At This Moment, West Denmark's Wind Turbines Are Running at Less Than 1% Capacity Utilization.

[NNadir]

From the Electricity Map (Accessed 03/01/23, 7:48 Copenhagen time, 1:49 A US EST)



At 321 g CO2/kwh, they're "only" 221% higher (in "percent talk" ) than France's 145 g CO2/kwh, but less than Germany's 677 g CO2/kWh, Germany's carbon intensity being the second highest in Europe, being "only" 460% worse than France in "percent talk."

The Danes are burning biomass this morning because the wind isn't blowing. Biomass related air pollution is responsible for slightly less than half of the roughly 7 million air pollution deaths that occur each year. Biomass is described as "renewable energy."

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

Heckuva job!

[hunter]

1. It's clear now that wind and solar energy can't replace fossil fuels

The numbers are in, the experiment has been done. The only way any wind or solar enthusiast can claim success is by denying the environmental impacts of natural gas "backup" power, especially here in California or Denmark.

Germany remains a hellhole of burning coal...

I'm not going to name names, but I know some very affluent person who was hoping to disconnect from the electric grid entirely, wasn't going to embrace the "net metering" accounting trick. They now say they weren't in it for the money. Their absurdly expensive battery storage couldn't carry them through winter days when the sun wasn't shining, many days in a row. They could not disconnect from the grid.

But even that goalpost was a lie. Everything else about any affluent lifestyle, including the food one eats, is largely dependent on fossil fuels.

[NNadir]

2. They were never supposed to replace fossil fuels. Advocates of this reactionary scheme rarely...

...if ever, have a word to say about climate change and they clearly don't give a rat's ass about fossil fuels.

Their goal, driven by their poor educations, and whipped up hysteria, was to attack nuclear energy.

The result was oodles of money to fund Putin's imperialism.

Germany today:



Electricity Map, Germany (Accessed 3/3/23, 1:46 Berlin time, 3/2/23, US 7:46 EST)

It's been this ugly through much of the winter. I check it pretty much every damned day.

[hunter]

3. I feel I was a witness to the birth of this folly.

It was 1977 and I was present at a round table where David Brower was describing his vision for a solar/wind/natural gas power system. Gas was going to transition from the fossil fuel sort to the sort made out of cow poop and such.

That's a lot of cow poop and the natural gas industry knew it. So did David Brower.

[NNadir]

4. Ah, the guy who thought Glen Canyon was his property that he had the right to trade.

The trajectory of "environmentalism" in the 20th century, post John Muir, who worked and failed to protect wilderness, the Hetch Hetchy in that case, from development, to supporting and encouraging the development of wilderness for energy, is as depressing as hell.

It is now clear that without a serious understanding of science and engineering, in particular with respect to mass and land intensity, has left a trashed planet.

I cannot hear Brower's name without thinking of the destruction of Glen Canyon. To me that's his legacy.

We need to dust off the thinking of John Muir.