Renewed doubts

Some more cud to chew on - an expert challenges how cheap renewable energy will be if deployed on a large scale!

True, sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, BUT converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land.

The author takes the case of California where the state has the new mandate to source one-third of its demand from renewables. This means of the 52,000 megawatts required, about 17,000 megawatts must come from solar and wind.
Projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California, will provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, but will need 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.

To have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans.

Not to forget the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel.

Where will the steel come from? What source but fossil fuels to power their production? He goes on to ask if the world is rushing from one crisis to another, in the name of reducing emissions?

There is no denying these arguments, but one would tend to think that the answer lies in going lower on the scale. From massive grid-connected power to small community based off-grid power that uses the locally available resource. That emissions are soaring and will soon start producing results more direct than what we now see, is clear. Simply because we do not link the floods and droughts to them, we are largely abel to ignore the climate! But not for long. The consensus among scientists is chilling.

We must shift, even if the shift is in small steps. Coal and oil will soon run out.