RENEWABLE ENERGY IS A FOOLISH FANTASY – by Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE(rtd), power systems engineer [DT 10/8/23 redacted]:
“Net Zero policies are doomed. Professor Kelly, a Cambridge University engineer, has shown that the cost for the UK could exceed £3 trillion. Net Zero by 2050 is impossible at any cost.
This is because electricity supply largely based on wind and solar power is unachievable. Wind power is becoming more and more expensive and offshore wind farm projects are being abandoned.
Operation and maintenance costs are much higher than expected and some manufacturers have very serious ongoing maintenance problems. Solar power is also in serious trouble with steadily increasing costs of raw materials.
If electricity is expensive, Net Zero is much more economically damaging to achieve as it requires many energy-intensive activities – transport, heating etc – to be electrified. But that is not the worst problem with renewables.
To supply electricity reliably, wind and solar power need a low-cost, large-scale storage technology for surplus energy to deliver it when needed. But no such technology exists.
Yet without mass-scale storage, more wind and solar power will lead to major blackouts and intolerable price spikes alternating with price crashes. With the instability inherent in renewables, even a minor disturbance could collapse the power grid completely.
The only viable, reliable, scalable, and emissions-free power technology is nuclear. The only problem is that it is perceived to be dangerous and is violently opposed by some groups.
Dangerous, nuclear is not. Per unit of energy generated, nuclear power has proved to be much safer than any other major power-generating technology. Coal, gas and hydropower are respectively 4,000, 100 and 35 times more dangerous.
The disposal of nuclear waste is not a major problem. By contrast, large dams can stand for more than 2,000 years and remain a terrible menace. If they are abandoned, they will eventually fail and drown thousands of people. Nuclear waste can be safely isolated and forgotten: dams cannot. Besides, today’s nuclear ‘waste’ may become a source of new fuel should demand and prices rise in future.
Governments have only two realistic options: switch to nuclear power or abandon net zero. So how do we get from here to there?
First, the public needs to be educated on the benefits of nuclear power. Second, the media must stop exaggerating the risks of nuclear power: and this does not only apply to Chernobyl. The reporting of the Fukushima reactor incident was hysterically inaccurate. Germany even decided to shut down its reactors as a result and is now building new coal power stations which will do far more damage than the Fukushima reactors ever did to anyone.
Finally, subsidies, mandates and other enormously expensive policies intended to promote wind and solar power must be abandoned and the money switched to expediting nuclear power.”
The nation is being gaslit in order to keep the net zero edifice in tact.
