Environment & Energy

The unit of energy is the Joule, not the Watt. Yet, most claims about how fast solar and wind junk is spread across industrial parks carved out of wilderness, deliberately treat unreliable solar and wind as the equivalent of nuclear power plants, the most reliable energy producing devices on the planet.

Personally I oppose short lived crap that spews microplastics into the atmosphere, but that's just me.

This may come as a surprise, but the capacity utilization of wind and solar is seldom more than 30%. It's widely reported and generally accepted that sunlight is available for only a part of the 24 hour day, and the wind doesn't blow continuously. For the other 70% of the time, advocates for solar and wind have no problem with burning fossil fuels. They just couldn't give a shit about fossil fuels, because, in fact, the use of solar and wind depends on them.

Evidence:

Nuclear powered France:



Coal burning antinuke hell, Germany:



These are annualized figures (2023) available at Electricity Map

The current graphic, as of this writing, 11/07/2024 9 pm EST (US) is particularly illustrative:



In "percent talk" it appears that the climate gas intensity of Germany is 1106% higher than that of France, not that I expect the fossil fuel coddling apologists for the trillion dollar solar and wind hype to give a rat's ass about that fact.

As for China building 500% more transitory solar and wind junk, I'm sure that I assumed to be gullible and stupid enough to not understand the difference between a peak Watt and a Joule, but I'm no longer offended by this dishonest slight of hand, although I am disturbed to see what this dishonest rhetoric has done to the planet, leaving it in flames. For the record, in my scientific environmental reading, a prodigiously observed habit I've embraced for decades, I fully understand that in every LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) paper, the lifetime of infrastructure is included. This shows, again and again, that the climate intensity of solar and wind energy, not to mention the mass and land intensity, do not, and never will, match nuclear energy for cleanliness and sustainability. In my opinion, solar and wind, lipstick on the fossil fuel pig. They are not, and never were, about preventing the extreme global heating now burning the planet.

As for lifetime, again, always included in LCA calculations:

China's nuclear reactors will be serving humanity a the dawn of the 22nd century approaches, if not well into it with refurbishing, well over half a century after every wind turbine blade and every solar cell on this planet will have been landfill, some of it quite toxic, for half a century.

Thanks for taking my mind off the political tragedy, by the way. I'm pleased with myself for adjusting my ignore list here to point, once again, to the difference between a Watt and a Joule. I feel slightly, but not entirely, better. On some level its disturbing that this distinction, between the Watt and the Joule, which should be covered in high school, still gets by, but offering a correction is a distraction from a dire reality, the worst being the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, followed by the disgusting practices of the American electorate.

Nevertheless, it's tiresome now, so I'll quit it; this late in the game there's no point to trying to address dogma.

Have a nice evening.