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