When I first saw the paper critiquing Jacobson's 100% renewables plan (see here, here, here, and here) I thought to myself, “If he denies there are any mistakes but then makes changes, I'll know that the critiques had at least some measure of validity.” Lo and behold, after denying that there were any mistakes, he immediately made revisions to the study. I also thought, “And if any changes made involve his input assumptions, that would suggest that the study results were likely heavily biased by cherry picked assumptions all along (garbage in = garbage out).” Why did Mark Jacobson limit his 100% renewable game plan to the expansion of wind and solar?
Michael Shellenberger is going after Greenpeace in a series of articles exposing their disingenuous anti-nuclear energy activities. More power to him.
Climate change isn't a global conspiracy by scientists to solicit research funding.
Climate change is the result of mass global deforestation and the combustion of billions of tons of hydrocarbons that have been stored underground for hundreds of millions of years.
The oceans are not going to absorb the extra carbon and heat energy forever.
I could be wrong about climate change. You never know. But isn't it about time to stop using coal to make electricity, regardless? Coal was the replacement for wood when parts of Europe ran out of forests to burn. It's old-school, dangerous to mine, environmentally destructive (although less so that burning wood), and filthy. Nuclear has been coal's main competitor for over half-a-century now. It is a much cleaner and environmentally friendly alternative. Maybe we should replace coal plants with nuclear plants and lessen the impact on those who make a living mining coal by facilitating their participation in their construction and operation? Should we risk trying to decarbonize without help from nuclear, risk the effects of climate change by excluding the world's largest source of proven, scalable, low carbon electricity? Considering that there is no meaningful risk to including nuclear in the energy mix and that the risk of excluding it may be cataclysmic, the answer should be one of those rare no-brainers.
Video of a dragonfly laying eggs
Nature was collapsing all around us long before anyone heard of climate change. Read the latest in a very long line of books about this subject: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Just a few days ago I took the above video of a dragonfly laying eggs in a goldfish pond. This is not an intact ecosystem. It's covered with a net to keep the cats, raccoons, and herons from eating said colorful carp, which are an invasive species, as is the English ivy in the foreground. It has a pump to aerate the water, and the fish are fed fish food made from fish. Being in the middle of a city you can hear the city noises; cars, trucks, aircraft, snippets of conversations. If the larvae of that dragonfly reduce the goldfish population, that's fine, because dragonflies also eat mosquitoes.
Argentine wildlife reserve--Esteros del Ibera
Speaking of which, I once had the pleasure of visiting an increasingly rare, largely intact ecosystem. You have probably never experienced one this intact, and as sad as this sounds, your children and grandchildren are even less likely to do so. While watching caiman, capybara, and any number of other fascinating creatures go about their business at dusk, I witnessed hundreds of thousands of dragonflies rising into the sky to eat mosquitoes (3:17 into above video and pardon the poor quality for I knew not what I was doing). Although it was ideal mosquito habitat, I don't recall being bitten by one, or even seeing one, while there. What led many of the world's largest environmental organizations to focus on nuclear energy at the expense of nature (nuclear is one of our most benign sources of energy when it comes to ecosystem disruption--Chernobyl actually resulted in the creation of Europe's largest wildlife preserve)?
Figure 1 Emissions increase resulting from nuclear closures
"Twitter debate" is an oxymoron but once in a while I go down the rabbit hole, and when others get involved, it quickly devolves into a confused muddle not too unlike Alice in Wonderland. It started when I responded to a tweet by Jonathan Gilligan:
At this point, I mentioned that fear, not economic competition had created the gap between the red and blue curves seen in Figure 1 above. After visiting his Twitter page, I'm thinking that maybe he's not all that enamored with nuclear:
The first is a rehash of a joint 2016 Berkeley Labs and National Renewable Energy Lab study touting the benefits of solar titled The Environmental and Public Health Benefits of Achieving High Penetrations of Solar Energy in the United States[When Compared to Coal and Natural Gas, But Not Nuclear]. And keep in mind that solar in the U.S. makes up roughly 0.4 percent of total energy consumption at this point in time. Like any study, it has its biases, and like any study, the results are largely the result of assumptions chosen. Read The 44% Nuclear, 35% Renewables, 21% Natural Gas Low Carbon Grid and Bounding the Renewables-Nuclear Debate (also see Figure 1). When talking about water use, they assumed that concentrated solar will use dry-cooled technology (which uses an order of magnitude less water than a typical wet-cooled system). Why would the authors conclude that only solar would do that when there are no laws in place mandating it and if there were laws, why would they not apply to other power systems?
Typical Rube Goldberg machine with its many attendant assumptions and potential failure nodes
Proposed coast-to-coast HVDC super-grid with its many attendant assumptions and potential failure nodes
Would a continent-sized super HVDC grid be a Rube Goldberg machine writ large? Back in the day, you would have been hard-pressed to find an article on the internet critical of biofuels. We should all be driving biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol powered cars by now. Politicians at the Federal level from both sides of the aisle saw this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; buy votes from the farm belt, implement a permanent farm subsidy. So, in the end all we have left is the government mandated consumption of corn ethanol. Ethanol made out of corn now replaces roughly 10% of gasoline use. Not quite what everyone was hoping for. Governors and mayors also jumped on the bandwagon with similar dismal results.
Because Seattle is too small to grow its own biodiesel, the goal was to at least source it from Washington State, but for economic reasons, it ended up coming from Canada. So, in the end, there was a transfer of wealth going on from Seattle to Canada for its canola-based biodiesel, which is why all of the biodiesel stations have since disappeared. A similar situation arises with the generation of electricity. Dozens of studies and white papers supporting biofuels were being pumped out (no pun intended) at the height of the craze. I see all of this as a potential analogy for what we're witnessing today with wind and solar.
The latest low carbon energy system research seems to have given up on storing excess wind and solar generated electricity in a form that will be used to create electricity later (minus the 20%-30% lost from storing and retrieving it) when there is demand for it.
