pro fossil fuel climate science

  Renewables are the socialists in the energy space.   They only work part-time and expect the government to support them.   Unreliable (Intermittency)  - Solar only generates electricity during the day which is inverse of our power consumption habits. Its generation capacity is also substantially impacted by overcast weather which is common in the northern hemisphere.  Wind fares better than solar yet is unreliable by virtue of relying on the wind.    The Economics of Renewables Yes, developed countries can overlook all these shortcomings and continue to throw money at them but developing countries do not have this luxury. Renewables need to be economic to scale in the developing world which is where the population growth and by default energy growth is. For renewables, you need to know the fully integrated costs to operate them.   Battery Storage   Battery storage is currently more frequency control and still cost-prohibitive to store ...

  Fossil Fuels, ESG, and Investor Activism The question remains however, if renewable energy is so inefficient and uneconomic why have energy giants like  Shell (LSE:RDSA)  and  BP (LSE:BP)  shifted so heavily toward green energy? Fergus believes that investor activism and ESG (Environmental and Social Governance) mandates are the cause. He highlights the  recent actions of BlackRock  and several other investor activist groups against ExxonMobil’s management, due to beliefs that the oil giant was not committed to action against climate change. Fergus sees this as a prime example of companies being forced into renewable energies against their best interests. “By sheer shareholder force, the management can’t toe the line of the actual business” However, this extends much further than just BlackRock, with the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, Vanguard, and many other funds targeting fossil fuel businesses...

  Suspicious Success Stories  Despite their reputations as renewable success stories both Germany and Denmark are struggling to put their green policies into practice. Germany  Despite 42% of Germany’s electricity coming from renewable sources, the country has failed to reduce its carbon emissions per capita by any significant amount, and still ranks far higher than other Western European countries like the UK and France, as well as the EU average. Germany is also experiencing the second highest electricity costs in Europe, second only to Denmark. However, it is worth noting that for Germany  over half of this cost  is from taxes and other surcharges. With  roughly 20% of the electricity cost  coming from the renewables surcharge, which supports the expansion of renewable energy. The transition to renewables has been repeatedly hampered by conservationists and local associations resisting the construction of onshore wind turbines. Germany has targets t...

  Levelized Cost of Energy - A Misleading Metric Arguments for renewables tend to rely quite heavily on the Levelized Cost of Energy, a metric which supposedly accounts for all the costs associated with a particular energy type, from development and construction all the way to decommissioning. However, Fergus Cullen believes that LCOE is incredibly misleading as it fails to account for the integration costs of switching to renewables. “This is like quoting someone the cost of the flight and leaving out the pilot and half the fuel” There are three main costs that aren’t included in LCOE: 1) The infrastructure required to handle the fluctuating power levels associated with renewables. Even the infrastructures of the most developed countries aren’t up to the task, with Fergus citing the US energy grid which is already well past its life expectancy, with it being  graded D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers . 2) The need for back-up power stations to handle the unpredicta...

  The real issue with solar, however, is seasonality. In the Northern Hemisphere during winter, when the earth is angled away from the sun, there is a 50% decrease in solar power production. The only solution to this requires either twice the number of panels, half of which will be excess capacity in the summer, or having back-up power stations that will remain idle for half the year.  Wind power experiences similar issues and also requires supplementation by other energy sources to account for unpredictable down time.  Due to the very nature of their design, renewables like solar and wind fail to provide energy security, leading to a reliance on backup power stations, which ultimately contradict the very purpose of installing renewables Energy Density Human development has been framed by the energy density ladder, with each rung more energy dense than the last: transitioning from wood, to coal, onto oil and gas, before arriving at nuclear power. For Fergus Cullen solar a...

  1. Hydrogen has very low energy content by volume. That means that it has to be very highly compressed, to 5000 or 10,000 PSI, for use in a FCEV. 2. Compressing hydrogen to that degree requires special expensive high-pressure pumps, along with high-pressure pipes and storage tanks. Dispensing stations also have to have such pumps, pipes, and tanks, which is one of several reasons why building a hydrogen filling station is so extremely expensive; construction costs are about $1 million for each dozen FCEVs serviced per day! And of course maintenance costs for such fueling stations will also be orders of magnitude higher than costs for a regular gasoline filling station, on a per-car basis. 3. H2 (the hydrogen molecule, composed of two hydrogen atoms) is so very tiny that ordinary seals won't stop it from leaking pretty rapidly. Special expensive seals are needed for storage of compressed H2, and even then there is some slow leakage past seals. In fact, the H2 molecule is so tiny t...