European progress on renewables

[excoriator]

Some interesting data here on how Europe is doing on meeting its 2020 target.

www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/03/five-charts-showing-the-eus-surprising-progress-on-renewable-energy/

Quite encouraging really, as is this, from the same site:

www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/03/daily-briefing-global-carbon-emissions-stall-in-2014/

We can do it if we have the will, despite constant predictions of failure from the naysayers in the denialist camp.

[marchesarosa]

From your link, which obviously you have not read, exco!

40 per cent of Europe's so-called "renewables" is wood. "Much of the wood goes towards heating". This is by no means "clean" energy.










Don't bother to explain to us how the CO2 and pollution from burning wood don't count as "anthropogenic emissions", exco. It's just another of the slippery tricks Greens resort to when they need to.

I live in a street where people have added wood burning stoves to their heating paraphernalia since gas became so expensive. The stink is sometimes appalling. The smoke and fumes come into my house through open windows. What happened to the Clean Air legislation?




The percentage of supposedly "clean" and "renewable" wood burning GLOBALLY is even greater than 40% of the total. Much of Africa and Asia depend upon the burning of "clean", "renewable" wood and dung, indoors for cooking where it is an even greater health hazard than outside.

Greens have to include wood and dung burning in the "renewables" total to present the rosy picture they are spinning to the usual gang of the incredulous.

[excoriator]

Nothing slippery about recycling plant food March.

I can see why you are so upset though. It must be irritating to see how your prophecies of failure are being so thoroughly trashed by events.

[marchesarosa]

USA solar energy employs 174,000 people to produce 0.23% of the Electricity! And gullible little exco BOASTS about it! What about the same number producing the 39% of the USA's electricity from coal?


Tee hee!

Who's the prat? "Productivity doesn't matter", declares exco! "Wood and dung burning is clean energy" , declares our resident little clown. "The world is on track for a Green future", he prattles.






You rely too much on Green propaganda blogs, self-serving press releases and fluff pieces from the "Renewable Energy" industry, exco. The audience here are a bit more savvy than you are.

How much of that "wood burning clean energy" comes from clear cutting American forests to fire up Drax, little man?

[marchesarosa]

Also from the link you provided, exco

I am troubled by the huge amount of wood burning in Europe including a big jump in wood burning for electricity. I have read elsewhere that deforestation is a major contributor to global warming and have read how Europeans are chopping down southern U.S. forests for wood chips for European power plants. This appears to me to be a bogus game Europeans are playing, just like their decrepit EU Emissions Trading System where the rights to destroy life on our planet are sold very cheaply. Who's Europe trying to kid?

[excoriator]

Presumably the result of trawling for a half-witted comment from someone as ill-informed as yourself.

Forests are replanted as they are cut down. No company is going to simply deforest an area and walk away from it when replanting will give them a sustainable cash cow as carbon dioxide is converted back into trees.

A little scepticism applied to your own claims would not go amiss.

[loop]

Meanwhile the pundits believe oil may plunge to $20 US a barrel.

www.thestar.com/business/economy/2015/03/12/us-running-out-of-room-to-store-crude.html

The U.S. has so much crude that it is running out of places to put it, and that could drive oil and gasoline prices even lower in the coming months.
For the past seven weeks, the United States has been producing and importing an average of 1 million more barrels of oil every day than it is consuming. That extra crude is flowing into storage tanks, especially at the country’s main trading hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, pushing U.S. supplies to their highest point in at least 80 years, the Energy Department reported last month.
If this keeps up, storage tanks could approach their operational limits, known in the industry as “tank tops,” by mid-April and send the price of crude — and probably gasoline, too — plummeting.
“The fact of the matter is we are running out of storage capacity in the U.S.,” Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citibank, said at a recent symposium at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Morse has suggested oil could fall all the way to $20 (U.S.) a barrel from the current $50. At that rock-bottom price, oil companies, faced with mounting losses, would stop pumping oil until the glut eased. Gasoline prices would fall along with crude, though lower refinery production, because of seasonal factors and unexpected outages, could prevent a sharp decline.
The national average price of gasoline is $2.44 (U.S.) a gallon. That’s $1.02 cheaper than last year at this time, but up 37 cents over the past month.
Other analysts agree that crude is poised to fall sharply — if not all the way to $20 — because it continues to flood into storage for a number of reasons:
U.S. oil production continues to rise.

[excoriator]

Oil is pretty inelastic. Roughly the same amount is sold irrespective of the cost, so one can expect supply fluctuations to have a big effect on the price.

But cost is only one factor anyway. There are at least two others. First seems to be that folk are getting increasingly fed up with the pollution from burning it, but as well as that there is (despite panglossian bullshit from denialists) increasing concern about carbon dioxide. I think the fossil fuel era is coming to an end. Anyone who can find other ways of doing things is going to do it.

Replacing electricity generation with renewables it pretty easy. Road transport is a much bigger problem. I cannot ever see battery cars being a success. the energy density of even the best batteries - which tend to be hugely expensive, toxic, and prone to overheating when short circuited in an accident for instance - is about 1% of petrol or diesel. These fuels are the best way we have for storing the large amounts of energy a decent car requires. And you can recharge in two or three minutes instead of the hours that batteries need.

Hydrogen fuel cell powered cars might be a better bet. The energy density is not as good as diesel, you need pressure vessels in the car, and the fuel cells themselves are expensive, but they are perfectly practical. You can make the hydrogen by electrolysing water if you have plentiful electrical energy of course. One possibility would be to employ domestic solar panels to electrolyse water into hydrogen and storing it so you can recharge your car with hydrogen when it is needed using domestic scale equipment.

It will be interesting to see what happens, but I think it is clear that the days of fossil burning are coming to an end