Energy experts have been warning us for years about the problems inherent in trying to SCALE GREEN TECHNOLOGIES. This piece addresses the issue head-on.
Green Technologies Have a Glaring Problem of Scale
Salient points — and I’m quoting from the piece:
- Mass deployment of these technologies will encounter fundamental physical limits that call into question their ability to function as replacements for their equivalents in the current energy system.
- Due to unavoidable physical constraints, future green technologies offer little promise for achieving economies of scale.
- Efforts to improve energy efficiency remain essential, but those efforts are not likely to reduce aggregate energy use.
- Technologies designed to capture the radiant energy of the sun or the kinetic energy of the wind must accommodate the inherent randomness of these sources.
- Clever engineering can finesse technical challenges but cannot overcome fundamental forces of nature.
- Successful technologies may not succeed instantly and need to emerge over time, but their success cannot be forced by government fiat or the mandates of Five-Year Plans.
- Technologies that do not scale are destined to remain boutique technologies, the purview of the rich, environmental activists, and politicians that seize upon them to make empty promises.
TUDOR PLACE: Energy transitioning — to the extent it occurs at all — will be COSTLY and DIFFICULT. Just because some view climate change principally as a MORAL ISSUE, doesn’t mean that it just arrives via some sort of SEAMLESS or FREE evolution.
Notice how ardent — and at times ALARMIST — climate activists NEVER DISCUSS the COSTS involved in moving to so-called RENEWABLES, an infrastructure which ITSELF will need REPLACING every 10 years or so. And using WHAT KIND OF ENERGY, might I ask?
FOSSIL ENERGY! Assuming we’re STILL PRODUCING IT.
Climate change is NOT principally a moral issue. It’s one involving a) the LIMITS OF ENERGY in general and b) an ENGINEERING CHALLENGE on a scale we’ve never encountered.
THE WORST ERROR WE COULD MAKE — and, yes, we’re already making it — is to SCALE DOWN OUR USE OF FOSSIL ENERGY PREMATURELY.
The good news? The realization of this error should become apparent soon enough and before it’s too late.
FINGERS CROSSED.
Tudor Place 