Links - 11th June 2020 (2) ('Green' Energy)

Renewables Risk Taking Longer to Match Fossil Fuels on Price - Bloomberg - "Europe’s hopes that green power will soon beat out fossil-fuels on costs will fade unless governments implement shrewd policies to support renewable after the coronavirus crisis. Propped up over decades by hundreds of billions of euros of government subsidies, power from wind and solar was slated to undercut coal, and even natural gas as soon as a year. But those estimates were made before the health crisis gutted energy demand and sent oil prices below zero for the first time... Before the pandemic, the outlook for clean power reflected expectations of ever-improving technology, falling costs, and generous government subsidies at a time when it became less profitable to burn coal... As the evidence mounts that the world is headed for a prolonged recession from the devastating effects of the coronavirus, policymakers may be tempted to back away from renewable energy subsidies, focusing instead on rebuilding their economies"
When you're riding off subsidies... And yet virtue signalling by frivolous spending on luxury goods is more important to some than rebuilding the economy

This simple crib cost $28,885—because it used zero fossil fuels - "It’s not a scalable way to make a crib now—and it took the team months to locate the right materials. A single crib cost $28,885"
The future that green activists want - with a lower quality of life for everyone

Harvard study finds wind turbines warm the U.S. - "the interaction of wind turbines and the atmosphere slow down the wind as wind energy is extracted by turbines. This has a warming effect on temperatures. Moreover, they found that many of the best locations for wind turbines are already utilized. This means future wind power installations will utilize lower-quality locations requiring many more turbines and much more land development to produce as the same amount of wind power. As a result, the study determined that current government and industry estimates of wind power production per turbine are significantly inflated... To meet present-day U.S. electricity demand, the scientists determined wind turbine projects would need to cover one-third of the continental United States. Transforming transportation vehicles to electric batteries would require even more."

Germany Rejected Nuclear Power—and Deadly Emissions Spiked | WIRED - "nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions. More distressingly, the researchers estimated that burning more coal led to local increases in particle pollution and sulfur dioxide and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses. Altogether, the researchers calculated that the increased carbon emissions and deaths caused by local air pollution amounted to a social cost of about $12 billion per year. The study found that this dwarfs the cost of keeping nuclear power plants online by billions of dollars, even when the risks of a meltdown and the cost of nuclear waste storage are considered. “People overestimate the risk and damages from a nuclear accident,” says Akshaya Jha, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and an author of the study. “It’s also clear that people don’t realize the cost of local air pollution is pretty severe. It’s a silent killer.”... The UN has stated that nuclear power will have to be a part of the energy mix to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsisus"

The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer | WIRED - "Only two new reactors are under construction in the US, but they’re billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.Enter the small modular reactor, designed to allow several reactors to be combined into one unit. Need a modest amount of energy? Install just a few modules. Want to fuel a sprawling city? Tack on several more. Coming up with a suitable power plant for a wide range of situations becomes that much easier. Because they are small, these reactors can be mass-produced and shipped to any location in a handful of pieces. Perhaps most importantly, small modular reactors can take advantage of several cooling and safety mechanisms unavailable to their big brothers, which all but guarantees they won’t become the next Chernobyl."

The Politics of Nuclear Power - "attitudes toward nuclear power have been moving toward more favorable in recent years. This seems to be due to a few factors. The more people know about nuclear power, the more favorable they are towards it. Fears about global warming have caused some to moderate their views on nuclear energy. And newer reactors designs are moving toward smaller and safer designs.There is still an asymmetry politically, however. Only 31% of Democrats say that nuclear power is essential or helpful, while 34% say it would be harmful. For Republicans the numbers are 50% and 17% respectively... Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced.Nuclear waste can be dealt with, and the newer reactors produce less waste, and can even theoretically burn reprocessed waste from older plants.Nuclear power can be cost effective. First, we need to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel. Second, we need to consider the economics of full decarbonization. Many comments tout wind and solar as being more cost effective – but that is only for now, while their penetration is low. You cannot extrapolate this to 100% renewable. When you start to get north of 30-40% penetration you need significant grid updates (including grid storage) and overproduction, so the cost effectiveness starts to go way down. So – if you consider the total cost to get to 100% low carbon energy (not just consider the current cost of wind and solar at low penetration) keeping and adding nuclear is the most cost effective option.This is also the option most likely to succeed. We do have examples from other countries. Germany tried to go completely renewable and closed their nuclear plants, and now have to build coal-fired plants to meet their energy needs. Meanwhile the countries that are doing the best with low carbon energy are France and Sweden, who invested heavily in nuclear. This is why Bernie’s plan would be a disaster, it would exactly follow the failed strategy of Germany, but on a larger scale."

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all | George Monbiot - "The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice... she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me. First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink – in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them... For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false... Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers"
Ironically, many anti-nuclear people are also on the climate change bandwagon

Buffering volatility: A study on the limits of Germany's energy revolution - "this paper studies the limits of Germany's energy revolution in view of the volatility of wind and solar power. In addition to pumped storage, it considers double-structure buffering, demand management, Norwegian hydro-dam buffering and international diversification via grid expansion. If Germany operated in autarchy and tried to handle the volatility of wind-solar production without using stores while replacing all nuclear and fossil fuel in power production, on average 61%, and at the margin 94%, of wind-solar production would have to be wasted, given the current level of other renewables. To avoid any waste, the wind-solar market share in an autarchic solution must not be expanded to more than 30%. By using Norway's hydro plants the share could be expanded to 36%. If Norway were to build all the pumped-storage plants the ESTORAGE study deems feasible, Germany's wind-solar market share could be expanded by another 24 percentage points to about 60%, which corresponds to 48% of the combined German and Norwegian markets. Additionally expanding the market to Switzerland, Austria and Denmark and building the maximal number of pumped stores would increase the combined wind-solar market share for all five countries to nearly 50%."
In other words, Germany's "sustainable" "green energy" from renewables is unsustainable

BBC Radio 4 -  Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On renewables] What battery technology’s for at the moment in the UK is what's called frequency response, it stabilizes the grid. And batteries aren't really capable at the moment of storing electricity for a long time. So if we wanted to look at a week without wind in the UK, which is a reasonably frequent occurrence, and we wanted to build a battery which would store power for the UK for a week, it would cost about a trillion pounds... what you're paying for in your electricity bill is not just electricity when it's windy and when it's sunny, you're also paying to switch on your lights when the wind’s not blowing and it's a dark still night. That's the cost of the system"

More renewables mean less stable grids, researchers find - "integrating growing numbers of renewable power installations and microgrids onto the grid can result in larger-than-expected fluctuations in grid frequency"

Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy | The Spectator - "To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth. Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand... Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation. Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years... If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year?... If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it... As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips. It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy... The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer."

The dirty little secret behind 'clean energy' wood pellets - "It is touted as a smart way for Europe to reach its renewable energy goals... Burning forest biomass – essentially, wood – has been promoted by industry as a cleaner, more renewable energy alternative to coal and gas. American companies such as Enviva have developed a growing export industry for trees diced into wood pellets, with export volumes increasing from almost nothing in the early 2000s to 4.6m tons of pellets in 2015 – almost all of which goes to Europe to displace coal in power plants there.The wood pellets industry claims that it uses tree branches and waste wood, but environmental groups say there is strong evidence that vast swaths of valuable, untouched forest have been felled in states including North Carolina and Florida to feed the growing sector.Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate expertsRead moreUK-based researchers found last year that burning wood is a “disaster” for climate change because older trees release large amounts of carbon when they are burned and aren’t always replaced with replanted forests. Even when trees are replaced, it can take up to 100 years to cultivate a wooded area that soaks up as much carbon as was previously released. And the fuel burned in shipping wood pellets to Europe is also a significant source of emissions.“Philosophically it looks good but practically it looks pretty bad in many cases,” said William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist and member of the US Environmental Protection Agency advisory board. “When you cut down existing trees and burn them, you immediately put carbon dioxide in the air. None of the companies can guarantee they can regrow untouched forest to capture the same amount of carbon released. The whole renewable forest industry is kind of a hoax in terms of its benefit as climate mitigation.”"
On the sham of "renewable" energy

A thread written by @ShellenbergerMD - "Renewables bubble popping
- Germany installs fewest wind turbines since 2000
- Tesla lost $2.6B in bail-out of Solar City
- SoftBank has built or has deals for just 1.6% of solar farms promised
- Subsidies ending in US, UK, Germany
- Local & eco opposition to renewables growing
Industrial wind turbine installations declined 82% since 2018
Main reason is local & environmentalist opposition to high number of bird deaths, particularly the red kite, a raptor...
Renewables “revolution” was a mirage
Always depended on massive, unsustainable subsidies
Would cost $3-4 trillion for Germany to go from today’s 35% renewables to 100%...
No amount of marketing could change the poor physics of land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy."

The UK’s move away from coal means they’re burning wood from the US - "Drax started transitioning its units off of coal and onto wood fuel because the UK government is putting tight restrictions on carbon emissions to help fight climate change. This year, the country announced its plan to cease burning coal for electricity entirely by 2025. And under EU law, biomass is classified as a source of carbon neutral energy. The wood pellets, which are made from compressed sawdust and look like something you might feed a pony at a petting zoo, are burned, just like coal is. And just like coal, that emits carbon dioxide... many critics say Enviva’s claims of sustainable sourcing and carbon neutrality are misleading at best.Adam Colette, with a forest protection group called the Dogwood Alliance, recently walked through a forest of pine, Cyprus, maple and oak in North Carolina, not far from the Enviva plant.Before long he stopped at a big clearing that’s full of stumps.“These are old trees,” Colette said. “This is an old forest. I can’t imagine that this is the future of green energy.”The Dogwood Alliance says it has tracked logging trucks carrying whole, mature trees from this patch of forests and others in the region to three Enviva pellet mills... “We are now opening up a pathway to log natural forest ecosystems that would otherwise be let [to] grow and flourish,” Colette says.That’s because the wood pellet industry has put a value on timber scrap, adding additional financial incentives to logging... critics take strong exception to the industry’s claim that wood pellets are a carbon neutral fuel.“That’s just not correct,” says John Sterman, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who recently published a lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy.“What we found is that contrary to your intuition, burning wood to make electricity in places like the Drax power plant actually makes climate change worse for the rest of the century,” Sterman says. Sterman’s research shows that, in the short term at least, burning wood pellets adds more carbon to the atmosphere than coal. That carbon can eventually be sucked back up by new trees, but he says that can take more than 100 years. So for decades, all that additional carbon dioxide is contributing to climate change, ocean acidification and sea level rise."

Instability in Power Grid Comes at High Cost for German Industry - "executives at the highest levels are also thinking about freeing themselves from Germany's electricity grid to cushion the consequences of the country's transition to renewable energy.Likewise, as more and more companies with sensitive control systems are securing production through batteries and generators, the companies that manufacture them are benefiting. "You can hardly find a company that isn't worrying about its power supply," said Joachim Pfeiffer, a parliamentarian and economic policy spokesman for the governing center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).Behind this worry stands the transition to renewable energy laid out by Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster... The problem is that wind and solar farms just don't deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures. A survey of members of the Association of German Industrial Energy Companies (VIK) revealed that the number of short interruptions to the German electricity grid has grown by 29 percent in the past three years. Over the same time period, the number of service failures has grown 31 percent, and almost half of those failures have led to production stoppages. Damages have ranged between €10,000 and hundreds of thousands of euros, according to company information... "In the long run, if we can't guarantee a stable grid, companies will leave (Germany)," says Pfeiffer, the CDU energy expert. "As a center of industry, we can't afford that.""

The Myth of the German Renewable Energy 'Miracle' - "as the percentage of renewable energy resources in the form of wind (both onshore and offshore) and solar has increased, Germany’s carbon emissions have increased.  This is because conventional resources must be kept on line to provide stability to the grid due to wind and solar’s intermittency... solar resources and wind resources are often producing at maximum output at times when the grid doesn’t need them – resulting in excess electricity supply on the grid – and pushing the market price of power to very low levels, even negative... Germany does not have an independent standalone high voltage grid (transmission system) but rather is part of the European interconnected grid.  In evaluating reliability impacts associated with penetration levels of renewables, the focus should be on overall grid comparisons... The German portion of the grid is supported by extensive hydroelectric resources in Denmark and coal resources in Poland.  The interconnected grid as a whole does not have anywhere the same level of renewable penetration as is found in the German portion.  The 2016 statistics show that 75% of the generation within the European interconnected grid in 2016 was conventional thermal and nuclear.  Renewables in the entire European interconnected grid were 12% hydroelectric, 10% wind, and 4% other. [5]  Thus, Germany relies on (or “leans on”) the conventional rotating machinery in neighboring counties in order to ensure continuous, reliable operation."

Germany's Green Energy Destabilizing Electric Grids - "residential electricity prices in Germany are some of the highest in Europe and are increasing dramatically (currently Germans pay 34 cents a kilowatt hour compared to an average of 12 cents in the United States)... More than one third of Germany’s wind turbines are located in the eastern part of the nation where this large concentration of generating capacity regularly overloads the region’s electricity grid, threatening blackouts. The situation tends to be particularly critical on public holidays when residents and companies consume significantly less electricity than usual with the wind blowing regardless of the demand and supplying electricity that isn’t needed. In some extreme cases, the region produces three to four times the total amount of electricity actually being consumed, placing a strain on the eastern German electric grid. System engineers have to intervene every other day to maintain network stability... To deal with the excess electricity, eastern Germany exports it to western Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. In 2009, exports of electricity to these areas totaled 6.5 gigawatts on days with strong winds, an amount that will increase as wind capacity increases. While the eastern German region would like to channel its excess electricity to southern Germany and the industrial Rhineland area, it lacks infrastructure to do so. Because German energy laws stipulate that “green” power must always have priority on the grid, control centers cannot take wind farms off the grid when too much electricity is being generated... Germany’s neighbors, Poland and the Czech Republic, are taking action on Germany’s use of their power grid that Germany undertook without asking permission and without paying for its use. These countries are building a huge switch-off at their borders to block the import of green energy that is destabilizing their grids and causing potential blackouts in their countries. This action by German’s neighbors fragments the European electrical grid, turning Germany into an electrical island... Despite significant investment in wind and solar power, Germany still faces an energy shortfall because the renewable energy it invested in does not work in the cold winter weather when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Further, the shift to renewable energy is taking a toll on family budgets.[vi] Germany increased a special tax levied on consumers to finance subsidies for green energy by almost 50 percent this year, increasing electricity prices by 10 percent. There are also growing concerns that price increases are hurting businesses, although the German response has been to charge some consumers with much more of the burden than favored industries."

Could renewable energy pioneer Germany run out of power? - "Katharina Reiche, chief executive of the VKU association of local utilities, many of which face falling profitability as plants close, said the government’s strategy was risky because it had not stress-tested all scenarios. She characterised the plan as “walking a tightrope without a safety net”.Utilities and grid firms say if the weather is unfavourable for lengthy periods, green power supply can be negligible, while storage is still largely non-existent. Capacity aside, the network to transport renewable power from north to south is also years and thousands of kilometres behind schedule, they add.Stefan Kapferer, head of Germany’s energy industry group BDEW, said it would be risky to rely on imports. “Conventional power capacity is falling nearly everywhere in Europe and more volatile capacity is being built up,” he told Reuters... Germany is a net exporter to Austria, Switzerland and Poland and also the Netherlands, which sends some of the power onwards to Britain and Belgium. Thus, if Germany alone was to stop reliably producing surpluses, several parts of the continent could see power shortfalls - and outages - as a consequence."

Promises of a green energy jobs boom in Scotland are proving to be so much hot air | Kevin McKenna - "The French firm plans to award this lifesaving contract to an Indonesian firm, effectively saying that it can’t afford a skilled Scottish workforce... UK taxpayers are entitled to ask why they are paying fortunes to subsidise green energy and create jobs everywhere else in the world except here. By 2022, all UK energy bill payers will be paying an extra £500 a year for renewables"
"Sustainability" isn't sustainable

China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining - "Beginning in the 1990s, rare earth mining took off in this region, located in Southeast China about 300 miles north of Hong Kong. As China began to produce more smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other high-tech products requiring rare earth elements, the mining intensified. But the removal of these elements from the earth’s crust, using a mix of water and chemicals, caused extensive water and soil pollution."
The environmental cost of "green" energy

We Shouldn't Be Surprised Renewables Make Energy Expensive Since That's Always Been The Greens' Goal - "nuclear plants have seen their efficiency increase dramatically. Nuclear plants used to operate for just 50% of the year. Now, thanks to greater experience in operations and maintenance, they operate 93% of the year.Nuclear plants were expected to run for 40 years, but thanks to greater experience, they’re expected to run for 80. And simple changes to equipment allowed the amount of power produced by existing nuclear plants in the US to increase the equivalent of adding eight full-sized reactors. By contrast, the output of solar panels declines one percent every year, for inherently physical reasons, and they as well as wind turbines are replaced roughly every two decades.As for circularity, solar panels and wind turbines are rarely recycled because the energy and labor required to do so are much more expensive than just buying raw materials.As a result, the vast majority of solar panels and wind turbines are either sent to landfills or join the global electronic waste stream where they are dumped on poor communities in developing nations.And that’s just at the level of the solar and wind equipment. At a societal level, the value of energy from solar and wind declines the more of it we add to the electrical grid.The underlying reason is physical. Solar and wind produce too much energy when we don’t need it and not enough when we do. In 2013, a German economist predicted that the economic value of solar would drop by a whopping 50% when it became just 15% of electricity and that the value of wind would decline 40% once it rose to 30% of electricity.Six years later, the evidence that solar and wind are increasing electricity prices in the real world, often without reducing emissions, is piling up. In 2017, The Los Angeles Times reported that California’s electricity prices had risen sharply, and hinted it might have to do with the deployment of renewables.In 2018, I reported that renewables had contributed to electricity prices rising 50% in Germany and five times more in California than in the rest of the US despite generating just 17% of the state’s electricity.And in April, a research institute at the University of Chicago led by a former Obama administration economist found solar and wind were making electricity significantly more expensive across the United States. The cost to consumers of renewables has been staggeringly high.Two weeks ago, Der Spiegel reported that Germany spent $36 billion per year on renewables over the last five years, and yet only increased the share of electricity from solar and wind by 10 percentage points.It’s been a similar story in the US. "All in all,” wrote the University of Chicago economists, “consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy."... there is a growing consensus among economists and independent analysts that solar and wind are indeed making electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100% back-up, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining... “The story of how California’s electric system got to its current state is a long and gory one,” James Bushnell wrote, but “the dominant policy driver in the electricity sector has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation.” We shouldn’t be surprised that renewables are making energy expensive. For as long as Greens have been advocating renewables they have viewed their high cost as a feature, not a bug.Environmentalists have for decades argued that energy is too cheap and must be made more expensive in order to protect the environment... Indeed, the reason environmentalists turned against nuclear energy in the 1960s was that it was cheap and effectively infinite.In the early 1970s, the Sierra Club’s Executive Director advocated scaring the public about nuclear to increase regulations to make it more expensive. And that’s what his organization, and many others, proceeded to do over the next four decades... Few university environmental studies students today, for example, ever learn of the mostly positive relationship between rising energy consumption and environmental protection.Fewer learn that the energy density of the fuel, whether wood, coal, sunlight, wind or uranium, determine energy’s environmental impact.Because sunlight is energy-dilute, solar panels are the most extractive of all energy resources, requiring 17 times the resources as nuclear while returning just 2% the energy invested.But the ideologically-driven leadership of European Greens and American environmentalists knows renewables make energy expensive and view raising energy prices as a high priority... Greens and environmentalists also seek to make food, another form of energy, more expensive. They do so by making agriculture more labor-intensive, land-intensive, and resource-intensive... Making farming more labor-intensive would take humankind back toward an agrarian economy where far more people work in farming, and everybody is much poorer.Unlike the original New Deal, a Green New Deal would thus result in what Greens call “de-growth,” not growth... It was only in the last decade that Greens started insisting that the renewables transition would “create jobs” as part of a Green New Deal.What they rarely mention is that the jobs are usually low-paying and low-skill, like spreading low-yield solar and wind collectors across landscapes, or collecting and spreading manure at organic farms."
In other words, why environmentalism is about destroying the economy and reversing progress

Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet - "California is a world leader when it comes to renewables but we haven’t converted our dams into batteries, partly for geographic reasons. You need the right kind of dam and reservoirs, and even then it’s an expensive retrofit.A bigger problem is that there are many other uses for the water that accumulates behind dams, namely irrigation and cities. And because the water in our rivers and reservoirs is scarce and unreliable, the water from dams for those other purposes is becoming ever-more precious. Without large-scale ways to back-up solar energy California has had to block electricity coming from solar farms when it’s extremely sunny, or pay neighboring states to take it from us so we can avoid blowing-out our grid... What house cats kill are small, common birds, like sparrows, robins and jays. What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines.In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with. Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying... France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billion on renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too. What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery... scientists have studied the health and safety of different energy sources since the 1960s. Every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity... nuclear plants have actually saved nearly two million lives to date that would have been lost to air pollution. Thanks to its energy density, nuclear plants require far less land than renewables. Even in sunny California, a solar farm requires 450 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear plant... A single Coke can’s worth of uranium provides all of the energy that the most gluttonous American or Australian lifestyle requires. At the end of the process, the high-level radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce is the very same Coke can of (used) uranium fuel. The reason nuclear is the best energy from an environmental perspective is because it produces so little waste and none enters the environment as pollution. All of the waste fuel from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program can fit, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all spent nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.By contrast, solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste. We tend to think of solar panels as clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.Experts fear solar panels will be shipped, along with other forms of electronic waste, to be disassembled—or, more often, smashed with hammers—by poor communities in Africa and Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium. Wherever I travel in the world I ask ordinary people what they think about nuclear and renewable energies. After saying they know next to nothing, they admit that nuclear is strong and renewables are weak. Their intuitions are correct. What most of us get wrong—understandably—is that weak energies are safer. But aren’t renewables safer? The answer is no. Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants... The problem with nuclear is that it is unpopular, a victim of a 50 year-long concerted effort by fossil fuel, renewable energy, anti-nuclear weapons campaigners, and misanthropic environmentalists to ban the technology... France shows that moving from mostly nuclear electricity to a mix of nuclear and renewables results in more carbon emissions, due to using more natural gas, and higher prices, to the unreliability of solar and wind. Oil and gas investors know this, which is why they made a political alliance with renewables companies, and why oil and gas companies have been spending millions of dollars on advertisements promoting solar, and funneling millions of dollars to said environmental groups to provide public relations cover... scientists recently warned that wind turbines are on the verge of making one species, the Hoary bat, a migratory bat species, go extinct.Another scientist who worked to build that gigantic solar farm in the California desert told High Country News, “Everybody knows that translocation of desert tortoises doesn’t work. When you’re walking in front of a bulldozer, crying, and moving animals, and cacti out of the way, it’s hard to think that the project is a good idea.” I think it’s natural that those of us who became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world. Collectively, we have been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy no different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket labeled “all natural.” But it’s high time that those of us who appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the science, and start questioning the impacts of our actions.Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?"

The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid - MIT Technology Review - "These batteries are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online—rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology—we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path. Today’s battery storage technology works best in a limited role, as a substitute for “peaking” power plants, according to a 2016 analysis by researchers at MIT and Argonne National Lab. These are smaller facilities, frequently fueled by natural gas today, that can afford to operate infrequently, firing up quickly when prices and demand are high... But much beyond this role, batteries run into real problems. The authors of the 2016 study found steeply diminishing returns when a lot of battery storage is added to the grid. They concluded that coupling battery storage with renewable plants is a “weak substitute” for large, flexible coal or natural-gas combined-cycle plants, the type that can be tapped at any time, run continuously, and vary output levels to meet shifting demand throughout the day.Not only is lithium-ion technology too expensive for this role, but limited battery life means it’s not well suited to filling gaps during the days, weeks, and even months when wind and solar generation flags. This problem is particularly acute in California, where both wind and solar fall off precipitously during the fall and winter months. This leads to a critical problem: when renewables reach high levels on the grid, you need far, far more wind and solar plants to crank out enough excess power during peak times to keep the grid operating through those long seasonal dips, says Jesse Jenkins, a coauthor of the study and an energy systems researcher. That, in turn, requires banks upon banks of batteries that can store it all away until it’s needed.And that ends up being astronomically expensive."
Addendum: This is actually a duplicate link

Addendum 2: I liked this article I linked it (removed the second one as the bits I quoted were duplicated too, unlike here) thrice... Sigh
You Asked: How Much Does the U.S. Subsidize Renewable Energy Versus Fossil Fuels?
Environmentalists like to do a hand wave and say that since fossil fuels are also subsidised, it doesn't matter that renewables are too. Yet in 2016, the US spent about 14 times as much on subsidising renewables as fossil fuels. When you consider that in 2018 80% of US primary energy consumption came from fossil fuels - and 11% from renewables, that makes the disproportionality of subsidies for renewables even more obscene

Cost of Transitioning to 100-Percent Renewable Energy - "There are several studies that indicate it would cost the United States trillions of dollars to transition to an electric system that is 100-percent renewable. Costs range from $4.5 trillion by 2030 or even 2040 to $5.7 trillion in 2030—about a quarter of the U.S. debt. The lower estimate results in a cost per household of almost $2,000 per year through 2040. The $4.5 trillion cost does not include the stranded cost of the oil, natural gas, and coal technologies that would be disrupted. Costs can be greatly reduced by allowing nuclear as part of the non-carbon emitting mix and allowing natural gas to generate 20 percent of the electricity. Allowing existing nuclear plants to operate would save about $500 billion. Also, moving the goal to 2045 or 2050 would help to reduce costs by allowing advanced technologies to be developed and commercialized. A spokesperson for Wood Mackenzie, who was in charge of one of the studies indicates, “In areas of the country that have a decent mix of wind and solar potential, those places can probably get to 50% renewables without struggling. Above 50%, the challenge of ensuring reliable grid operations starts to take off.” No large and complex power system in the world operates with an average annual wind and solar generation level greater than 30 percent. Another issue is that installers of wind turbines will be faced with NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) challenges... As these two studies indicate, a 100-percent renewable electricity system is not realistic by 2030 as the Green New Deal requires and certainly not at a reasonable cost"

Do Renewable Portfolio Standards Deliver? - "7 years after passage of an RPS program, the required renewable share of generation is 1.8 percentage points higher and average retail electricity prices are 1.3 cents per kWh, or 11% higher; the comparable figures for 12 years after adoption are a 4.2 percentage point increase in renewables’ share and a price increase of 2.0 cents per kWh or 17%. These cost estimates significantly exceed the marginal operational costs of renewables and likely reflect costs that renewables impose on the generation system, including those associated with their intermittency, higher transmission costs, and any stranded asset costs assigned to ratepayers. The estimated reduction in carbon emissions is imprecise, but, together with the price results, indicates that the cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $115 in all specifications and ranges up to $530, making it least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon"
In other words, some climate change policies have higher costs than that of climate change