It is beyond bizarre that activists prattle about freeing the world from the “tyranny of oil”, the most cost-efficient and convenient of all energy sources. The phrase makes as much sense as the “tyranny” of physics
Green-minded people hate coal, because of all its carbon pollution, as they call it. They also hate natural gas, especially the fracked variety, partly because it poisons water supplies and all that, but mainly because it’s so cheap and plentiful. Nuclear power? It’s straight from the devil. Ditto hydro power. So of course we must switch to “renewable” energy, that is, wind farms and solar panels.
Global energy analyst and journalist Robert Bryce demolishes such fatuous thinking. He is the author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, an intriguingly cumbersome title for his fifth book on energy.
Bryce was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne in September. As a cogent and entertaining speaker he is also a class act.
Read his book and marvel that the developed world is now spending countless billions on renewables for no rational reason. Gaining significant (as distinct from token) power from renewables is a pipe-dream. Bryce does the maths, and renewables add up like 2 + 2 = 3. Renewables are not a good basis for policy, as the Germans—the foremost proponents, with a third of the world’s nameplate (peak) solar capacity—are discovering. The German power grid totters towards crisis. Would you believe, 38 per cent of German “renewable energy” now comes from chopping down forests for firewood to burn in otherwise coal-fired power plants, medieval-style.
Bryce says he is agnostic about the global warming debate, and makes his case purely as an energy analyst. He foresees the cost-per-watt of solar panels falling steeply as global production ramps up, but notes that in 2012 solar was meeting only 1/625 of global energy needs. Solar and wind combined produced only 1 per cent of global energy.