Coal keeps lights on at COP26 as low wind strikes again

[NNadir]

6. You and I define "good" differently.

The so called "renewable energy's" LCA never makes reference to the LCA of the redundant systems. So there's that coke. On top of that there's all the copper to connect this junk and to build redundant generators with redundant magnets, redundant petroleum based insulators, etc., etc., etc.

These costs should be obvious, but still people carry on insipidly that wind energy is "cheap." It's cheap in a transitory fashion, when the wind is blowing. When the wind is not blowing it is prohibitively expensive, and in fact, quite deadly.

The idea that nuclear power plants are "too expensive" never accounts for the fact that the United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors in about 20 years while providing the lowest electricity prices in the world. A vast number of human lives, and medical costs associated with air pollution - never mind climate change - were saved as a result.

And then my generation of pampered consumers suddenly started a festival of selective attention as to what is safe and what is dangerous. This ignorant affectation killed people, over my life time more people than were killed in the Second World War from all causes, combat, bombing, starvation, genocide, what have you.

If you want to talk about a failure of regulation, one might start here. We are willing to spend, in appeals to stupidity and selective attention, millions upon millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, to imagine we are saving one or two lives from radiation, and are not willing to spend the same money to prevent the far worse and far more deadly, by six or seven orders of magnitude, deaths from climate change and air pollution, which occur regularly and consistently without stop.

For me there's no "good" in any of that.

You may focus on momentary prices that outrage you from the Drax powerplant as needing "regulation," but made no reference to the fact that the Drax power plant kills people whenever it operates normally. And since it must operate whenever the wind fails to blow, while these shithole turbines rot at sea doing nothing but accumulating costs, it follows that, to my mind, there is nothing "good" about it at all.

"Lithium" batteries depend on electrodes that are cobalt based, so it doesn't matter where lithium is mined; what matters is where cobalt is mined. Every month hundreds of papers are published in the scientific literature about lithium batteries and how to get around the ongoing requirement for cobalt, still the children dig in Congo for no or little pay. Lithium needs to be intercalated in these electrodes for the battery to operate; the only practical structures for doing this involve cobalt, manganese and nickel based alloy/oxide structures. (Similar strategies for sodium and even potassium batteries are an on going scientific quest, but basically, none of these research efforts has built a practical plant to build batteries to store energy, thus wasting energy.

The cost spikes at Drax don't fucking matter a bit in this context. It's small potatoes. I personally feel that the French should suck all the money it can out of Germany this winter, because Germany's contempt for addressing climate change hurts everyone on the fucking planet. They should pay. The real cost of energy is climate change because we've chosen to make nuclear energy expensive by destroying nuclear infrastructure, demonizing it, and holding to standards that no other form of energy can meet.

It is clear to anyone who can compare numbers that the 2nd derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change of concentration is rising. I monitor the numbers every damned week; they scare the shit out of me. The rate of new accumulations of carbon dioxide has risen, since the year 2000, as measured by running ten year week to week comparisons from 2.44 ppm per year as of the week beginning October 26, 2021 as compared 2.04 ppm/per year for the week beginning October 23, 2011, and 1.60 ppm/year for the week beginning October 20, 2001. (The data can be calculated from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory at the "Data" pages for weekly comparisons. I've pulled it off a spreadsheet I've prepared from this data reaching back to 1975.)

The whole damned time this was going on, I was hearing how "good" wind power was, and trillions of dollars were thrown at it in that period. I fail to see the "good." What I see is a waste of resources on a faith based effort to turn the whole damned world into 17th century Holland. It's reactionary horseshit.

I would suggest that you are making a rote illusion of the "good" into a defense of the indefensible.

There is nothing good about the wind industry. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Why? Because faith in it did nothing, nada, zilch, to address climate change. Faith in it merely made the destruction of the planetary atmosphere worse and resulted in making it worsen faster than ever.