About the Renewable Energy category

So called “renewables” not only are expensive, with short lifetimes before replacement, they require huge footprints that use miles of area that limits its use for anything else. Harvesting wind and sun is still fuel consumption that requires a lot of infrastructure to utilize.
They are harvesting weather dependent sources that are not consistently productive.
There is not a “renewable” facility on Earth that can provide constant energy supply for a month or more without using fossil fuel backup.
Why not bypass the expense and ecological ruin of large areas devoted to “renewables”, and just use a modern power generator with the appropriate scrubbers on a much smaller footprint.

Time will tell especially during the next administration in the U.S. when subsidies will be severely curtailed or eliminated.

Exceptions to

include hydroprojects and geothermal. And I would add wave technology almost totally undeveloped.

Does the cost of fossil fuels include safe disposal of cinders? Flyash? Scrubbers to remove sulfur? Technology to capture mercury?

No energy technology is absolutely without limitations. We have long experience with fossil fuels and have learned to tolerate (or ignore) many of those risks.

1 Like

Many of the heavy metals released in the mining and burning of coal are environmentally and biologically toxic elements, such as lead, mercury, nickel, tin, cadmium, antimony, and arsenic , as well as radio isotopes of thorium and strontium.

Mercury, arsenic and lead are all potent neurotoxins.

Mercury:
Mercury is primarily removed from emissions from coal-fired power plants through a process called “activated carbon injection (ACI),” where powdered activated carbon is injected into the flue gas stream, allowing the large surface area of the carbon to adsorb and capture the mercury particles before they are released into the atmosphere; this method is often implemented alongside existing pollution control devices like scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators. However, these methods remove only 90% of the mercury - 10% are released to the atmosphere.

Arsnic
Coal-fired power plants are considered a significant source of arsenic enriched in fly ash migrates to low-temperature flue with the flue gas and is removed by wet FGD device, electrostatic precipitator (ESP) and wet electrostatic precipitator device, and fixed in desulfurization gypsum, fly ash, and other wastes.

At present, the control of heavy metal arsenic in coal-fired power plants mainly relies on the collaborative removal of ESP and Wet flue gas desulphurization (WFGD). However, ESP mainly removes trace elements in the form of PM, and it is not effective in removing arsenic from flue gas attached to submicron particles, which is easy to escape into the atmosphere. Although WFGD has a good effect on the removal of gaseous arsenic, the removed gaseous arsenic mainly enters the desulfurization wastewater in the form of PM and becomes arsenic in the liquid phase, which is more complex and difficult to remove. Only small amounts of arsenic-containing species are emitted in gaseous form. Therefore, the application of air pollution control devices (APCDs) can significantly affect the redistribution of arsenic in combustion byproducts and change the path of element to the environment.

Lead:
Coal-fired power plants are considered a significant source of lead emissions, releasing lead into the atmosphere through the burning of coal which naturally contains small amounts of lead, with this lead primarily accumulating in the ash produced during combustion; this can pose a significant health risk due to the toxicity of lead.

To remove lead from coal-fired power plant effluents, the primary method is to utilize a combination of physical and chemical treatment processes, including precipitation, adsorption onto materials like fly ash (which can be recycled), ion exchange, and filtration; with the key focus on properly managing the coal ash residue where most of the lead concentrates after combustion, often through techniques like stabilization and solidification to prevent leaching into the environment.

LOL - So according to you breathing CO, CO2, NOx, SOx, and carbon black will not kill someone taking a hose from the exhaust of a car into the passenger compartment. Many people die every year from high concentrations of carbon monoxide…

CO poisoning generally results from faulty home or business heating units, not autos. You knew that but still try to obfuscate/gaslight.

I see that you are fully engaged with the alarmist narrative. It seems that 50 years of failed climate predictions has no effect on your thought processes.
Alarmists in the 70s told us that we were entering another ice age. The solution was more government control and taxes. The cooling didn’t occur so the next narrative was global warming with the solution being more government control and taxes. Then there was the pause in warming so the narrative changed to climate change to cover the bases with the solution being more government control and taxes. The narratives have the common theme of authoritarian government control.

Just for your edification, we are presently in an ice age where approximately 20% of the surface water is frozen. Thankfully we are in an interglacial period where the gradual warming since the Little Ice Age has been greatly beneficial to our species. This is great because cold generally causes 10 times the number of deaths than heat.

1 Like

Wrong. You stated that suicide is not possible by running from exhaust pipe into the car. It is possible to commit suicide that way -dying form CO and lack of oxygen due to CO2 and NOX.

EXXON scientists and climate scientists told us 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would cause the earth to warm because CO2 and methane are heat trapping gases. We now see that their scientific forecasts were correct.

Your statements are wrong! The rest of the world is pursuing net zero. You can remain a climate change, global warming denier while progress is being made to net zero.

If my statements are wrong, please show data that shows actual evidence, such as real experimental results.
Computer modeling projections are not data.

Since this is a site dedicated to financial matters, I believe anyone investing in “renewable” energy is heading for a big loss. The outcomes in Germany, UK, and Australia prove me correct.

1 Like

There are trade offs with any energy technology. A cost/benefit analysis is needed for each method.
It is my contention that so called “renewables” for energy generation are expensive, ecologically destructive, and not economically viable without government subsidies.
Since government subsidies come from my taxes, they are stealing my money to fund this boondoggle.

Just because it is your contention doesn’t make it true. I installed solar panels on my roof in 2015. I got a ~30% tax credit for the installation. Including the tax benefit they had paid for themselves a year or two ago. (Exact date irrelevant and tricky to compute since my utility rates have gone up and up since then.) Based on those new high rates they will have paid for themselves sometime next year without the subsidies.
This is all despite the fact that my roof doesn’t even face south (it is ~west) and due to the low sun angle in the winter they are partially shaded by a tree from Nov - Jan.
This year it looks like I’ll be producing ~96% as many kwh as the first year. And they have a warranty to be at 80% after 25 years.

On another issue.
CO poisoning from car exhaust. Have you tried this experiment?
We have catalytic converters that take several dangerous chemicals and convert them to CO2 (+ others). The converters are expensive and thus the high rate of theft, mainly for the palladium, IIRC. But they aren’t 100%…older cars especially can allow as much as 10% of CO to remain. But even this is after they warm up to around 400C - 800C! Before that the concentration can be 10x to 50X higher.

This is why, when I used to have a gas car, and was required to get the CA smog check they idled the car for ~5 minutes before taking a reading. If you failed they would idle the car for a few more minutes and try again. So, yes, EVERY time you cold start your ICE car it spews much higher levels of cr@p into the air right in your garage, parking garage or wherever you are.

Seriously, don’t try the “breathing from a hose from your exhaust experiment”

Mike

3 Likes

Climate Change: Global Temperature | NOAA Climate.gov)%20per%20decade.

Given the tremendous size and heat capacity of the global oceans, it takes a massive amount of added heat energy to raise Earth’s average yearly surface temperature even a small amount. The roughly 2-degree Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) increase in global average surface temperature that has occurred since the pre-industrial era (1850-1900 in NOAA’s record) might seem small, but it means a significant increase in accumulated heat.

That extra heat is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals—expanding some and shrinking others. As the map below shows, most land areas have warmed faster than most ocean areas, and the Arctic is warming faster than most other regions. In addition, it’s clear that the rate of warming over the past few decades is much faster than the average rate since the start of the 20th century.

Though warming has not been uniform across the planet, the upward trend in the globally averaged temperature shows that more areas are warming than cooling. According to NOAA’s 2023 Annual Climate Report the combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.11° Fahrenheit (0.06° Celsius) per decade since 1850, or about 2° F in total. The rate of warming since 1982 is more than three times as fast: 0.36° F (0.20° C) per decade.

1 Like

The period between 1250 and 1860 is also known as the Little Ice Age. You want to start your records during the coldest period in 8000 years. Typical leftist technique.
What you don’t include is that historically, CO2 increases after the temperature increase. This has been known for decades. You are out of touch.

1 Like

Would you have installed solar without the tax credit plus whatever was included with the credits?

1 Like

Wrong again. CO2 increases cause temperatures to increase.

What are you basing your opinion on?
Here’s some papers to back up my statement.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1141038
“In the original article, as [Euan Mearns] notes in his robust assessment, the authors believed that temperature increase preceded CO2 increase.”

“In their seminal paper on the Vostok Ice Core, Petit et al (1999) [1] note that CO2 lags temperature during the onset of glaciations by several thousand years but offer no explanation. They also observe that CH4 and CO2 are not perfectly aligned with each other but offer no explanation. The significance of these observations are (sic) therefore ignored. At the onset of glaciations temperature drops to glacial values before CO2 begins to fall suggesting that CO2 has little influence on temperature modulation at these times.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224962710_Climate_and_Atmospheric_History_of_the_Past_420000_Years_from_the_Vostok_Ice_Core_Antarctica

1 Like

First, can you reply about your claim that solar panels are not economically viable without government subsidies. I just proved this statement false…and I don’t have the ideal roof location. Today the panels are cheaper, as well.

Mike

1 Like

Since you installed the panels using tax credits plus other incentives by government providing incentives for the solar industry, you just added proof to my statement.
Hope your batteries don’t catch fire.

1 Like

Your opinions are based on climate deniers like Singer who has been debunked! Here is an article from Nature which explains why Singer was wrong.

We use a newly developed technique that is based on the information flow concept to investigate the causal structure between the global radiative forcing and the annual global mean surface temperature anomalies (GMTA) since 1850. Our study unambiguously shows one-way causality between the total Greenhouse Gases and GMTA. Specifically, it is confirmed that the former, especially CO2, are the main causal drivers of the recent warming. A significant but smaller information flow comes from aerosol direct and indirect forcing and on short time periods, volcanic forcings. In contrast the causality contribution from natural forcings (solar irradiance and volcanic forcing) to the long term trend is not significant. The spatial explicit analysis reveals that the anthropogenic forcing fingerprint is significantly regionally varying in both hemispheres. On paleoclimate time scales, however, the cause-effect direction is reversed: temperature changes cause subsequent CO2/CH4 changes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21691

I thought that all the old climate science deniers had given up their weird science. Sorry to see Dracula coming to life again.

Wrong. I would have gotten the solar with or without the subsidies. And I just checked my utility’s rates… Wow! I hadn’t actually checked since before COVID and I was estimating based on 22c/kwh (tier 1) and 28c/kwh for tier 2. The current actual rates are about 40c and 60c. So I have already saved enough to have paid back the install cost without any subsidy. (Note: when installed my rates were about 15c/kwh)
And your bias is completely showing since you somehow assumed I have batteries with my solar – which I do not.
Although, battery backup during an emergency is not a bad idea, they are just too expensive to just use a few hours a year, unlike a grid battery that gets partially or fully cycled most everyday, smoothing out the peaks and valleys of supply vs demand.

Mike

1 Like