Life is about trade-offs. Some people act as though solar and wind power are somehow free, but of course they aren’t–and the cost goes beyond just the dollar cost of erecting wind turbines or putting solar cells in the desert.
A yellow-rumped warbler singed by the reflecting mirrors of a solar power plant. Fish & Wildlife Service researchers say the area above solar mirrors can easily reach more than 400 degrees Celsius (750° F).
A study reported just a few months ago found that wind turbines kill between 140,000 and 328,000 birds per year. A more recent study from the Fish & Wildlife Service found hundreds of bird carcasses around three solar energy facilities in Southern California. The report added that, “The numbers of dead birds [found] are likely underrepresented, perhaps vastly so,” partly because birds carcasses attract more birds, creating a cycle of death.
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A few hundred birds killed by solar energy stations seems insignificant compared with hundreds of thousands of birds killed by wind turbines. But there are lot more wind turbines than solar energy facilities, so construction of more solar projects could even the score.
Neither wind nor solar kills come close to the numbers of birds killed each year by flying into windows, which some estimate to be as many as 100 million and some even more. As far as species diversity goes, however, the birds in urban areas may be a lot more numerous, and can therefore stand greater mortality, than ones in deserts or wind farm areas. Few eagles fly into the windows of suburban homes, but many of the birds killed by wind turbines are eagles or other raptors.
The Antiplanner doesn’t think that wind or solar should be banned because of bird kills. The real problem is that solar and wind energy are far more costly (not to mention less reliable) than more traditional sources. It is probably possible to mitigate the effects of renewable energy on birds, but that will only make renewable energy more expensive, and until the cost problem is solved, doing anything more than a few experiments with wind or solar is simply a waste of money, not to mention a waste of birds.
The wont build solar farms in the desert, it would interfere with the habitat of the desert tortoise. You wanna build windmills in the mountains, gonna chew up the whole mountain side. Most people don’t realize where the wind turbine starts. In a mine in China which you need for the tons of neodymium to make the magnets for the generators. Most of California’s derelict turbines are only now being removed 30 years later. Hawaii has 6 abandoned wind farms, if wind power fails to operate in one of the windiest places in the world, it doesn’t bode well in less windy places. Major turbine manufacturers like Vesta’s have lost almost 80% of their stock share value in a few short years. Years of being boosted by European tax payers, when the subsidies stopped, the industry collapsed. And theirs the capacity factor. An average of 15-30%. So one-in-six chance they’re going to work on a given day. Imagine if your car only worked on a one-sixth chance (a dice roll), you’d need six cars. That’s why fossil fuels are still winning the energy battle. And the idea of building tens of billions of dollars of high voltage transmission lines to connect the future, currently unbuilt, unfinanced windfarms of the MidWest to the cities of the Eastern Seaboard or West Coast, that would only deliver consistent power. Versus building the power plant in closer proximity to the location it serves.
There are vast windfarms in West Texas. An enormous mileage of roads had to be laid between the thousands of turbines.
Carbon energy will be reduced. Something has to replace it (please, no nuke shills telling me what to replace it with). That’s reality.
DS
Dan’s hot air could power an entire state.
“It is probably possible to mitigate the effects of renewable energy on birds, but that will only make renewable energy more expensive…”
Just imagine if we internalized some of the externalities of coal power! Could we afford it?
Just imagine if we internalized some of the externalities of coal power! Could we afford it?
Could you be saying
“It is probably possible to mitigate the effects of fossil energy on birds and humans but that will only make carbon energy more expensive…”
That is: what if we started charging for dumping in the airfill? And charging for the coal ash spills? And can they shower in WV yet – can we charge for that?
DS
Dan, You have to weigh all of the detrimental effects which you rightly mention, against the decidedly beneficial effects that hydrocarbon based energy has had on economic development and human well being globally. I submit that if we care about people then we need more hydrocarbon based energy, not less; even if it does raise global temps by one, or two, or three, or take your pick degrees. Nuclear energy is the only realistic non-hydrocarbon based energy which we can rely on in the future when hydrocarbons are no longer cost effective. Industrial scale solar and industrial scale wind are unreliable, expensive and have their own profound adverse effects on terrestrial eco-systems now, not theoretically, in the future, like global warming.
“…no nuke shills…” Nice of you to play God with the lives of billions of people who need reliable energy.
Nuclear technology has improved greatly since the last plants were built in the 1970’s.
Smaller, safer and creating much less waste.
The amount of land used to run wind or solar farms is incredible. To match the energy from a newly built reactor, you may need to take the state of Rhode island.
But since no solar or wind farms will be built anywhere near the residences or playgrounds of the wealthy northeast progressives, politicians or media heads, it does not matter that huge swaths of hinterlands will be wasted for fantasy fuels that destroy the land and wildlife.
I submit that if we care about people then we need more hydrocarbon based energy, not less; even if it does raise global temps by one, or two, or three, or take your pick degrees.
Actually, Jardinero, if we care about people we need less HC energy, as increasing the temp globally even one more degree will put all of human societies into an atmospheric temp and GHG regime that no Homo sapiens’ society has ever seen, ever. Highly irresponsible across scales.
And of course we are experiencing adverse affects from HC emissions now, so not theoretical at all.
DS
One thing I’ve wondered is whether or not extracting kinetic energy from the most active wind currents will have unintended and/or undesirable consequences further down the windstream, either upon the local environment or even local weather patterns.
By analogy, hydropower certainly does.
That’s an interesting question J.C. I’ve pondered this in regards to tidal generators but the wind aspect never crossed my mind.
“The amount of land used to run wind or solar farms is incredible.”
Agreed. However, the one thing solar is great at is distributed energy production. I’m not sure solar farms are “the” answer, but the energy distribution powers at be have a hard time thinking outside of massive energy production sites. Seeing as so much energy is lost through distribution, distributed energy production seems like a win to me.
Distributed energy is a solution for many. Transmission rights-of-way are not guaranteed (see southern Colo & Trinchera Ranch) and we know transmission lines affect wildlife (reindeer do not like to pass underneath them due to their flicker in the UV spectrum, which also affects bird migration patterns). Plenty of commercial rooftops to cover in collectors.
DS
Germany is often perceived as the greenest country in Europe. Emphasis being they invest heavily in renewable power. But they’re breaking ground on 20,000 megawatts of coal and gas fired electricity over the next couple of years. In order to rescue their economy from the rest of Europe, cheap power is essential, since they’ve sworn to dismantle all their nuclear reactors by 2017. What are they gonna replace it with? France meanwhile gets most of their power from atomic energy, they have some of the cleanest air in the industrialized world, their carbon emissions are one-tenth that of Germans. The Germans have the reputation for being green, the French have the results and overall achieved that by doing relatively nothing. We can argue nuclear power receives subsidies on behalf of the socialist French, but the externalities and costs of using fossil fuels (given they have no native sources) more than make up for it; localized air pollution, smog, particulates, carbon dioxide. We can argue that the government has heavily nationalized it’s nuclear industry. True. But they have standardized reactor designs compared to the US which operates over a dozen different types which is notoriously expensive and time consuming when it comes to fabricate spare parts.
Or we can build LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) It can’t suffer meltdown, the fuel is already melted as liquid salt, it doesn’t operate at high pressure. It doesn’t need water for coolant so you don’t have to build it near the sea, don’t have to worry about the fear of steam explosions. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond and a carbon-hydrogren bond has more energy density than wind and solar energy. If you could put million to one energy odds, a 20 megawatt LFTR the size of a town house could be mass produced like cars. And you can get the fuel anywhere. Thorium is not rare, it’s as abundant as lead in the Earth’s crust, there’s a thousand places in the US alone where you can dig it up. Just remember last year, human energy habits consumed 4 billion tons of coal, 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 65,000 tons of uranium. 20,000 tons of thorium could replace all of that. 6 parts per million of thorium in the Earth’s crust………that’s 120 billion tons. We will never run out of this stuff.
And there’s a multitude of things you can do with nuclear power via LFTR that cannot be done with renewable power. You can transmute the leftovers into useful substances. Like Molybdenum-99 which is very useful in radiological scans. Another thing you can make is Bismuth-213 which could be a smart bomb against cancer. It only has a half life of 45 minutes when attached to an antibody and injected, it targets non localized cancer cells. You can generate Neodymium, Bismuth, Molybdenum, Xenon, and Plutonium 238 which is useless for making weapons but useful for radio generators on space probes, NASA exhausted its supply, they used to buy some from Russians but they’re out too (and given current political climate wont get any more). NASA has billions in future space missions that depend on a stead supply of Plutonium 238, sadly they don’t have anymore. You can destroy radioactive waste and spent fuel. You can desalinate sea water very cheaply, diffuse hydrogen, remove carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the air and generate renewable fuels such as methanol, dimethyl ether and ammonia. All of which can be used to power vehicles with little engine modification. Grow crops, make the desert bloom. First you mine 250 tons of natural uranium containing 1.75 tons of uranium-235, enrich and get 35 tons of enriched uranium, the U-235 is ”burned”, some plutonium-239 is formed and maybe it’s burned to, assuming the government doesn’t want it for other purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11e8XyUBqRQ
After that, you’re still left with 215 tons of depleted uranium-238, the government will gladly take it off your hands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGUIUQp3LsQ
35 tons of spent fuel which is 33.4 tons of uranium-238, 0.3 tons of U-235, 1 ton of fission byproducts, 0.3 tons of plutonium. All of which has to be stashed for 20,000+ years.
Or………..one ton of thorium in a molten salt reactor…….converts thorium-232 to uranium-233 and destroys 99% of it. You do get one ton of fission byproducts…..but in just 10 years most of the fission products are stable and can be stored indefinitely by burial. The rest are radioactive, but their radioactive half-life is short for only 300 years. And you get 0.0001 tons of plutonium. Human society always undergoes an enormous progressive shift when it unleashes a new energy source and much of the rest of humanity doesn’t even have access to electricity, let alone drinkable water. Imagine what we could do with Thorium.
Actually, Jardinero, if we care about people we need less HC energy, as increasing the temp globally even one more degree will put all of human societies into an atmospheric temp and GHG regime that no Homo sapiens’ society has ever seen, ever.
That’s a surprising statement, considering we’ve only been taking GHG concentration readings for a about a century, and temperature readings for only a bit longer than that.
That’s a surprising statement, considering we’ve only been taking GHG concentration readings for a about a century, and temperature readings for only a bit longer than that.
You’re right: all those geologists have the orogeny all wrong because we’ve only had seismometers emplaced for a couple generations now. Our ancient diet? Balderdash. We’ve only had cookbooks for a hundred years.
If only we had a systematic method of inquiry that would allow us to determine past conditions of various areas of study based on evidence found and studied and analyzed. If only we could take that evidence and analysis and form guesses and have others contribute and build on knowledge, little by little. If onlyyyy. If oooooooonlyyyy.
DS
Nobody alive today will ever see a world where fossil fuels won’t provide a majority of power on earth. Probably nobody alive’s grandkids will see that.
In the 1990s I used to be optimistic that wind and solar power would have a large portion of US power by 2020.
Nobody alive today will ever see a world where fossil fuels won’t provide a majority of power on earth. Probably nobody alive’s grandkids will see that.
I guess humans are too stupid to figger it out. That’ll be bad for those grandkids, surely.
DS
Climate change is a fact of life with or without rising CO2 concentrations. CO2’s contribution to climate change is over rated vis a vis the myriad other factors which affect the climate. Adaptation is the only way forward.
For most of human history man relied upon wind, wood and or solar for power and heat. During that same period, life was “nasty, brutish and short.” Fossil fuels contribution to the huge leap in longevity and living standards for the last two centuries is well documented. I choose to take my chances with the energy source that has the proven track record of improving lives.
If someone chooses to rely on wind or solar on their own dime, that is just fine with me. I happen to think rooftop solar is pretty cool. But in terms of public policy, I refuse to allow a group of rent seekers to impoverish this generation and the next by imposing legislation which turns back the clock and returns the bulk of power generation to low energy density, intermittent, unreliable, and expensive wind or solar.
CO2?s contribution to climate change is over rated vis a vis the myriad other factors which affect the climate. Adaptation is the only way forward.
Sane and rational science-based policy would say exactly the opposite. You don’t willingly send the entire population – and it’s entire infrastructure – into the unknown on a wish. Risk.
DS
Science is evidence based, not speculative. The evidence does not show as much forcing as the models would speculate.
But all of that is neither here nor there, because a radical, sudden change in global power generation will harm more humans, physically and economically, than any kind of centuries-long-change in climate, which I agree is a certainty; because climate is continuously variable throughout history.
Unlike some hubristic individuals , I claim zero foreknowledge of the type of change we are in for. But, I resolutely believe, because the historical record supports this, that high energy density fuels, like coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear, provide more cushion for adaptation against climate change than low energy density fuels.
You’re wishing too hard. CO2’s role is neither speculative nor model-based. And risk for society in a climate regime that no modern human is familiar with – and few crops either – is simply silly to contemplate.
DS
You’re right: all those geologists have the orogeny all wrong because we’ve only had seismometers emplaced for a couple generations now. Our ancient diet? Balderdash. We’ve only had cookbooks for a hundred years.
If only we had a systematic method of inquiry that would allow us to determine past conditions of various areas of study based on evidence found and studied and analyzed. If only we could take that evidence and analysis and form guesses and have others contribute and build on knowledge, little by little. If onlyyyy. If oooooooonlyyyy.
Extrapolations (especially those based on proxy variables) are not observations. Guesses are not facts. There is plenty of room for skepticism there.
Hello Dan, I am not wishing for anything. Unlike some, I don’t think that the science is settled on the impact of human activity on global climate. And by human activity, I refer to much more than CO2 emissions, i.e. forestry, agriculture, animal husbandry, range management, urbanization, industrialization and on and on and on.
Jardinero, I gave you a chart that shows the influence of those things you name. That is the current state of scientific knowledge. If you have access to the future state of knowledge in, say, 2035 that supercedes current knowledge, you should share.
Similarly, MJ, the current state of knowledge is not extrapolation or guess, no matter how comforting it is to pretend so.
DS
Dear Dan, The second graph shows the enormous variation in temperatures in the pre-industrial era, hence my indifference to any attempt to mitigate CO2 emissions in the name of halting the inherent variability which is utterly unavoidable. The first chart characterizes the potential forcing of eight atmospheric components. It begs the question that those are the only variables which control temperatures. They are not. It also begs the question that they are anthropogenic, which they are not. Sorry. I can’t agree with you. But I respect your opinion, nonetheless.
dear J:
The Holocene temperature variation is not “enormous”. By ~2025 we will be warmer than at any time in modern human history. That is: we have zero precedent upon which to base decisions.
DS
“~2025 we will be warmer than at any time in modern human history.”
Ah, yes, the alarmist predictions of fortune tellers. Here are just a few of their greatest
hitsfails:July 26, 1999 The Birmingham Post: “Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”
July 26, 1999 The Birmingham Post: “Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”
March 29, 2001, CNN: “In ten year’s time, most of the low-lying atolls surrounding Tuvalu’s nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean will be submerged under water as global warming rises sea levels.”
1969, Lubos Moti, Czech physicist: “It is now pretty clearly agreed that CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”
January 2000 Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund commenting (in a NY Times interview) on the mild winters in New York City: “But it does not take a scientist to size up the effects of snowless winters on the children too young to remember the record-setting blizzards of 1996. For them, the pleasures of sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling, and the delight of a snow day off from school is unknown.”
June 11, 1986, Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Space Institute (NASA) in testimony to Congress (according to the Milwaukee Journal): “Hansen predicted global temperatures should be nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years, ‘which is about the warmest the earth has been in the last 100,000 years.’”
June 8, 1972, Christian Science Monitor: “Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.”
May 15, 1989, Associated Press: “Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide [USA] two degrees by 2010.”
Cute quotes plagiarized from paid denialist shill sites are cuuuuuute.
DS
So is an ad hominem circumstantial.
And accusations of plagiarism in a blog comment are absolutely adorkable.
Shows you got nothing except 300.3 in the DSM-IV. Meds are available.
I’d try and distract away from using something from a disinformation site too. Sane and reality-based society knows better.
Best,
D
Can’t disprove? Disparage! Planner Dan’s MO.
Cue having a sad because hilarious logical fallacy isn’t taken seriously. (M.O.).
Turn that frown upside-down, Frank!
Societies are waking up. Multinational carbon corporations are starting to understand their risk in the carbon bubble. Change is coming, folks.
Still can’t refute that those predicted climate events were made and didn’t occur?
“Change is coming, folks.”
And the sky is falling and doomsday predictions have so far failed to materialize and there’s been no warming for more than a decade. You’ll excuse me for not holding my breath (and exhaling carbon).
You *might* be taken more seriously if you didn’t contribute more CO2 than your urban counterparts. You choose to live on the fringes of a city that relies on fossil fuel for electricity generation. You have a large pickup parked outside your large suburban single-family home. You have reproduced, bringing another CO2 producing American in to the world.
Do as the government tells you based on the way I voted not as I actually do. That’s Dan’s change for you.
Cue the weak lashing out by pretending hypocrisy by making sh– up.
I already pointed out your cheap lie about reproduction too. You just can’t help yourself and your cheap little habit of making sh– up to spam the thread. Grow up and put down the third-rate novels.
DS
Making sh— up accuses the guy who cries to the admin when a satellite view of his SFH is linked.
A cheap like about reproduction accuses the man with a child–guess your daughter is adopted, eh? Good for you!
Grow up demands the man living in his mother-in-law’s (or life partner’s mother’s) house.
Love you, Dan! Hugs and kisses, buddy! 🙂 Have some Merlot, relax, and try to stop worrying about your large CO2 footprint.
PS
Third-rate novels? If you’re speaking of Rand, I’m no fan, and you’re in no place to evaluate having never read her. Nice distraction tactic, though!
When poor Frank is sad, the voices lash out and it gets embarrassing. Smoke a bowl, man.
The worlds societies are moving to efficiencies and clean energy. In fits and starts and painfully. But they know what to do.
DS