Archives de catégorie : renewable energy

better to know...?, press and newspapers, renewable energy

La voiture à hydrogène est un miroir aux alouettes de la transition énergétique

by Olivier Daniélo, 2 avril 2019 in Reporterre

Il y a urgence à agir pour réduire les émissions de CO2. La marche et le vélo sont certes préférables à la voiture particulière. Mais parmi les différents types de voitures, quelle est la solution la plus efficace pour réduire les émissions de CO2 ?

Il existe un indicateur particulièrement intéressant pour tenter d’y répondre : la quantité d’énergie consommée pour réaliser par exemple 200.000 kilomètres. Energie non seulement pour propulser la voiture, mais aussi pour fabriquer la voiture elle-même et extraire dans les mines les matières premières nécessaires. Le bilan carbone est bien entendu corrélé au bilan énergétique. Les experts du groupe Volkswagen (VW) ont fait le calcul et ont présenté les résultats le 12 mars 2019 à l’occasion de la conférence de presse annuelle de ce mastodonte dont les décisions influencent l’industrie automobile mondiale.

 

 

 

Verdict : la voiture aux carburants synthétiques (eFuel et eCNG) consomme trois fois plus d’énergie primaire que la voiture électrique. Et celle à l’hydrogène, 1,7 fois plus. Ces 70 % supplémentaires représentent un impact à la fois économique et carbonique. La fabrication de la pile à combustible et du réservoir capable de résister à une pression de 700 atmosphères est énergivore. La voiture à hydrogène la plus vendue au monde (quelques milliers d’exemplaires) pèse 1.850 kg, soit 3 kilos de plus que la Tesla Model 3 Long Range (100 % batterie), qui a la même autonomie. Mais, c’est surtout le mauvais rendement de la chaîne hydrogène qui plombe le bilan global.

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energy and fields, renewable energy

La transition électrique européenne, une impasse?

by J.P. Schaeken Willemaers, 29 mars 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

La transition énergétique est abondamment traitée dans les médias, souvent de manière univoque (ce que d’aucuns appellent le débat confisqué) en ignorant les conséquences socio-économiques. Dans ce papier, nous nous limiterons à sa composante électrique.
Rappelons tout d’abord que la finalité première d’un système électrique est d’assurer l’adéquation entre la production et la consommation d’électricité.


Il va de soi, quoique ce ne soit pas évident pour tout le monde, qu’il faut anticiper les adaptations nécessaires du système avant de procéder à la mise en œuvre du changement. Dans ce processus, l’analyse de l’impact sur la transmission et la distribution d’électricité et sur la continuité des services ainsi que la réalisation des travaux correspondants requis, sont prioritaires. Or aucun gouvernement ayant décidé de réduire drastiquement les émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES), ne s’est soucié des conséquences de leurs décisions. Ceci explique les déboires des pays qui se sont précipités dans une stratégie de pénétration accélérée de production d’électricité renouvelable intermittente.

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climate-debate, energy and fields, renewable energy

Report : The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking

by Mark P. Mills, March 26, 2019 in ManhattanInstitute

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A movement has been growing for decades to replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It began with the fear that we were running out of oil. That fear has since migrated to the belief that, because of climate change and other environmental concerns, society can no longer tolerate burning oil, natural gas, and coal—all of which have turned out to be abundant.

So far, wind, solar, and batteries—the favored alternatives to hydrocarbons—provide about 2% of the world’s energy and 3% of America’s. Nonetheless, a bold new claim has gained popularity: that we’re on the cusp of a tech-driven energy revolution that not only can, but inevitably will, rapidly replace all hydrocarbons.

This “new energy economy” rests on the belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power and battery storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in computing and communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing efficiency. But this core analogy glosses over profound differences, grounded in physics, between systems that produce energy and those that produce information.

In the world of people, cars, planes, and factories, increases in consumption, speed, or carrying capacity cause hardware to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics—not clever software.

This paper highlights the physics of energy to illustrate why there is no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a “new energy economy.”

Among the reasons:

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better to know...?, energy and fields, renewable energy

REPORT: GREEN ENERGY ECONOMY IS SIMPLY ‘IMPOSSIBLE’

by Mark P. Mills, March 23, 2019 in GWPF

Hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—are the world’s principal energy resource today and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. Wind turbines, solar arrays, and batteries, meanwhile, constitute a small source of energy, and physics dictates that they will remain so. Meanwhile, there is simply no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a “new energy economy.”

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see the .pdf

better to know...?, climate-debate, renewable energy

The Green New Deal’s Weak Chain Of Logic

by Daniel G. Jones, March 18, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Reagan observed: “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

So it is with the Green New Deal. Most liberals regard it as a simple proposition: Global warming is a really big problem, and it’s our fault, so let’s fix it.

But closer analysis reveals that the argument for the Green New Deal rests upon a long chain of interdependent assertions, every one of which must be believed for the problem to be of sufficient peril to warrant their drastic solution.

Here are links in their chain of logic. If you doubt the truth of any single step, you must discard the entire argument.

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renewable energy

Unreliable Power Source…Adding Capacity Does Little To Solve Germany’s Green Energy Power Gaps

by P. Gosselin, March 6, 2019 in NoTricksZone

German wind park protest group MenschNatur posted here explaining how even adding more wind and solar capacity does not make Germany’s energy supply any more reliable, but in fact may even make it less so.

Time and again the proponents of the Energiewende (transition to green energies) promote the idea that we must invest massively in more wind and solar power plants and that only an accelerated expansion can save the transformation to green energies.

Thus the wind energy protest group MenschNatur has taken a closer look at the increase in installed nominal capacity over the past years and compared it to what actually gets fed into the grid.

How increases in wind generator capacity affects the feed-in power is described in the following diagram. MenschNatur plotted the installed capacity of all German onshore wind turbines from 2014 to 2018, along with what actually got fed in.

Figure 1: Expansion of rated installed wind power capacity and the power that actually got fed into the grid in Germany. Chart: MenschNatur, by Rolf Schuster.

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better to know...?, minerals and ores, renewable energy

Captured carbon dioxide converts into oxalic acid to process rare earth elements

by Michigan Technological University, February 22, 2019 in ScienceDaily

Until now, carbon dioxide has been dumped in oceans or buried underground. Industry has been reluctant to implement carbon dioxide scrubbers in facilities due to cost and footprint.

What if we could not only capture carbon dioxide, but convert it into something useful? S. Komar Kawatra and his students have tackled that challenge, and they’re having some success.

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energy and fields, renewable energy

China: No Wind Or Solar If It Can’t Beat Coal On Price

by  John Parnell, January 10, 2019 in Forbes

China has said it will not approve wind and solar power projects unless they can compete with coal power prices.

Beijing pulled the plug on support for large solar projects, which had been receiving a per kWh payment, in late May. That news came immediately after the country’s largest solar industry event and caught everyone by surprise.

Officials are understood to have been frustrated at seeing Chinese suppliers and engineering firms building solar projects overseas that delivered electricity at prices far below what was available back home.

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climate-debate, renewable energy

Can wind and solar replace fossil fuels?

by Richard Patton, January 1, 2019 in WUWT

Statements implying that wind and solar can provide 50% of the power to the grid are not difficult to find on the internet. For example, Andrew Cuomo announced that

“The Clean Energy Standard will require 50 percent of New York’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030…”

Considering that the wind is erratic, and the solar cells only put out full power 6 hours per day, it seems a remarkable statement. Can intermittent energy actually supply that much power?

For some answers, we turn to Germany, which has some of the highest electric bills in the world as well as a high proportion of its electric power produced by wind and solar (19%). Let’s take a look at German consumption and generation.

 

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renewable energy

Germany’s green transition has hit a brick wall

by O. Lundseng at al., December 21, 2018 in WUWT

More people are finally beginning to realize that supplying the world with sufficient, stable energy solely from sun and wind power will be impossible.

Germany took on that challenge, to show the world how to build a society based entirely on “green, renewable” energy. It has now hit a brick wall. Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last ten years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.

Germany has installed solar and wind power to such an extent that it should theoretically be able to satisfy the power requirement on any day that provides sufficient sunshine and wind. However, since sun and wind are often lacking – in Germany even more so than in other countries like Italy or Greece – the country only manages to produce around 27% of its annual electric power needs from these sources.

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renewable energy

WHY RENEWABLE ENERGY CANNOT REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS BY 2050

by Robert Lyman, May 2016 in FriendsOfScience

A number of environmental groups in Canada and other countries have recently endorsed the “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water and Sunlight (WWS)” vision articulated in reports written by MarkJacobson, Mark Delucci and others. This vision seeks to eliminate the use of all fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) in the world by 2050. Jacobson, Delucci et. al. have published “all-sector energy roadmaps”in which they purport to show how each of 139 countries could attain the WWS goal. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the 100% goal is feasible.

While a range of renewable energy technologies (e.g. geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and wave energy) could play a role in the global transformation, the world foreseen in the WWS vision would be dominated by wind and solar energy. Of 53,535 gigawatts (GW) of new electrical energy generation sources to be built, onshore and offshore wind turbines would supply 19,000 GW (35.4%), solar photovoltaic (PV) plants would supply 17,100 GW (32%) and Concentrated Solar Power plants (CSP) would supply 14,700 GW (27.5%). This would cost $100 trillion, or $3,571 for every household on the planet.

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only geology, renewable energy

Relics of ‘lost continents’ hidden under Antarctica are revealed by satellite images after scientists track 200 million years of tectonic plate shifts

by H. Pettit, November 9, 2018 in MailOnline

  • Images reveal a timeline of the ancient landmasses buried beneath Antarctica
  • They were taken by the long-dead Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer 
  • The ESA satellite collected data on Earth’s gravitational pull

  • The study revealed that West Antarctica (green) has a thinner crust than East Antarctica (blue), which has a ‘family likeness to Australia and India’
climate-debate, renewable energy

Paradigm Shift? The ‘Belief’ That Bioenergy Is Climate-Friendly Is Now Recognized As A ‘Major Error’

by K. Richard, November 1, 2018 in NoTricksZone/PNAS

Governments vociferously promote bioenergy as renewable, sustainable, and carbon-neutral. But scientists are increasingly characterizing this “belief” as a “major error”, as bioenergy generates more CO2 emissions per kWh than burning coal does, and the projected rapid growth in bioenergy will serve to ‘increase atmospheric CO2 for at least a century’ as well as clear forests and destroy natural ecosystems.

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renewable energy

Failure of ‘World’s Biggest Solar Project’ in Saudi Arabia Is No Surprise

by Jason Deign, October 2, 2018 in gym

Renewables developers eyeing Saudi Arabia remain wary of the market following the news that the world’s biggest solar project has been canceled.

The $200 billion, 200-gigawatt solar plant planned by SoftBank and the Saudi Public Investment Fund had raised skepticism among developers when it was announced in March, partly because of technical concerns over how it might be integrated into the grid.

The main worry, though, was that the megaproject appeared to have been approved independently of plans for an orderly ramp-up of solar through a tender program managed by the Saudi Renewable Energy Project Development Office (REPDO).

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climate-debate, renewable energy

Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming

by James Temple, October 4, 2018 in MITTechnologyReview

Wind power is booming in the United States.

It’s expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation’s electricity. The US Department of Energy expects wind turbine capacity to more than quadruple again by 2050.

But a new study by a pair of Harvard researchers finds that a high amount of wind power could mean more climate warming, at least regionally and in the immediate decades ahead. The paper raises serious questions about just how much the United States or other nations should look to wind power to clean up electricity systems.

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Highlights

  • Wind power reduces emissions while causing climatic impacts such as warmer temperatures
  • Warming effect strongest at night when temperatures increase with height
  • Nighttime warming effect observed at 28 operational US wind farms
  • Wind’s warming can exceed avoided warming from reduced emissions for a century
pollution-contamination, renewable energy

Environmental “Time Bomb”…China To Dump 20 Million Tonnes Of Solar Panel Waste Into Environment

by P. Gosselin, September 30, 2018 in NoTricksZone

We have to face it: The West has done our planet no favor by moving industrial production and manufacturing to China. Trump is right, many of factories and industries are better back home, even if it means paying a bit more for products.

Not only does the China use the oceans as a global dump for much of its plastic trash, the country now is gearing up to turn parts of the planet into a toxic solar panel waste dump.

According to French science magazine Futura here, we are looking at a “solar panel time bomb”.

Futura describes how China is installing “gigantic” solar panel farms in remote places like Tibet and how 30 years from now the country will have “mountains of solar panels reaching their end of their lives and that nothing is planned for their collection and recycling.”

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better to know...?, renewable energy

Germany’s Energiewende program exposed as a catastrophic failure

by Larry Hamlin, September 30, 2018 in WUWT

“Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems.”

“A little more than a year before Germany’s climate-policy “milestone 2020”, the auditing body has concluded a catastrophic assessment of the government’s energy policy. Germany would miss its targets for both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and primary energy consumption as well as for increasing energy productivity and the share of renewable energy in transport. At the same time, policy makers had burdened the nation with enormous costs.”

The audit further concluded that the program is a monumental bureaucratic nightmare where “The Federal Government, incidentally, does not have an overall grasp of the costs or any transparency in this respect.”

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renewable energy

Renouvelables : le déclin des investissements

by Rémy Prud’homme, 16 septembre 2018, in Contrepoints

Michael Bloomberg est un milliardaire américain (pas un petit : l’une des vingt plus grosses fortunes mondiales), membre du parti démocrate, ancien maire de New York. C’est naturellement un farouche défenseur de l’environnement, ce qui lui a valu d’être nommé par le Secrétaire Général des Nations-Unies « envoyé spécial pour l’action climatique ». On ne peut pas le soupçonner de minorer le développement des énergies propres.

LES INVESTISSEMENTS DANS L’ÉNERGIE « PROPRE » SONT EN DÉCLIN

Le rapport1 que publie l’entreprise qu’il dirige (en fait une filiale consacrée aux énergies nouvelles) montre que les investissements dans « l’énergie propre », définie comme l’éolien et le photovoltaïque, ont diminué dans la plupart des pays du globe au cours des années 2010. Le point haut a été atteint en 2011. Depuis cette date, les investissements stagnent ou diminuent, à des taux divers selon les pays et les années.

La COP21, en 2015, devait sauver le monde grâce à des investissements massifs dans ces domaines. Elle n’a rien fait de tel. Au contraire, les années 2016, 2017 et 2018 sont marquées par une accélération de la baisse des investissements.

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better to know...?, energy and fields, renewable energy

La France dans le noir. Les méfaits de l’idéologie en politique énergétique

by Johann Rivalland, 24 août 2018 in Contrepoints

Les nouvelles politiques énergétiques et le choix des énergies renouvelables sont-ils en train de nous mener droit dans le mur ?

Hervé Machenaud a mené toute sa carrière professionnelle dans le secteur de l’énergie, où il a notamment contribué à la création de centrales nucléaires en France et à l’étranger et à la conception de l’EPR, le réacteur franco-allemand.

C’est en spécialiste des questions industrielles liées à l’énergie qu’il tire la sonnette d’alarme, mettant en cause des orientations politiques périlleuses, susceptibles selon lui de causer des dommages colossaux à nos sociétés dans leur ensemble.

UN CONSTAT IMPLACABLE

Au cours de la dernière décennie, ce sont des montants gigantesques de dépréciations qui ont été essuyés par les grands électriciens européens. Plus de 100 milliards d’euros rien qu’en quatre ans depuis 2014. Constat qui se paye par un désengagement préoccupant des grandes compagnies dans la production d’électricité. Au total, ce sont en effet 60 GW de moyens conventionnels d’électricité qui auront été arrêtés en Europe à la fin de la décennie, précise-t-il, soit l’équivalent du parc nucléaire français.

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renewable energy

Clean Energy Investment Trends, 2Q 2018

by BloombergNRF, July 9, 2018

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Wind

Electricity generation using wind turbines. Included in this sector, are players across the entire value chain of both onshore and offshore developments. From manufacturers of turbines, components and subassemblies to developers, generators, utilities and engineering firm.

Solar

All technologies which capture energy directly from the sun. These include production of electricity using semiconductor-based photovoltaic (pv) materials, use of concentrated sunlight to heat fluids that drive power generation equipment (solar thermal), and passive methods which use sunlight to heat water. Whilst company level investment of passive methods is recorded, investment in passive projects is not.

Biofuels

Liquid transportation fuels including biodiesel and bioethanol. These can be derived from a range of biomass sources, including sugar cane, rape seed, soybean oil or non-food cellulosic feedstock. Our database excludes producers of base biomass, but includes suppliers of everything from the processing technologies and equipment, through the logistics of distribution, to manufacturers of energy systems which are specially adapted for the use of biofuels and products, and the services on which they depend.

Biomass & waste

Electricity and/or heat produced with bio-based feedstocks, typically through incineration but also through more advanced processes like gasification or anaerobic digestion. This sector also includes waste-to-energy which includes energy produced through landfill gas projects and incineration of municipal and industrial waste.

Energy smart technologies

This sector covers technologies like digital energy, smart grids, power storage, hydrogen and fuel cells, advanced transportation and energy efficiency on both the demand and supply side.

Other renewables

Includes small hydro – hydro projects with capacities smaller or equal to 50MW; geothermal – extraction of useful power from heat stored in the earth; marine – the extraction of tidal, wave and thermal energy from the ocean.

renewable energy

Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 2: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Ecological Disasters’

by ‘Stop These Things‘, August 14, 2018

Germany’s wind and solar experiment has failed: the so-called ‘Energiewende’ (energy transition) has turned into an insanely costly debacle.

German power prices have rocketed; blackouts and load shedding are the norm; and its idyllic countryside has been turned into an industrial wasteland, with its forests, no exception (see above).

Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.

climate-debate, renewable energy

New Study Concludes Europe Will Always Require 100% Back-Up By Conventional Energy

by P. Gosselin, July 5, 2018 in NoTricksZone

A new German paper assesses wind energy in Europe . The results are devastating. It concludes that wind energy requires almost 100% backup and that the more capacity that gets installed, the greater the volatility.

The paper appearing at the VGB, authored by Thomas Linnemann and Guido Vallana, finds that “the total wind fleet output of 18 European countries extending over several thousand kilometers in north-south and east-west direction is highly volatile and exhibits a strong intermittent character.”

In other words the power supply across the European grid fluctuates wildly and thus cannot work well. The paper’s abstract continues: …

better to know...?, renewable energy

Why Are We Doing This? A Trove Of New Research Documents The Folly Of Renewable Energy Promotion

by K. Richard, July 9, 2018 in NoTricksZone

The advocacy for widespread growth in renewable energy (especially wind, solar, and biomass) usage has increasingly become the clarion call of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement.  And yet more and more published research documents the adverse effects of relying on renewables.

Over the course of the last year, at least 30 papers have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature detailing the fatuity of promoting renewable energy as a long-term “fix” for climate change mitigation.  A categorized list of these papers is provided below.

(…)

renewable energy

Vent contraire pour l’éolien terrestre

by Jean-Pierre Schaeken, 2 juliet 2018 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Le gouvernement belge a adopté le 16 juillet 2002 l’arrêté royal relatif à l’établissement des mécanismes visant à la promotion  de l’électricité produite à partir de sources d’énergie renouvelable. Ces dernières sont dominées, en Belgique par l’éolien et le photovoltaïque (l’éolien étant prédominant) c.à.d. des productions électriques intermittentes.

Ce reformatage  de la génération électrique a été décidé dans la précipitation sans analyser l’impact sur le système électrique, sur la compétitivité des entreprises et sur le pouvoir d’achat des ménages, la priorité étant la réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES). Un tel manque flagrant de préparation est également patent dans la mise en place du tournant  énergétique allemand (Energie Wende), décision politique particulièrement désastreuse. (…)

renewable energy

Green No More: Germany Rejects EU’s Green Energy Ambitions

by Dr. Benny Peiser, June 13, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, who rejected calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030. —EurActive, 12 June 2018

The German government is about to concede officially that the country is on course to widely missing its 2020 climate target. —Clean Energy Wire, 12 June 2018

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