There are a number of misunderstandings when it comes to wind and solar I wish more people were aware of.
Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Regardless of whether solar cells become cheaper, it makes energy more expensive as a whole because it makes the energy system more complex and as many might have learned in physics, starting up something take more energy than when it's up and running. This is true for coal plants too and with wind and solar being highly fluctuating and with highly fluctuating demands on the backup sources.
The use of fossil fuel is increasing not decreasing more than wind and solar.
You can't make either windmills or solar cells without fossil fuel.
Wind and solar is only 1% of the worlds energy not projected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040.
Electricity can replace most energy needs. Whatever is left should be minimal (~5% total oil consumption, air travel, chemical processing, steel coking, etc). Coal and nuclear are already not cost competitive, if natural gas can't compete with batteries, it too will be left as a stranded asset. Natural gas is a perfect fit now for renewables, it throttles very fast and ramps every night for the steep duck curve in California. Batteries are even faster. Hundreds of GWs of annual battery production coming online across the world.
Electricity currently supplies 20% of our energy needs.
Please outline how you are planning to, in the next 20-30 years, scale world-wide electricity production, as well as the capacity of the electrical grid by 5x.
Nobody has even the foggiest plan for how that is going to be done. I understand that it's easy to just shrug, and say: "Someone will figure it out". That isn't very comforting to me.
It's not quite as bad as that, as electricity is a more efficient fuel source for many applications, including heating if you have a heat pump and the cold side isn't a lot colder than your target temperature. For transport it's much more efficient - 1kWh of electricity will get you a few times further than fossil fuels containing 1kWh or energy.
But your point is still valid, we certainly need to more than double grid capacity if we want to rely on electrification to avoid lifestyle changes.
Especially as solar and wind are not consistent (clouds and windless nights etc), so you need to overbuild by large factor, and considering that there is no viable way to store energy, that requires insane overcapacity, on the order of 10-20x of current electricity use.
Fossil fuels are used for thousands of products everything from medicine to concrete to asphalt to pesticides, to solar cells, to windmills and machinery and manufacturing, etc.
We are not even close to having the battery technology that will work with most things we use fossil fuels for today let alone replace the other products that come from fossil fuels.
Fuel Cells are not even on the drawing board let alone at scale.
With regard to nuclear, it's expensive because it's being demonized which creates all sorts of extra requirements which is part of what make it more expensive. Furhtermore nuclear is calculated at actual cost neither wind or solar is.
> Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
It depends on how you look at it. Solar and wind energy is absolutely used for growing crops for example. Oil also, of course, for creating fertilizers.
> Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Not really. Availability might be an issue for onshore wind but not for offshore. 200 meters up in the air, out in the North sea it blows a lot! In addition, hydro power can be used to balance out the supply.
One can always conjure some "perfect storm" scenario in which it isn't windy so no wind power, cloudy so no solar power and not enough water so no hydro power and ask what happens then? But what is the probability of such a situation ever occurring? If it is incredibly low, then I don't think it makes sense to consider it.
Do you have any source showing that wind turbines in the north sea can deliver electricity on demand 365d/24h.
Renewable energy is all nice and fine but when it comes to having electricity available at any given time there is a reason why germany has so many coal plants to compensate the slack or why UK taps in France nuclear capacity when brits turn on their water kettle during the ad break.
No electricity source has 100% availability. Nuclear tops out at about 90% so tough luck for the poor Britons that want to drink tea during the remaining 10% of the time.
Modern offshore wind farms features huge wind turbines built dozens of kilometers out in the sea on spots chosen by computer simulations to have optimal wind conditions. They can reach up to 60% utilization meaning that 60% of the time they produce electricity at full capacity. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/04/5-stats-about-offs... Of course that is still lower than nuclear's 90% so what you do is that you build many wind farms. Especially if augmented with hydro power they can be a just as reliable electricity source as nuclear power.
Nuclear tops out at about 90% so tough luck for the poor Britons that want to drink tea during the remaining 10% of the time.
This is extremely disingenious. A particular plant might have 90% availability, but collectively with a handful of plants hitting five-six nines should not be a problem. The crucial thing is that the performance of nuclear plants is uncorrelated: if one plant is not producing power, there are not many situations in which other plant aren't producing power either at the same time. On the other hand, with solar or wind, correlated performance is typical: winter tends to happen to the whole country at the same time, bad weather covers huge swaths of the country, etc. This might be worked around to some degree if your country is huge (like US), but if you're, say, Austria, your only option is nuclear or depending on the neighbors on the most crucial thing you need.
No it is not disingenuous! The point is that the standard of reliability that you require for renewable energy cannot be higher than the one you require for nuclear energy.
You say that a handful of nuclear plants can hit five nines of reliability. Sure, but then you must also consider a network of thousands of wind parks that can also hit five nines of reliability without breaking a sweat. Even assuming a high correlation in wind conditions.
You say that import is not an option because electricity is so critical. But then how come all the world's nuclear power is dependent on imports of uranium from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia? Not to mention oil and food imports.
Is wind power the perfect energy source? No. Is it better than what we have? YES.
It's not low that is the status quo. Wind and solar have a capacity factor of 20-40% why do you think you always need backup from coal, gas, oil or nuclear?
Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Regardless of whether solar cells become cheaper, it makes energy more expensive as a whole because it makes the energy system more complex and as many might have learned in physics, starting up something take more energy than when it's up and running. This is true for coal plants too and with wind and solar being highly fluctuating and with highly fluctuating demands on the backup sources.
The use of fossil fuel is increasing not decreasing more than wind and solar.
You can't make either windmills or solar cells without fossil fuel.
Wind and solar is only 1% of the worlds energy not projected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...
In other words, fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.