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Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
The US is the size of continental Europe and also has Canada and Mexico grid connections. If you put enough density of turbines and solar panels - chances that there won't be enough trough all of the areas are quite slim. By the time that there is peak in NY the sun is still shining in California. 6 months of the year you have very long days in northern Canada.
It is doable. Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada. Burning thermite seems energy-inefficient - and that's another huge capital cost since you make a specialized power plant.
Power should be produced near where it's consumed, reliably and consistently. Breeder reactors are the way to go IMO, or we could rush towards fusion. Just one set of infrastructure with 90% capacity factor and minimal transmission cost. It's not hard to make reactors, the US has the technical chops to fit a 300 MW PWR reactor on a submarine along with sonar, torpedoes, stealth all for a total cost of $2 Billion.
Maybe the solution is the for US to commission giant submarines with gigawatt reactors on them, where they can tap into underwater transmission cables that just barely reach out into international waters.
Wouldn't be the dumbest thing we've ever done to get around crippling regulations. Maybe.
I’ve joked before we should mass produce aircraft carriers.
Can solve energy and housing problems with one stone.
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Just get rid of the regulations! It's insane. In Australia, nuclear power is illegal - we're actually trying to buy US nuclear submarines because they're superior to conventional subs in range. But no, we can't have nuclear energy for civilians despite having by far the biggest uranium reserves on earth. Our geography is stable and technology is quite advanced. We have a research reactor. We should be a nuclear energy superpower, mining and enriching and building reactors.
Stalin blamed Soviet economic problems on 'wreckers', workers deliberately sabotaging machinery, undermining morale, giving false orders. Ironically the wrecking came from the top down, in incentives, laws and institutions that undermined performance. That's the problem the West faces - industry taking body blows from regulators on housing, energy, production and so on.
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Surely something like Texas would make more sense than California here? There's a lot of empty land in the South.
That would be better, but not significantly enough so to solve the underlying problem.
This is a bit old (2007), but the fundamental challenges and dynamics are still valid, and material sciences involved in transmission haven't change that much.
In a nutshell, at a relatively normal transmission line cost/load, you can stand to lose about 8% of generated per 1000 miles. (This is very rough- it can be notably better, or considerably worse.) That means you have to push more (to get what you need at the end), and you're paying for what is required to be generated, as opposed to what is consumed. This assumes away any disruptions to the transmission paths, such as any sort of natural disaster / malign actor effort to disrupt the transmission medium. (Hope you don't have any strategic rivals who can afford cyber-attacks / drones.)
It makes far, far more sense from just about any planning context other than ideology- whether financial or reliability or safety or resiliency to hostile interests- to just generate the power considerably closer to the consumer. Given that the overwhelming most important aspect of an electrical grid at scale is baseline power- the ability to meet the need you have as you need it- it doesn't really make sense to invest in mass-renewable, short or long distance, if you're just going to need a redundant power generation capability anyways.
Aren't the British trying to run a cable from Iceland for geothermal?
You are probably thinking of the Icelink proposal.
This was a proposal as opposed to a project, and more or less died in the later 2010s at the Feasibility study level. There are probably three main reasons for that. One, cost-benefit on a technical level, as Icelink was more of an environmental proposal for UK governments to boast green credentials than an actual way to most efficiently use green energy in industry (as you could just invest the energy consumption infrastructure in Iceland). Two, related to cost and benefit, was Brexit, on top of the internal budget disruption to the UK governmental also put the UK and Iceland on opposite sides of the EU single market wall at a time when UK and EU relations at the regulatory and policy level were, shall we say, uninterested in major investments to the UK benefit. Third was the point that any UK investment in Icelink would land in territories with significant risk of separating from the UK over the medium/long term, as the cables would either naturally land in Scotland- where the SNP was having a strong period and polling near-majorities in hypothetical separation referendums- or in Northern Ireland- which the post-Brexit EU policy was to have economically segregated from the rest of the UK economic-legal architecture. A major, UK-level investment which would provide EU baseload power to territories with significant political interests who would rather be a part of the EU than UK would be a territorial integrity risk.
So, don't expect it to go through.
Which is a shame, because when it is available at economically viable rates, geothermal is one of the 'better' green power systems because it meets the baseload power requirements of predictable, non-swingy power. The economic viability is dependent on geography that isn't necessarily where you want it, but that's actually why long-range transmission makes sense in that context because you can't simply build a closer geothermal plant, but geothermal is good baseload generation and if you do build it, you don't have to build duplicative generation capacity like with intermittant green sources.
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Meanwhile the Germans are planning to run a cable from Morocco for that sweet sweet solar power.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/britain-risks-losing-germany-16bn-155135780.html
Not really what your article shows, which doesn't actually indicate a German government role. Rather, it's a threat by the company that wants to be paid to build the project in order to pressure the UK to provide more money, with the threat to build to Germany instead. However, the article doesn't claim that Germany is interested in this, and the underlying context is that the company (XLinks) is in the capital/financing accumulation phase (trying to identify investor governments), of which the UK was the primary interested investor.
Xlinks garnered initial UK interest, in the 'UK is sending civil servants to study this in depth if it actually makes sense' sort, because it claimed the project would be profitable for it if it was guaranteed a solar energy cost floor (minimal price) of 48 pounds per MegaWatt Hour (GBP/MWh), when the UK cost is generally higher. The route was intended to be a shallow-water cable basically bypassing Spain to go direct to the UK, meaning it wasn't to enter the EU energy market (which would risk/compromise the viability of the project for the UK for multiple reasons).
But that's kind of where the project has stalled. It's unclear if the UK found other information indicating it's not viable, whether the costs are higher than initially advertised, or what. But implicitly the project is under negotiation. And this article isn't the Germans saying they want in, but rather the company involved threatening to go ask the Germans to see if they want to replace the UK as the recipient... but naturally if the UK isn't delivered to, it's not going to be a load-carrying investor, and as for the Germans...
Well, there are a couple problems for that. One being that it have to enter the European energy grid, unlike the sea transmission route to the UK, and the French have typically opposed solar transmission network proposals (such as from Spain) linking solar producers to their consumers... surely unrelated to France's own substantial electricity exports to Germany, and its desire to expand its nuclear energy exports to its European neighbors.
But there's also the point that the Xlinks Morocco project started being pushed in 2021, and the Ukraine War kicked off in 2022. Germany energy policy since has been about (re)building natural gas import capacity, as natural gas is not only critical for stable baseload power generation, but specifically as an input for many of Germany's industrial processes as a resoruce separate from the electricity. As a result, Germany's energy investment priority has been on scaling up its import capacity / storage for gas as it fights to keep as much industrial capacity as it can.
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