If you look at the complete manifold of global energy needs Wind power’s contribution is too small to measure. In 2014 (the last year for which there is data) the nearest whole number for wind’s contribution is zero percent.
From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Based on the data in this report I’d recommend that in the future that these ‘sources’ provide even less.
Matt Ridley reports that while the green meanies are boasting a 14% share for renewables it just isn’t so.
Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with.
Remember When Wood Was Sacred?
A reader in our Facebook comments noted that single-use plastic bags were “invented” to save the world from deforestation. But it’s okay to include woodburning in the renewables portfolio even when burning these ‘carbon offsets’ releases all the trapped CO2.
Ridley goes on to deliver even more bad news for wind. For Wind turbines to produce just the annual increase in power we’d need to add 350,000 of them every year. That doesn’t even put a dent in the existing demand. (For which wind provides 0.46%of global energy needs if you forgot. And since wind is land intensive, we’d need an area the size of the entire British Isles every year, covered in Wind machines, just to meet expected growth.
Again, we’ve not even broached the problem of demand before growth.
Wind energy is a boutique solution. A vanity project. Big expense bird and bat killing, virtue signaling, with no hope of making any meaningful impact on our electricity needs. One that has never prospered or advanced without taxpayers bailout money.
Greater efficiency is unlikely. According to Ridley, they are near their peak now. Which leaves us with this, something I shared at the bottom of this post earlier.
Wind is Dirty Too
“…out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fiberglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal.
Much like solar, the green/renewable fantasy is a ruse on which we’ve wasted billion or even trillions to mitigate the lie of CO2 and Global Warming, which makes it doubly worse.
All to try and charge batteries that not environmentally friendly at either the beginning and end of their life cycle.
| WUWT
