Environment & Energy

This fraudulent substitution is why the planet is flames despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars in the last 10 years on solar and wind garbage.

The solar scam - which has done absolutely nothing to even slow the acceleration of the degradation of the planetary atmosphere uses the unit for power, the Watt, as if it were equivalent to the unit of energy, the Joule.

The capacity utilization of solar garbage - all of which will be landfill before today's toddlers finish college (if there are colleges to finish) - is roughly 25%, if they are sited in an suitable area. Therefore 277 Gigawatts of solar power is the equivalent of 70 GW of a reliable system that operates continuously, but that's only represents the surface. People do not shut all of their electronic devices off when the sun goes down, or the surface is covered with snow, or storms are underway. This means that redundant systems are required which - despite all of the absurd handwaving about batteries, and worse, hydrogen - further exacerbates both the environmental cost and well as the thermodynamic penalty. People who equate energy storage with being "green" simply ignore the laws of thermodynamics, just as they ignore simple physical parameters, the distinction between physical units the Watt and the Joule. The laws of thermodynamics require - they are not subject to change using wishful thinking - that storing energy wastes it.

Now, let's look at what 70 GW of continuous average power represents by recognizing that the Watt is a Joule/sec, and multiplying it by the number of seconds in a year. The tropical day has 86164.0905 seconds in it, the tropical year, 365.24219 days in it, thus a tropical year has 31470761.11 seconds in it. Since we have only two significant figures this means that 70 GW of average continuous power - which we're using despite the fact that solar garbage is not continuously available - this suggest that all of the solar facilities in China produce 2.2 X 10¹⁸ Joules, or 2.2 Exajoules.

Now we have antinukes around here who object to me continuously producing the following table apparently believing that if someone repeats data then the data is no longer true. (This is a reflection of the intellectual and moral paucity of antinukes.)

The table:



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

I note, with some disgust, that the antinukes are very fond of the soothsaying in the table, but as someone who has been following the World Energy Outlook since the end of the 20th century, I have a jaundiced view of soothsaying. If the soothsaying back in the 1990's had been true there and elsewhere, then, we wouldn't be looking at a burning planet.

From the most recent data from the WEO, solar produced just 8 Exajoules of energy on a planet consuming 642 Exajoules of energy for the last year for which the comprehensive data is available. That China produced a little over 2 EJ of these does not mean China is "green."

In the "percent talk" apologists for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to do a damned thing to slow the accelerating collapse of the atmosphere, solar energy produced 1.2% of the world's energy supply despite vast quasi-religious cheering for it, China, the world's largest emitter of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, 0.3% of the world's energy.

The world began spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on solar and wind garbage around 2010. There is no signal to be seen the rise in the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory:



Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory.

The orange pedophile in the White House will look to destroy this scientific resource, another regrettable consequence of the supremacy of ignorance.

The purpose of the solar and wind scam was never about attacking fossil fuels. In China, solar and wind garbage is not backed up by hydrogen or batteries, despite the slick ads the fossil fuel industry runs here about a "hydrogen miracle." It's backed up largely by coal. So called "renewable energy" - a misnomer because there's nothing "renewable" about tearing the shit of the planet with mines to make this junk or trashing vast stretches of ecosystems to site it - was hyped to attack nuclear energy, something at which it partially succeeded. It certainly succeeded in the United States, which once had the world's best nuclear manufacturing infrastructure which was vandalized by fools and thus destroyed.

This said, to return to China, China now has the world's leading nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, followed by Russia's.

China now has 58 operating nuclear reactors, and 32 under construction and many more planned. When the 32 now under construction are completed, they will have 90 reactors, which given the fact that nuclear plants are the most reliable power production facilities in the world, should produce better than 2 Exajoules of energy without the need for any thermodynamic (and environmental)) nightmares about redundancies, including the hydrogen bullshit handed out here by the fossil fuel industry to greenwash their product.

Those reactors will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century, when every solar cell and wind turbine now on this planet will have been landfill for half a century.

As for hydrogen, I'm an old man. When I was a young man, hydrogen bullshit struck me as plausible, as did a putative solar miracle that never happened, isn't happening and won't happen. And let's be clear, hydrogen bullshit was around back then, when I was young.

The first issue of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy was published in 1976.

International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

A hydrogen economy didn't happen "by 1990" or "by 2000" or "by 2010" or "by 2020" and won't happen "by 2030" or "by 2040" or "by 2050." The reason is that hydrogen manufacture wastes energy, has horrible physical properties including an absurdly low critical temperature, extremely low viscosity, and poor material compatibility, notably with steels.

Have a pleasant Sunday.