, or waste, or synthesised using electrolytic hydrogen.
“Tesla promises an electric semi truck but it’s a pragmatic joke…”
Battery-electric semi trucks can and do work *better* than diesel ones on steep gradients. You get better torque for the climb and you win back energy with regenerative braking on the descent. There’s no point poking sticks at what you think Tesla can’t do, when they are *already* using their own trucks to ship heavy loads of car parts, batteries and battery assemblies back and forth 380km each way across the Donner Pass (2100m above sea level) in the Sierra Nevada range between their factories in California (almost at sea level) and Nevada (over 1km above sea level). They were doing this experimentally for months before they even announced their own truck as a product, using electric traction in prime movers of more traditional appearance.
“There’s also the matter of countless critical products made from petroleum, including fertilizers that modern high-yield agriculture couldn’t exist without.”
Industrial production of urea fertiliser was first done in 1904 using hydroelectric energy at Ryukan in Norway, first using the Birkeland-Eyde electric arc process, then later using hydrogen from water electrolysis and the Haber process. No fossil energy or material involved. Even when fossil fuels are used (as they usually are today due to the lower cost), ammonia fertilisers are not made “from petroleum”: natural gas is the preferred fossil feedstock in the West, and in China naturally coal is used instead. The choice of fuel is down to cost: fossil fuels are not critical to the process at all.
You’ve quoted the number 3.8 million several times for the number of wind turbines required to help run industrial civilisation. There are already over 350,000 of them, 10% of those installed in 2017 alone. I understand that you don’t find them attractive, but over the course of a decade or two a tenfold expansion does not strike me as outside the realm of the practical or the possible.
Alice Friedemann has some relevant comments and links in the comments
section here:
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/richard-heinberg-on-why-low-oil-prices-do-not-mean-there-is-plenty-of-oil-eroi-collapse/#comments
Chris Harries wrote: “….Most opposition to wind and solar comes from the conservative side of politics.”
I think that’s more myth than reality (based on opinion pieces) but the wind industry thrives on that perception. Trump’s opposition to wind turbines near his Scottish golf course was a propaganda gift from a fool who happens to be right on specific topics. He also told the truth about bird deaths in Iowa speeches, etc.
Sites like http://www.basinandrangewatch.org and http://www.savetheeaglesinternational.org have been compiling evidence of wind industry corruption for years and Obama green-lighted bald eagle deaths. The U.S. expansion of wind power under his reign was a crime against nature, just like badly-done fracking. Do people who value landscapes, non-dead birds & bats automatically deny climate change? Such claims are guilt by association, though many anti-wind sites draw climate-deniers for a combination of reasons.
The standard pro-wind-power argument says that nobody truly cares about aesthetics because wind turbines are “beautiful,” so they must be Koch acolytes. What sort of brainwashed drones call something “beautiful” with no context of what’s been destroyed or tainted by it? Someone could have an aesthetic taste for the silhouettes of oil rigs over the tri-blades of wind turbines, like favoring trucks over cars. All those things impact nature, but wind turbines are the physically biggest invaders now.
Nobody has accused opponents of 100-foot cell towers, or LG’s proposed (and downsized) office building on the Hudson River Palisades of being climate denying NIMBYs instead of scenery-advocates. Why are huge wind turbines morally exempt from scenic ordinances? Here’s a good article on that from the UK: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/why-cant-country-views-be-protected-from-wind-turbines/
Many people are against wind power for visceral reasons that have nothing to do with politics. You can’t build the BIGGEST SPRAWLING EYESORES ever invented and claim that nature isn’t being trounced by their presence. If supporting growing blight and species-loss is “liberal,” something is very sick about liberalism. Anthropocentric utility has crippled the original goals of environmentalism as people futilely scramble to replace fossil fuels
http://bit.do/blight_for_naught
Hi again Silence. Let me be clear, there are valid reasons to challenge wind energy, not just from a climate denial stance. I challenge the hard limits of renewable energy per se and have written many posts on this site to that effect.
I do understand that wind machines irritate you particularly, it’s your beef. But I do think there’s a risk in using arguments that are driven from the climate sceptics lobby, all the same. It’s hard enough differentiating one’s position without undermining our argument by aligning ourselves with those who challenge the basics of climate science.
Wind Turbines are seen by many as a shrine to modern man’s ability to produce power post peak oil. As wind paths change with our heating world I can see people praying underneath them to turn.
Angella wrote: “Wind Turbines are seen by many as a shrine to modern man’s ability to produce power post peak oil. As wind paths change with our heating world I can see people praying underneath them to turn.”
Funny comment, since so many wind turbines are put in marginal wind zones and can be seen idle on many days. Their overstated reliability is in plain sight, which is why any pamphlet crowing about powering “50,000 homes” should read < 20,000 realistically, and not 24/7 without backup power.
This blade-failure statistic is also not well publicized, and it's coming from the industry: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1347145/annual-blade-failures-estimated-around-3800
P.S. This site doesn't reliably title replies to an individual, which is why I often put text in quotes.
One of the best science writers, and not one for hyperbole, is Kurt Cobb. Here is his take on renewable energy performance and prospects. Kurt is definitely not into denial of climate change nor resource depletion. His first two paragraphs would replicate in almost any audience in Australia. Most citizens think renewable energy is much more advanced than it really is.
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/the-troubling-realities-of-our-energy.html
As an exercise, ask this question around your friends: “What proportion of Australia’s energy comes from renewables? Nearly everyone will get it wrong by a huge margin.
MIT: “At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system to clean energy.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/
Prof Tom Murphy in his blog: “Confined to Earth, we boil ourselves in a little over 400 years on a 2% energy growth trajectory.”
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
So good news is that we will switch to clean energy. Bad news is that we will boil.
Hi Cupid,
One of those studies uses “at this rate”, assuming linear growth.
The other uses “2% growth trajectory”, assuming exponential growth.
Population dynamics and adoption of new technology follow neither linear growth lines nor exponential growth curves. They follow *logistic* growth curves, sometimes called “S” curves.
These growth curves get faster and faster, looking like exponential curves, but then they slow down again. In the simplest mathematical model, the logistic curve approaches a saturation level (the carrying capacity, or 100% adoption) asymptotically, never quite really getting there.
In the fully generalised case for population logistics, where carrying capacity is not a fixed figure, the population may overshoot a “real” but initially ineffective ultimate carrying capacity and fall back, maybe many times or even indefinitely eg. as with predator/prey population cycles.