The Hard Reality of Solar & Wind Power is a Screaming Joke
Anyone got a spare hundred trillion dollars for my new windmills ?
Why has no one run the numbers of fossil fuel usage and looked at IF and HOW it could actually be replaced ?
So we need 121 Trillion kW hours of power and a large portion of it for planes, automobiles and heating needs to be in a reliable and portable form.
Let’s see how solar stacks up :
And that's before you get into the expansion of mining and processing for the raw materials, new manufacturing plants, installation and a new power grid.
Not to mention the maintenance, cleaning and endless replacement cycle of the whole mess.
Now you might imagine that in time the technology would improve, but the sun only produces 1kW per sqm in the first place, so there's an upper limit on the technology and we already have 20-40% at 200 to 400W per sqm conversion rate at the moment, (which is not perfect but reasonable).
Obviously it’s impossible to reach more than 40-50% even with highest technology solar - and not forgetting that all these calculations assume perfect sunny days with no clouds, storms or dust on the panels and we have not taken into account transmission or storage losses OR the lifecycle decay of the output. We might need to double the numbers right here, but they are so dire already, we’ll leave it as it stands.
We can assume the manufacturing, installation, maintenance and replacement cycle will eat at least 25% of the capacity so add 25% to the above numbers and we need redundancy and overage another 25% - AND we’re rolling out a technology with a clear natural cap on it’s productivity.
Solar Cost to replace fossil fuels is : Well over $200 Trillion Dollars
Now some people will say in passing that “we’re not trying to replace all fossil fuels” with solar - we also have wind power and other means - sure - we’ll get to that in a minute (hint: it’s even more of a joke) - but let me ask you - how much fossil fuels are you planning to replace with Solar and where is your fkg feasibility study, never mind the hard cash to get the job done !
Solar looks good for an off grid residence, for supplying remote off grid areas, for enabling areas to be independent and taking pressure off the existing grid and to give home owner’s autonomy. It looks perfectly lousy for any kind of industrial application, power major factories or cities and any installations that run overnight 24/7.
You might imagine that the governments would incentivize housing estates and condos to go off grid and become their own mini power stations - but fk no - they’re not gonna allow any of that. Too much money to be made. In many areas solar is mandated to be connected to the grid and if / when the power is out the poor home owners (who are forced to sell at wholesale into the grid and buy back at retail from the grid, having paid out huge amounts for their power supply in advance) - still have no power. Try and see if you can disconnect from the grid once you're on it - no chance !
Where is the logistics, planning, feasibility and financial analysis study for this behemoth black solar elephant ?
That has an absolute and finite energy output cap on it by virtue of the natural environment.
“Oh - we’ll find a way” - will you ? - or is this whole farce just an excuse to jack up fossil fuel prices - stranger things have happened….. let’s look at wind power….
The average windmill can make 6,000,000 kWh in a year
To create 121 Trillion kWh it will require over : 20 Million Windmills
Average Cost $3.5M ea. = $70.5 Trillion Dollars, plus transportation and installation. Lets say $100 Trillion.
Average net 30 Hectares per MW of power = 8760 MW hr per year per 30 Hectares.
Just to give you an idea 30 hectares is 1km x 300m of land area. A huge field.
121 Trillion kWh / 8,000,000 kWh per 30 Hectares = 15,125,000 units of 30 hectares =453,750,000 Hectares = 4,537,500 sqkm of Windmills - an area 18 Times the size of the entire United Kingdom.
Not gonna cause any environmental damage ? And who is gonna clean the whole mess up once it’s decided that windmills can be replaced with something else ? Warp Drive Engine anyone ? That’s what we should be working on - whilst we still have the fossil fuels to do it.
Now let’s take a look at transportation - the much vaunted electric cars.
World Electrical Consumption : 23,398TWh
World Electrical Production Capacity : 27,500TWh
Fossil Fuel use 121,000TWh
About 80% of electrical generation is from fossil fuels
18,718 TWh Conversion at average 33% efficiency = 56,154 TWh used for generating existing electrical power - and logically the rest is used for transportation or heating, both of which are locally critical and need a battery supply.
So you’re gonna need about 50 TWh of new power supply, just to replace the transportation \ heating component of fossil fuels, and keep in mind you’ll only get an 80% conversion rate before you consider transmission and storage and recharging losses.
Where is all this going to come from ?
Your “GREEN” leaders are literally leading you up the garden path here. Going back to bicycles and horses and carts is a more realistic option - horses of course shit all over the streets and cause massive sanitation issues so be prepared for Polio and Cholera and etc. to restart en-mass.
The only green they seem really interested in, is the green in their bank accounts and stock portfolios.
Now let’s consider the batteries needed to replace the portable component (transport and heating) provided by fossil fuels.
We need at least 50TWh of batteries for cars, trucks, planes, trains (where electric direct is not possible), and back up for heating applications.
Lithium-ion battery packs across all sectors have increased to $151/kWh in 2022, a 7% rise from last year in real terms. That’s gonna increase like wild fire if you start making all these batteries you need, but since economics is only a minor consideration here, we'll just quietly ignore that for now.
1 Terawatt Hour in Kilowatt-hours = 1,000,000,000 kW hrs. So we need 50 Billion kWhrs of batteries at $151 a kWh. = $7.5 Trillion dollars in new batteries - just to come close - and don’t forget the redundancy and replacement cycle. OR the fact that other areas of industry are competing for batteries they need for their applications.
By comparison the entire global car industry is worth about $2.86 Trillion dollars per year.
To produce a typical Li-ion battery with 1 kWh requires approximately 0,5 kg of Cobalt, which are often mined in very poor labor conditions and 850 g of lithium carbonate is needed to be mined for each kWh.
So we need to mine about 50 billion kg of Lithium Carbonate and about 25 Billion kg of Cobalt. Not too much environmental or human damage - don’t worry. We won't mention all the power requirements for the mining and processing operations….. gonna need a bigger windmill 😝.
Global lithium reserves are estimated at over 14 million tons, which is 14 billion kg, so we’re about 75% short in supply of lithium - ops.
Total global cobalt reserves amount to 8.3 million metric tons, or 8 billion kg, so we are again about 75% short of supply here. Don't worry once we have a warp drive engine we can go mine asteroids for your fkg electric car batteries.
Oh and keep in mind that propane and butane that are commonly used in industry and for remote areas, 164.3 Million Tons of propane (2.2 Trillion kWhrs) and 147 Million Tons of Butane (2 Trillion kW hrs) in 2021, is not included in the calculations. I guess throw in another $10 Trillion of solar panels and you’ll be fine.
What a fkg mess. Even if some of these numbers are out, there are so many factors such as real wind and solar conversion, cloudy or windless days and drop off in productivity over life span etc. - that it barely matters since we've only inputed ideal circumstances.
Easter Island has nothing on this mess. At least for them it was obvious that building stone heads was not productive whereas the make believe of the greenies solar and wind is actually fooling us that we have any chance in hell of replacing oil, coal and gas.
Fusion, Warp Drive, Anti-Gravity Engines, Force Fields, Magnetics, Impulse Engines, Pyramids, Harmonics - dig into sci-fi and use some imagination, because what we have so far is almost garbage.
references- go google it for yourself and cross check the calculations.
Any 5th grader can do this, but the green ninnies apparently forgot to run the numbers.