fayfreethinkers.com

1) Claim: “With Solar, the max efficiency of converting photons to electrons is 33%”

Two points.
a) Not true: “Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) created a solar cell with a record 39.5% efficiency under 1-sun global illumination.”
https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2022/nr ... conditions.
Likely something around 50% will be possible. Again, not that it matters that much.
--A new solar panel has reached 47 percent efficiency in the lab and nearly 40 percent in the field.
--This panel exceeds typical panels by combining six kinds of collectors into one micro-thin surface.
--Researchers say the same tech could be fine-tuned to reach a full 50 percent efficiency
https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... fficiency/

b) Appeal to efficiency here is largely a red herring. A distraction. Thermal plants, such as coal or nuke are about 33% efficient. Current solar panels about 22%. Wind about 50%.
If you go to buy a truck, do you ask the salesperson the thermal efficiency of the ICE engine? Of course not. They wouldn't know and you don't care. You might care about the horsepower, so you ask that (which has nothing to do with efficiency). You don't ask if it happens to lose 75% or so of the power in the process (which it does), they just overbuild the engine to make up for that inefficiency so you get to the goal of having enough power to get the job done.
Same with renewables. You over build until you have enough power to cover your needs.
The 41 panels and 750 square feet of solar I put on my roof covers 105% of my needs. If my panels were 11% efficient instead of 22% efficient, it’d just need 1,500 square feet instead.
With wind and solar the fuel is free, nigh limitless and delivered to source for free with no emissions and no waste ash to clean up afterward. And you aren't burning a fuel that needs to be constantly mined, processed, delivered, burned, replaced, cleaned up afterward and then go do it all again.
When harvesting free wind and solar, what matters is cost per watt to build and cost per watt for production. And nothing can compete with renewables on that count. Which is why 95% of new energy capacity going in worldwide is now renewables.

2) Claim: “Wind power max conversion is approximately 60%.”

Yes, this is known as the Betz limit.
“The theoretical maximum efficiency of a turbine is ~59%, also known as the Betz Limit. Most turbines extract ~50% of the energy from the wind that passes through the rotor area.9”
http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet#
Doesn’t matter, wind is free. All you have to do is catch it as it blows by.

3) Claim: “100MW’s are needed to power 75k homes”

Right now we are installing offshore turbines that are 16MW. These have a capacity factor of about 60%. Meaning you can provide the net electricity needs for 75k homes with ten of these turbines. Larger ones are on the way.
The Vestas V236-15.0MW
The Vestas V236-15.0MW boosts wind energy production to around 80 GWh/year, enough to power around 20,000 European households and save more than 38,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing 25,000 passenger cars from the road annually.”
https://electrek.co/2021/02/10/vestas-g ... d-turbine/?

A Chinese company is building a colossal 16 MW offshore wind turbine
https://electrek.co/2021/10/08/a-chines ... d-turbine/

4) ”85 kWh battery pack weighs 1,200 lbs and requires 250 tons of earth to be mined to obtain components.”

[soon]

5) Claim: “To build a 100MW wind farm requires 30k tons of iron ore, 50k tons of concrete, and 900 tons of plastic.”

Let’s pretend that’s all true. That wind farm will payback the energy and carbon used to make it in about a year or less and make electricity for about 25 years. A single large turbine (14MW and above) can make as much electricity as burning over 1 million tons of coal.
From free wind. Afterward 85% of that turbine is easily recycled (and often came from recycled steel already). And now we have ways to recycle the fiberglass blades as well.
--
Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines
The work presented examines life cycle environmental impacts of two 2.0 MW wind turbines. Manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and end of life have been considered for both models and are compared using the ReCiPe 2008 impact assessment method. In addition, energy payback analysis was conducted based on the cumulative energy demand and the energy produced by the wind turbines over 20 years. Life cycle assessment revealed that environmental impacts are concentrated in the manufacturing stage, which accounts for 78% of impacts. The energy payback period for the two turbine models are found to be 5.2 and 6.4 months, respectively.”
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/ ... 014.062496?

6) Claim: “To build a 100MW solar farm requires 150% more materials than wind.”

That’s 1.5x as much material. Solar lasts about 1.5x as long as wind so this is a wash. What matters is, solar pays back the energy and carbon used to make it in 1-2 years, depending on location and whether they are trackers or not.
--
What is the energy payback for PV?
Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1).
With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that PV systems generate won’t be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources.”
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf

“In Australia, the energy payback period for a solar power system found to be under two years. This means a solar power system takes less than two years to generate enough energy to break even on the amount of energy taken to manufacture it.”
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/25/so ... per-short/

7) Claim: “The lifespan of renewable components is approximately 20 years.”

Average solar PV is currently 33 years. The DOE has a plan to make that 50 years at half the cost, this decade.
Turbines are actually designed to last about 25-30 years on purpose. They could make them last longer but after that period of time, the main pitch bearings are pretty worn and after 25-30 years the new tech is so vastly better and cheaper it makes sense to upgrade to the new technology rather than overhaul and refurbish. Like this:
"East of San Francisco, one of the country’s oldest wind farms has produced power for more than 30 years. There, almost 1,500 old turbines were taken down in recent years. Only 82 new ones were installed in their place, but they produce about the same amount of electricity."
Meaning, the turbines are 18x more powerful than the ones they are replacing. That's a lot.
And now we have ones that are 50x more powerful than that on the way.
Also note, thermal plants such as coal, gas and nuke also get regular expensive upgrades and refurbishment about every 20-30 years as well.

This 10 minute video by a wind engineer explains why it makes sense that turbines are designed to last 20-30 years on purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfquMx9h98M

8] Claim: “It costs approximately the same to build a single oil well vs a single wind turbine.”

It’s not clear why this would matter. It’s irrelevant if the goal is to stop adding 40 billion tons of carbon to the air each year when instead we can harvest clean renewables that generate electricity without emissions.
"Solar, wind and nuclear have ‘amazingly low’ carbon footprints, study finds"
Wind and solar are… equivalent to EROIs of 44:1 and 26:1.”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-wind- ... footprints?
Oil used to have an EROI of 44:1 but now that we’ve gotten most of the easy stuff, it has become much more energy intensive. While the renewables keep improving, the carbon stuff keeps getting worse.
--
The Downwards Spiral
In 1950, the EROI of global oil production was really high, at about 44:1 (meaning, for every unit of energy we put in, we were getting a whopping 44 out). Yet as the graph below from the new study illustrates, this value has undergone a shockingly steep decline.
By 2020, it reached around 8:1, and is projected to decline and plateau to around 6.7 from 2040 onwards.”
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/20/oil- ... cientists/?

9) A single oil well produces 10x times more energy per hour than a single windmill. (1 barrel = 1700 kWh).

Two points.
a) Mills grind grain. It would be useful if the author could at least learn the correct terminology. These are turbines. They make electricity.
b) Utility turbines vary from 1MW to 16MW. Oil is a wonderful energy dense product and we need it for many uses, which is why we should stop foolishly and needlessly burning it when harvesting renewables can to the job much better, with no emissions.
Using electricity to power an EV uses energy about 5x more effectively than burning petroleum. It’s also about 5x cheaper too.

10) “It costs less than 50 cents to store a barrel of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. But you need $200 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in one oil barrel.”
Apples to oranges. The energy in a barrel of oil comes from a product that is finite and a burned barrel of oil puts 950lbs of Co2 in the air.
Batteries are rechargeable and after their lifecycle the materials are entirely recyclable. The cost of storage (such as lithium) has declined by 97% in 30 years.
The cost of solar per module watt has declined by a factor of 260x in 35 years.
Wind has declined by 85% in the last decade.
While the energy return on investment for oil and carbon products just gets worse.

Many others taking swings at this Prager U video here:
"How to debunk popular PragerU video on "Whats wrong with Wind and Solar"?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/solar/comments ... _on_whats/

I think this is a transcript of the PragerU video.
---
Environmentalists think they've found [our energy solution] here on earth in the form of wind and solar power.
They think all the energy we need can be supplied by building enough wind and solar farms; and enough batteries.”
Consider some simple physics realities that aren't being talked about.
All sources of energy have limits that can't be exceeded. The maximum rate at which the sun's photons can be converted to electrons is about 33%.

Our best solar technology is at 26% efficiency. For wind, the maximum capture is 60%. Our best machines are at 45%.

So, we're pretty close to wind and solar limits. Despite PR claims about big gains coming, there just aren't any possible. And wind and solar only work when the wind blows and the sun shines. But we need energy all the time. The solution we're told is to use batteries. Again, physics and chemistry make this very hard to do.

Consider the world's biggest battery factory, the one Tesla built in Nevada. It would take 500 years for that factory to make enough batteries to store just one day's worth of America's electricity needs. This helps explain why wind and solar currently still supply less than 3% of the world's energy, after 20 years and billions of dollars in subsidies.

Putting aside the economics, if your motive is to protect the environment, you might want to rethink wind, solar, and batteries because, like all machines, they're built from nonrenewable materials.

Consider some sobering numbers:

A single electric-car battery weighs about half a ton. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 250 tons of earth somewhere on the planet.

Building a single 100 Megawatt wind farm, which can power 75,000 homes requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades. To get the same power from solar, the amount of cement, steel, and glass needed is 150% greater.

Then there are the other minerals needed, including elements known as rare earth metals. With current plans, the world will need an incredible 200 to 2,000 percent increase in mining for elements such as cobalt, lithium, and dysprosium, to name just a few.

Where's all this stuff going to come from? Massive new mining operations. Almost none of it in America, some imported from places hostile to America, and some in places we all want to protect.

Australia's Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global "gold" rush for energy materials will take miners into "…remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven't yet been disturbed."

And who is doing the mining? Let's just say that they're not all going to be union workers with union protections.

Amnesty International paints a disturbing picture: "The… marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks."

And then the mining itself requires massive amounts of conventional energy, as do the energy-intensive industrial processes needed to refine the materials and then build the wind, solar, and battery hardware.

Then there's the waste. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries have a relatively short life; about twenty years. Conventional energy machines, like gas turbines, last twice as long.

With current plans, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that by 2050, the disposal of worn-out solar panels will constitute over double the tonnage of all of today's global plastic waste. Worn-out wind turbines and batteries will add millions of tons more waste. It will be a whole new environmental challenge.

Before we launch history's biggest increase in mining, dig up millions of acres in pristine areas, encourage childhood labor, and create epic waste problems, we might want to reconsider our almost inexhaustible supply of hydrocarbons—the fuels that make our marvelous modern world possible.

And technology is making it easier to acquire and cleaner to use them every day.

The following comparisons are typical—and instructive:

It costs about the same to drill one oil well as it does to build one giant wind turbine. And while that turbine generates the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil per hour, the oil rig produces 10 barrels per hour. It costs less than 50 cents to store a barrel of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. But you need $200 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in one oil barrel.

Next time someone tells you that wind, solar and batteries are the magical solution for all our energy needs ask them if they have an idea of the cost... to the environment.

A friend, Leo Bach, put this rebuttal together.

MY REBUTTAL OF ANTI-RENEWABLE ENERGY CLAIMS
Complaints/Retorts
1. Renewable efficiency is limited and systems are expensive:
All generation efficiencies and systems are limited and costly. What matters is life cycle $/MWh, g CO2/kWh, and learning rate… all of which favor RE.

2. We need energy all the time:
Solar primary by day and wind primary by night are natural complements that overlay and overlap to both load follow and peak match. Renewables are reliable and perpetual, especially blended with existing hydropower, geothermal, arbitrage, storage, demand response control, distributed energy resources, plus enhanced efficiency and conservation.

3. Battery can’t store one day of US kWh use:
It is not supposed to. Grid battery is not primarily for UPS type backup. It is a peak demand limiting system wherein 1 GW of battery offsets the requirement for 1 GW of generation. In doing so, battery converts low value off-peak wasted capacity and energy into high value on-peak capacity and energy. It also averts constraint payments to standby generation.
Additionally, US EV and rooftop PV battery will eventually reach an amalgamated 1 TW. As smart grid devices; that approaches the total operating capacity of the entire US grid. Battery will flatten peak and shift loads to match renewable power on a day-ahead forecast basis.

4. Renewable systems are made from non-renewable materials and fossil energy:
This is fully accounted for in life-cycle cost. Cost reflects embodied resources. All cost is comparative. RE lifecycle cost is less. Once built, the operation of RE continually repays its embodied resources. Fossil and nuclear are constantly consuming more resources and producing more pollution.
Additionally, all RE systems can and are being recycled. Fuel based consumption cannot be recycled.

5. Renewables require mining:
Compared to what?

6. Renewables destroy pristine forests:
Compared to what?

7.Renewables require child labor:
They do not; and it is illegal to import products of forced, slave, or child labor production.

8. Renewables require millions of acres:
The petroleum enterprise: exploration, drilling, field/offshore/downhole services, 50 hp jack pumps, pipelines, refineries and their electrical substations and gas line connections, tanker-ships/trucks/trains, delivery, distribution, gas stations, administration, pollution and second/third/fourth order impacts… cover 1.3% of the world and consume 22% of industrial sector energy.
On the other hand, we could power the entire earth with current technology renewables using 1.4 million sq km of land and 488 thousand sq km of ocean, plus some rooftop space adding about 8% to the total...wherein the non-rooftop RE monopolize less than 20% of the area they are sited on. That is a net RE area of 166,000 sq km. The basic assertion of millions of acres is bogus. 1 sq mile is 640 acres or 259 hectares or 2.6 sq km

9. RE and battery have short lives:
That is incorporated into life cycle comparisons that all favor RE and battery over the legacy power and infrastructure they replace. Furthermore, hardening the durability of RE systems past their economic obsolescence is nonsensical. All systems should be replaced at the optimum life extent of their use when the replacement cost lowers the overall project lifetime cost. Salvage value/recycling is part of that life cycle accounting.

10. Renewables can’t power the world:
There are no holistic and coherent plans for nuclear power, fossil fuel power, or any non-RE technology that meets the mission for decarbonizing society by 2050 while providing reliable power to a growing world prosperity.
There are such holistic and coherent plans for RE which are vetted, practical, affordable, viable, and sustainable.

Anti-wind guy spammed a bunch of links. My response.
---
John Neddy Needs
Neddy burps up all the standard pedestrian canards, so let's debunk them all. I'm number them in case he wants to defend any of his junk.

1) "Wind turbine fires"

Actually, there are about 425,000 utility scale wind turbines in operation. The number that have collapsed or caught fire is under 20 globally. The rate of catastrophic failure of a utility scale wind turbine is vanishingly small and impact nothing. The US has 150 car fires today, and we still have cars.

2) Claim: "Bird-Chomping Wind Power"

Wind power saves birds.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/want-to-sav ... rms-18274/?

3) Claim: "The Taxpayer-Funded,"

That's your dirty gas, coal an oil. The new wind power going in now wins with no subsidy.
"Conservative estimates put U.S. direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion per year; with 20 percent currently allocated to coal and 80 percent to natural gas and crude oil."
That's just direct Federal subsidies.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-s ... etal-costs?

4) Claim: "Wind turbines are neither clean nor green"

"How Green is Wind Power?
“…amortizing the carbon cost over the decades-long lifespan of the equipment, wind power has a carbon footprint 99% less than coal-fired power plants, 98% less than natural gas..."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christophe ... enewables/?

5) Claim: "and they provide zero global energy"

Wind and solar alone reached 10.5% last year, surpassing nuclear.
Worldwide, wind and solar pass nuclear.
https://ember-climate.org/insights/rese ... view-2022/

6) Claim: "Report Tallies Up The Carbon Cost Of Renewables"

Way less than all the competition. Boring, already covered.

7) Claim: "Wind Farms Fail To Deliver On Energy Promises"

Denier blog propaganda link, not worthy of time.
Installed wind has quadrupled in 10 years, and now it is really accelerating.

8] "When (If Ever) Will Wind Turbines Become Carbon-Neutral?"

That takes about 6-8 months.
"…after operating for five to eight months, the average wind turbine will have offset the energy expended during its manufacturing.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 093317.htm

9) "Landfill begins burying non-recyclable Wind Turbine Blades"

We could land fill them all or set them on fire and wind would still be 100x better, and cleaner, than coal. And now they're recycled anyway.
"Vestas announced its plans for zero-waste turbines. 14k wind turbine blades will be decommissioned in Europe next 5 years. The recycling of these old blades is a top priority for the wind industry."
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/news/bl ... -industry/?

10) "Germany Has No Plan to Recycle Wind Turbines"

Reality: "Germany Installs World's First Recyclable Wind Turbine Blade In Offshore Windfarm"
https://www.iflscience.com/germany-inst ... farm-64755

John Neddy Needs 11) "Solar Panel Waste: A Disposal Problem"

Rightwing Canadian clickbait blog. Garbage source. What Canada is actually doing, recycling panels.
"Canada: Solar X revolutionizes the solar industry in Canada with the launch of its new solar panel reuse + recycle program"
https://pvbuzz.com/solar-x-launch-solar ... e-program/?

12) "Solar Panels Generate 300 Times More Toxic Waste Than Nuclear Reactors"

Nuke waste stays toxic of thousands of years. Solar has a future, nuclear does not. The world will add more nameplate capacity of solar in the next six months than nuclear has accomplished in the last 25 years.
By 2030 we'll be adding 1,000 GW of solar per year. After 60 years of trying nuclear has accomplished 440GW. Nuclear portion of generation has almost been cut in half in 20 years.

13) "Wind Industry Claims That Wind Power’s Both Reliable & Cheap"

Wind and solar are easily the least expensive major sources (per MWH) of electrical energy in the USA. They are also the most reliable, each with a 98 percent uptime, far better than fossil fuels, and beats nuclear too.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/el ... ration.pdf?
Cheap? I'd call 2 cents cheap.
Wind Is the Cheapest Sources of Electricity & It's Getting Cheaper
Comprehensive survey of the wind industry shows wind energy is routinely purchased in bulk for just 2 cents per kWh —and turbines are only getting cheaper, bigger, and better
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/pl ... g-cheaper/?
Beat 2 cents. Only solar can do that.

There you go, 13 links spammed all roasted. Thanks for the softballs, right across the plate.
Oh shoot, did I miss one?

14) "What's Wrong with Wind and Solar? Pragar University "

I actually wrote a ten point rebuttal to this one from Fake University Prager.
It's posted here:
viewtopic.php?p=27525#p27525
I understand there is no chance of you reading it.
Surprise me.
Now I'm bored.
Let me know if you think I missed one that is a good one. Because none of these 14 are.

Regarding claims about thorium being the way of the future.
From my friend Andre.
---
This is Kirk Sorensen's second presentation at TEDx on the same subject (the first one was in 2011), and it is just as great as the first one. Unfortunately he has been wasting his time (and ours) preaching for the wrong cause for many years now, he should have been hired by some wind turbine or solar panel manufacturer years ago instead. Thorium-cycle nuclear has been (for the last 60 years), is (zero investment today in most countries) and will always be a dead-end technology, contrarily to what Kirk Sorensen (who is not a nuclear reactor engineer nor a nuclear science researcher) has been preaching all this time.
The basic problem is that despite the brilliant arguments that KS makes when comparing LFTR technology and the thorium cycle to traditional PWR uranium-cycle reactors, hard facts show that thorium is not a viable solution for the nuclear industry.
Even assuming a thorium reactor could be built that is perfectly safe (an assumption that can clearly be disputed), hard math and facts show that a thorium reactor fleet would take centuries to be deployed. The reason is summarized in two words: doubling time (or Td). This is the time it would take for a TMSR to breed enough U-233 to fuel another identical TMSR. And the answer is, in the best of cases, 52 years (in the worst case, 200 years). Remember, first, that U-233 does not exist in nature, it must be created in a breeder reactor in the first place, by breeding thorium, then processing the spent thorium to separate and remove the U-233. Second, because thorium is not fissile although it is fertile, a TMSR requires a certain quantity of U-233 to get a critical reaction started. Check here for the math: https://indico.cern.ch/event/222140/ses ... ThEC13.pdf

(that's from CERN so I assume these guys know what they are talking about).
Conveniently the guys from the Thorium Alliance always forget to mention the issue of doubling time in ALL their interviews, presentations and videos...
The US is the only country in the world that has any significant reserves of U-233 (estimated 2 metric tons, the result of breeding thorium in traditional uranium-cycle reactors during the Cold War) and even so, these reserves would only be enough to get at most a couple of medium-sized (<500MW) reactors started in the first place. Clearly not a solution for the energy/global warming crisis and the simple reason why no country in the world has ever undertaken further work on thorium reactors in the last 50 years (beyond small-scale experimental work).
Indeed the DOE has a small amount of U-233 that was bred in various military and civilian uranium-cycle nuclear reactors from thorium. The spent thorium was then removed from these reactors and the U-233 was separated (an extremely expensive, laborious and dangerous process). Any company wanting to develop a thorium-cycle reactor (that as I explained above, requires an initial load of fissile U-233) would have to apply to the DOE to have access to this U-233 stash. But then that's it. There is not enough U-233 in the US to launch a nationwide deployment of thorium-based reactors and the doubling time is too long to make such a deployment likely.
Now, the LFTR crowd has a ready made answer when one suggests that the scarcity of U-233 is a major impediment to the large-scale deployment of thorium-cycle reactors: they'll explain in a casual way that they can just as well use plutonium (Pu) instead of U-233, and the DOE has plenty of Pu in storage from the decommissioning of nuclear warheads.
Now, imagine the situation where Kirk Sorensen goes to the DOE and asks for access to their plutonium stash.
DOE - "OK, how much plutonium do you need? 50 grams enough?"
KS - "No, actually I need around 100kg for a start, to see if we can make our reactor work, and many tons later if all goes well."
DOE - "...when pigs fly and hell freezes over, son..."
Just as a reminder, 50 grams of plutonium is enough to wipe out the population of a mid-size town if weaponized, and 100kg is enough to build at least half a dozen atomic bombs - and not the smallest ones at that. So the LFTR crowd is never going to get their hands on enough plutonium to even build and test their first prototype of a mixed thorium-plutonium cycle reactor which they don't even know if it could work at all. Exactly the same scenario applies to U-235, btw.
Again, these are facts that any investor doing his homework will have researched when considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build an initial LFTR prototype.
The reason these basic facts are never mentioned in a single video from the thorium crowd is rather obvious: hard facts and a quick reality check vastly undermine their credibility. --Andre