Tuesday 2 December 2014

GOOGLY REALITY CHECK?

REALITY CHECK  of  REALITY CHECKS?

Monday, Dec 01 2014
Written by Lewis Page, The Register on 28 Nov 2014
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible (full article here).
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren't guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or "technology" of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE
REclosed it down
 after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum.
The two men write:
At the start of RE
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
One should note that RE
Koningstein and Fork aren't alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn't feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn't even vaguely plausible.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms - and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive - which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly). That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go - none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.
So nobody's up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork - and many others - remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real and massive. Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that we must move rapidly not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the air by such means as planting forests).
So, how is this to be done?
Read more at www.theregister.co.uk

oooooo00000oooooo
Source:
http://www.principia-scientific.org/renewable-energy-simply-won-t-work-top-google-engineers.html 

5 comments:

  1. I would like to see an 'Octopus' diagram, as in -- tinyurl.com/obhq3w9 -- of the Koningstein/Fork findings to illustrate this Reality Check. Could the output tentacle ‘A: EXTRACTION OF RAW MATERIALS’ become larger than the total available input from recurring sources requiring extraneous power to make the ‘Octopus’ function? Luckily the AGW fraud has been debunked by now, except for diehard Lysenkoists and their apparently limitless Gleichschaltung funds.

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  2. “The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would not be able to grow.”

    Vaclav Smil: ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES AND UNCERTAINTIES [MIT Press, 2003]

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  3. The AGW fraud has one beneficial side effect: “Global warming did serve a couple of useful purposes. The issue has been a litmus test for our political class. Any politician who has stated a belief in global warming is either a cynical opportunist or an easily deluded fool. In neither case should that politician ever be taken seriously again. No excuses can be accepted.” http://tinyurl.com/ptgrz34 . The same consideration also applies to those 'real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics'.

    This 'Reality Check’ merely reports that some more people who should know better also allowed themselves to be persuaded by the AGW Gleichschaltung and their activists who need to be ignored – and therein lies all the regrettable ‘Reality’ here portrayed. http://tinyurl.com/mro3dhg & http://tinyurl.com/n7kvbff

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  4. Remembering an oldie of mine:
    Nuclear heat, whether fission or fusion, is still nothing more than powering a steam engine with enormous requirements for water in operation and for cooling(i.e. 3.2 litre/kWh) Besides, come the year 2000+ the world will need, very conservatively, about four times the current production of electricity of 13TW. That would require some 50,000 nuclear power stations (if you think that's the only answer) by then, or about building one every 1.5 days from now on (not counting 30-yearly replacement units). Do your own sums. The only nuclear reactor which will satisfy humanity's energy needs is that thing called the Sun which delivers 10,000 times the current global energy consumption at the surface of the planet and seems guaranteed to last for another 4 billion years (barring Black Swan events); no nuclear clean-up mess and no water requirements – unless you want to drive yet more heat engines as proposed in CPS systems. In contradistinction to using photovoltaics: photons in, electrons out, preferably proximity-coupled to use requirements. Day-night cycles and longer term storage, yes, needs to be solved. But that will no doubt be tackled by human ingenuity. Meanwhile use fossil fuels while they last - as long as SOX, NOX and OBNOX (sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and anything else obnox-ious incl. particulates) are removed, the CO2 will do no harm to anyone, least of all to the planet, and plants just love it. But that's another story some other time.
    • July 14, 2010

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  5. ...seems Google did a good job letting those guys go,

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