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Those articles are essentially meaningless. The longer the wind turbines and solar farms stay in use, the less fossil fuel energy from their manufacturing becomes a factor. That is called life cycle analysis. They do the same with electric cars to show that emissions and oil consumption is not as favorable once you include the energy and pollution from extracting the power source from the ground and the loss of energy during the transmission. If they upgraded the electrical grid, it would greatly improve the comparisons. I think oil & gas are on their way to diminished roles since the reserves are dwindling and one can't predict when shale production will fall off a cliff in the next 15 years. You need to look ahead 50 years since the power plants and the entire fleet of cars will take that long to replace.
Better read The Comments written by engineers, researchers & workers in the field at the end of this article, then adjust your opinion according to the actual facts about Renewable (??) Energy. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/...ve-demolition/
Electric cars also weigh more, therefore do more damage to the roadways (most of which are made of asphalt, a petroleum product). As an example, a "regular" Audi Q5 weighs just over 4,000 lb. The electric version weighs over 4,600 lb, or about 15% more. Tires don't last as long either.
I'd love a link since I am against this fourth grade civics project being transmuted to national policy. I can't cite RocketDawg or for that matter jbgusa when writing a congressperson.
Those articles are essentially meaningless. The longer the wind turbines and solar farms stay in use, the less fossil fuel energy from their manufacturing becomes a factor. That is called life cycle analysis. They do the same with electric cars to show that emissions and oil consumption is not as favorable once you include the energy and pollution from extracting the power source from the ground and the loss of energy during the transmission. If they upgraded the electrical grid, it would greatly improve the comparisons. I think oil & gas are on their way to diminished roles since the reserves are dwindling and one can't predict when shale production will fall off a cliff in the next 15 years. You need to look ahead 50 years since the power plants and the entire fleet of cars will take that long to replace.
You seem to be forgetting that these things have a lifespan, and not a very long one. By the time it turns 25 years old, a wind turbine will have lost 40% of its generating capacity, and they take 20 years just to repay their construction cost. See here. https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...60148113005727
There are also more issues with "renewables" than just the energy needed to produce them. There's the massive amount of unrecycleable waste, and the fact that they kill very large numbers of bats and raptors, both of which reproduce very slowly.
Quote:
According to a study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, every year 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines — 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009, due mainly to increasing wind power capacity across the nation.
Also, given the dismal capacity factor of wind power, (25-35%) wind power needs to be massively overbuilt to have any hope of getting the needed amount of power.
Offshore wind is no savior either. The first offshore wind facility in the U.S., Rhode Island’s 30-MW Block Island Wind Farm. The power purchase agreement (PPA) for the project specified that utilities pay a first-year price of $245/MWh for the electricity it generates; that price escalates at 3.5% each year,and by the time the PPA ends, utilities will be paying $470/MWh, even though in 2019, the average wholesale cost of electricity in New England was $30.67/MWh.
The performance of offshore turbines also decreases dramatically. A 2020 British study showed that the performance of larger offshore wind turbines decreased an average of 4.5% per year for turbines installed after 2011. In ten short years, large turbines were putting out just over half the power they did when new. The study also showed another problem: subsea transmission lines “are notorious for the severity and length of their outages.”(The Block Island Wind Farm’s offshore cable was exposed because of erosion. Repairs and reburying of the cable are anticipated to take at least six months to complete.)
The study also showed that the likelihood of major outages lasting at least one month increases by at least 10% per year. So by the time a turbine is 8 years old, there is an 80% chance of a major, long term outage. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/...re-wind-energy
You seem to be forgetting that these things have a lifespan, and not a very long one
The problem is that they're looking at things statically. The useful lifespan for these have been extended to 30 years, and will extend further. The manufacturing process will change over time to reduce the use of coal in producing the steel blades.
You're pinning your hopes on excavating uneconomical sources of energy. That can't continue indefinitely. If anything, it's undermining the development of oil and gas reserves in deep water because they require the price of crude oil to be nearly double the current price.
It's foolish to rely on a source of energy that has such a steep production curve which will likely be just as steep in decline and result in price shocks to the economy. That will drive up the cost of replacement energy sources. The best time to implement alternatives is while they're relatively cheap.
In general, wind and solar are probably limited to replacing a certain percentage of the energy generated using fossil fuels. The main problem is that it requires a large amount of land which is far from urban centers.
You seem to be forgetting that these things have a lifespan, and not a very long one. By the time it turns 25 years old, a wind turbine will have lost 40% of its generating capacity, and they take 20 years just to repay their construction cost. See here. https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...60148113005727
There are also more issues with "renewables" than just the energy needed to produce them. There's the massive amount of unrecycleable waste, and the fact that they kill very large numbers of bats and raptors, both of which reproduce very slowly.
This is one reason why I equate this effort with a fourth grade civics project. It's more a "you have start somewhere" or "we have to to something" than consideration of whether that something or somewhere does any good.
Both oil & gas and renewables have issues with waste, deforestation, and environmental degradation. If they hadn't exempted the oil & gas industry from environmental regulations, there would be no fracking today. They also received a free pass from state regulators on the radioactive fracking fluids when they applied for drilling licenses. They're assuming that the waste won't pollute the water table for 100 years. Texas is looking at dumping the toxic waste into the aquifers which was opposed by a Republican EPA.
Recycling blades is not as difficult a problem as solve as the waste and recovery for mountaintop coal removal, tar sands, and fracking wells. The taxpayer is getting stuck with the cleanup for cleaning up the fracking wells since many of those companies are now out of business.
A friend of mine recently had a family emergency that required him to do a lot of driving back and forth from his house. After a few hours he depleted the battery in his electric car and was playing "connect the dots" using EV charging stations at stores, waiting a minimum of 2 hours at each stop so that he could drive his car another short distance. He eventually was able to borrow an ICE car from a friend.
Until this "feature" is fixed... yeah, I'll never own one. I can store enough gas in a 5 gallon can to drive my ICE at least 150 miles, and it only takes a few seconds to transfer the fuel.... and NO COAL WAS BURNED to power my car, and no slave-labor children had to mine lithium or cobalt in a third world country.
A friend of mine recently had a family emergency that required him to do a lot of driving back and forth from his house. After a few hours he depleted the battery in his electric car and was playing "connect the dots" using EV charging stations at stores, waiting a minimum of 2 hours at each stop so that he could drive his car another short distance. He eventually was able to borrow an ICE car from a friend.
Until this "feature" is fixed... yeah, I'll never own one. I can store enough gas in a 5 gallon can to drive my ICE at least 150 miles, and it only takes a few seconds to transfer the fuel.... and NO COAL WAS BURNED to power my car, and no slave-labor children had to mine lithium or cobalt in a third world country.
This is part of the enviros' desire to turn the U.S. into a Third-World country; make grocery shopping cumbersome with bag bans and travel difficult to impossible.
Here, they banned plastic bags. Some stores switched to paper, even though paper bags are far worse for the environment than plastic ones. Other stores just stopped offering bags at all other than they will sell you a reusable bag.
Then, because of the pandemic, they banned reusable bags. They could still sell reusable bags, but we aren't allowed to bring them back to the store to be reused. So now people are buying these giant plastic reusable bags with 10x the plastic of the ones that were banned.
So as a result a lot of people are shopping on Amazon causing a lot of fuel to be burned in delivering multiple little packages in giant Earth-killing cardboard boxes.
"This is part of the enviros' desire to turn the U.S. into a Third-World country"
This is exactly the strategy of the globalists, they have come out and said it directly. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. It's impossible to bring every country up to the standard of living of the rich industrialized "western" countries, so the only "fair" solution is to knock us all down to a level playing field. That's what the PARIS accord and all these "trade agreements" are about. It's a wealth transfer scheme.
Here, they banned plastic bags. Some stores switched to paper, even though paper bags are far worse for the environment than plastic ones. Other stores just stopped offering bags at all other than they will sell you a reusable bag.
Then, because of the pandemic, they banned reusable bags. They could still sell reusable bags, but we aren't allowed to bring them back to the store to be reused. So now people are buying these giant plastic reusable bags with 10x the plastic of the ones that were banned.
So as a result a lot of people are shopping on Amazon causing a lot of fuel to be burned in delivering multiple little packages in giant Earth-killing cardboard boxes.
"This is part of the enviros' desire to turn the U.S. into a Third-World country"
This is exactly the strategy of the globalists, they have come out and said it directly. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. It's impossible to bring every country up to the standard of living of the rich industrialized "western" countries, so the only "fair" solution is to knock us all down to a level playing field. That's what the PARIS accord and all these "trade agreements" are about. It's a wealth transfer scheme.
I wish the people who were against these senseless measures could explain things that well. I don't know if even the enviros understand this; most are useful idiots. OK, maybe a bit harsh; useful imbeciles or useful morons.
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