We must do more to promote renewable energy. Otherwise, we risk losing the battle

 

Above, you can see the answer to a question about renewable energy given by the "Leonardo" AI system, one of the best available to the public. Leonardo works by parsing a huge database downloaded from the Web, searching for an answer on the basis of the popularity and the reputation of the sites it examines. So, you can see it as a special kind of search engine that will focus on a specific question and give you an answer weighed for relevance and diffusion. You can also see it as an instant "opinion poll" that tells you what the opinion leaders are thinking. 

This answer about renewables is deeply worrisome. It means that the opinion leaders believe the legend (*) that renewable energy is an appendage of fossil fuels and that it cannot stand by itself without the support of fossil energy. It confirms what you can note if you examine what is being said in the social media: a large number of "environmentalists" seem to have engaged in a personal crusade to denigrate renewables. 

In Sweden, where elections will be held in September, one of the main issues right now is the centre/right promise to build 10 new reactors and to finance the investment partly by obliging wind and solar power systems to pay an extra fee. Nobody among the proposers seems to be worried about how long it will take to build these reactors, and where the uranium needed to power them will come from. This is not just worrisome. It is a tragedy in the making. 

The problem, here, is that Leonardo (just like the general public) has no access to the data published in scientific journals, usually kept hidden behind paywalls. Which means, in practice, that Leonardo does not parse the high quality information of refereed scientific journals. The result is that Leonardo makes the same mistakes many people do, swayed by the by special interest lobbies, such as the fossil fuel industry. 

Once more, humans show their capability of shooting themselves in their feet. Governments pay huge amounts of money to scientists to develop and evaluate renewable energy technologies. Scientists give to publishers their results for free, then the publishers make these results available to the public at exorbitant fees, even thought the public has already paid for these results with their taxes. 

We have to rethink of what we are doing as scientists, researchers, and developers. It is not possible to waste so much effort because of these absurd rules, especially in a moment when renewable energy is desperately necessary in a world where the combined action of climate change and resource depletion is destroying the wealth of entire nations. 

We can't reform science in a single day, but I invite my colleagues to come down from the ivory tower and engage in informing the public about the real value and effectiveness of renewable energy. Do it. It is your duty as scientists, and as human beings. The battle is not lost, yet, but it will be if you don't engage in it. 

 h/t Anders Wijkman and Domenico Rutigliano (developer of the Leonardo program.)

(*) If you believe that the idea that renewables cannot support themselves is not a legend, write me. I'll send you a preprint of our recent paper on the subject. (ugo.bardi(whirlywhirl)unifi.it)

Renewable energy: the game of denigration continues

 

A new example of someone engaging into the popular game of denigrating solar energy:

https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/the-future-of-electricity-d227eac74ba8

Fortunately, this post does not appear on a peer reviewed journal, but this type of paper is becoming the run-of-the-mill of the discussion. It contains classical statements such as:

 "Energy captured and transformed by solar and wind cannot be compared to coal or natural gas used in power plants:"

Why that? Well, because,

"1. As mentioned above these sources can de-stabilize the grid’s voltage and frequency, and thus need to be balanced with either gas fired power plants or batteries

2. Weather dependent energy is available half of the time at best, so you need double, triple the nameplate capacity to make sure you have enough"

and therefore

 "solar and wind are mere additions to an ever growing fossil fuel platform. " and "we can safely say, that a nationwide stable electric grid (which is available on demand 24/7, just like today) is practically impossible to build based on renewables and battery power alone, or at least be maintained without the massive aid provided by fossil fuels.

And more of the same: no quantification, no calculation, no justification. The references are carefully chosen only among those that support the author's viewpoint. The many studies that prove that renewable energy does not need the support of fossil fuels are ignored. It is like that because it has to be like that. Typical.

The author signs his blog as "The Honest Sorcerer." There is no evidence that he is a scientist and, as I said, this is not a peer reviewed paper. The problem is that the public and decision-makers, alike, read this kind of papers. I know plenty of smart people, even scientists, who have completely swallowed this nonsense. And the more people believe in this assessment of renewable energy, the more the assessment spreads over the media.

The results can be tragic. In Italy, we have a large wind plant ready to be built, approved by all the agencies charged with approving it, and yet it cannot be built for the opposition of the cultural ministry of the Italian government. 

We are facing a failure of the communication strategy of the renewable industry. In time, it may be that people will understand how things stand but, at present, we need a more proactive stance to fight this kind of disinformation. That doesn't mean that the Honest Sorcerer and the others should be silenced, not at all, but that we should state more openly, more often, and more clearly, that renewable energy CAN sustain a complex civilisation, and not just that: renewable energy is cheaper, more efficient, less polluting, and better than fossil fuels in all aspects. But it is true that it will never work if we continue believing that it can't.

Idiocracy and Energy: If you forget physics, you'll suffer the consequences

Forgetting about simple physics makes people do stupid and dangerous things. See, for instance, the "water bubble" a fashionable toy. This is NOT a good idea. The concentration of CO2 inside the ball will rapidly rise and if you stay in there for more than a few minutes you'll suffer CO2-generated hypoxia. At the very minimum, you may suffer headaches, vomit, dizziness, and the like. Staying inside for a long time, you might faint (it has happened) or even die (it has not happened, so far, fortunately). The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an alert in 2011 about these water bubbles, but it seems to have gone unheeded. Unfortunately, until someone suffers brain damage or dies, these dangerous things will remain freely available.  

But it seems that plenty of people don't know the most elementary rules of physics, those, for instance, that rule the functioning of the human metabolism. Look at this:

In 2019, Hyundai produced this image as an ad for their "Nexo" hydrogen car. It was meant as a demonstration that their car produces no harmful gases. Obviously, the image is photoshopped, not the photo of a real test. Remarkably, though, nobody at Hyundai thought that this image shows a risky situation. And no one felt as necessary to add an alert such as "Do not try that at home."

To be fair, if this experiment were done for real, it would not be as dangerous as staying inside a water bubble for a long time. In this case, the flow of the exhaust of the car would remove part of the CO2 in the bubble. Still, it would be a risky experiment, given the small size of the bubble and the high metabolic activity of the running lady. Remarkably, though, this image seems to be understood as a demonstration of what a great idea is the hydrogen car. It still makes the rounds on social media. 

It is always the same problem: not knowing the elementary laws of physics causes you to make stupid and dangerous things, like putting your child inside a plastic bubble, or just stupid things, like buying a hydrogen car.  

 

Does this look dystopian to you? Get the energy when it is available

 

by Harald Desing

The sun is up…

Shortly before sunrise, I jump out of bed. Today will be a sunny day, so lots of things to do. After a quick breakfast, I swing on my bike and cycle with the first rays of sun to work. My colleagues and I gather for a quick organizational meeting and then prepare the smelting of glass and spinning it into glass wool for insulation. The well-insulated smelting furnace had been kept idle over the night using its thermal mass and no extra energy. Now it only needs a little heating from the rising sun to start operating again. Production can increase until midday, and we try to bring as much solar energy as we can into pre-heating sand and glass cullets (broken pieces) to extend production towards the evening. Lunchtime is taken in shifts to not waste the most productive peak sun hours. By the evening, we have produced enough insulation materials to turn a small city into passive buildings. Transforming the summer's solar abundance into avoiding domestic heating in winter, we contribute to the grand challenge of getting off the hook from fossil fuels.

The next day is rainy, so there is no need to rush. Everybody comes a bit later to work and there is time to discuss and reflect about the sunny day experiences and ideas on how to make even better use of the sun. The furnace is operated at low load – as much as the diffuse light permits – and we are mostly packing and preparing yesterday's produce for distribution across the country. In addition, there is time for other low-energy tasks such as administration, bookkeeping of material and energy balances and organizing the distribution and installation of the insulation materials. It's still raining in the afternoon, so time to call it a day early, spend some extra time with family and friends, perhaps have a beer and discuss future possibilities once the transformation is complete.

 Does this sound dystopian to you?

Carpe Solem!

The Gold Rush of Photovoltaic Energy: scams are unavoidable, but they might not be a bad sign!

 

Recently, Fox News investigated some companies engaged in selling PV plants to individual customers. As you would have expected, there have been cases in which the customer was promised impossible results. The customer had to pay for plants that didn't work as promised or that could not be connected to the grid for lack of the needed permits. 

It is nothing new. It also happened in Italy some ten years ago, when the government provided a relatively high financial support for PV plants. That led to plenty of people to rush into the market, many of them without the necessary competence, and some being pure scammers. 

It happens every time a market starts lifting off: do you remember the story of the California gold rush of 1849? Lots of scammers would cheat in all possible ways: selling fake digging permits, selling plots where they had "planted" gold nuggets but contained none, or simply robbing the forty-niners. Bad. But is also true that the gold was there for real. 

It is the same for photovoltaic energy: it is the gold of our times. And the gold is there for real: it is the sun. Scams are just a symptom of a true "PV rush" that will lead us out of the current mess. 

The Joy of Doomerism -- Denigrating Solar Energy.

This is a comment received on Facebook yesterday. It is curious how some people seem to be their duty on this Earth to express themselves as ancient monks and preachers in terms of "repent, sinners, your time is nearly over" These people seem to live in a world of their own, and the most impressive thing abut them is their dull certainty: "renewable energy cannot work because it cannot work, and that is the way it is." I guess they are best ignored, but the lines below are just for fun.  

Going odd (correction: off, but it's funny enough) the rails is not an alien thing to Ugo Bardi, sadly. For all his wisdom, he still seem caught up in some pleasurable fallacies, such as energy transition.

It's worth noting that the mere concept has not scientific grounding (cf Vaclav Smil).

It's the last refuge of the bourgeois: pretending that there *is* a solution, if only we would listen...

Preach, brother. Defend your turf. But what is your turf exactly? minimizing human suffering OR cutting humanity at the knee before we do too much damage?

This is one or the other. Unless you abandon all your own observations.

And sorry to say but "renewable energies" are a mirage. At *best* (disputable) those energy converters will only help us extract more fossil fuels (cf Vincent Mignerot, "L'Énergie du déni").

Photovoltaics and tuk-tuk in Sudan: an interpretation of the Sunflower Paradigm

 

The low cost of solar panels is making possible things that not long ago were unthinkable. Low cost transportation by three-wheeled electric vehicles in Sudan. So far, they mainly use grid power, but they can be powered using solar PV panels. Cheap, simple, no pollution, no noise, no fossil fuels. There starts the solar revolution!

Read the whole article at: 

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-sudan-electric-rickshaws-environment.amp