Energy balance of renewables negative, quite the contrary!

[rickgthf]

  By far, the largest energy cost to making solar panels is that to produce the purified silicon.  It takes 84 lbs. of coal to produce 1 lbs. of purified silicon.  Using US countrywide average performance data it takes about 2/3's of a standard solar panel to produce 1 kwh per day which pretty close to the performance of our system and it's nowhere near as sunny here as much of the rest of the country.

  A little math shows that it take 148 lbs. of coal to make the purified silicon required which means that the solar panel recovers it's 148 kwh's equivalent in 148 days.  Given that solar panels are designed (& guaranteed) to last a minimum of 25 years but can be expected to last 50 years, the tradeoff to produce solar panels is between 1.6% to 0.8% of total solar energy production.  Burn 148 lbs. of coal to avoid burning 14,800 lbs. of coal.

But the real advantage is the reduction of CO2 produced, namely 21 tons.  You trade the production of 400  lbs. of CO2 now for  not producing 21 tons of CO2 later.

[r3020]

And yet the chinese are building coal fired power plants by the dozen.

[Packard27]

Rick,

Everyone is for green, renewable energy and saving the earth right up until the moment that their own lights go out and they begin to freeze in their own homes.

After that, maybe no so much.

[File under: Ignore what American power elites might say, but watch very closely what they actually do with their own property, their own money, their own kids education, their own healthcare, and now, with their own personal energy needs.]

[rickgthf]

I've said this before.

  A dozen miles from here there is an older coal-fired plant that was refurbished and is used as back up for the nuclear plants up north (every so often one goes down). They even built a new transmission line north in order to get the power where it needed to be.  They keep a little steam up all the time, to keep it ready to go.  Nobody begrudges the little bit of coal needed to keep it ready, the cost is figured into the rate payers' bills over the whole state. 

   Meanwhile, the state continues to build out solar, why?  Because our peak power demand always come in the middle of the hottest day in the middle of the summer.  You know how much that "peaker" power costs $300+ per Mwh compared to $50 per Mwh for solar.   And when is solar power most available?  That's right, in the middle of the hottest day in the middle of the summer.

    In the meantime, what's NY planning for power to NYC, they going to build an new power line, underground & out of sight, down from Quebec buy that $20 per Mwh power instead of that $150 per Mwh coal-fired power.

    Unlike Texas, some states try to be smart about their electricity system, try to plan for contingencies & build smart capacity. 

    Watch the power elites, my *****, you just watch the power elites running the Texas power system, and how their greed killed people in Texas.

[sdholloway56]

I suppose it is just a more sophisticated form of trolling, but Packard is particularly infuriating when he lies with such oblivious self satisfaction.

[Packard27]

Rick,

Solar and wind renewables cannot yet reliably store energy. They just can’t. For these green vendors, it is either a use it or lose it proposition for selling their product. Fortunately for wind investors like Warren Buffett, many states have already written laws that require power companies to give preference to purchasing renewables over fossil fuel generated vendors (A very good deal if you are Warren Buffett.).

If and when the sun fails to shine or the wind fails to blow, however, the energy needs for a community remain a constant. Your dirty coal fired back-up plant is a great example. While wind and solar graphs look like an up/down repeating parabola, coal is just a simple supply/demand diagonal line. As demand for electricity increases, so too must the supply of electricity increase in order to keep up, or the lights go out.

This means, if you need more 24/7 electricity with your coal fired dynamo, you just load up the bobcat and start dumping the coal into the furnaces, boil your water, turn the turbines, and voila! You’ve got your electricity. Great stuff! It is not nearly so easy (read: reliable) to do this with wind or solar power.

Lastly, my earlier comment about power elites and their own personal energy needs was really meant to say that those with the financial means to purchase back-up home generators are not going to miss a beat during any foreseeable power blackouts. I wonder only how the freezing peasant classes are going to view all of the lit up homes of he wealthy while they themselves sit with their families in the dark and freeze.

An genuine energy crisis has a way of making converts of us all. Let’s hope we do not ever get there. Semper paratus.

[sdholloway56]

Going unnoticed regarding the extremely ambitious Chinese program is the storage element.

If they can (and I'm betting they will, the tech is advancing rapidly) scale much lower cost into battery storage like they have in panels, then even the baseload question gets a lot easier.

Although stuff like pumped storage, where applicable, is already here. The huge project on Lake Michigan at Ludington is 80% efficient in primarily storage cheap nighttime output from the nuke plants to the south.

There is a tremendous wind resource sitting just the the west of that- you could power the entire Great Lakes region off of just the offshore wind. But there is a NIMBY problem with both that and more pumped storage, though.

Which brings us back to the good old days when you could put a coal plant near the poor part of a town or city and let people who have little voice get the worst of the soot and mercury. A major piece of environmental injustice.

[sdholloway56]

Packard, in regards to your oblivious pedantry, of course we are aware of the challenges with the intermittent nature of renewables.

Those are quite maneagable over a 20 year transition.

We are looking at the cheapest large scale energy source in history, which also happens to be very, very substantially cleaner than the conventional alternatives.

The people who fund the RW fascist network just don't want to get their forelegs and snouts out of the trough. Other frightened whitefolk are riding along for their own reasons.

[sdholloway56]

Slick trick that works with those employing motivated reasoning.

Solar will always bo too expensive (until it wasn't), then, yes but it is too intermittent (storage, pairedbase load) so it would be folly to help either achieve the scale that would make them displace fossil fuels.

That The Market thingy.

[rickgthf]

 Power doesn't fail here for the lack of power but from weather-related transmission failures, ice storms, snow storms, wind storms, etc.  Having a back up generator isn't so much an economic issue as it is taking personal responsibility for your own safety.  No reasonable responsible person living in the rural Northeast would be without some means of backup heat and light, even if it was only a kerosene space heater and a kerosene lamp.

  But even beyond that both the town government and the fire department have backup generators and the space to shelter a good number of people if we need to and us socialists will make sure they are sheltered if the need arises 

  We may be poor communists but we're not stupid.