The Realities Of “Going Green”
By Paul Homewood
I came across this on Facebook, translated from Norwegian. It’s a good summary:
"Batteries do not create electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, especially through coal, uranium, natural-powered power plants or diesel-powered generators. "So the claim that an electric car is a zero-emission vehicle is not true at all.
Since forty percent of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal power plants, thus forty percent of the electric cars on the road are carbon-based.
But that’s not all of it. Those who are excited about electric cars and a green revolution should take a closer look at the batteries, but also wind turbines and solar panels.
A typical electric car battery weighs a thousand pounds, roughly the size of a suitcase. It contains 25 pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel and plastic. There are over 6,000 individual lithium ion cells inside.
To make each BEV battery, you’ll need to process 25,000 pounds of salt for lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for cobalt, 5,000 pounds of resin for nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore from copper. In total, you have to dig out 500,000 pounds of dirt for a battery. "
The biggest problem with solar systems is the chemicals used to turn silicate into the gravel used for the panels. To produce sufficient clean silicon, it must be treated with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, fluoride, trichlorotane and acetone.
In addition, gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium diselenide and cadmium telluride are needed, which are also highly toxic. Silicone dust poses a danger to the workers and the tiles cannot be recycled.
Wind turbines are non-plusultra in terms of cost and environmental destruction. Each windmill weighs 1,688 tonnes (the equivalent of the weight of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tonnes of concrete, 295 tonnes of steel, 48 tonnes of iron, 24 tonnes of fiberglass and the hard-to-win rare soils Neodym, Praseodym, and Dysprosium. Each of the three blades weighs 81,000 pounds and has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, after which they must be replaced. We cannot recycle used rotor blades.
Admittedly, these technologies can have their place, but you have to look beyond the myth of emission freedom.
“Going Green” may sound like a utopian ideal, but if you look at the hidden and embedded costs in a realistic and impartial way, you’ll find that “Going Green" does more damage to earth’s environment than it seems. Every.
I’m not opposed to mining, electric vehicles, wind or solar energy. But I show the reality of the situation.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Does Greta speak Norwegian. Many Swedes do, even those who don’t go to school.
My bet is that manufacturing, installing/delivering, maintaining and then scrapping wind turbines and EVs produces more CO2 emissions than they theoretically save. And because those emissions are front-loaded but the saving only occur over time, the emissions are much worse for any supposed “warming”.
That must be true because none of that can take place without transportation using vehicles that run on fossil fuels. The transition from conventional transportation to electric transportation adds those CO2 emissions every step of the way. A rapid reduction of emissions from transportation fuels will only make it worse. Embedded stupidity?
A good article.
Carting the raw materials to China, then sailing the completed product to the UK will add to their energy cost.
Plus there is the bird and bat carnage from windmills – said to be 4 per DAY. Not to mention visual and noise pollution. And wind certainly deserves the intermittent label -as I write this, “the Saudi Arabia of Windmills” is generating just over 5% of UK grid power.
Not many technologies would be permitted with all these negatives.
A single wind turbine is said to kill 40 million insects a year according to German research https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348790564_Insect_fatalities_at_wind_turbines_as_biodiversity_sinks
Phoenix, the recent Volvo report showed that it took 50,000-150,000 km for their new XC40 EV to emit less CO2 over its life cycle than the petrol version (they don’t do a diesel any more).
My own calculation is that the new petrol embodies the equivalent of 100,000 km of driving an existing car. Similarly, running the old car for 150,000 km = buying a new EV.
See my “Slips the Green Halo” at Cliscep.
And I wonder what they assume about generation of electricity to get that?
Volvo’s calculations do NOT include the 31% of energy LOST from transmission or from charging. Consumption ONLY at the engine . . .
OHM’S LAW . . .
https://www.academia.edu/62574334/Tesla_Versus_Toyota_Camry
Madness and Propaganda RULE . . .
It’s the Drax argument all over again.The CO2 built up over 20 years is emitted “in one go” and is only ‘carbon neutral’ after another 20 years and that assumes the trees get replanted and I’m prepared to bet that there is no system in place to guarantee that happens!
And it ignores the emission “cost” of processing the trees and shipping them across the Atlantic to a power station sitting on top of at least another 50 years of coal!
It makes no economic or environmental sense once you factor in all the costs — financial and environmental — from the start of the process.
“trichlorotane”
Shouldn’t that be [x,x,x-] Trichloroethane?
It’s machine translated?
And published here without being noticed.
And there should not be a comma between ‘Gallium’ and ‘arsenide’.
It should also read “Silicon” dust, NOT Silicone…
And in paragraph 5th from end it should be SILICON not SiliconE
Rare earths, rather than soils.
He doesn’t mention the huge nasty spoil heaps and toxic tailing ponds and the danger to the environment and anyone living close by, but it doesn’t matter because it is green
Global database of tailing dams goes live
“Tailing dams are getting bigger and bigger. Mining companies have found most of the highest-grade ores and are now mining lower-grade ones, which create more waste.
https://www.mining.com/global-database-of-tailing-dams-goes-live/
And nobody talks about energy in vs energy out or CO2in vs CO2out
The world bank’s data for minerals & wind turbines as follows:
Nice! Would I be correct in immagining that the ‘high speed’, ‘direct drive’ and ‘hybrid-drive’ windmills will be set up as “Super-turbines” to blow very hard and keep all the ones we already have, when becalmed? Sounds excellent!
Almost as good as the Mafia’s floodlights (on night-time electricity tarifs) keeping solar panels going in the small hours…
Ah, what joy it is to be controlled by gormless Arts Grads and their hand picked “experts”.
And onshore wind and solar farms take up precious agricultural land, as their energy density, like a battery, is very low compared to fossil fuels and nuclear. Batteries also lose a significant amount of the input energy, and the faster the charging, the higher the losses. A hybrid car is also carrying around the weight of 2 engines and energy sources, but whereas the fuel tank gets lighter as the fuel is used, a battery doesn’t.
And don’t forget the land being taken up by the vegetation used to make the biofuel ethanol blended into fossil fuels. All of that is then transported by tanker trucks to service stations where it is quickly burned. The sequestered CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. Using 100% fossil fuels instead of the 90% in biofuels would avoid all of that. Another global warming scam?
Indeed not sure how this chimes with BoJos desire that the UK needs to grow more of its own food not import it.
We currently import it rather than growing it because imports are cheaper/better. So Johnson apparently wants us to have more expensive/worse food.
Oh good.
Perhaps UK EV battery demand will now reduce as the govt have just axed the plug-in electric car incentive? https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/consumer/uk-government-axes-plug-car-grant-immediate-effect?sfmc_id=36126156&sfmc_activityid=d1043602-9741-4c31-a704-5b29b3fda405
and just as the price of batteries are going up from commodity input price increase. no more spouting how they are dropping in price every year.
In my town they are in the process of digging up every inch of pavement to lay the next generation of internet cables, presumably the same country wide. Imagine trying to do that with battery powered jack-hammers, diggers, and dumper trucks.
At the South of England show there was a nice Bobcat mini-digger that was battery powered. Some chap started asking about it, almost sounding like he was thinking it might plug in to the mains, but the saleman said it just had a battery. How I managed not to say that it would be wise to have a diesel generator to hand I will never know.
I saw a report a while ago on a test battery powered tractor. The battery lasted just 1 hour.
And after all that they are unreliable, non-despatchable. Conventional generation still required both when system has to turn them off in summer or wind/sun doesn’t happen in winter ( as well as system support all the time).
There was an article in the ToL yesterday about ‘Ministers’ looking at revising the payment mechanism in UK ‘to take advantage of lower cost unreliables’ to lower customer prices. It was garbage. Perhaps when they said ‘Ministers’ they meant people praying a lot to get them out of their self made mess.
I keep reminding you all, it isn’t a question of facts. Especially not awkward, inconvenient facts like these!
“Don’t confuse me with facts, I’ve made up my mind!”
Of course, the important thing is how our Beloved Leaders FEEL.
As long as their wizard schemes are more or less approved by Princess Nut-Nut & GangGreen, everything is fine and they can relax.
Even if GangGreen scream they ‘must go faster and harder’ (just as Big Pharma fans, with Covid Lockdowns), they think they will be adored one day.
It seems that they aren’t aware that GangGreen really hate them and wouldn’t even vote for Zac Goldsmith, if he had a hard Left opponent.
Such is the mindset of Beloved Leaders everywhere, perhaps. And they certainly ‘don’t need no stinkin’ facts!’
Is it just our leaders’ FEELINGS? Or is their ‘LIVED EXPERIENCE’?
Copper bottomed idiots every one of them; which is why they will never listen to inconvenient facts.
Your comment “don’t confuse the issue with facts” reminds me of when, some 50 years ago, I worked in a Procter & Gamble Technical Centre. At one of the frequent presentations to senior management my R&D team leader was told very pointedly not to confuse the issue with facts, even thought he was pointing our the physical impossibility of what the senior management wanted. I see echos of this attitude across all of the Green/Net Zero agenda – we must not let inconvenient physical reality get in the way of the religion!
Very true. Johnson and many of the others don’t care if what they are doing will reduce emissions, they just care if it appears that they are doing the approved thing. We have gone from Blair’s Messiah Complex to Johnson’s fake Messiah Complex in a very short time. Both are extremely destructive.
They simply don’t have the knowledge, they’re surrounded by “yes-persons” and the results of focus groups. If the question’s “Would you want to poison babies or feed them”? The answer’s obvious.
They probably believe that what they’re doing will reduce emissions & thus they’re “Doing their bit to SAVE THE PLANET”, as that’s what they’re told.CO2 bad, EV’s good.
I know this is off topic but I just watched a video from DW Planet A about how dangerous methane was for global warming. I added a comment with some facts showing that methane was not a dangerous GHG. No swearing or bad language. Comment has been taken down. We are now living in 1984.
Similarly off topic but I’ve just cancelled my PayPal account as they have been busy cancelling accounts of people who question the Trans lobby on social media. Practice free speech and the tech companies will make get you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another. For instance, chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy when a stick of dynamite explodes. If one adds up all forms of energy that were released in the explosion, such as the kinetic energy and potential energy of the pieces, as well as heat and sound, one will get the exact decrease of chemical energy in the combustion of the dynamite.
fossil fuels are in reality stored energy from the sun from millions of years ago.
Green energy initiatives are really about fooling people into spending vast sums on things they don’t understand while hiding the fact that huge amounts of carbon is still being released in the manufacture of the green solutions.
“fossil fuels are in reality stored energy from the sun from millions of years ago.”. ‘Adibatic’ oil should probably be excepted though, as it’s from a geological process rather than decomposition/compression of botanical matter.
I think you are confusing “adiabatic” (thermodynamics) with “abiotic” (ohysical rather than biological) and coming up with “Adibatic” which really doesn’t mean anything!
Yes, of course 🥴 Apologies. I stand corrected.
Except nobody has ever found any.
Oil/petroleum are of biological origin. A fact proven by stereo chemistry; it is all levorotatory.
However, it’s quite possible that it is the result of organisms transforming methane into longer chain hydrocarbons. Methane exists in large quantities in the solar system. This conversion process, if it exists on earth, might still be going on. I.e., the current amount petroleum on earth may not be fixed and forever declining, it may be growing still.
https://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/abstracts/2005research_calgary/abstracts/extended/mello/mello.htm
Petroleum: To Be Or Not To Be Abiogenic
“Present-day analysis of petroleum systems, when performed integrated with direct geochemistry, remote sense and high resolution geochemistry technology (HRGT), can provide irrefutable proof that 99.99999% of all the oil and gas accumulations found up to now in the planet earth have a biologic origin.”
Also, from oil geologist David Middleton, full of great information.:
Also off topic in the Telegraph today: “Climate change contributes to violence against women” – article includes “…researches point out that floods have more than doubled in the past two decades while storms have increased by 40 per cent and droughts by 29 per cent…”
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
The endless repeating of completely false claims.
Meanwhile the same people refuse to accept that a trans person who raped a woman was in fact a man.
Perhaps they believe that a ‘trans person’s’ male sexual organ magically disappears once they have decided to self identify as a woman? It would certainly be in line with their other wacky beliefs
Oh how the truth hurts but then the virtue-signallers won’t be seeing or hearing anything like this.
Storage batteries can only provide help for a couple of hours max, that doesn’t plug the gaps on a low wind day. A fake solution to a secondary problem caused by trying to fix an imaginary problem.
A Wind turbine needs 1000 tonnes of concrete and steel in their foundations.
Realistically at least 10km of access roads need building and asphalting for each farm.
Before they even begin to function they have a significant carbon footprint.
whats connected to the UK grid can actually cover about 5mins at average demand so might deal with the next eclipse.
My main area of concern is the resource depletion which many of the numbers for EV’s and wind turbines combine, along with a continued population growth that is adding 1 billion to the global total every 12 years. Within the next two months the global population will surpas 8 billion, sooner than the UN forecasted. Look at the list of critical raw materials and it does not look good, beacuse mineral ore quality is declining on the basis of “use the best first”. Sadly, oil and gas a following the same path.
I work in refining and petrochemicals. Both are no longer deemed a business to invest in. The ESG and EDI activists are doing a pretty good job at the moment. Europe and North America has lost significant refing capacity as activist investors pressure the oil co’s to green up. Both the EU and the US are probably balanced to short on refining capacity and things are going to get worse. Refineries and base petrochemical plants generally require maintenance turnarounds every five years. This can and does cost $millions. Some refineries are looking at the next turnaround and are closing the doors as they cannot see payout on the investment. Others are downisizing based on estimates of future fuel demand, some based on the impending EU fuel efficiiency targets for 2025 and 2030, and the new testing regime.
In the petrochemical business we are looking at ways to decarbonise and much is being ploughed into hydrogen, green electricity and CCUS. A lot hangs on wind energy but very little is actually understood by the clowns working up the policy. The fact is that a wind turbine power density is limited to about 5 watts per square metre of land/ sea and you might realistcally obtain half that output over a year. That requires a 10 MW turbine to need an unobstructed area of around 2 square kilometers (200 hectares) or about 480 acres.
Then there is a little known fact that these mega turbines are not that reliable. The stress cycles on a wind turbine are of the order of 100x that on a modern passenger jet aircraft. The bearing and pitch change mechanisms as well as the blades are under enourmous cyclic loads. Offshore the matter is made worse by ice accretion on the blades and the hostile environment.
Meanwhile we are now experiencing the folly of low oil pricing which severely reduced exploration and production activities over the past 5 years. Depletion does not rest and roughly 4-5% of the global oil supply is lost each and every year. What we have now is a situation where most of the spare global refining capacity exists in China and India. So we now have a perverse situation whereby China and India are buying up Russian crude cheaply ( forget sanctions) and then are refining it into finished products , to sell to the west at very nice margins. It gets worse though, as over the past decade the ME producres have been building refineries and joint ventures which is actually reducing the oil supply to the free market. Senile Joe is wishful if he thinks the Saudis are going to produce more oil.
Thanks for highlighting the issue of refining capacity which is critical but receiving no attention.
I read recently that the US lost 2m bpd of refining capacity over the past few years, mainly due to the demand slump of the pandemic causing older plants to be shuttered and not re-opened.
Add in the under-spend on exploration and development and we are facing a serious shortfall in oil, gas and refined products.
And, don’t forget the price of them batteries….
The production of glass fiber for the turbine blades is very energy intensive.
Most of the turbines baldes are carbon fibre composite, which is even more energy intensive tha glass fibre and impossible to recycle. BMW are using carbon firbre in their EV’s and have come up with a laughable recycling process that utilises an oven to burn off the epoxy, leaving behind pieces of carbon fibre wich only can be used used as filler. Theoretically possible but as dumb as a fence post.
And yet all of these ‘save the world’ ecomentalists fail to recognise that nature is the ultimate and by far the most efficient recycler. It may take longer to recyle our waste, but then how long did it take to recycle biomatter to make our coal, oil and gas. Placing wind turbine blades into a landfill site is probably the best way of dealing with them. No doubt this view will have me shot down in flames as a heretic.
Making the resins without petroleum could be interesting.
With EVs versus ICEVs always compare their respective lifecycles, from raw material extraction, to fuelling through to disposal. The much vaunted zero tailpipe USP doesn’t look so favourable does it.
Is the original Norwegian text accessible? I can think of a couple of deserving recipients, one of whom teaches teens at a school in Sussex, and is a fluent Norwegian speaker.
Send him/her a copy and ask him/her to translate it for you. That should require him/her to read and study it.
A small (but important) voice for sanity:
https://www.conservativehome.com/highlights/2022/06/interview-lord-frost-on-johnsons-future-tax-cuts-admiring-cummings-net-zero-and-the-abuse-he-has-faced-as-he-mulls-his-political-future.html
“He, [Frost], deplores the restrictions on freedom of expression during the lockdowns of recent years, and opposes the target of reaching Net Zero by 2050:
“I think we’re going at it too fast with technology that can’t yet do the job, and the risk is that we end up with rationing and demand management rather than achieving the goal.”
Any ‘demand management’ must be considered utterly unonservative. That’s the stuff of communism (i.e. Labour).
“Social Engineering – The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.”
— Thomas Sowell
Also “the art of government thinking it knows better”.
I know I have posted this before, but it is worth doing so again.
https://economics21.org/inconvenient-realities-new-energy-economy
The full pdf and all the links are worth your time.
The points are interesting.
‘Efficiency increases energy demand’
See: Jevon’s Paradox, 1865.
At first it was heat pumps, now EVs, the Government is resorting to Stalinist tactics to force manufacturers to sell more electric cars or be punished with fines:
“Now, here comes the stick: the government is currently preparing plans to bring in a “zero emissions vehicle mandate”.
It will in effect force manufacturers to ensure that a set proportion of the cars they sell are electric. If they fail, they will be fined.
So rather than subsidising electric car sales, the government will be penalising carmakers who don’t sell enough of them. This will put the responsibility for expanding EV sales firmly on the shoulders of the industry.”
From the BBC of all places.
So much for free market Conservatism!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61795693
It forces manufacturers to subsidise sales instead of the taxpayer. It’s “clever” but utterly wrong.
They will just add the cost onto the sales price. At least then the people actually have a choice of buying or not.
“There is no plan to fix anything…
Because the plan was to destroy everything.”
(Errol Webber on TwitFace)
As Jordan Peterson has suggested, “Look at the outcome, and infer the motivation.”
I have been writing extensively on this very subject over the years here are Two papers that go into all of this in great detail . . . Plus the Big Green Lie that is “Net Zero . . .
https://www.academia.edu/71023588/Batteries_Renewable_Energy_and_EV_s_The_Ultimate_in_Environmental_Destruction
https://www.academia.edu/76965285/Clean_Green_Energy_and_Net_Zero_Fairy_Tales_on_Steroids
I hope this measurably adds to Paul’s comments . . .
My worry is that most people coming fresh to this subject must think that the facts discussed above are all wrong because their betters would never be so stupid to allow such a situation!
The statistical quirk survived another year, June 13th is the only June day that has never reached 30C in the UK (well never been recorded with a thermometer anyway!).
Another one for the BBC file.
Laughable as per usual, and blaming normal coastal erosion (and ignoring the areas of accretion) on sea level rise yet again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61795783
Listened to it on R4 Today this AM. It would be laughable if it wasn’t that many people would believe the BBC and think that coastal erosion is not only a new phenomonem but all caused by MMGW.
To maintain the narrative, there must be constant reinforcement, otherwise public belief in the whole paradigm would be suspended. It doesn’t matter about the facts, just the headline.
From the article ” says the report’s author Paul Sayers,” who just happens NOT to have any climate science qualifications but is a Civil Engineer running his own consultancy touting for work.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sayers-21713217/?originalSubdomain=uk
So is this how journalism now works? Get a brown paper envelope and then promote a highly vested interest. Apparantlty journos are not particularly well paid!
http://www.sayersandpartners.co.uk
Given that journalists just copy and paste the approved narrative on topics and do not even bother to question any obvious errors then they do not deserve to be well paid.
Today is “Wind Power Day” and wind is contributing just 7 percent of Britain’s energy needs!
No, not energy, just electricity.
I hope people are enjoying the show Down Under as the crash test dummy for windmills and sun temples is in all sorts of trouble trying to stop blackouts.
The heart of the BBC’s latest coastal erosion tripe was eroding rapidly long before man-made climate change could possibly have been a factor.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/case-studies/coastal-erosion-at-happisburgh-norfolk-landslide-case-study/
No, not energy just electricity which is only about 30% of our “energy” consumption.
The points are fine, but the translation is ugly, especially mixing pounds and tonnes.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/australians-urged-to-save-electricity-to-ease-power-crunch/ar-AAYwlld?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=ccbe052b5f0b4ed6950fb508461c7f76
Australia beginning to realise that you can’t power a modern society, without reliable back up?
I was looking at gasoline prices around the world suspecting that Europe US Canada and Australia would be most punished and I wasn’t wrong. Some surprises though.
Venezuela US 2c per litre
Libya 3c/litre
Angola 37c/litre and cheaper than Nigeria at 41c/litre
Colombia cheaper than Saudi Arabia at 60c and 62c
Logistical nightmare Ethiopia 71c/litre
Trinidad 99c while you can actually see Venezuela from the island.
Land-locked Botswana 1.13/litre while neighbour South Africa 1.47/litre
Most expensive place was Hong Kong at $2.99 and second most expensive Norway at $2.70
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/06/limburg-and-noord-brabant-electricity-grid-is-at-full-capacity/
“The Limburg and Noord Brabant grid is under pressure because of the rapid rise in heat pumps, car charging stations, new companies and increasing use of electricity in industry”