Renewable Energy ''Simply WON'T WORK'': Top Google Engineers !

Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO₂ emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible. 

Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren't guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or "technology" of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.

The project ''RE'' (Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal)  was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum. The two men write:

''At the start of RE we had high hopes but found that renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.''

One should note that Koningstein and Fork aren't alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn't feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn't even vaguely plausible.

Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage, etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms - and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.


In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive - which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly).


That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go - none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.


The Way I See It......nobody's up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork - and many others - remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real.
Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that ''we must move not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions'' (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO₂ out of the air by such means as planting forests). So, I ask these Greenie idiots, how is this to be done especially when the BioMass of the planet is lapping up this increased CO2 with increased growth.?  Dead Silence !

UPDATE:  The wind industry in Australia is in full-scale panic because the Senate’s cross-benchers (who hold the balance of power in the Upper House) have won Coalition support for their Inquiry into the great wind power fraud: which will turn a (long-overdue) blowtorch on the biggest rort in Australian history.

In Canada: 
Professor Ross McKitrick, from Ontario, has been slamming the great wind power fraud for years now: his analysis is detailed, pointed and cuts across the lies and half-truths peddled by the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers. Ross points to the glaringly obvious when he says that  “wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies”  Ross and fellow energy market expert, Tom Adams put together a detailed study that shows how the true and hidden costs of wind power – including the massive subsidies upon which the whole stinking rort depends – are sending Ontario’s power prices through the roof. No surprises there, as many other countries who blindly invested in these horrible machines have found out as well.