The ideologues-terrorists of “green” climate protection and the energy transition constantly claim that electricity from renewable sources, i.e. mainly from the wind and the sun, is cheaper than that produced in power plants burning coal, oil, natural gas or from nuclear energy. More often than not, the thesis of cheap “green” electricity is supported without empirical evidence. This usually works because critical voices in the mainstream media have been almost eliminated and the professional qualifications of most journalists are so low that they are unable to ask critical questions or do not want to ask them because they are ordered to do so by the oligarch owners of the media.
How an electrical power system works
If we look at the evolution of electricity prices from wind and solar, it becomes clear that they have fallen sharply in the three decades since the start of the energy transition. The main reason for this was the transition from specialized to mass production, which significantly reduced the manufacturing costs for wind turbines and solar panels. However, these economies of scale are only possible once, so the downward price jump cannot be repeated.
The technical results that would argue in favor of lowering prices are also only possible to a very limited extent. For example, wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger, but also more and more expensive. Today, an installed Megawatt hour (MWh) costs about one million euros. The basic technology of wind turbines or PV systems remains the same and there are also physical science limits to their performance. Under laboratory conditions, solar cells can achieve an efficiency of more than 40%, but such systems are 100 times more expensive than installed and require certain materials that are very expensive and particularly rare or limited, for some time their efficiency has been approx. 20%. That is, the higher the demand for raw materials such as rare earths, copper, etc., the more their prices increase. This trend is already clearly felt in this period of time and makes wind turbines, for example, so expensive that already planned projects are revised. Not to mention the often disastrous ecological impacts and disposal-removal problems of old facilities.
A decisive and technically insurmountable disadvantage of wind and solar energy is its variability (fluctuating output) due to the natural cycles of wind and sun. This means that these systems often perform little or nothing, and it is also unclear when and to what extent this happens. A comparison: Who would buy a car that you know you can only use three days a week, but you don’t know which days? This drawback is called the “dark stagnation” problem, i.e. the absence of wind and sun. The consequence of dark stasis is that other, reliable producers or storage systems must step in. The danger here is that there is a high possibility of a grid collapse (blackout) or regional blackouts.
In the case of energy raw materials, the use (extraction or conversion) depends on how high the energy content (energy density) of the raw material is. Wind and sun are inexhaustible energy sources that contain more energy than humanity needs. However, the decisive factor is the amount of energy per individual technical system, since we cannot operate devices with sunlight or wind, but we need electricity for this. Due to the low energy density of solar and wind energy, compared to coal or even nuclear fission materials, the technical effort required is relatively high.
We will demonstrate this with a simple calculation using the example of wind power. A modern 4-5 MW wind turbine costs 5-6 million euros. The media claims that such a wind turbine could supply many to many households. This is wrong on two counts. First, the actual input power of (onshore) wind turbines is only about 20% of the installed capacity, i.e. only one Megawatt with an installed capacity of 4-5 MW. Second, the wind turbine produces little or nothing when there is little or no wind, meaning other, reliable generators must step in.
The claim that wind energy is cheap is a “bakalistic” calculation by climate “protectors” and is demonstrated by the fact that a wind turbine has a life limit of about 20 years, after which it technically wears out or its subsidy expires, which limited to 20 years according to the European Commission. While a power station can operate for 40 to 80 years or more, in the same period, the wind turbine must be renewed several times to replace the motor shaft or to erect a new wind turbine. It is clear that factoring in these costs also makes wind energy extremely expensive. Example: In order to supply the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant (about 1,400 MW), about 1,400 wind turbines of 4-5 MW must be installed. This would result in a cost of approximately 1,400 x 5 million = 7,000 million = 7 billion euros. After 20 years, the same amount is needed again, after another 20 years again and so on.
The real purpose of climate propaganda
The real purpose of climate propaganda is to make carbon dioxide (CO2) the climate killer and to demonize and shut down all CO2 emitting producers (coal, oil and natural gas power plants) as “climate bad”. The energy transition is a financial stimulus program and the “climate terrorists” are its useful idiots. In other words, the huge investments in renewable energy sources would not be necessary at all, if instead the existing power plants could have been modernized at a much lower cost. Simply upgrading coal-fired power plants to the latest standards would result in the same amount of electricity being produced with 20% less coal consumption and 20% less emissions of any kind. The only catch with this strategy is that the “green” capital could not gain anything from it. The “green” capital that international moneylenders are known to indulge in.
A huge cost factor in RES is also grid expansion. This is necessary to a) connect the large number of small plants (solar plants, wind turbines) to the grid and b) because the majority of wind turbines are in the mountains, but the main industrial consumers are in the plains. This means that the electricity from RES must be channeled to where the industrial consumers are, while large coal, oil or natural gas power plants are mainly located close to the consumers. On the other hand, some willfully overlook that electricity is lost during the transfer process. In other words, more electricity must be produced in order to have the same amount of final energy available. Equally overlooked is the fact that more and more ‘renewable’ electricity from fluctuating generation plants puts grid stability and baseload supply at risk. The latter is the minimum amount of electricity that is always consumed. The grid frequency of 50 Hz has so far been mainly ensured by the fact that the large flywheel masses (the turbine blades of large power plants) rotate uniformly. Of course, this result can also be achieved through control measures in the network (redistribution), but only if there is sufficient generation capacity. The energy transition objectively brings us closer to a general blackout or some breakdowns or outages.
A big question is also the issue of storing “green” energy. Despite progress, the best battery storage systems are still expensive and have limited capacity and run time. The “miracle batteries” are green dreams of uneducated journalists and politicians. An example: The largest battery in the world is the Hornsdale storage system in Australia with just 200 MWh. The factory cost about 100 million euros, a pure money burn. It’s purely a stupid endeavor, a poor cost-benefit ratio that any idiot realizes can’t work. But none of this is of interest to the “green” terrorists. They continue to burn other people’s money or shovel it into the pockets of shady “green” oligarchs.
Electricity storage is currently and in the near future economically impossible on a large scale. This objective, scientifically formulated problem cannot obviously be ideological. The wrong course of the energy transition is also made clear by the fact of the hydrogen technology that will be used in the future. The use of hydrogen as an energy source is particularly expensive and technically difficult to control. During the production and conversion of hydrogen into electricity, about 70% of the energy is “lost”.
We’ve broken down, in as simple a way as possible for non-complainants, that the cheap renewable electricity position is not only empirically wrong, but also contradicts fundamental laws of science and technology. Also, the energy transition does not save the climate, because the climate cannot be “destroyed” by CO2. Instead of improving the world, the energy transition is doing the exact opposite: It has huge negative effects from an economic and even ecological point of view.
