Bishop Hill Google: renewables "simply won't work"
Nov 21, 2014 Energy: solar Energy: wind Via The Register we learn that some of Google's top engineers have been tasked with making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We also learn that they have given up.
At the start...we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope ...
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
There's lots of kowtowing to Gaia in the article ("scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger"), but on renewables they seem to have done their homework.
(H/T El Reg)
Reader Comments (51)
This story was also reported by the (presumably pro-renewables) GreenTechMedia a couple of days ago.
Well that IS a surprise!
Seriously Ed Davey and the other "experts" in DECC need to be forced to read this.
And draw the inescapable conclusions.
They cite James Hansen as an authority.
A 2008 paper by James Hansen [PDF], former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change, showed the true gravity of the situation.
Perhaps Google should have two engineers study climate modeling.
This is also highly relevant;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/21/renewable-energy-solar-and-wind-power-capital-costs-and-effectiveness-compared/
Just how much more evidence does DECC need?
There really is no cure for "stupid".
The sad thing is this quote from the original
"Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger."
When you click on the reference link they provide, it is just to the `Summary for Policy makers`of the latest IPCC report. A less than reliable source, I would have thought.
Tony.
They've given up because they can't see how any new technology will displace the power plants that are already built - the capital having been spent.
As such, according to the IPCC, the emissions will definitely continue beyond the point of no return. Renewables or any other new power plants won't save the world, therefore.
Presumably, Google will now research floating cities or, more in keeping with Bond villains, weather control.
Interesting but the nuke industry death stats are a thoroughly iconic triumph of "dishonest activists" over arithmetic.
We gave up renewables in the past for more efficient fossil fuels, however environmentalists, Green politicians and climate "scientists" want to go back to a pre-industrial medieval society.
In this society Green-thinking people will be more equal (as per Orwell's Animal Farm) than the rest of us plebians.
We have wasted an enormous amount of money with the daft green experiment, money than could have lifted people out of poverty, warmed people in cold weather and improved our NHS!
I call this criminal!
Ivanpah, fah.
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Heh, Google saw the future in the flights of birds.
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People like those in google have been conned by a view that has become prevalent in our society that you can "R&D your way through problems". More than a decade ago I discovered a paper "Bricolage versus Breakthrough" which fundamentally changed my view as it showed that this R&D led approach had been a cataclysmic disaster in renewables. It doesn't work.
But no one listened, I lobbied government, etc. but as one expects, they either ignored the sceptic or kept telling me that it was going to be fantastic - wind machines would be cheaper than fossil fuels, wave machines would fill the seas somehow free reliable energy would be everywhere and everyone would be delighted. And until I got bored of telling them, I kept saying that a product in an energy market was fundamentally different in the way the design process works to the "google like" markets where you can innovate your way out of problems.
It's too complex to explain, but basically the focus has to be on cost and reliability not high-tech.
The basic law of enerconics is that if a form of generation costs more than the market price for energy, then it is highly likely that it takes more energy in than it gives out.
So, I'm reasonably certain, that when the final accounting is done, that we will find more energy went into selling, manufacturing, transporting, erecting, maintaining, these bird-mincers than ever came out.
One small victory over big greedy wind and Government bureaucrats in north Devon
As if to prove the point:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-30151276
Nuclear has always been the way to go; it was the success of the sandal wearing soap dodgers who manged to conflate nuclear power with nuclear missiles and caused their current "CO2 problem".
There have been nuclear submarines and nuclear ships running reactors for years in the US & Royal Navies. Where are the myriad of accidents, cancers, dead people, etc, that the eco-types forecast would happen? France has run reactors for years without incident although the current shower of buffoons want to shut them down.
Ivanpah : the $539m grant that Google/NRG asked for 2 weeks ago to pay an installment of the DEA backed loan they got for the Ivanpah thermal solar plant, cos it's not working as well as predicted so they don't have the cash now ...and the $660m tax breaks haven't kicked in yet. ..is not mentioned in that article I see.
(and it fries a few birds who get trapped in the rays)
Hydrogen as wind/solar batteries ?
- However the talk is now that with subsidy farms you could split water to make hydrogen fuel .."so it's a kind of battery system",
...but anyone know what the losses are by the time you have got into a car and used it ?
Seems like a lot of these IT types cling to the idea that Moore's Law ought to apply to things like solar panels, windmills and chemical batteries that are in fact fairly mature technologies unlikely to see rapid improvements.
Well, there's always nuclear.
Fred Hoyle was of the opinion that there was so much uranium kicking around that we'd never burn it out during the entire life of the planet (please get ian Stewart to say 'planet' at this point) and with everyone (i.e. everyone) on a western 125 kWh/day consumption. He deemed it renewable.
So skeptics are proven right once again: Renewable energy is a failure.
It is time to cut losses, especially since the losses are nearly all borne b y the tax payers of the US and Europe.
That Google engineeers toss in a few non-sequitors defending the cliamte apocalypse is to make the reality palatable to the obsessed.
Why would a company the size of google spend so much time and
money on a problem that in all probability, does not exist.
Where is the research into whether or not there is a problem.
The moment I see "OceanAcidification" mentioned, I lose interet
in whatever I am reading.
What a tragic waste of money and resourses which could have been
so worthwhile if only they had independently confimed that there was
a problem.
Google had what was afaics a really diverse ecosystem of individual and group pet projects and some of them they fed and watered since value was perceived ... They have also quite ruthlessly shut down what must now be dozens of those same projects and products when the value was gone or the functionality eclipsed.
That they tippy-toe around calling it as it actually is is neither here nor there. The arithmetic does not work but - we mustn't I suspect rub Mr. & Mrs Schmidt's noses in it. Probably some "do as I say and not as I do" in there somewhere too -> something that Eric and Wendy appear to excel at.
And here at MS&T we just closed our coal-fired power plant and expect to save some $1 million a year plus (which will pay off the loan) as we have moved to ground source heating on a large scale. (http://bittooth.blogspot.com/2014/11/tech-talk-geothermal-plant-opens.html). But somehow that didn't make much splash in the media.
wow there are some pie charts as high as wedding cakes in the article.
I wrote this on my blog in 2011 (edited slightly):
The Google crowd are just left wing Californian liberals who fell into the trap of thinking that wanting it to be true makes it so.
As a couple of people above said, they imagined that just because there was exponential improvement in productivity in their industry, every other industry was the same. Well, old industries like steelmaking are never going to get exponential growth in productivity, as anyone with a lick of common sense could have told them. The same goes for wind power and solar - as their researchers belatedly found out, the physics are against them.
And then there's ... physics?
Definitely at least two cheers for Google. They did much of it with their own money, I think. And independently rediscovered the received wisdom (which is pretty g.damn praiseworthy in these days of 'climate science').
O.K. They could have hired almost anyone on this blog to tell them that for much less, but hey, there's nothing wrong with questioning received wisdom.
The received wisdom is that sometimes the wind doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun goes down at night. Not infrequently, the two coincide. And the energy cannot be stored economically in most places at most times. Google want affordable energy to run their servers 24/7/365 and also want to have money left over for something else. Human beings want affordable energy to run their computers/hot-showers 24/7/365 and also want to have money left over for something else.
Doubtless somebody will come up with an expensive model that says this is not correct.
But, on this occasion at least, reality seems to be gaining the upper hand.
michael hart, I would be a lot more forgiving if they didn't manipulate their search engines to downgrade sceptics and upgrade believers. And that's not the only example.
For years, Anthony Watts' site, which is the biggest by far of sceptic sites (or any other site about climate), appeared well down in their search results on climate change.
For years, when I typed "Andrew Bolt" into google, the first thing that came up was accusations that he is a racist. Bolt is the most popular blogger in Australia, and writes on dozens of topics every week. He was involved in a controversial court case about privileged people with a smidgin of Aboriginal heritage claiming the grants and awards reserved for indigenous people. And every time I typed in Andrew Bolt, the top find was "Andrew Bolt racist."
These things are not accidents.
"Although the electricity from a giant coal plant is physically indistinguishable from the electricity from a rooftop solar panel"
O.K. So we can connect CPUs to 240V AC. All your millions of power supplies are a waste of money.
Do you want to rephrase that. guys?
johanna:
Money is rank. It stinks.
These guys are confusing. At times, they claim that humanity is causing "catastrophic" climate change. At other times, they claim that "catastrophic" is a denier word used to undermine and dismiss the climate change caused by humanity.
Could the believers lurking around here please tell us which it is and why? Is it catastrophic or not?
Perhaps Google just added up the requirements* of its server farms and realised that renewables wouldn't cut it...
*about 300MW
Brute,
Great questions. It is not uncommon in my experience to have the climate obsessed deny (ahem) that anyone ever said there was a climate catastrophe. Then I quote Hansen, Gore, Romm, the Prez, etc. and then they typically either change the subject or call me a denier.
Stop Press......Small bog dog from Lincolnshire several years ahead of Googles top engineers.
Brute, you are suffering from contrarian thinking that is easily cured with a bit of self-sealing.
When they [consensualists] claim it, humanity is causing "catastrophic" climate change. When you claim it, "catastrophic" is a denier word used to undermine and dismiss the climate change caused by humanity.
Damn
The team have reached some of the same conclusions I have recently reached and maybe gone further. To get everyone to quickly move to renewables, this new technology that would have to be a lot cheaper than coal or gas, as well as dispatchable. They looked at a method of energy generation that could deliver electrical power on demand to the consumer at $0.09/kWh to $0.20/kWh. Furthermore, it would have to be a lot lower than the $0.04/kWh to $0.06/kWh generation cost in the USA. So much lower that even if the capital costs of existing coal and gas-fired power stations were written off, they could not compete against this new source with all its capital, infrastructure, maintenance and fuel costs.
What is needed is a power generation unit that can produce at least 50kW, is the size, weight and cost of a washing machine, needs zero maintenance, runs on tap water and just produces steam or oxygen as a waste product. For cars, it would be useful if the device could also better 2mpg of water, or it might be a little impractical.
Publicly declaring that renewables don't make sense?
No wonder the EU wants Google broken up.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/european-parliament-break-up-of-google
But they may not be deliberate, Johanna.
Without direct evidence, that is difficult to prove. The internet is filled with people who think Google didn't rank them "fairly", whatever that may mean. A subset of previously popular sites have used methods that Google considered as being too close to spam (BMW and Sears in the US are good examples). Some of those have since corrected their honest mistakes or had their come-uppance. As Google has improved at rejecting spammy sites, WUWT are still with us.
The bigger issue might be that Google is just supplying people with what Google thinks they want to see, even if it is horribly wrong. Finding a good search result is not intrinsically any easier than finding a good book in a library or finding a good pair of shoes: It can sometimes be surprisingly difficult, even when you know precisely what you are looking for and when you know that the site exists. In the past this has, very rarely, happened to my searches for WUWT (I was too lazy to bookmark). I'm not saying that 'negative SEO' doesn't exist, but that it may not be due to Google and may affect your search results more than mine.
Do you think a company that owns a huge solar plant won't fiddle with its search engine results on global warming?
On balance, yes, Shub. It seems too difficult to do without someone (an employee, probably) finding out. But there would likely also have to be hundreds of other sites blocked. WUWT isn't really such a big fish in the grand scheme of things, and certainly wasn't and isn't blocked most of the time.
That solar plant doesn't bring in $tens of billions in revenue. If they lose the trust of people searching with their engine, then they have nothing. I don't think they would take that risk for so little gain (or, more likely, a loss without subsidies). But I'll admit I have previously wondered at where the line is drawn and come to improbable conclusions.
I think watching videos of the inestimable Matt Cutts (their head of 'spam police') also helped persuade me of the basic honesty of the algorithm. Yes I could be wrong, and I have a streak of natural gullibility, but I'm not one for conspiracy theory about this.
From the horses mouth - nor are they IT types, nor do IT types believe Moores Law to be a general law.
It took them 10 years to figure out what a reasonably competent (Mechanical) Engineering graduate could work out from basic principles; on 2 sheets of A4 paper, in half an hour.
stewgreen:
Re question about hydrogen as energy store for renewable...fantasy. Comes up every few months when some warmist works out it 'burns' to water vapour.
Firstly commercial hydrolysis is about 80% efficient, but the yield based on electricity can be boosted by the application of external heat to 93-95%. (Heat supplying 20% to bring total energy to 120 units). Conducted under high pressure in potassium hydroxide solution as a continuous process. Despite this hydrogen is usually made by the breakdown of methane, as less costly.
Low pressure bench top type hydrolysis is at best 60% efficient, and if intermittent more like 45%. This is the type they are 'thinking' about. Even at 60% the economics are bloody awful.
There remains the slight difficulty of storing and handling hydrogen. Burning it in air generates nitrogen oxides. As a replacement in internal combustion engines it still gives nitric oxides and has an octane rating around 66, so less efficient engine. Used as a fuel with oxygen in an electrochemical cell can be very efficient (60-90%), depending on type. Obviously double your cost of handling reactants, and not many vehicles work well with a 10 ton power generator.
There is the small? problem of storage as hydrogen is notorious for leaking, even passing through some metals.
Nov 21, 2014 at 8:16 PM | johanna
what sites did come up for bolt then? They aren't going to fiddle the results, ie "climate change anthony" has WUWT at the top without a strong reference to it in that search. Why would they anyway? it doesn't help to produce the billions in revenue that they do.
Whilst burning hydrogen mauy be clean, how does a hydrogen powered car save the planet, if GHG theory is correct? Burning hydrogen produces water so instead of cars emitting CO2, cars will be emitting water vapour. There are an awful lot of cars, so that will be an awful lot of water vapour, especially in urban areas leading to increased humidy and UHI.
Perhaps on a per mole basis, water vapour has less forcing compared to CO2, but surely if one is concerned about GHGs, hydrogen fueled cars whilst may be better than fossil fueled, still does not solve the perceived problem.
"But they may not be deliberate, Johanna.
Without direct evidence, that is difficult to prove. The internet is filled with people who think Google didn't rank them "fairly", whatever that may mean."
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Michael, as you are not an Aussie I completely get what you are saying.
But, Andrew Bolt is an avowed enemy of CAGW and a range of other fashionable causes. He (like Watts) is also the most popular blogger in his demographic.
It is true that the court case involving Bolt and the indigenous privilege lobby was big news at the time. But, two years later, after countless posts on other subjects and getting his own TV show, when I typed his name into google, the first thing that came up was "Andrew Bolt racist."
It's no accident.
Nov 22, 2014 at 12:58 PM | johanna
It is an accident though. I don't see that obviously in Google. What did the other search engines bring back at the top? You might want to use another anyway if you not a fan of Google, they all do the same thing.
Google search results are an accident? Who knew?
No doubt that is the secret of Google's success.
Delingpole's take : SO USELESS THAT EVEN GREENIE GOOGLE GAVE UP ON IT
The thing which constantly exercises me is this:
Us plebs out here in Realityland have known this all along - just how many expensive and time-consuming 'investigations' will it take before the Great and Good (huh..!) of Westminster, Brussels and Washington realise that they've been comprehensively 'had'..?
The kowtow to the consensus on so-called cliamte change should remind people that so-called renewable energy was once a grand consensus as well.