“Any source of energy is intermittent, but renewables are perhaps the least intermittent, since they use the sun and wind. The crucial missing piece of renewables is the lack of infrastructure.” This
For thousands of years, humanity sustained on the power of sun and sail. The solution to intermittently is actually right in front of us - the hydrocarbon batteries that nature herself builds, whether she does it in 20 years (a tree) or 200 million years (oil, gas, coal)
The problem with the transitionists is that they envision a future which is a low energy, carbon free world. If they were serious, there would be a proliferation of nuclear power like nothing else. But they openly state that such sources of unlimited energy would make the problem (?) worse.
I suppose it is fortunate the economic hardship is coming sooner rather than later, before these idiots do more damage. Then again, when has civil discontent ever deterred True Believers
Another hidden danger is that some research consultancies still attempt to use the IEA analyses as a touchstone for their own work instead of at least attempting some sort of independent analyses. The agency itself has admitted, albeit in earlier times, that the availability and quality of the data it has for "Non OECD" countries wasn't the best. These include, among many others, China, Venezuela, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia. No wonder the BRICS don't pay much attention to what they say!
Now we're being treated to the IEA's expressed concerns around energy security. It would appear that at least some of the oil companies have pointed out that trying to eliminate an industry when you' still need it is a delicate process, and could potentially result in some blowback.
When he started in the job, he was honest for a little while. I'd like to know what happened there, behind the scenes. Probably never will, but it might be enlightening. I don't think he's an idiot. He might be venal, but he at least knew what reality looked like when he started.
He got bought or blackmailed, pick one. Same as all the medical people who bit their tongues and road the Covid gravy train whilst avoiding the Covid beat down given to detractors.
Well a litany of lies provides so much material. ““Any source of energy is intermittent, but renewables are perhaps the least intermittent, since they use the sun and wind. The crucial missing piece of renewables is the lack of infrastructure.”” Absurdly wrong and perverse in the first part of that statement, but actually almost right in the second. If the infrastructure isn’t there to carry and distribute the load, all else is moot.
Looks like we lost balance between strict egoism and other motivations. Today's people are egoists, meaning when in conflict between anything and their own profit, they choose behavior which lead to their profit in expense of everything else.
You seem to express negative opinion on mr. Birol actions. But on what basis? He just seeks power, profit & control like most of today's people even if they deny it. So he does good in terms of nowadays rules. He gets his profits and you don't.
Because position in the world (social, political, economical) is basically a prize for acting as owners of such prize expects, people on high positions like mr. Birol, acts and talks as it is expected and that way earn their profits.
Who offers such profits? Well... this is not general public. Not people. They really have nothing to offer. They are busy, by being frightened, by poor entertainment, being angry at something in political theater, be seeking their own profits cause everybody needs some, especially when cooperation is rare and everybody seems to compete on getting profits with everybody else.
So criteria like truth, logic, rationale, making life better are irrelevant in real behavior. Mr Birol is not busy with energy, he like polititians, scientists, doctors is busy with making profits. That's cool. In the same time these people pretend to be economists, polititians, scientists, doctors etc. This pretending is extremely important to them, cause it allows gaining profits they seeks.
Sum of all these pretending results in situation where nothing is as it seems to be. This unrestricted race for profits devoured essence of institutions, of public roles in society. Nothing seems real sometimes. It just pretends this or that. We live in kinda false reality. Like simulacrum. Once you "get new glasses" and see that it is all just struggle for profits, it starts to be reasonable and understandable.
Popular idea is that those on the top are wrong, stupid or evil while we are quite ok. But... maybe it's not the case. One may think that removing such people from the top will change situation, but maybe it won't, because problem is in us, let's say in most of us. It is the society that went astray. We as people have been accepted both - new rules that seeking profits prevails anything else, - and pretending otherwise.
Sorry for long comment. I just started writing and... you see :)
And of course all about this men's fight with "climate change" is harmful to most of us nonsense.
It's interesting what you describe because just the other day someone here sent a link to the 5 laws of stupidity (https://bonpote.com/en/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/) and the reality you describe is a world of bandits, essentially.
What's even more interesting is that I have heard a lot of people in Bulgaria, including myself, complain about the rise of egotism above all else after the fall of our totalitarian regime. I see it's not just here, this lament that nothing matters more than personal enrichments these days. But I have to admit I am a little bit optimistic. I see people doing things that enrich others as much as themselves. We need more people like this and I do believe they will come in future generations.
And yes. It looks as if there were kind of waves flowing through human populations, interfering with people, changing us. The thing is we probably can create our own waves, maybe the little ones, but still, maybe it's our "job" to do :) Keep going!
Q: If I have solar panels, will my house still have energy at night?
A: Yes.
Solar-powered homes collect excess energy and pass it to the grid for future use, and if you don’t have excess energy stored you pull energy from the grid at any time, like when it’s dark. Another option for night-time energy use is on-site battery storage, which collects excess energy and saves it for when it’s needed.
Talk about ignring reality. No worries somebody else will do the hard work. Install solar panels and enjoy a huge hidden subsidy.
This caused me physical pain. "pass it to the grid for future use". There is no such thing as future use, all use is right now, for Pete's sake. Thanks for sharing this tool of indoctrination. A lot of people will be wondering why they've got panels and are still paying through the nose for electricity. Maybe that will help.
Someone should sit Birol down & tell him about the famous quote by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." Even if Birol is the type of bobblehead that only works well under constant supervision, I'm sure the quote could be explained to him in a few days. 🤘😎🤘
The Ami looks like it was designed by Stanley or Makita - like a blocky power tool. It could be a cute little thing with shallower recesses for lights, or a more prominent snout, and pretty useful if you find yourself puttering (not really puttering since motors are quiet) around the narrow roads of old cities.
Beyond brilliant! I need to keep a Top 10 list of quotes from you. Although it would be rather difficult to stop there. This reminds me of the following gem from a few decades ago:
I have each year looked forward to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which BP issued since 1952. However, they recently decided to give this task to an outside organization, the Energy Institute. I have wondered, if this is because an independent organization would have better access to data, or if BP simply doesn't want to be the one making reports that conflict with the IEA and other bureaucratic government organizations that are clearly trying to promote an agenda rather than providing factual data. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I am betting on the latter.
BP is worse than even the IEA. At least the IEA correctly calculates Primary Energy values. BP invented this schlock method of multiplying wind & solar by 2.6X in order to make their primary energy contribution look far better than it really is (2% of World TPES, not BP's 5.2%) and dividing nuclear by 1.2X to make it look less than it actually is. Scam artists. Why is BP so big on promoting Wind & Solar and devaluing Nuclear?
I never realized that, probably because I was mostly interested in the oil and gas numbers. But, a decade or more ago, BP was the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels and even branded their solar panels for retail sale in hardware stores. They ended up selling out because they were undercut by the Chinese, but I suspect the numbers started going wrong when BP declared themselves bp and rebranded as "beyond petroleum." Few big corporations are immune to this green pretension. As for nuclear, it is a business few oil companies have much involvement with, while the big European majors have all dived into wind and solar as part of their public relations (and nuclear is not going to earn them ESG credits).
But frankly I don't trust the IEA numbers on oil and gas either. And for what it is worth, I catch the USGS making multi-billion barrel mistakes all the time in places where I have my own work to verify it, so for many countries there is not much you can do but take them at their word what production and reserves they have. That is all the IEA does is collect voluntarily reported data, while I would believe an oil company might have internal work that could verify these numbers rather than just reporting what they are told.
A little sarcasm - "Yes, please start demanding more climate action from your governments so we can keep running the apocalyptic narrative that keeps so many people employed at NGOs, consultancies, and research firms. That’s where the “green” jobs are...They’re making good money dealing fear..."
If only that's all it was, a green cash machine. Unfortunately, it's much worse than that. A devious indirect method of bringing about their REAL objective, which is DeGrowth, DeIndustrialization, DePopulation and Impoverishment. Creating a new feudal, World totalitarian state. Our real leaders, often called The Globalitarian Misanthropists, are Malthusian, psychopathic parasites.
Thank you (again) for exposing the ever growing package of lies told by these sociopaths. Allow me to tackle the issue of EVs by repeating a post I put on Mr. Blackmon’s Substack earlier this week:
My apology, in advance, for this lengthy comment. You raise excellent points that I need to elaborate on. Why 38% of energy executives still believe in zero carbon by 2050 may be explained by their age, and hence, poor education. For years, our educational systems have been conscripted by propagandists. Basic chemistry, mathematics, and physics, are shunned along with literature. Students have been raised as "activists", not scientists. Here is the reality of electrification of all things transportation, it will not happen.
I'm not seeing EVs ever taking over the wheeled transportation business, or even equaling what they were at the turn of the twentieth century. That was an attempt in the first version of auto/truck development, with almost one-third of all cars on the road being electric! That reversed, and lost out then for the same reasons as it will today. The energy density of gasoline and diesel is just too overwhelmingly favorable. The other thing we have to remember is this. Electricity is not a "compound" that exists in nature like hydrocarbons or uranium. It has to be generated by some mechanical means, usually powered by hydrocarbons, in order to exist. Once it comes into existence, it must be either used immediately, or stored in a very inefficient way (battery), and each of these steps is subject to loss from transformation.
Just the gyrations of generation to motive force is unbelievable. Consider the entire process:
1. Power plants produce alternating current (AC) electricity, that is stepped up to tremendous voltages (155,000 up to as much as 765,000) using transformers for long distance distribution (the grid). Why not Direct Current Generation? Because of HUGE losses of energy over long distance transmission. (This was the origin of Mr. Nikola Tesla, beating his old boss Thomas Edison and winning out with an AC electric distribution standard over Edison's DC system.)
2. Local transformer stations reduce that voltage for area distribution,
3. Neighborhood transformers either on the pole in your backyard, or in that green box if your neighborhood has underground electrical service, reduce it further to 480,240-, and 120-volt feeds, still all AC, for use.
4. Now comes the Tesla (or any other EV charger) that has to take that AC current and run it through a transformer/rectifier/conditioner that for large loads could even involve mechanical energy rectifiers (like large electric motors) to get the voltage transformed to Direct Current (DC) that is needed to charge the battery. The battery only stores and then gives up direct current (DC). It cannot do anything with Alternating Current.
5. Once the battery is charged, the car's onboard inverter must convert the high voltage DC from the battery back into high voltage (400-600 volts depending on the brand of car) ALTERNATING CURRENT (AC) to drive the Alternating Current Inductive motors that turn the wheels. Why don't the EVs just use a DC motor to turn the wheels? Because DC motors that produce a lot of power are much less efficient as compared to AC inductive motors and the solid-state controllers that we have today.
6. Using the brakes in the car turns the Alternating Current (AC) inductive motor into an alternator (an AC current generator) that then runs the AC current through onboard transformers/rectifiers/conditioners to change back to DC current to put back into the battery. This "dynamic braking" is why the friction brake material in EVs lasts much longer than internal combustion engine cars, and lifting your foot off the accelerator pedal is a bit like stepping on the brakes in a conventional internal combustion engine car.
Now, count the steps above, and remember, at each one of them, there is energy loss through heat, mechanical friction, or electrical resistance. You cannot change AC to DC, DC to AC, voltage to current, current to voltage and make all of this happen without significant loss.
This isn't really news. It is just chemistry and physics, neither one of which has changed from the time of the early 1900s.
And all of the above happens AFTER you have spent thousands of gallons of hydrocarbon fuel mining, transporting and refining the cobalt, lithium, antimony and "rare earth elements" that go into EVERY EV battery and EVERY high energy AC inductive motor!
WAY TOO ENERGY INTENSIVE, and WAY TOO DIRTY for the environmentalists who understand this process, and way to expensive economically to be anything but a fool's dream.
I would like to challenge any EV campaigner to do a reading comprehension test using your comment, Mr. Waspi. That would be fun and educational. Thank you for detailing the matter for everyone interested.
This is a remarkable post! With your permission, I am going to give this post as a reading assignment in my power engineering class this summer. I will prepare a thermodynamics second-law problem for EV-grid analysis. This is an excellent, superb concise analysis of EVs with their AC to DC, DC to AC, voltage to current, and current to voltage! People in the west have lost connection to reality and are consuming horse shit from media. Your knowledge is impeccable and it is sad that our universities cannot utilize people like you!
You are too kind. My days at the academy are over, it’s now up to you to carry on the good fight to keep truth from disappearing from University education. Thank Ms. Slav also for continuing to use her platform to help expose the lies of these grifters.
Feel free to use whatever you wish of what I’ve said.
Lithium batteries have a very low energy density, and that is why monumental numbers of them are needed to give an EV any range further than 100 km. This greatly increases the weight of the vehicle as well.
A breakthrough battery chemistry with orders of magnitude higher energy energy density would be useful, but replacing every car in the world with an EV will make no difference in CO2 levels because the contribution is fractional. And that is assuming that CO2 is the cause for so called global warming.
That battery chemistry breakthrough would probably be useless because...
What do you call a package containing a huge amount of energy waiting to be released?
A bomb...
Unless someone is going to create a fuel cell that runs on hydrocarbons and doesn't get contaminated after a week of use...and can run backwards to suck CO2 back in and refill the fuel tank when charged.
Hydrogen is far, far worse. Much higher heat output, as well as explosive potential, than either an ICE vehicle or a BEV. An H2 filling station blew up killing 11 people.
The potential safety issues of BEV fires is another good reason why the focus for battery usage should be on the high value applications like heavy trucking, mining equipment, heavy construction equipment, ferries, rail. The high value and high usage of these applications mean the extra expense of battery protection systems is not a big issue. And the heavy weight of these vehicles make battery mass less significant.
The battery energy density is sufficient for light vehicles, trains, heavy trucking, heavy equipment, short distance sports cars & shipping, ferries, short range aircraft. Improving energy density would of course make them more practical. That is coming:
American battery company reveals production ready 1000 Mile EV Battery, 391 wh/kg, one million mile life, The Electric Viking:
The problem is more about battery cost and resource growth constraints. Especially when vast amounts of precious batteries are wasted on idiotic Wind & Solar storage. Battery usage should be focused on diesel replacement, mainly heavy trucking, but also mining equipment & rail. The economics for doing that are overwhelming. And a diesel supply bottleneck is coming. This is our economy at stake, not joyriding. The populace can enjoy ICE vehicles or hybrids, save the batteries for where they are needed most, by far-and-away most, that is diesel fuel replacement.
Battery fires are an issue, the intensity is similar to an ICE vehicle fire, total heat output of a burning BEV is less than for an ICE vehicle with a full tank, and most of the heat output comes from the car materials, tires etc, not the battery. The fires are more difficult to extinguish, but in almost all vehicle fires, the fire burns itself out before the fire dept can extinguish it.
Battery locomotives have been used in underground mines for almost a century now. No worse place for a fire than in a mine. Fires do happen occasionally but they don't kill people like a fossil fire will do. That's why gasoline vehicles are banned in mines. Diesel are used quite a bit but they cause a lot of toxic exhaust people have to breath. BEVs are more economical to operate and O&M costs are much lower than diesel vehicles. Diesel are becoming more popular due to the prominence of trackless mining with big wheeled vehicles.
I think you hit the nail on the head regarding "green" jobs, they are the ones at NGOs and such that are well funded (for some reason) and in high demand to demonstrate social virtue. My money is still on physics winning this battle and those jobs becoming a victim.
Irina,
For thousands of years, humanity sustained on the power of sun and sail. The solution to intermittently is actually right in front of us - the hydrocarbon batteries that nature herself builds, whether she does it in 20 years (a tree) or 200 million years (oil, gas, coal)
The problem with the transitionists is that they envision a future which is a low energy, carbon free world. If they were serious, there would be a proliferation of nuclear power like nothing else. But they openly state that such sources of unlimited energy would make the problem (?) worse.
I suppose it is fortunate the economic hardship is coming sooner rather than later, before these idiots do more damage. Then again, when has civil discontent ever deterred True Believers
When the discontented go after them with sharp objects that could be quite a deterrence...
I just hope the discontented are aimed properly when the time comes.
The "transition" grifters are so good at misdirection and lying, they will blame someone else all the way off the cliff.
LOL! Yes, that would work.
If we had a carbon free world we would all be dead.
Another hidden danger is that some research consultancies still attempt to use the IEA analyses as a touchstone for their own work instead of at least attempting some sort of independent analyses. The agency itself has admitted, albeit in earlier times, that the availability and quality of the data it has for "Non OECD" countries wasn't the best. These include, among many others, China, Venezuela, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia. No wonder the BRICS don't pay much attention to what they say!
Now we're being treated to the IEA's expressed concerns around energy security. It would appear that at least some of the oil companies have pointed out that trying to eliminate an industry when you' still need it is a delicate process, and could potentially result in some blowback.
A lot of them are doing it. But there's worse -- JP Morgan used Ember data for one paper on the transition and investment opportunities.
All true, Irina, thanks. Fatih has lost some weight.
Must be the pressures of his work.
Simply, Birol is an idiot but making huge money for himself spouting this gibberish.
When he started in the job, he was honest for a little while. I'd like to know what happened there, behind the scenes. Probably never will, but it might be enlightening. I don't think he's an idiot. He might be venal, but he at least knew what reality looked like when he started.
He got bought or blackmailed, pick one. Same as all the medical people who bit their tongues and road the Covid gravy train whilst avoiding the Covid beat down given to detractors.
I don't know how much money there is in running the IEA. But there many be quite a bit in running the narrative.
Well a litany of lies provides so much material. ““Any source of energy is intermittent, but renewables are perhaps the least intermittent, since they use the sun and wind. The crucial missing piece of renewables is the lack of infrastructure.”” Absurdly wrong and perverse in the first part of that statement, but actually almost right in the second. If the infrastructure isn’t there to carry and distribute the load, all else is moot.
Looks like we lost balance between strict egoism and other motivations. Today's people are egoists, meaning when in conflict between anything and their own profit, they choose behavior which lead to their profit in expense of everything else.
You seem to express negative opinion on mr. Birol actions. But on what basis? He just seeks power, profit & control like most of today's people even if they deny it. So he does good in terms of nowadays rules. He gets his profits and you don't.
Because position in the world (social, political, economical) is basically a prize for acting as owners of such prize expects, people on high positions like mr. Birol, acts and talks as it is expected and that way earn their profits.
Who offers such profits? Well... this is not general public. Not people. They really have nothing to offer. They are busy, by being frightened, by poor entertainment, being angry at something in political theater, be seeking their own profits cause everybody needs some, especially when cooperation is rare and everybody seems to compete on getting profits with everybody else.
So criteria like truth, logic, rationale, making life better are irrelevant in real behavior. Mr Birol is not busy with energy, he like polititians, scientists, doctors is busy with making profits. That's cool. In the same time these people pretend to be economists, polititians, scientists, doctors etc. This pretending is extremely important to them, cause it allows gaining profits they seeks.
Sum of all these pretending results in situation where nothing is as it seems to be. This unrestricted race for profits devoured essence of institutions, of public roles in society. Nothing seems real sometimes. It just pretends this or that. We live in kinda false reality. Like simulacrum. Once you "get new glasses" and see that it is all just struggle for profits, it starts to be reasonable and understandable.
Popular idea is that those on the top are wrong, stupid or evil while we are quite ok. But... maybe it's not the case. One may think that removing such people from the top will change situation, but maybe it won't, because problem is in us, let's say in most of us. It is the society that went astray. We as people have been accepted both - new rules that seeking profits prevails anything else, - and pretending otherwise.
Sorry for long comment. I just started writing and... you see :)
And of course all about this men's fight with "climate change" is harmful to most of us nonsense.
It's interesting what you describe because just the other day someone here sent a link to the 5 laws of stupidity (https://bonpote.com/en/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/) and the reality you describe is a world of bandits, essentially.
What's even more interesting is that I have heard a lot of people in Bulgaria, including myself, complain about the rise of egotism above all else after the fall of our totalitarian regime. I see it's not just here, this lament that nothing matters more than personal enrichments these days. But I have to admit I am a little bit optimistic. I see people doing things that enrich others as much as themselves. We need more people like this and I do believe they will come in future generations.
Two quotes:
1. "I am a little bit optimistic"
2. "they will come in future generations"
Yes. Sounds optimistic :)
And yes. It looks as if there were kind of waves flowing through human populations, interfering with people, changing us. The thing is we probably can create our own waves, maybe the little ones, but still, maybe it's our "job" to do :) Keep going!
The problem you describe is everywhere. New York Solar Smarts Quiz (https://view.nyserda.ny.gov/?qs=a4d3e91ab157ac2a18dff3c3a089bb8127018c00018949f2d395814b617d65d09118de44571b0a8f12b3a9adb14ba30144f50ff21a4c7df2412f7fb3aacf6b637914a0f4ed85bb7847b1c624cdda2ba0) includes this gem:
Q: If I have solar panels, will my house still have energy at night?
A: Yes.
Solar-powered homes collect excess energy and pass it to the grid for future use, and if you don’t have excess energy stored you pull energy from the grid at any time, like when it’s dark. Another option for night-time energy use is on-site battery storage, which collects excess energy and saves it for when it’s needed.
Talk about ignring reality. No worries somebody else will do the hard work. Install solar panels and enjoy a huge hidden subsidy.
This caused me physical pain. "pass it to the grid for future use". There is no such thing as future use, all use is right now, for Pete's sake. Thanks for sharing this tool of indoctrination. A lot of people will be wondering why they've got panels and are still paying through the nose for electricity. Maybe that will help.
Someone should sit Birol down & tell him about the famous quote by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." Even if Birol is the type of bobblehead that only works well under constant supervision, I'm sure the quote could be explained to him in a few days. 🤘😎🤘
Great quote!
The Ami looks like it was designed by Stanley or Makita - like a blocky power tool. It could be a cute little thing with shallower recesses for lights, or a more prominent snout, and pretty useful if you find yourself puttering (not really puttering since motors are quiet) around the narrow roads of old cities.
Edit: The Fiat Topolino looks cuter at least.
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/fiat-topolino-has-returned-fully-electric-quadricycle
Yes, the Topolino looks like a car.
The city slicker's grocery grabber. Easy to park.
"the equivalent of a waking wet dream"
Beyond brilliant! I need to keep a Top 10 list of quotes from you. Although it would be rather difficult to stop there. This reminds me of the following gem from a few decades ago:
https://youtu.be/DjnVBXPgz4U?si=wQAfFzR9EkWkAJxF
I'm flattered, thank you. :) Love the clip! :D
Love your writing Irina, always succinct, on point and pithy.
Tiny correction though, Citroen, not Renault.
Oh, damn, you're absolutely right. I don't know why I did this to poor Renault. Their Zoe is actually pretty easy on the eye. I'll do a correction.
I have each year looked forward to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which BP issued since 1952. However, they recently decided to give this task to an outside organization, the Energy Institute. I have wondered, if this is because an independent organization would have better access to data, or if BP simply doesn't want to be the one making reports that conflict with the IEA and other bureaucratic government organizations that are clearly trying to promote an agenda rather than providing factual data. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I am betting on the latter.
BP is worse than even the IEA. At least the IEA correctly calculates Primary Energy values. BP invented this schlock method of multiplying wind & solar by 2.6X in order to make their primary energy contribution look far better than it really is (2% of World TPES, not BP's 5.2%) and dividing nuclear by 1.2X to make it look less than it actually is. Scam artists. Why is BP so big on promoting Wind & Solar and devaluing Nuclear?
I never realized that, probably because I was mostly interested in the oil and gas numbers. But, a decade or more ago, BP was the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels and even branded their solar panels for retail sale in hardware stores. They ended up selling out because they were undercut by the Chinese, but I suspect the numbers started going wrong when BP declared themselves bp and rebranded as "beyond petroleum." Few big corporations are immune to this green pretension. As for nuclear, it is a business few oil companies have much involvement with, while the big European majors have all dived into wind and solar as part of their public relations (and nuclear is not going to earn them ESG credits).
But frankly I don't trust the IEA numbers on oil and gas either. And for what it is worth, I catch the USGS making multi-billion barrel mistakes all the time in places where I have my own work to verify it, so for many countries there is not much you can do but take them at their word what production and reserves they have. That is all the IEA does is collect voluntarily reported data, while I would believe an oil company might have internal work that could verify these numbers rather than just reporting what they are told.
I think it's the latter, too, yes.
A little sarcasm - "Yes, please start demanding more climate action from your governments so we can keep running the apocalyptic narrative that keeps so many people employed at NGOs, consultancies, and research firms. That’s where the “green” jobs are...They’re making good money dealing fear..."
Yes, follow the money.
If only that's all it was, a green cash machine. Unfortunately, it's much worse than that. A devious indirect method of bringing about their REAL objective, which is DeGrowth, DeIndustrialization, DePopulation and Impoverishment. Creating a new feudal, World totalitarian state. Our real leaders, often called The Globalitarian Misanthropists, are Malthusian, psychopathic parasites.
Ms. Slav,
Thank you (again) for exposing the ever growing package of lies told by these sociopaths. Allow me to tackle the issue of EVs by repeating a post I put on Mr. Blackmon’s Substack earlier this week:
My apology, in advance, for this lengthy comment. You raise excellent points that I need to elaborate on. Why 38% of energy executives still believe in zero carbon by 2050 may be explained by their age, and hence, poor education. For years, our educational systems have been conscripted by propagandists. Basic chemistry, mathematics, and physics, are shunned along with literature. Students have been raised as "activists", not scientists. Here is the reality of electrification of all things transportation, it will not happen.
I'm not seeing EVs ever taking over the wheeled transportation business, or even equaling what they were at the turn of the twentieth century. That was an attempt in the first version of auto/truck development, with almost one-third of all cars on the road being electric! That reversed, and lost out then for the same reasons as it will today. The energy density of gasoline and diesel is just too overwhelmingly favorable. The other thing we have to remember is this. Electricity is not a "compound" that exists in nature like hydrocarbons or uranium. It has to be generated by some mechanical means, usually powered by hydrocarbons, in order to exist. Once it comes into existence, it must be either used immediately, or stored in a very inefficient way (battery), and each of these steps is subject to loss from transformation.
Just the gyrations of generation to motive force is unbelievable. Consider the entire process:
1. Power plants produce alternating current (AC) electricity, that is stepped up to tremendous voltages (155,000 up to as much as 765,000) using transformers for long distance distribution (the grid). Why not Direct Current Generation? Because of HUGE losses of energy over long distance transmission. (This was the origin of Mr. Nikola Tesla, beating his old boss Thomas Edison and winning out with an AC electric distribution standard over Edison's DC system.)
2. Local transformer stations reduce that voltage for area distribution,
3. Neighborhood transformers either on the pole in your backyard, or in that green box if your neighborhood has underground electrical service, reduce it further to 480,240-, and 120-volt feeds, still all AC, for use.
4. Now comes the Tesla (or any other EV charger) that has to take that AC current and run it through a transformer/rectifier/conditioner that for large loads could even involve mechanical energy rectifiers (like large electric motors) to get the voltage transformed to Direct Current (DC) that is needed to charge the battery. The battery only stores and then gives up direct current (DC). It cannot do anything with Alternating Current.
5. Once the battery is charged, the car's onboard inverter must convert the high voltage DC from the battery back into high voltage (400-600 volts depending on the brand of car) ALTERNATING CURRENT (AC) to drive the Alternating Current Inductive motors that turn the wheels. Why don't the EVs just use a DC motor to turn the wheels? Because DC motors that produce a lot of power are much less efficient as compared to AC inductive motors and the solid-state controllers that we have today.
6. Using the brakes in the car turns the Alternating Current (AC) inductive motor into an alternator (an AC current generator) that then runs the AC current through onboard transformers/rectifiers/conditioners to change back to DC current to put back into the battery. This "dynamic braking" is why the friction brake material in EVs lasts much longer than internal combustion engine cars, and lifting your foot off the accelerator pedal is a bit like stepping on the brakes in a conventional internal combustion engine car.
Now, count the steps above, and remember, at each one of them, there is energy loss through heat, mechanical friction, or electrical resistance. You cannot change AC to DC, DC to AC, voltage to current, current to voltage and make all of this happen without significant loss.
This isn't really news. It is just chemistry and physics, neither one of which has changed from the time of the early 1900s.
And all of the above happens AFTER you have spent thousands of gallons of hydrocarbon fuel mining, transporting and refining the cobalt, lithium, antimony and "rare earth elements" that go into EVERY EV battery and EVERY high energy AC inductive motor!
WAY TOO ENERGY INTENSIVE, and WAY TOO DIRTY for the environmentalists who understand this process, and way to expensive economically to be anything but a fool's dream.
I would like to challenge any EV campaigner to do a reading comprehension test using your comment, Mr. Waspi. That would be fun and educational. Thank you for detailing the matter for everyone interested.
Thank YOU for doing the heavy lifting of writing these revealing truths.
Kevin,
This is a remarkable post! With your permission, I am going to give this post as a reading assignment in my power engineering class this summer. I will prepare a thermodynamics second-law problem for EV-grid analysis. This is an excellent, superb concise analysis of EVs with their AC to DC, DC to AC, voltage to current, and current to voltage! People in the west have lost connection to reality and are consuming horse shit from media. Your knowledge is impeccable and it is sad that our universities cannot utilize people like you!
Satish,
You are too kind. My days at the academy are over, it’s now up to you to carry on the good fight to keep truth from disappearing from University education. Thank Ms. Slav also for continuing to use her platform to help expose the lies of these grifters.
Feel free to use whatever you wish of what I’ve said.
Important and thought provoking post, thank you!
Lithium batteries have a very low energy density, and that is why monumental numbers of them are needed to give an EV any range further than 100 km. This greatly increases the weight of the vehicle as well.
A breakthrough battery chemistry with orders of magnitude higher energy energy density would be useful, but replacing every car in the world with an EV will make no difference in CO2 levels because the contribution is fractional. And that is assuming that CO2 is the cause for so called global warming.
That battery chemistry breakthrough would probably be useless because...
What do you call a package containing a huge amount of energy waiting to be released?
A bomb...
Unless someone is going to create a fuel cell that runs on hydrocarbons and doesn't get contaminated after a week of use...and can run backwards to suck CO2 back in and refill the fuel tank when charged.
As long as the battery chemistry is not catastrophically explosive, there may be some niche use as a car, perhaps in congested smoggy cities ?
Li chemistry is too flammable
Well, at least they're not trying to sell flourine based batteries...
Hydrogen is far, far worse. Much higher heat output, as well as explosive potential, than either an ICE vehicle or a BEV. An H2 filling station blew up killing 11 people.
The potential safety issues of BEV fires is another good reason why the focus for battery usage should be on the high value applications like heavy trucking, mining equipment, heavy construction equipment, ferries, rail. The high value and high usage of these applications mean the extra expense of battery protection systems is not a big issue. And the heavy weight of these vehicles make battery mass less significant.
The battery energy density is sufficient for light vehicles, trains, heavy trucking, heavy equipment, short distance sports cars & shipping, ferries, short range aircraft. Improving energy density would of course make them more practical. That is coming:
American battery company reveals production ready 1000 Mile EV Battery, 391 wh/kg, one million mile life, The Electric Viking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMoI9fAPYGk
The problem is more about battery cost and resource growth constraints. Especially when vast amounts of precious batteries are wasted on idiotic Wind & Solar storage. Battery usage should be focused on diesel replacement, mainly heavy trucking, but also mining equipment & rail. The economics for doing that are overwhelming. And a diesel supply bottleneck is coming. This is our economy at stake, not joyriding. The populace can enjoy ICE vehicles or hybrids, save the batteries for where they are needed most, by far-and-away most, that is diesel fuel replacement.
Battery fires are an issue, the intensity is similar to an ICE vehicle fire, total heat output of a burning BEV is less than for an ICE vehicle with a full tank, and most of the heat output comes from the car materials, tires etc, not the battery. The fires are more difficult to extinguish, but in almost all vehicle fires, the fire burns itself out before the fire dept can extinguish it.
I will be publishing a report on an interesting niche fire issue with BEVs in the near future:
tow trucks and tow yards going up in smoke due to BEVs.
Battery locomotives have been used in underground mines for almost a century now. No worse place for a fire than in a mine. Fires do happen occasionally but they don't kill people like a fossil fire will do. That's why gasoline vehicles are banned in mines. Diesel are used quite a bit but they cause a lot of toxic exhaust people have to breath. BEVs are more economical to operate and O&M costs are much lower than diesel vehicles. Diesel are becoming more popular due to the prominence of trackless mining with big wheeled vehicles.
I think you hit the nail on the head regarding "green" jobs, they are the ones at NGOs and such that are well funded (for some reason) and in high demand to demonstrate social virtue. My money is still on physics winning this battle and those jobs becoming a victim.
Physics always wins, sooner or later. That's my hope mantra. :D