Renewable energy ‘simply WON’T
WORK’: Top Google engineers, Posted
on November 24, 2014 Written by theregister.co.uk
Windmills, solar,
tidal — all a ‘false hope’, say Stanford PhDs
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.
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<C
project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it
could produce energy more cheaply than coal.
RE<C was a failure,
and Google closed
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<C, we had shared the attitude of
many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to
today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic
climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy
technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different
approach.
One should note that RE<C didn’t restrict itself to conventional
renewable ideas like solar PV, windfarms, tidal, hydro
etc. It also looked extensively into more radical notions such as
solar-thermal, geothermal, “self-assembling” wind towers and so on and so
forth. There’s no get-out clause for renewables believers here.
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 [sic] 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?
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