It's fantasy that green "renewable" energy can replace our current, efficient abundant fuel sources like coal, oil, and gas, not to mention our cleanest and greenest source of energy, nuclear.

Hopes and promises abound that green energy can somehow replace all current fuel sources. How? With wind farms and solar panels. Big tech firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple are touting their pledge to become 100% renewable in less than a decade. Of course, they all remain attached to the "dirty" power grid because they know that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine.

Battery backup, doesn't that solve the wind and sun issue? No, it doesn't, not even close. If it were the solution, we'd have net zero emissions already. It's been the problem all along for supposed green energy...how to store enough power to maintain electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

This was proven in 2018 when Tesla produced the largest battery cluster storage unit for a wind farm in South Australia. As it turns out, according to Sky News Australia, this massive battery storage unit would only be capable of powering the region for an estimated three minutes, off peck for maybe as much as an hour.

Physicist and engineer Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute explained that it would take Tesla's production plant in Nevada, the world's largest battery manufacturing facility, 500 years to produce enough batteries to power the US for a single day.

It is estimated that NYC alone would have to spend $3 trillion on batteries just to store enough energy for a seven day period. That's twice the metro area's entire GDP.

Batteries are not the answer, nor is sole reliance on wind or solar. I doubt we'll have much success convincing the greenies of that. After all, what's another $3 trillion to them?

Besides, where are they going to get all the metals required to build all the storage batteries. I have not yet seen a metal mine that the greenies didn't object to.

Good point.

T7: do you have a link for that info ? I'd like to save it

The only reason politicians allocate $ for green energy is because they get kickback $ returned to them under the table. They don't become millionaires on their salaries.

This does not even take into account the infrastructure of supply for all these electric vehicles either, making the charge stations across the country is not going to be paid by the battery makers either, the users will suffer that cost ! Be quite some time before there is enough demand for charging stations across the company as electric vehicles for the most part are not capable of doing much beyond shuttling people around !

Going to be sometime before people even get close to having no oil fueled vehicles, let alone straight home or production use of none oil produced or hydro electricity, people don't want Nuke plants all over the country either, they are not so popular with the problems of waste they develop and they take an enormous amount of water to run them.

Whatever happened to the hybred vechiles of yesteryear my daughter had one don't remember the year but was a ford Not a bad ride weird taking off with no noise then once in awhile the engine kicked in At a dealership for a service she was told the battery was nearing the end of its useful life 3 grand for a replacement another 2 for new computer to go with the battery basically another thou for getting rid of the old battery and then the labor She traded it in on a Chevy Equinox

Not yet, they can't. Petroleum products weren't a very good fuel source in their infancy, either. It took a while to get the infrastructure in place (imagine trying to find a gas station in 1920), to build refineries, to learn how to get the raw materials (it took a long time to figure out deep sea drilling and fracking), and to make it efficient (think of the fuel economy of a 1960s vehicle).
Electric is the same way....right now it's inefficient, hard to find refuel sources, expensive, we're not good at getti g the raw materials, and they don't last long. That will all change in due time with improvements in technology.

You seem to have done some looking into this. My question is what's the difference between mining for lithium or coal?

Thorium salt generators would answer much of the problem once perfected. They CAN'T run away. can run on the spent fuel from the other reactors and low enough on radiation to not be able to make a bomb if robbed. They had a working model up and running but it wasn't what they were looking for at the time. They can be made to scale to fit any need. Even made to be mobile.

Thorium in an abundant element. One has to wonder how advanced we would be if the money thrown at the green energy had been used for the research on thorium. Salt reactor

Loosegoose: I'm not so sure we will see those improvements. Physics seems to limit that prospect.

Wade: here is ( I think) the original article that Trapper7 has quoted from above.

It is quite long but extremely interesting. It also addresses your question on mining

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible

I don't know about the link, but if you google, Brent Smith batteries can't do the job greenies think, you can get it.

I'm pretty sure I found it ! Thanks !! Really good info !

W17, that's a different article, but also very interesting. Let me know if you can't find the article I mentioned by Brent Smith. I posted the condensed version originally.

OK


Got it !

And to charge the batteries you still have to produce the electricity somehow - usually fossil fuels. So you burn the fuel to make the electricity, just like you normally would. You charge the battery with a charger that isn't 100% efficient so you loose a little of the electricity which has to be made up with more fossil fuel, you then use the electricity through a system that isn't 100% efficient. You've now used more fossil fuel than you used before. And... you have all the environmental problems with mining, storing, and disposing of the lithium metal.

I'm not at all anti-battery, anti-electric car, or anti-any-new-technology but I don't see how electric vehicles are better for the environment.

Now, nuclear I like. I carried a lot of firewood as a kid and nuclear beats the heck out of carrying firewood.

I have read that natural gas is pretty environmentally-friendly. Fail to see why they don't look into this.

Probably too clean in its natural form so it's not profitable enough to refine and jack the price up.

Lot of power plants have converted to natural gas. It is more environmentally friendly, not as expensive as oil, we have hundreds of years worth of gas BUT...........it's not PC and it works opposite the political goal to INCREASE the cost of energy so that government can ration it and control everything you do.

This man understands the green agenda completely.