What a load of clueless shite.
There's barely any of that at all that stands up to scrutiny, for example
In a sense, we need our whole fossil fuel powered system of schools, roads, airports, hospitals, and electricity transmission lines to make any of type of energy product work, whether oil, natural gas, wind, or solar electric–but it is difficult to make boundaries wide enough to cover everything.
It's not fucking difficult, it's really pretty simple unless you're a bored insurance industry actuary turned clueless amateur commentator on energy issues. (eta or Charles Hall, or Falcon)
The basics of the situation being to only count additional energy use that wouldn't have occurred without the production of the product being analysed. Whether solar panels were being produced or not, children would still be going to school, hospitals would still be treating the sick, airports would still be operating, and the electrical grid would still be in place. Therefore all of this should be excluded from the energy return on energy investment calculation for any specific energy form, unless possibly it was directly related eg courses required to train up the engineers specifically in the work directly related to that energy source.
Another way intermittent renewables raise world CO2 emissions indirectly is by making the country using intermittent renewables less competitive in the world market-place, because the higher electricity cost raises the price of manufactured goods. This tends to send manufacturing to countries that use lower-priced energy sources for electricity, such as China.
So would emissions globally be higher or lower if there were no renewables and everyone was reliant on cheap (at the point of use) coal based electricity, but had the vastly higher health care costs, and lower life expectancy associated with this energy policy? (40% rise in childhood asthma in 5 years, 1.2 million premature deaths, and 25 million healthy years of life lost in 2010 in China due to air pollution -
source)
The answer I hope is pretty fucking obvious to anyone with half a brain.
And let's be clear on this here, Europe is phasing out the cheapest, dirtiest forms of unabated coal fired power generation because of the associated air pollution, acid rain, and health impacts from it, not specifically because of renewables or climate policy - they're still allowing abated coal with SO2 scrubbers etc to continue operating, which actually has a higher CO2 intensity than unabated coal due to the energy costs of operating the scrubbers etc. So the author is talking complete shite, and clearly knows fuck all about the wider subject.
Wind and Solar PV do not fix our oil problem.
Our big problem is with oil. Oil and electricity are used for different things. For example, electricity won’t run today’s cars, and it won’t run tractors, or construction equipment, or aircraft.
1 - Several oil producing nations use huge quantities of oil to produce electricity, eg Suadi Arabia burns approximately half a million barrels of oil a day in electricity production, and is investing in a massive solar plan to reduce it's self consumption of oil in electricity generation (along with nuclear power plants, and gas plants). So this statement is patently wrong in those countries.
2 - Of course electricity can't be used with internal combustion engines, but then diesel can't be used in petrol engines and this hasn't stopped it being a useful fuel that fuels a significant proportion of our vehicle fleet. Electricity can be used to power battery based eelctric vehicles, hybrids, and potentially hydrogen fuel cell based vehicles which can replace oil powered vehicles and reduce our oil dependence signfiicantly. Also worth noting that in China sales of electric bikes have now overtaken sales of all forms of cars, so again, electricity is directly replacing oil based vehicles.
3 - She's talking from a peak oil perspective and ignoring climate change and air pollution as problems that need tackling.
4. Even if wind is “renewable,” it isn’t necessarily long lived.
Manufacturers of wind turbines claim lives of 20 to 25 years. This compares to life spans of 40 years or more for coal, gas, and nuclear.
One recent study suggests that because of degraded performance, it may not be economic to operate wind turbines for more than 12 to 15 years.
Anyone uncritically citing that study is automatically suspect as either having an agenda, or being clueless. Even that linked article gives the lie to the studies findings with this quote
Scottish Renewables for one said that its oldest commercial windfarms in Scotland were around 16 years old and that none of them have been decommissioned or repowered.
Also, several gas plants built in the early 90s have closed already, which puts their lifespan at a lot less than the 40 years claimed there.
5. Wind and solar PV don’t ramp up quickly.
After many years of trying to ramp up wind and solar PV, in 2012, wind amounted to a bit under 1% of world energy supply. Solar amounted to even less than that–about 0.2% of world energy supply. It would take huge effort to ramp up production to even 5% of the world’s energy supply.
If there's one thing PV and wind is capable of doing, it's ramping up quickly. Global installed capacity of solar PV increased by 35% last year to 136GWp installed, with the installation rate increasing from 31GWp in 2012 to 38GWp in 2013. Since 2000 the global installed capacity of solar PV has roughly doubled every 2 years, which is an exponential growth rate far higher than any previous energy source.
Also, comparing solar and wind to primary energy supply is misleading, as it's replacing electricity, and electricity generated from coal requires 2.5 times more coal to produce, or maybe 2 times as much from gas (assuming it's replacing mainly gas from older less efficient plants) so the actual impact of renewables on primary energy figures would have to be multiplied by those sort of factors to get a more accurate picture (the same would apply to nuclear energy).
Here's Germany's oh so slow ramp up of solar PV capacity with only a doubling of capacity every 1.56 years, the laggards.
tbc
