Tag Archives: net zero

When You Don’t Think Something All The Way Through

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This is a picture of a landfill with used windmill turbine blades. Note the size of the tractor in comparison to the size of the blades.

The picture is from an article posted at The Federalist on Friday.

The article reports:

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. 

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

…“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar eWaste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in net zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

The article concludes:

What’s more, bankruptcies among European companies have begun to mar the renewable wind landscape as surely as the towers, a trend that could continue or accelerate as the Trump administration stops the federal spigot.

“The government has let them off the hook by shaping their policies around climate activism,” Shaffer said. “They’re not putting down escrow money for decommissioning and someone’s going to have to come along and remove them, or we’ll be staring at these rotting towers in the ocean.”

The blades are so big that they are usually broken into three pieces when decommissioned, and the giant chunks of fiberglass, resin, and composite materials go to landfills or warehouses.

Already, horror stories exist of municipalities faced with decommissioning problems. Towns like Sweetwater, Texas, which for many years has been the leading state for wind power, have seen turbine recycling contracts ignored. Global Fiberglass Solutions, one of the companies handling such contracts, did not return requests for comment.

“You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already,” Isaac said. “It’s an environmental disaster we’re looking at.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.

There is nothing environmentally friendly about either wind or solar energy when you look at the bigger picture–how it is manufactured and how it has to be disposed of.

Actions Have Consequences

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The idea of renewable energy sounds wonderful–sunlight should be endless, and wind should be endless. Unfortunately, the sun does not shine all of the time, and the wind does not blow all of the time. That could (and did) create a problem.

On Tuesday, Breitbart reported the following:

Spain’s power network has remained silent on the actual cause of Europe’s worst power blackout in a generation, but has acknowledged that it is “very possible” that a problem with solar power systems may have contributed to the failure.

A freak weather incident was blamed on Monday for a massive power cut that affected the entire Iberian Peninsula, depriving Spain and Portugal of electricity. However, this narrative was quickly questioned by energy industry insiders, and Spain’s national energy company now acknowledges that renewable power failure may have been a contributing factor.

Red Eléctrica (RE), the national energy grid firm, has stated that it has ruled out a cyberattack and insists, “We were able to conclude that there was indeed no intrusion into Red Eléctrica’s control system,” despite the national counter-terrorism prosecutor ordering an inquiry. Judge José Luis Calama has given RE and the national cyber-security centre ten days to compile initial reports into the sabotage hypothesis, reports El País.

While the Spanish media is today full of the effects of yesterday’s total blackout, with 150,000 having to be rescued from underground trains trapped in tunnels and whole areas, including hospitals, left without water as the electric-powered pumps fell silent, the public unable to buy food and drink unless they had ready cash to hand, and telephone and internet networks being rendered non-functional, less is being said about how the crisis began.

The article notes:

A report on the importance of inertia in a functioning power grid cited by Porter in turn quoted the United Kingdom’s National Grid Electricity System Operator, who explained in 2022: “Operating the system with low inertia will continue to represent a key operational challenge into the future and we will need to ensure we improve our understanding of the challenges this will bring”.

That report, published by a supplier of clutches for power stations, noted: “Renewable generation is increasingly displacing conventional generation in the generation mix, reducing the amount of heavy, rotating turbines on the grid and therefore the amount of inertia they provide.”

These fragilities are not unknown to the electricity industry, and much has been written on the challenges of transition to renewable power. Yet Bloomberg’s Blas wrote just last week that it has only been comparatively recently that the green energy lobby has even acknowledged such problems, having taken the position in the past that any criticism of green energy systems was motivated by cynicism and ideological opposition, rather than what he called “electricity realism” and real concern about grid resilience.

…Naturally, political attention throughout Europe has turned to the Iberian blackout, particularly as left-leaning governments strive to catch up with Spain in what they call decarbonising their own energy grids. In the United Kingdom, where the government says it wants to reach “Net Zero carbon emissions” by 2050 and wants to achieve this without importing slave-labour-linked solar panels from China, Green Great Reset sceptics have spoken out on the need for a pause and rethink in the light of this week’s events.

Brexit’s Nigel Farage, who is already styling himself as a Prime Minister in waiting and who is cruising towards what pollsters say may be a convincing election victory in nationwide local government contests this week, said on Tuesday morning that “the power outage in Spain is a warning”. The United Kingdom is dangerously reliant on foreign energy imports, he said, stating: “This net zero madness must end”.

Things that work in theory don’t always work in practice.

The Problem With Kamala Harris In Six Numbers

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article listing six numbers that are a problem for the Kamala Harris campaign.

These are the numbers:

1. $17,080 – According to the House Budget Committee, that $17,080 was, as of this summer, the annual Harris-Biden “inflation tax” on the average American household.

2. 662,566 – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has copped to having more than 600,000 illegals with criminal backgrounds on its national docket…

3. 323,000 – 32,000 unaccompanied children who, according to the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, did not appear for court dates between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – and 291,000 who never even received Notices to Appear during that period? For whom ICE admits it has “no assurance” that they “safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor?”

4. 0 – Kamala’s commitment to net zero – from which she has not backed off, and cannot without a revolt in her radical progressive base – amounts to the fracking ban she claims is not in the cards.

5. and 6. $6.75 trillion and 5,044 – The former represents federal outlays for fiscal 2024. The latter is the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. No sane individual would make this woman-child (and watch the last 20 seconds in particular), the chief executive in control of an enterprise of this size with this level of firepower.

On November 5th, the voters will decide whether or not these numbers are acceptable.

Settled Science?

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First of all there is no such thing as ‘settled science.’ The scientific method calls for constant questioning and re-evaluating. Second, if something is declared settled science, you can be sure that someone with a potential financial gain is promoting it (sorry for my cynicism).

On Sunday, WattsUpWithThat reported that the idea of net zero carbon is based on insufficient date. Wow. We are crippling some of the world’s major economies based on insufficient data.

The article quotes and article from The Telegraph posted on Saturday:

Britain’s climate watchdog has privately admitted that a number of its key net zero recommendations may have relied on insufficient data, it has been claimed.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who led a recent Royal Society study on future energy supply, said that the Climate Change Committee only “looked at a single year” of data showing the number of windy days in a year when it made pronouncements on the extent to which the UK could rely on wind and solar farms to meet net zero.

“They have conceded privately that that was a mistake,” Sir Chris said in a presentation seen by this newspaper. In contrast, the Royal Society review examined 37 years worth of weather data.

Last week Sir Chris, an emeritus professor and former director of energy research at Oxford University, said that the remarks to which he was referring were made by Chris Stark, the Climate Change Committee’s chief executive. He said: “Might be best to say that Chris Stark conceded that my comment that the CCC relied on modelling that only uses a single year of weather data … is ‘an entirely valid criticism’.”

The CCC said that Sir Chris’s comments, in a presentation given in a personal capacity in October, following the publication of his review, related solely to a particular report it published last year on how to deliver “a reliable decarbonised power system”.

The article at WattsUpWithThat concludes:

It is now clear that Parliament authorised Net Zero without any proper assessment, whether financial or energy, and the whole Net Zero legislation must now be suspended until a full independent assessment is carried out.

In addition, the whole of the CC should now be disbanded. Unfortunately it is still required by law, but it should now be staffed by truly independent members, with a remit to prioritise energy security and cost/benefit goals. The ideological pursuit of Net Zero must not override the wellbeing of the British public, put its energy security at risk or make the public worse off.

But the current and past members of the CCC who have overseen this attempt to bamboozle and defraud the public must be held to account, and excluded from any further influence over the country’s energy policy, or indeed on any issue of public policy.

So why are we even thinking about doing some of the things we are doing to bring down carbon?