Is renewable energy a pipe dream?

[Binkie The Clown]

Broadly speaking, there are two groups of people who talk about renewable energy these days. The first group consists of those people who believe that of course sun and wind can replace fossil fuels and enable modern industrial society to keep on going into the far future. The second group consists of people who actually live with renewable energy on a daily basis. It’s been my repeated experience for years now that people belong to one of these groups or the other, but not to both.

As a general rule, in fact, the less direct experience a given person has living with solar and wind power, the more likely that person is to buy into the sort of green cornucopianism that insists that sun, wind, and other renewable resources can provide everyone on the planet with a middle class American lifestyle. Conversely, those people who have the most direct knowledge of the strengths and limitations of renewable energy—those, for example, who live in homes powered by sunlight and wind, without a fossil fuel-powered grid to cover up the intermittency problems—generally have no time for the claims of green cornucopianism, and are the first to point out that relying on renewable energy means giving up a great many extravagant habits that most people in today’s industrial societies consider normal.

---SNIP---

To begin with, the numbers are just as problematic for solar and wind power as they were for biofuels and fracking. Examples abound: real world experience with large-scale solar electrical generation systems, for example, show dismal net energy returns; the calculations of how much energy can be extracted from wind that have been used to prop up windpower are up to two orders of magnitude too high; more generally, those researchers who have taken the time to crunch the numbers—I’m thinking here especially, though not only, of Tom Murphy’s excellent site Do The Math—have shown over and over again that for reasons rooted in the hardest of hard physics, renewable energy as a source of grid power can’t live up to the sweeping promises made on its behalf.

More at the link

[ladjf]

1. It's not only not a pipe dream, it's one of the prime mandates of human existence.

Don't let the fossil fuel people continue to define our energy programs.

[Binkie The Clown]

2. Ah, I see you didn't read the whole blog post. n/t

[ladjf]

3. My post was my answer to the question in the title of the OP.

I had no need to read the entire blog post.

[kristopher]

4. The blog is garbage.

[Binkie The Clown]

5. Logic at its finest. Call anyone who diagrees garbage, and you're done. Q.E.D. Well done. n/t

[hunter]

6. A renewable energy society is nothing like our fossil fueled high energy industrial society.

Neither is a nuclear powered society, even with fancy electric cars.

That's actually okay with me. I don't like our high energy fossil fueled society. A "drop-in" replacement for fossil fuels would not make the world a better place.