The ecollusion of renewables
Notes taken while watching the documentary Planet of the Humans and TEDx talk Why renewables can’t save the planet.
Planet of the Humans (Jeff Gibbs)
- Wind turbines have ~20 year lifespan
- The electricity to charge electric cars are produced by coal/gas plants
- A soccer field of solar panels theoretically provide energy for 30 houses. The mayor says, in reality, it’s more like 10 houses. The solar panel the town hall can afford to purchase has 8% efficiency.
- What to do when there is no sun or wind? You need to have a backup power that is natural gas most of the time.
- Production of solar panel requires fine quartz and coal. For the melting process you need extra coal.
- “Free energy forever”: solar panels’ lifespan is a few decades
- The management of solar panel farms (e.g. turning the panels towards the sun) is often powered by natural gas
- Mining and producing solar panels takes more energy than what the panel can harvest during its lifespan
- Elon Musk’s battery gigafactory is connected to the grid too. Although he claimed that it would only be powered by solar, wind and geothermic energies.
- We convert deserted landscapes to digital power plant deserts
- Worn out solar farms stay behind as trash in nature
- Are we smart enough species to limit ourselves?
- 100% renewable tech companies — it’s never true
- Beyond coal movement pushed colleges to go for renewables, meaning biomass, meaning burning trees. Many times wood is mixed with other, toxic elements to increase combustion efficiency
- Wood in Europe is imported from US, Asia, Brazil
- Some already experiment with dead animal bodies and seaweed as biomass source
- Capitalism found its way through environmentalism
- Earth Day event, powered by diesel generator behind the scenes, is sponsored by Toyota, Citibank, Caterpillar
Why renewables can’t save the planet (Michael Shellenberger)
- Electricity for solar rooftops costs twice as much as for solar farms
- Building solar farms and win turbines require clearing a vast amount of land and its wild life
- Idea: convert hydro-electric dams to batteries. Due to climate change, water is unreliable in CA.
- Wind turbines and solar farms kill lots of threatened birds and bats
- Regardless of technological advancement, wind and sun stay unreliable. The bottleneck is not technical, it’s natural.
- With the introduction of more solar power, electricity prices significantly increased in the US and Germany
- France gets 91% of its energy from clean sources compared to Germany’s 46%, and yet Germany’s electricity is double the price. France uses nuclear.
- Nuclear is reliable
- If Germany spent its money on nuclear instead of renewables, it could generate 100% of its energy from clean sources
- Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable energy
- 7 million die annually from air pollution
- Solar needs 450 times more land than nuclear
- Renewable power plants are very resource heavy to be built compared to nuclear
- There is no plan how to safely recycle solar panels
- “In our efforts to save the climate, our we destroying the environment?”
- Nuclear is hard to up scale or down scale. If France wanted to more renewables, they would need to burn more natural gas to compensate the reliability issues with sun and wind
- Oil companies invest in solar energy
- Netherlands decided to increase its nuclear capacity (2018)