As the late Carl Sagan said, back-of-the-envelope calculations are the great bullshit-busters. Any old nonsense can be made to sound plausible, but maths doesn’t lie.
Unfortunately, a great many people today seem to be barely literate, let alone capable of scribbling some basic maths on a piece of paper. So the most obvious towering bullshit stomps around on stilts, without ever being questioned.
Few more so than ‘Net Zero’.
I’ve written posts running the basic maths of ‘Net Zero’ several times. The conclusions are horrendous: to convert all our energy use to so-called ‘renewables’, landmasses the size of India would need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms. The cost would dwarf the two World Wars and Covid combined. Australia alone, one of the world’s smallest ‘emitters’, would need to spend the equivalent of its entire budget for WWI, every year, for the next 50 years.
No doubt I’m preaching to the converted, here, but it’s worth running through the maths again. If nothing else, so Good Oil readers have access to fact-based arguments to hit back at Climate Cultists with. Not that that often matters: the Cult are emotional, not logical, thinkers.
Still, here goes…
Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy will restore our personal and community independence […] Others believe green energy represents the free spirit and harmony with nature. ‘What would you rather have in your neighbourhood?’, I remember being asked in 2005. ‘A little wind turbine swirling gently in the breeze, or a nuclear power station and pylons?’
Except that it’s not a “little” turbine: the average turbine is taller than the Statue of Liberty. Many newer ones dwarf the Eiffel Tower. And it’s hundreds of them, humming and swirling at 200kph at the ends of the blades, ready to hack innocent birdlife or smash the delicate lungs of bats. As for pylons, ‘renewables’ are currently bulldozing vast swathes of wildlands to make way for the necessary pylons.
Give me the nuclear power station, with the safest track record of any method of power generation.
It would certainly beat covering the entire neighbourhood in acres of aluminium and glass, or whirling blades of death.
The green transition means armies of gargantuan wind turbines on land and sea; great blue-black mirror of solar panels glazing over thousands of acres of farmland; a neurotic spider’s web of grid cables criss-crossing the country; and dozens and dozens of whining substations and vast Area 51-like compounds of shipping-container sized lithium-ion batteries.
As if that were not bad enough, it transpires that in spite of all this green industrialisation we will still require nuclear and conventional gas turbine power stations. We may not use them as much, but reliability is an issue with wind and solar, and therefore generators are needed to guarantee security of supply at times when the British weather fails to deliver. ‘Who knew, except everyone?’ as the Americans say.
Well, everyone except anyone who reads the Guardian, Stuff, or New Zealand Herald.
Here’s some basic maths to make them run off, screaming, “La-la-la-la!”
The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.
A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 Megawatts (MW) Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just about fit into Middlesex). It is one of many major wind installations that the government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently produce about 15 Gigawatts (GW) of operational offshore wind power. To meet this quadrupling of capacity, we would need around 30 more Sophia Offshore wind farms.
The Sophia will use the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 MW. It has three blades 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes. The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.
So, that’s twice the area of Greater Sydney, covered in towering behemoths nearly the height of the Empire State Building. Nearly 150 aircraft carrier’s worth of steel, and some concrete. Roughly nine million tons – or 50 per cent more than the UK’s total annual production of steel.
That’s not even taking into account the vast nets of undersea cables which will be needed to get the electricity to where it’s needed.
For all that, you’ll get (putatively, assuming the turbines work at peak capacity 24/7), less than half of Britain’s annual electricity demand.
Electricity.
Which is, at present, just a fraction of total energy consumption. If, as the Climate Cult so ardently wish, the entire economy is turned over to electricity, then all of the numbers above will have to be multiplied by about 10.
On the other hand, a nuclear plant occupying just a thousandth of the area of a wind farm produces 1500 to 3000 times as much energy.
So, the next time a Labour/Greens-voting acquaintance starts banging on about renewables, feel free to pull up this post and hit them with the numbers.
They’ll still refuse to believe you, of course. They’re a bit like that.
