Can We Rely on Wind and Solar Energy?|5 Minute Video
Is green energy, particularly wind and solar power, the service to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy requirements and ecological obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress describes.
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Script:
Are wind and solar energy the answer to our energy requires? There’s a lot of sun and a great deal of wind. They’re free. They’re tidy. No CO2 emissions. So, what’s the problem?
Why do solar and wind combined provide less than 2% of the world’s energy?
To address these concerns, we need to understand what makes energy, or anything else for that matter, plentiful and cheap.
For something to be cheap and numerous, every part of the procedure to produce it, including every input that enters into it, should be low-cost and plentiful.
The process of turning sunshine and wind into useable energy on a mass scale is far from free. Compared to the other sources of energy– fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power, solar and wind power are very pricey.
The fundamental problem is that sunshine and wind as energy sources are both weak (the more technical term is water down) and undependable (the more technical term is periodic). It takes a great deal of resources to gather and focus them, and a lot more resources to make them readily available on-demand. These are called the diluteness problem and the intermittency issue.
The diluteness issue is that, unlike coal or oil, the wind and the sun don’t deliver focused energy– which implies you require a great deal of extra products to produce an unit of energy.
For solar energy, such materials can include extremely purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and a lots other complex compounds like titanium dioxide. All these products have to be mined, refined and/or manufactured in order to make solar panels. Those industrial processes take a lot of energy.
For wind, needed products include high-performance substances for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, specialty magnets, in addition to the steel and concrete needed to develop structures– thousands of them– as tall as high-rise buildings.
And as big an issue as diluteness is, it’s nothing compared to the intermittency problem. This isn’t exactly a news flash, however the sun doesn’t shine all the time. And the wind does not blow all the time. When we required them, the only way for solar and wind to be really beneficial would be if we could save them so that they would be available. You can save oil in a tank. Where do you save solar or wind energy? No such mass-storage system exists. Which is why, in the whole world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them need backup. And guess what the go-to back-up is: fossil fuel.
Here’s what solar and wind electricity look like in Germany, which is the world’s leader in “renewables”. The word irregular leaps to mind. Wind is constantly differing, sometimes vanishing completely. When Germany most needs energy, and solar produces bit in the winter season months.
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source
Can We Rely on Wind and Solar Energy? Is green energy, especially wind and solar energy, the option to our environment and energy issues? Are wind and solar power the answer to our energy requires? Compared to the other sources of energy– fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power, solar and wind power are really expensive.
Where do you save solar or wind energy?
