I often see “claims” about China’s wind&solar investments. But, after years of advocates crowing about significant exponential growth in wind&solar in China, I can also look things up.
As of 2024, 15 months ago China had INCREASED its fossil fuel consumption by 251% since 2000. That is more than tripled. And the largest part of that is Coal, by a wide margin. And at the same time, all of its installed wind capacity amounted to only 9% of the amount of that increase; solar, 7%.
And for reference, in 12 months (2023–24) China’s green energy transition INCREASED its fossil fuel consumption by 15% of Canada’s ENTIRE energy consumption.
I will be keen to update this information as soon as peer-reviewed data for 2025 is available. WindySolarites keep telling me China has turned a corner. However, up to now, this is hardly anything remotely resembling a “renewable” “green” energy transition.
And even if China actually started to reduce it fossil fuel consumption in 2025, at 2% of 2024’s consumption per year it would take almost 36 years (2062) to get back to the already unsustainable levels from 2000.
There will be people who dismiss the overwhelming data and research and peer-reviewed science showing that wind&solar are NOT solving our energy crisis, and won’t, but that nuclear can. And despite rejecting every bit of published evidence, some of those people will claim that their opinion must be respected, on account of having got a PhD. Maybe even in physics. But jumping through the hoops to get a graduate degree is not a guarantee of anything really, other than being a good student.
So I share this anecdote about a PhD in Geography, as an illustration of how, while you might expect such a person to really know their subject, or to be either educated or intelligent, sometimes you may be disappointed.
I have done a lot of map drawing in my career. Hundreds of maps. There is another illustrator in Toronto who has done most of the rest. We both know what we are doing.
Years ago, one of our educational publishing customers hired a “Senior Content Production Manager,” who had a PhD in Geography, because they wanted better geography products. This Doctor of Geography got in a whole thing with the other illustrator about maps they had drawn, putting the freelancer to something like 23 passes of changes, which is ridiculous. So the good Doctor, the presumed expert in Geography, which includes one might think maps, decided the solution was to only hire “approved” “cartographers” from then on.
There was a process for suppliers to run a map-drawing obstacle course to get approved. I was part of that process. I was not approved. But I found out pretty quickly why the PhD had so much trouble with the other illustrator. Dr Geo knew sfa about maps or illustration or the production process. Depending on what their thesis was, maybe little about grade-school Geography.
There were numerous facepalms. But I will leave this here so you can wonder, “Who the hell is giving these people PhD’s?”
When the project began I had some practical questions about the specifications for the artwork. Dr Geo, did not seem to have useful answers to these questions, except for one in particular. I asked, because publishers each have their own preferences, “What map projection would you like this test map to be?” Dr Geo’s angry answer? “I don’t want any kind of ‘map projection!’ I just want an ordinary map.”
They did not know what a map projection was, that all accurate maps are defined by a projection. Education is our best defence against stupid ignorance. But it is not fool-proof.
Anti-nuclear activists often talk about nuclear being expensive. It is not. However if you are deliberately obstructing infrastructure investment, you can artificially balloon costs. Then pretend it is not your own fault.
Regulatory fees in the US, for example, dominate the upfront cost of building new nuclear, because the bureaucracy is deliberately obstructionist. But mismanaging financing creates the largest cost overruns.
Let’s say you take out a business loan for $20 billion. And the expectation is that you will complete your nuclear project and start grinding down the principal in 7 years. But then idiots delay the start of your project for five years. Then part way through they put a stop to the project for an additional three years for a bogus environmental assessment. By the time you actually complete the project, your “costs” of servicing that loan have gone on for an extra decade. Compounded 5% interest on $20 billion over ten years is almost $13 billion. Just the inflated principal from interest during delays.
And that example does not even take into account inflation. Which typically could be 2% per year. Over ten years that compounds to a 22% increase in costs. It is the delays that mostly cause cost overruns.
Between the delays and inflation cited in the above examples, that $20 billion “ballooned” to over $40 billion. Nuclear provides one of the highest ROI of any energy technology. But if you let the anti-nuclear lobby pile on red tape and “fish discos” and impose delays, it can be no surprise that their are large cost overruns, because those are deliberate.
And even so, because wind and solar have such short lifespans, and appalling capacity factor and demand an almost equal investment in storage, which we do not actually have a technology for, even with the deliberate mismanagement, nuclear is still far far cheaper.
This is how it works. There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of published misrepresentation, and misinformation out there about “renewables;” about wind&solar particularly. Cherry-picked data, carefully couched half-truths and outright lies. And activists will quote that shit a thousand times. And when anyone shows those people the data that contradicts their deeply held beliefs they either ignore what has been shown to them, or they just deny it. And if pressed, or if they feel threatened by the clear inevitability of their energy fantasy being a delusion, they get mad and they get rude.
That is how PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times) are so tragic. Almost any wind&solar or anti-nuclear claim, I have a graph, or an article, that I can just pull out… again… that shows the claim to be dishonest or more often just delusional.
But it does not make a difference. Because while there are levels of *belief* from just misinformed to fanatical, in the end, believing the “renewable” orthodoxy is essentially religious. And adherents are quite often willing to dye, or get all of us kilt, on that hill as a matter of devotion.
I paused a science podcast, cause they pissed me off. Their claim, regarding the promise of nuclear power was that, “the story on nuclear power is more equivocal.”
We need to emphasize that the reality is that nuclear power has the best safety record of any real and meaningful source of electricity and that safe used-nuclear-fuel storage has been a solved problem for five fucking decades!
These popular lies about nuclear power, Points Refuted A Thousand Times, have been a major contributing factor, and the reason why we have done absolutely nothing, less than nothing, far less, to reduce our CO2 emissions.
Anti-nuclear energy activism is effectively the same as fossil fuel lobbying, in that they both equally prevent our actually depreciating fossil fuels and replacing them with abundant low-carbon energy.
And a science program dancing around and promoting disinformation about nuclear energy is the same garbage, in kind, to the science denial regarding the evidence for anthropogenic climate change that the program then went on to deride.
A few considerations… ————— “Temporary” dry-cask storage does NOT pose any kind of risk. Not any more than a jug of bleach. Unless you are stupid enough to drink the bleach. And it would be so many orders of magnitude more difficult, and time consuming, and labour intensive, and costly, to “get at” any of the fuel in DCS than to just chug some bleach in front of the washing machine.
A simple solution to automatically cooling wet storage is called a Stirling Engine. As things stand, most backups are diesel, but if you just wanna be able to “walk-away” there are solutions.
The solution to sites where nuclear plants have been decommissioned or removed and the DCS has been left behind, is to rebuild the nuclear plants. Those sites are ideal for new nuclear. All the original connectivity is already in place.
The discussion of military waste is not relevant to civilian energy. Here’s an idea. Don’t build nuclear weapons.
It is insane to put 90% recyclable fuel in DGS. FFS! Recycle it!
OMG! She said, ass backwards, that reprocessing fuel could power the entire US for 100 years at a cost of $100 billion. I don’t know about you, but that seems like $1 billion a year to power the whole country for a century. Um, seems like a really really low-cost. The US could just take that out of the criminal-ICE budget. GFGDCoaS!
If we just took $100 billion from Eloi Mush right now, he would still be a many-multi billionaire and everyone’s energy could be FREE for ten decades? Sounds awesome!
“Burning coal produces toxic coal ash.” Yes. And orders of magnitude more of the radioactive waste in our environment than nuclear technology. Because radioactive Carbon 14 is just dumped into the environment out chimneys of coal plants. Coal burning presents an actual radioactive waste problem.
Worrying about how a collapsed civilization would deal with our waste is a bit like worrying about whether you might have left the iron on after your house has been blown away by a hurricane.
I was confused yesterday. I was listening to Science In Action interview “University of Toronto chemist Geoff Ozin and Eric Bachman, founder of the start-up CO2 Rail, explain their vision.”
I was confused because their vision is to add rail cars to existing trains everywhere that capture CO2 as they go. And the part that confused me was about energy. They kept saying that they would have huge batteries in the rail cars to run the CO2 extraction, and that these batteries would be continually charged from the WASTED energy of regenerative breaking. The confusing part was the “otherwise wasted,” bit. Electrified rail, like used all over China and Europe does not “waste” regenerative breaking energy. It feeds back into the system powering vehicles that are not breaking…
But then it dawned on me. There is a more primitive kind of rail engine. Almost all rail drive units are electric motors, but in savage countries like Canada those motors are supplied electricity by huge onboard diesel generators…
It suddenly dawned on me that their carbon extraction system depended on adding heavy loads to trains and increasing diesel fuel consumption. Burning extra fossil fuel to extract fossil fuel emissions.
People sometimes put yard waste in big paper yard waste bags. And fine, that may be the only way you have of getting rid of a bag-load of leaves. But the net resource cost of each bag, if price is indicative, is like 50¢ per bag. But the material you are conserving, by diverting the yard waste, is certainly worth less than 50¢. You are using 50¢ worth of resources to conserve 5 to 10¢ (¿?) worth of resources. This is a net waste of resources.
And this is what I was immediately reminded of by Geoff and Eric’s vision. A scheme which takes some CO2 out of the atmosphere, while probably putting more, or at least a large fraction of the amount of CO2, back.
And there it is. Another fantasy environmental ‘solution’ which on closer examination turns out to likely do more harm than good.
This is because Germany’s “Left”-affecting Greenies have absolutely fucked the country with their disastrous Energiewende wind&solar anti-nuclear fantasy. It is hard to say how much investment Germany has flushed away, but even wind and solar advocates like Clean Energy Wire put the cost to 2025 at €520 BILLION in the electricity sector alone. The final cost is likely to be in thousands of billions. And for all that, to date, Germany’s green house gas emission reductions can mostly be accounted for by the consequent shrinking, some might say, “collapse,” of their industrial sector.
And for all that, “Energy in Germany is obtained for the vast majority from fossil sources, accounting for 77.6% of total energy consumption in 2023” Investment to date in energiewende could have built anywhere between 25 and 50 new nuclear plants in Germany and mostly decarbonized the electricity sector already. And they would be well on their way to decarbonizing the rest of their energy sector.
This is a political suicide mounted by fact-averse anti-nuclear activists, who apparently don’t care what progress they don’t make on decarbonizing, so long as it isn’t with safe, clean, cost-effective nuclear electricity generation.
And now the whole country, and Europe, gets to pay the price. And that price is a rise in opportunistic Reich-wing parties, happy to champion “sensible” policies that make the current governing ideology look absurd. And that resurgence in far-right politics is something any thinking person ought to have hoped that Germany, of all places, had had enough of.
Ordinary Germans, facing a manufactured domestic energy crisis and an unprecedentedly shrinking national economy, and eye-watering costs, were gonna lash out.
This is a fine example of why moderate and self-identifying Left politicians must not follow policy positions that are delusional. This kind of self-indulgence opens moderates up to quite reasonable ridicule. It creates a niche into which opportunistic scumbags can simply step.
The premiere of Ontario, DoFo, compared to his dead brother, looked like the smart, sober one. At the time RoFo was running for Toronto mayor, some poor woman, I think in North York, had been getting continually harassed by the city for parking in her own driveway, or something like that. The City was enforcing some nuance of some bylaw in a way that simply amounted to bullying. It had been going on for a while, with multiple abuses and complaints to the city. The then mayor and the woman’s councillor, and council more generally chose not to intervene and put a stop to it. So when the slobulent cretin RoFo took office, one of the first things he did, which made total sense, was be the heroic white knight and stop the City from persecuting this poor woman. Which helped legitimize him as a leader, when his term in office was in fact an unprecedented shit-show.
Part of a sustainable future depends on keeping regressive far-Right policies out of governance. And part of that depends on moderates following evidence-based policies and doing the right thing when it is right and stopping doing the wrong thing, as a matter of orthodoxy, when it is objectively wrong.
It was sometime before 2010 that my dreams of windmills and solar panels were dashed. I saw a headline proclaiming something like “for the first time wind and solar have become cheaper than coal for generating electricity.” I was surprised, more than 15 years ago, by that awesome news, but I wanted to know more about this wonderful turn-around, so I started reading the article.
Turned out, the devil in the details was that the headline should have began, “With a 95% subsidy…” What the article with the misleading headline was in fact reporting was that, with a 95% subsidy, the remaining 5% of the cost of wind&solar was comparable to the cost of the same KWh of capacity for a coal-fired generating station.
Or, put another way, wind&solar capacity was, in fact, TWENTY times as costly as coal capacity. However, thinking about this today, I have realized that it is much worse than that. If you take capacity factor into account, you could increase that figure anything from 1–6 again. Although CF varies dramatically by location and by year.
And just yesterday, almost two decades later, I was hearing the same sorts of ludicrous claims, that melt under the slightest scrutiny. Including the one where wind&solar, which in fact contribute a trivial 6% of the world’s energy, are growing exponentially. You just cannot see the exponential growth. But if we just continue to not start building real sources of grid-scale low-carbon energy for another 30 years, then the ‘bird’ will “have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!” Fwee energy.
But the reality is, “Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it!”
And I swear by the Great goddess Asherah I would love to be wrong. I would love for the mathematically challenged delusions of wind&solar advocates to be a path to a sustainable future. But it happens every bleedin time that when they make a glorious hopeful claim, it turns out that they nailed it to the perch.
Someone ‘what about Chernobyl’-ed me. “Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.”
That is an interesting misconception. So let me address it on two grounds.
First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.
In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and today the exclusion zone is a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot.
Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.
But to put the 4–15 thousand in context, particulate matter from German coal-fired mostly-electricity generation kills about 75,000 people in Europe EVERY year. And closing the last two nuclear plants in Germany was expected to increase that number by about 1000, per year. Closing Germany’s nuclear power plants has conservatively killed so many more people than Chernobyl ever will.
But here is a thought… Don’t build an unsafe archaic RMBK reactor. Problem solved.
But… again, for what it is worth if you are able to understand actual statistics, here is a graph. It is NOT building nuclear power that is killing people.
