Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels
Yes indeed, I assume I have piqued their rage by pointing out some of the glaring flaws in the renewable energy groupthink. No, Heat Pumps, EVs and renewables are NOT going to save us. But they are a great moneyspinner for some shifty air conditioning salesmen and biomass lumberjacks. Heat pumps are literally just air conditioners that can run backwards. If we install 300,000 heat pumps per year, that means we are also installing 300,000 high-powered air con units into badly-insulated houses. And the weather is getting hotter. What could possibly go wrong with that eco-idea? Last decade if I had an air conditioner I would have been a social piranha; people would tell me that I am selfishly ruining the planet for my own comfort. But now, I can just write "heat pump" on it with a marker pen and suddenly I'm an eco-hero?
In some ways, I wish that the Lithium Battery had never been invented. It gives us a false hope. People seem to think that we can continue our post-1980s consumption unabated, all we have to do is build more windmills and solar panels and store the energy in batteries to keep the lights on. But unfortunately it's simply not possible to store Terawatt-hours (the UK uses approximately 5 TWh per week, and we have had periods of calm weather where we have used 18TWh of gas before the wind started blowing again). Even if there were no shortage of copper and you could divert all the world's battery factories to making batteries for the UK, it would take decades to build a battery big enough to replace gas here for a week. But as TFA says, copper is limited, (so is Cobalt, and Lithium too because it takes a massive amount of water to extract, as does silicon wafer manufacture for solar panels) so the whole battery-revolution is doomed. Sorry Britishvolt et al, but you were sold a lie. The UK can never be self-sufficient in battery manufacturing, cos we need raw materials innit (and also labour here is terribly expensive compared to China)
The only thing that grid batteries are good for, is stabilising the frequency in the very short term i.e. over the order of seconds to provide something similar to the stored inertia in a flywheel, as a replacement for the mass of spinning turbines that we have lost with solar panels etc. They cannot be used for bulk storage.
All this stuff about electrifying everything, carbon capture, the hydrogen economy, liquid ammonia storage, CO2 batteries, is pure greenwash and bollocks of the highest order. It is only good for one thing: Making a few rich people richer as they cream off from all the government and industry incentives for green tech. They are as much good as a shady one-man company in Norfolk company selling £meelions of useless or nonexistent PPE to Matt Hancock.
Biomass is deforestation. Biofuel farms and Solar panels are springing up on land that could be used to grow food crops. Captured CO2 will escape (and suffocate swaths of people/animals/fish when it does). The only sensible way to capture carbon is to let the forests grow, not to chop them down.
Thus, the only way we are going to get to net zero, is to change our consumption habits (i.e. everyone has to live where we work, and forget about the luxury of always-on electricity, and put some wooly jumpers on in the winter) or else we have to reduce our population. Both of those options mean, shock horror, that "economic growth" has to go in reverse for a few decades. Otherwise the planet is fucked. But then again, that's never going to happen so most likely we're already fucked. Only a massive population crash due to nuclear war has a chance to save the planet now. Anyone for cheese & biscuits? Who'd like to buy some weapons?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
