The Futility of Wind and Solar Power in One Easy-to-Understand Picture – MishTalk

How can we get green energy from there to there and at what cost?

Morocco is an ideal location for both wind and solar power. It is sunny and windy. But how do you get Morocco’s energy to where it is needed? At what cost?

The Wall Street Journal says a new era of clean energy has arrived, using transcontinental power lines.

An ambitious project to build a nearly 2,500-mile undersea power link would link massive wind and solar farms in Morocco with the UK, providing a reliable electricity supply to meet forecasted growth in demand.

The plan’s architect, Simon Morrish, said it was the UK’s best option for clean electricity.

“I wondered, “Why doesn’t anyone do this?” said Morrish, a former management consultant who also runs a landscaping company.

If you’re seriously asking this question, it’s because you can’t think. Nevertheless, let’s continue.

Morrish has secured early-stage investment and hired an experienced team, but his vision has little chance of coming to fruition. It must negotiate subsidies from the UK government, raise tens of billions of dollars and obtain key permits from nations that control the seabed. The plan involves building the tallest building in Scotland – a giant cable factory – and a special ship to lay cables.

However, the project shows how the energy map is changing.

The map is only changing because no one is forced to pay for this rubbish, for now. Any project that needs subsidies to survive is not really feasible.

The four offshore transmission lines will require nearly 16,000 miles of cable—far more than current suppliers can handle. So Morrish founded a cable company to build a factory with a tower taller than the Washington Monument, where the colossal cables, covered in insulation, will be lowered.

Construction of the factory near the Scottish village of Fairlie has been delayed several times. Residents doubt whether this will happen.

Transmission projects could take well over a decade to complete. In the U.S., the Biden administration is pushing for easing permitting for lines that reinforce the national grid, raising hopes for more projects.

From Quebec to New York and from Arizona to California

A 539-mile high-voltage transmission line under construction will deliver hydroelectric power from Quebec to New York. A 550-mile line will deliver wind power from New Mexico to California and Arizona.

Overseas, Meridiam is a major investor in the first link between the UK and Germany and intends to invest in a planned 750-mile power line linking Greece with Israel via Cyprus. The project will lower sections of cables with a mass equal to the Eiffel Tower to a depth of approximately 3 km in the Mediterranean Sea.

“What we are trying to do is bigger than anything that has been done before, both in terms of the size of the project and the amount of electricity we are trying to transmit,” said Pascal Radue, who heads the generation and transmission unit at Nexans, the cable supplier working on the first phase of the project from Greece to Cyprus.

Here’s another beauty

Returning to Morocco…

Morrish convinced investors including TotalEnergys, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned utility, and General Electric’s wind-power spin-off, to buy into his plan. Xlinks closed a funding round of £100 million, or $126 million, in April.

However, construction costs alone will range from £22 billion to £24 billion, Xlinks says. The company is in talks with the UK government about a grant that Morrish hopes will spur investment, but those discussions have dragged on.

The dream of sending wind and solar from North Africa to Europe is not new. An earlier effort that would have transferred power over the land collapsed more than a decade ago amid infighting among supporters and political turmoil in the region.

“I have every confidence this will work,” Morrish said. “It’s taking a little longer than I expected.”

Assume wild success

Assume that this project in Morocco will succeed beyond your wildest expectations.

What I mean is no budget overruns, no regulatory hurdles, and no delays.

The cost will be just £22 billion and it will be delivered on time. In US dollars, this is equivalent to $27.84 billion.

There are ~28.4 million households in the UK. That works out to a fee of about $980 per household.

But that’s just the cost of the line. It does not reflect the costs of solar panels or wind turbines, line maintenance, battery storage, or any other details needed to run the system.

And how much clean energy does this provide for the UK?

Drum rolls… about eight per cent of UK demand.

It comes from one of the best places in the world for producing green energy. This would meet about 0.5 percent of U.S. demand and would require a major modernization of the transmission network to do so.

Morocco is considered economically and politically stable. But will it always be that way?

Who wouldn’t want to bet their country on Morocco?

“Why doesn’t anyone do this? Morrish asked.

What a bang!

Net zero is a very unlikely outcome

It’s not that wind and solar never come in handy. In the right places, they do.

Rather, the idea that we will meet all or even most of our energy needs with wind and solar energy by 2050 is absurd.

It is also important to remember that misguided attempts to do this on an impossible schedule result in high inflation.

In this context, please consider Sorry green energy fans, net zero is a very unlikely outcome

Let’s discuss the Kyoto Protocol’s climate goals and dozens of reasons why achieving net zero emissions by 2050 is virtually impossible.

The link provided above is very detailed and does not come from people called “climate deniers”.

Please check it.