Reply To: NIMBY FUD

[Brian H]

The actual engineering/industrial aspect of converting to the current set of renewables from fossil fuel is characteristically soft-pedalled, with much hand-wavy minimizing of the real challenges. Here’s an excerpt from an IEEE article on the subject:

… turning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is a truly gargantuan task. That system now has an annual throughput of more than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, about 4 billion metric tons of crude oil, and more than 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. This adds up to 14 trillion watts of power. And its infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil engines—constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place.

It is impossible to displace this supersystem in a decade or two—or five, for that matter. Replacing it with an equally extensive and reliable alternative based on renewable energy flows is a task that will require decades of expensive commitment. It is the work of generations of engineers.

The author details the specifics of some of the dominant renewables infrastructure requirements. It is notable that FF, of course, bypasses most of the problems and costs.

So, assuming (as I certainly do not) that de-fossilizing is good in itself, once FF is on the market it will be immensely better placed to do the job. I doubt it will take 5 decades, but 2 is possible. It could be much less because it is pretty much self-financing in pure market terms, relieving the world’s governments of the subsidy ball-and-chain which now afflicts them.

BTW, given the 14 trillion W of power requirement, it would take about 3 million 5MW FFs to satisfy. That’s about $750 billion worth. (Additional site costs would be offset, I guesstimate, quite handily by the savings on maintaining existing plant, not to mention the opportunity costs/benefits of not having to build out and upgrade the grid as anticipated currently.)