“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo, 1983, p. 115)
“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.” (Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979, p. 49)
What was said in a previous post regarding wind power’s 14 extensions of the Production Tax Credit also applies to solar power’s Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and its preceding tax favors. From 1978 to the present (46 years), 15 extensions belie the industry’s age-old claims of almost being competitive. Remember the New York Times’ declaration in 1994 (per Enron) that solar was “competitive” with fossil fuels? Remember Solyndra? Joe Romm in 2011: “It is clear that solar and wind are competitive in many situations right now.”
A legislative review (source: Congressional Research Service) of the solar tax subsidy reveals fifteen (15) legislative extensions from 1978 to 2022 with the current law extending to 2035 (57 years). A dividing point is the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which tripled solar’s credit (and put wind back into business after a short expiration).
Early History [7 laws; 6 extensions]
The Energy Tax Act of 1978 (P.L. 95-618) created a “temporary” 10 percent tax credit for business property and equipment using energies other than [thought to be rapidly depleting] oil or natural gas. Tax credits for solar (and wind) were refundable (e.g. credits could be received as a payment if the taxpayer could not offset his or her tax liability). Expiration was set for December 31, 1982.
The Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-223) expanded the energy credit to subsidize qualifying renewables. The prior tax credits for solar (and wind) were extended for three years (through 1985) and increased to 15 percent. The credit was made nonrefundable.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (P.L. 99-514), extended investment tax credits for solar (and geothermal) with a phase down to 10 percent before being set to expire December 31, 1988. The credit for wind was not extended.
The Miscellaneous Revenue Act of 1988 (P.L. 100-647) extended the solar, geothermal, and ocean thermal investment credits at their 1988 rates.
The Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 expanded the new solar tax credits for Solar Water Heat, Solar Space Heat, Solar Thermal Electric, Solar Thermal Process Heat, Photovoltaics, and Solar Hybrid Lighting with a home-use cap of $2,000.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (P.L. 114-113) extended the credit through 2019. The termination date was changed from a placed-in-service deadline to a construction start-date phaseout, with a 26 percent for construction beginning in 2020, and 22 percent for construction commencing in 2021.
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 (P.L. 115-123) extended the ITC for five years for fiber-optic solar (as well as fuel cell, small wind, microturbine, CHP, and geothermal heat pumps). These energies were eligible for a 30 percent credit through 2019, with rates declining with construction dates.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 extended the Residential Clean Energy Credit, previously called the Investment Tax Credit (ITC), through 2034 (12 years). The credit was increased to 30 percent (from 26 percent). Thirty percent of solar panel purchases were deductible from the total cost of federal taxes. The residential solar tax credit is scheduled to drop to 26 percent in 2033 and 22 percent in 2034.
The former head of Britain’s farming union yesterday spoke out against large-scale solar farms, declaring ‘there’s a huge amount not to like’.
But Minette Batters warned they will continue to be built while her members faced uncertainty about the future of dairy and arable farming – and while wealthy investors are free to buy up large chunks of the countryside.
Ms Batters, the ex-president of the National Farmers’ Union, also highlighted ‘horrific examples’ where tenant farmers are being booted off land for huge solar schemes so the landowner can make more money.
She said such changes of land use will continue while investors including overseas financiers and private equity firms are able to buy up huge chunks of the rural landscape unchecked, warning: ‘The country is up for sale’.
Ms Batters called for the next government to prioritise a new land strategy, so protections are given to traditional farming and its economic value is properly-acknowledged.
Ms Batters warned that solar farms will continue to be built while her members faced uncertainty about the future of dairy and arable farming (pictured: A proposed 1,400-acre site for a solar farm in Chickerell, Dorset)
She added: ‘We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change.’
She said she could understand opposition to solar farms – but also had sympathy for farmers cashing in on such projects because they provide a guaranteed, index-linked income for decades.
‘You can understand at the moment, from a farmer’s perspective… £1,200 a hectare (per year), index-linked, locked in for 20 years, what’s not to like?’ she said.
‘For everybody else, there’s a huge amount not to like. This is the trouble with a solar farm. There will be one beneficiary.’
But Ms Batters said that in some cases, farmers themselves have been forced to leave their farms to make way for solar farms if they are tenants of larger landowners.
She said: ‘We are seeing horrific examples of some land owners taking land back from tenants to put into solar.’
Ms Batters criticised how land ownership by wealthy investors including private equity firms is being allowed to proliferate – and called for action.
Citing the debt-fuelled private equity takeover of supermarket chain Morrisons, which the Daily Mail campaigned against, she said: ‘We saw what happened with Morrisons. We might not have a British-owned supermarket in 10 years.
‘Now, private equity has moved into land. The country is up for sale.
‘I remember having a conversation with (former Chancellor) Kwasi Kwarteng. He said, you can’t be a free market one day and not the next.
‘We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change.’
Ms Batters called for the next government to prioritise a new land strategy, so protections are given to traditional farming and its economic value is properly-acknowledged.
Coal is not the favorite “child” these days. It seems that almost the entire western political world has sworn to send coal to its grave. Not only have the United Nations and the IEA literally declared “war” on coal, but countless political, activist organizations and even leading financial institutions have pledged, if it had to be in their power, to immediately stop the usage of coal.
The reason for all of this is of course this “terrible” chemical element called carbon (number 6 on the periodic table). Please remember though that the same carbon is the 2nd most abundant element in the human body and it is a key building block for all life on Earth. By the way, carbon is not only essential because CO2 is plant food and plants grow best at 1.500 ppm of CO2 in the air (current atmospheric content is 420 ppm), CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, contributing to keeping our Earth temperature temperate and livable.
I have to mention that the prize for keeping Earth livable has to go to water, or better yet, water vapor, the most important and most abundant greenhouse gas. We all understand that increased greenhouse gas concentrations will contribute to slight warming, though only a few of us have learnt – including me only after studying it – that there are so-called saturation levels to consider which means that higher concentrations of any greenhouse gas have less and less impact on temperature changes (the warming impact logarithmically declines).
But today’s blog is not about globally measured temperature changes, its causes and its negative or positive impacts, but about coal and solar.
So why are coal and solar so closely interlinked? Why is it that solar panel manufacturing is impossible without coal? I always thought that coal is “only” important for electricity, contributing to 36% of global power demand, or over 8h of 24h every single day of the year. I always thought that coal is “only” required to produce all steel. Let us have a look at solar panel manufacturing, which is really about silicon production.
The vast majority of all energy required to make solar panels is consumed during silicon production, purification, and wafering. But first let’s talk about purity. 6N pure silicon means 99.9999% purity level, 11N pure silicon means 99.999999999% purity level, you get the point.
You may now have a first glimpse of the chemical and mechanical difficulty of making such a pure metal from a natural product.
In this blog post, you will see how important uninterrupted power supply is, especial for industrial processes such as silicon smelting. Obviously, this power comes from coal in China, and cannot come from wind or solar. Let’s dig deeper.
1. Metallurgical-grade silicon making and high purity quartz (HPQ)
Elemental silicon (Si) is not a naturally available element. Largely unchanged for over 100 years, silicon (Si) is produced by chemically reducing mined high purity quartz (SiO2) using carbon (C) in submerged-arc furnaces. The arc furnaces are each powered by up to 45 megawatts of electricity also to produce the heat required for the processes. As the mix of quartz stone and carbon heats, the carbon reacts with the oxygen in the quartz and forms CO gas, this is called silicon smelting. Consider it like iron ore (Fe2O3) being reduced using coke from coking coal (C) to make iron (Fe).
All simplified
Iron making: Fe2O3 + 3C + heat => 2Fe + 3CO
Silicon making (smelting): SiO2 + 2C + heat => Si + 2CO
This means that each ton of silicon roughly releases 5-6 tons of CO2 in this silicon smelting process alone.
High purity quartz sand (HPQ) is the feedstock for metallurgical-grade silicon. It is generally considered that the starting quality of feedstock for solar panels and semi-conductors is 99.95% silicon oxide (SiO2), with only <500 ppm of total impurities. Such HPQ is scarce and needs to be mined, processed, and of course transported before it is ready to be used for smelting (Chemical Research 2023 and Troszak).
The typical processing sequence for high-purity quartz includes:
(a) pre-treatment, which involves crushing, scrubbing, desliming, screening, and grinding;
(b) physical separation methods, including radiometric sorting, dense media separation, gravity separation, magnetic–electric separation, and flotation;
(c) chemical treatments, such as calcination-water quenching and leaching; and
(d) advanced treatments, encompassing chlorination, roasting and vacuum refining (Zhang et al 2023).
Estimates of the energy and therefore also CO2 footprint of silicon manufacturing diverge widely in the literature or “scientific community”. Though I believe we already understand that global silicon purification and solar panel manufacturing is dominated by China (Figure 1).
If you are interested to learn more about the physical and chemical characteristics of coal, please read the author’s newly published Coal Handbook available at your favourite book store.
2. Carbon sources for silicon making: Coal, petcoke, hardwood
Interesting is that various sources of carbon are used for the silicon smelting process. These carbon sources are derived largely from coal, petcoke (a byproduct of oil refining) and hardwood. Coal, to make coke, is the most important, but this coal must be of special quality, very low ash, high fixed carbon, with specific reactivity (tested using SINTEF tests), and of a specific size. This coal is rather scarce globally, with Colombia playing an important role. For more detail on silicon smelting please also see Troszak’s 2019, Burning coal and trees to make solar panels.
The mining of such coal is not only expensive, because it is scarce and requires large overburden removal, but also the coal processing (washing) requires energy and “wastes” resources. Once washed and ready, only a fraction of the coal consisting of specific sizing, usually 3-12mm can be used in the furnaces used for silicon smelting. The finer material has to be sold at lower values. Furthermore, to maintain the sizing, the coal should be shipped in bulker bags or sea containers so the sizing does not degrade with handling.
You can see why such special coal demands a large premium and a significant amount of energy for mining, processing/upgrading/sizing, and then of course transportation to the smelters (thanks also to Rob Boyd from New Zealand for his valuable input).
Hardwood is a remarkable one. Shredded hardwood must be mixed into the silicon smelter “pot” to allow the reactive gasses to circulate, so that the liquid silicon that forms, can settle to the bottom for tapping, and to allow the resulting CO (and other gasses) to escape the smelter “charge” safely (Troszak 2019). Woodchips provide a large surface area for the chemical reaction to take place more completely and at improved rates.
Hardwood helps to maintain a porous charge, thereby promoting gentle and uniform – instead of violent – gas venting. Woodchips help regulate smelting temperatures to keep the furnace burning smoothly on top, reducing conductivity, promoting deep electrode penetration, reducing dust, and help in preventing bridging, crusting, and agglomeration of the mix (Wartluft 1971).
Of course, aged hardwood trees are required to be burned to make woodchips. Hardwood is biomass that is extracted from nature but those trees, i.e. in the Brazilian Amazon, you may not be surprised, take more than a couple of years to grow.
Figure 2: The production of charcoal in a traditional manner in the forest
3.Solar-grade silicon (SoG-Si) making and wafering
For solar panel manufacturing to be complete, more is required. Metallurgical grade silicon (MG-Si) from the smelter, usually of 98% purity, does not meet the purity requirements of the photovoltaic industry, it must undergo two more energy-intensive processes before it can be made into solar cells and then into panels.
Firstly, the Siemens Process converts metallurgical grade silicon (MG-Si) from the smelter into polycrystalline silicon (called polysilicon) by using an extremely energy intensive process, a high-temperature vapor deposition process (Troszak 2019). The purity requirement for solar grade silicon (SoG-Si) is currently 9-11N (99.999999999%), a factor of 10.000 to 100.000 more pure compared to the 5-6N purity required for solar PV a decade ago and likey the basis for the solar panels on your roof (if you have some). In the Siemens process, silicon is crushed and mixed with hydrochlorous acid (HCl) to create Trichlorosilane gas (SiHCl3). This gas is heated and deposited onto very hot rods of polysilicon (1.150C) while the reaction chambers walls are cooled.
Each batch of polysilicon “rods” takes several days to grow, and a continuous, 24/7 supply of electricity to each reactor is essential to prevent a costly “run abort.” Polysilicon refineries depend on highly reliable conventional power grids, and usually have two incoming high-voltage supply feeds. (Sources Mariutti and Schernikau 2024, unpublished academic paper, Troszak 2019).
Secondly, the Czochralski Process turns the liquid silicon metal from the smelter and doping materials (gallium or phosphorous) into the silicon ingot, a large monocrystal, 20-30 cm diameter and 1-2 m in length. Next, the ingot is sawed into rectangular bricks, which are sliced into wafers using a diamond wire sawing process (Figures 3 and 4). This process requires several days, and uninterrupted 24/7 power supply. An ingot/wafer/cell plant can use more than 100 MWh additional energy per ton of incoming polysilicon, which is about 6 times as much as the original smelting of the silicon from ore.
Estimates of the energy and therefore CO2 footprint of silicon purification and wafering also diverge widely in the academic literature, mainly due to two reasons. On the one hand, there is no agreement on the estimated energy demand for these core processes. For example, solar grade silicon (SoG-Si) is the most energy-intensive step in the silicon purification process and should best be understood. Yet, SoG-Si inventories report an electricity demand ranging from 50 kWh/kg to 110 kWh/kg, which appears quite low.
On the other hand, secondary and pre-smelting processes are rarely included when considering the definition of an energy footprint, applicable to the average Chinese silicon industry. Currently, reporting used by governments for decision making, tend to be based on best-in-class plants, like in Europe or North America, which is far removed from reality.
Figure 3: Czochralski silicon ingot being pulled from melted polysilicon. Source: Siltronix, from Troszak 2019
4. Finalizing solar panel manufacturing
Once wafers are produced a few more steps are required before we have a ready-made solar panel. All of these steps require a significant amount of energy in addition to the raw materials required to build the factories and machines, the running of processes and operations, and the supply of electricity and heat required to perform these processes.
Wafer sawing: Silicon “bricks” are sliced into thin wafers for later manufacturing of solar cells
Solar cell and module production: requiring aluminum, glass, copper, plastic, rare earths, acids, and over 400 chemicals
Mounting structure supply: requiring aluminum or steel frames, cement foundation, etc.
Transportation: everything needs to be transported to the point of use i.e. in the US or Germany consuming at least oil products
I am not covering decommissioning and disposal of solar panels here. But it will suffice to mention that the average operational lifespan of the newest utility scale solar panels, is a fraction of the 20-25 years marketed in the media, proving to be more like less than 15 years. While older solar panels used to “live” longer, newer ones are optimized for the lowest raw materials and energy use, negatively impacting lifespan. Libra et al 2023 details that after about 10 years, serious failures of 1st tier (bankable) PV panels occur at an increasing rate.
It is obvious that decommissioning and disposal, and certainly any recycling, require again energy and actually also equipment made out of raw materials.
Figure 4: Czochralski process whole ingot (left), and brick and chords after sawing (right), crown and tail (upper right) Source: SVM from Troszak 2019
5. Coal and China
From this blog, you can now better see how important uninterrupted power and heat supply is especially for industrial processes such as silicon smelting. Obviously, this power comes from coal in China, and cannot come from wind or solar. Figure 5 illustrates how China increased its power consumption more than 5-fold in 20 years and how coal-fired power generation continues to grow with the economy. The large wind and solar installations can be seen as addition, rather than transition. For comparison, I added lines to illustrate the approximate electricity consumption of the US and Germany respectively.
Figure 5: Chinese electricity generation by sources compared to US and Germany. Source: Schernikau based on Ember, details here
Global electricity generation is dominated by thermal power. Coal and gas alone account for about 60% (Figure 6). We understand that the world, and especially China (Figure 7), continues to build large coal power plants to provide reliable uninterrupted power and domestic and industrial heat. Wind and solar enthusiasts often underestimate the importance of inertia of rotational mass for the stability of our grids.
Coal consumption hit another record in 2023, globally (8,6 Bn tons) and in China (over 4 Bn tons). At the same time, China also led the global installation of new solar plants domestically in addition to selling its solar panels globally. 2023 and 2024 show another upswing of new coal power plant installations amounting to numbers surpassing 2018 levels (Figure 7).n
Total global installed capacity for electricity generation is probably around 8,6 TW (including coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc.), of which coal is about 2,1 TW. Thus, 25% installed capacity provide for 36% for actual power generation. Utilization of coal plants will continue decreasing as more wind and solar hits the grids, but the installed coal capacity is still required and has to grow along with peak power demand.
Figure 6: Global electricity generation by source. Source: Schernikau based on Our World in Data and Global Electricity ReviewFigure 7: China coal power capacity additions. Source: BNEF, details here
6. Summary
Solar power and coal are closely interlinked. Today, there is not one single solar panel that can be produced without coal (or even oil and gas). The coal is required as a reducing agent for silicon making and as source for heat and electricity for the industrial process required to manufacture solar panels, not only in China. As unpopular as it may be, the world requires coal, even for the so called “energy transition”.
That is why I support investment in, not divestment from, coal technologies to make the production and utilization of coal as efficient as possible, not only to minimize its environmental impact, but also to keep costs low, which supports economic development and benefits in particular the less fortunate.
I hope this post helps you to understand my passion for coal and gives you a new insight into the “clean” world of solar power.
To learn more about how wind and solar work in our modern energy systems please read our recent book The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy available at your favorite book store.
We often tend to think that it is winter when electricity shortages are likely to occur. After all, in summer demand is lower and we have solar power as well.
With this in mind, let’s have a look at the last seven days, which have not been untypical from a weather point of view. Here is the generation mix:
Don’t pay too much attention to the individual bands at the moment. Instead focus on the four bands in the chart below.
As is often the case in summer, wind power frequently drops away close to zero. Solar power peaked at over 10 GW on some days, but on others it did not even reach 5 GW. Most important of all, of course, is gas which is always on hand, with up to 15 GW required at times, even with I/Cs running at full blast.
In total, gas provided 33%, and nuclear a further 17%. Wind and solar came to 11% and 9% respectively.
Fast forward to 2035, when the Government hopes we’ll have 70 GW of solar power, compared to the current 16 GW.
In theory that should raise solar output from 410 GWh for the week to about 1800 GWh. However, demand is likely to rise as well, maybe from 4600 to 6000 GWh. In other words the increase in solar power will probably only be enough to cover the extra demand. Wind should add some extra output thanks to new wind farms, but not when the wind does not blow.
That means we will potentially need as much power from non-renewable sources as we do now at times during summer months.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Whereas solar power can peak at 10 GW now at midday, this figure will rise to 44 GW when there is 70 GW of capacity. This will always exceed demand, and the surplus will be wasted unless it is exported to Europe, who will have their own surplus solar power. What we manage to export will inevitably be at prices well below CfD strike prices, and it will be billpayers/taxpayers who will end up footing the bill.
There is of course the option of battery storage, both to mop up these surpluses and to supply power at night.
So how much storage would we need, simply to balance solar output throughout each 24 hour period.
Let’s look at the period from noon on the 19th to noon on the 20th:
The average hourly generation through the 24-hour period was 3289 MWh, so how much storage would we need to ensure that this amount of electricity could be fed to the grid every hour of the day and night, while mopping up the midday surplus?
The surplus begins to build up at noon, (remember that the graph starts at noon), and peaks at 27 GWh at around 5pm. By 2am the surplus is entirely used up, and the deficit accumulates to about 13 GWh at about 7.30am.
I could of course started the graph at 7.30am, which would shown a bigger surplus and no deficit. However the results are exactly the same in terms of storage – that we would need about 40 GWh of battery storage – (27 GWh + 13 GWh).
This is of course just one day, and there will probably be other days when more would be needed. We also need to factor in energy loss during the charging and discharging of the battery. Also the fact that batteries would never be charged to 100%, nor discharged to zero.
But 40 GWh is a good ball park figure, and we can multiply that up to 175 GWh when we have 70 GW of solar power. Currently we have about 2.8 GWh of battery storage around the country, so plainly this does not even start to address the needs imposed by a mass rollout of solar farms.
Looked at another way, we currently have 16 GW of solar power. If solar farms were obliged to provide a steady supply to the grid, they would need to instal 40 GW of battery storage with 1-hour discharge, the typical battery specification. Effectively for every MW of solar capacity, they would have to build 3 MW of storage.
And thjs is just to balance out daily generation, it does nothing to provide seasonal storage.
The glut in solar power in Australia is so big that next year solar panel owners in Sydney will have to pay 1.2c a kilowatt hour to offload their unwanted energy between 10am and 3pm. Nearly a million homes in Sydney have solar panels, but only 7% of them have batteries, which means basically, thousands of homes installed hi-tech generators that aren’t very useful. Worse, other homes were forced to pay part of the costs for them. The only winner was China.
Finally, a tiny part of the strangled free market is re-asserting itself, which might slow down future installations, or trick a few people into installing a $9,000 battery. Naturally this unpredictable rule change will hurt the poorest solar owners, but benefit those wealthy enough to afford a battery.
The biggest electricity distributor on the east coast plans to charge households with solar panels to export their electricity to the grid during the middle of the day.
Ausgrid will impose a penalty of 1.2¢ a kilowatt-hour for any electricity exported to the grid between 10am and 3pm above a free threshold that varies by month. During peak demand times, between 4pm and 9pm, Ausgrid would pay 2.3¢ an hour as a reward to customers exporting solar to the grid.
The tariff will be charged by Ausgrid and the retailer will decide how to package it. It is opt-in from July this year, and mandatory from July next year.
The Sydney Morning Herald naturally thinks this is backwards and unfair, and in a sense it is, homeowners were led up the garden path. No one was given realistic information before they purchased another useless panel. But where was The Sydney Morning Herald? — it was selling the garden path. If they interviewed a few skeptics they could have told the hapless homeowners that the forced transition was artificial, unmanageable, and the conditions were doomed to be “adjusted” sooner or later.
Solar power at noon is electrical sewage
The wholesale market was trying to send the message. Negative spot prices show that solar is essentially a waste product at lunchtime which needs to be disposed off, a bit like electrical sewage.
You might wonder why any generator would keep generating during a glut so bad they had to pay for every watt they generated. But it’s logical in a screwed market — the negative prices are close to the value of the “Renewable Energy Certificates” the government forces us all to pay to solar and wind operators. So solar owners can produce a product the market essentially doesn’t want, but the government forces us to pay to make it profitable. See how this works?
The point of a free market is that stupid ideas are supposed to be free to lose their own money. That’s a signal to stop doing it.
And if there was some use for solar power at midday, negative prices would have found it. If there was an AI supercomputer that needed to sleep 18 hours a day and only work at lunchtime, the owners would have been beating down the door to get paid to use that solar juice. It didn’t happen.
Here’s the solar power contribution to the NSW grid this month.
During the solar spikes, hundreds of tons of exquisitely tuned infrastructure that could have kept running, just sits around and waits in case a cloud rolls over. And efficiency gained by solar is lost by the rest of the system.
About 90% of solar panels installed in Germany come from China, and earlier this year one of the last solar panel manufacturers closed in Germany. Last week, what was left of the industry begged for mercy (and subsidies) which they didn’t get. Now another German solar panel manufacturer has closed down.
For some cruel reason German factories which are close to their customers, can’t compete with distant foreign factories which have access to slave labor, fossil fueled shipping and cheap coal fired electricity?
The bigger question, seemingly, is how did the country that invented the printing press, diesel engines, and the theory-of-relativity get fooled by such a stupid ploy? Someone told them they could save the world with unreliable energy, so they converted their generators to unreliable ones, only to discover that they can’t afford to use unreliable generators to make the unreliable generators they need to keep saving the world?
The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the point where people are using solar panels as garden fences, and we have our own glut of solar power at midday.
The last hope of the German solar industry was a government mandated “bonus” for people who bought German solar panels.
Carsten Körnig, head of solar power lobby group BSW, …added that the solar industry was disappointed by the decision to leave out a “resilience bonus” for installations made in Europe. Given the stiff competition between producers in the U.S. and Asia for securing a share of the market in solar panel production, Körnig said including the bonus in the package would allow Germany to achieve greater supply security for the important future technology, adding that it is “perhaps the last chance for a renaissance of Germany’s solar industry”.
Solar panel manufacturer Solarwatt is set to halt production of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules in its factory in Dresden, business daily Handelsblatt reported. “Under the current circumstances, running a production facility here in Germany is extremely difficult economically, and we cannot justify this,” Solarwatt head Detlef Neuhaus told the newspaper. The plant with an annual production capacity of 300 megawatts (MW) will close “for the time being” at the end of August, with 190 jobs directly affected by the shutdown.
China generates 60% of its electricity with coal, while Germany uses 32% coal, and 30% solar-and-wind power. What should Germany do, bring back coal, or get some slaves?
Solar panels are now in the “top five” worst slave industries in the world, yet still barely any of the morality-police care. They’re apparently too busy atoning for slavery they didn’t cause that doesn’t exist anymore to worry about slaves that are alive today.
On Saturday March 2nd Northern California was hit by a major blizzard in its Sierra Nevada Mountain Range with 12 feet of snow and winds of 190 miles per hour. But during the following week America was hit with a blizzard of a different kind: a flurry of pro-renewable energy news reports which totally distorted the facts. The distortion of the truth has been going on for at least 15 years. In 2009 Scientific American published an article (citing a Stanford study) which predicted that renewables could become 100% of the world’s energy needs by 2030.
In March of 2021 Carbon Tracker posted a report errantly asserting that renewable energy was capable of meeting energy demand 100 times over. Two years later the World Economic Forum jumped on the bandwagon with a study that mistakenly claimed that we have “reached peak fossil fuels” and that we are now entering a “new era for power”. Yet the WEF’s own charts show that worldwide electricity production (WEF apparently forgot about the energy needs of the global transportation sector) in 2022 was less than 13%. The WEF also aberrantly suggested that global CO2 emissions might start to decline in the near future.
Making matters even worse, U.S. President Joe Biden touted renewable energy in his March 7th 2024 State of the Union speech, and two days later the Washington Postprinted a story about the efforts by Dartmouth University to try and find some way to bring solar power to northern Greenland where the sun does not shine for six months every year: solar power for six months and fossil fuel power when darkness shrouds the landscape.
Because of this never ending deluge of renewables propaganda, most American progressives dutifully believe that humanity can obtain all of its energy needs from renewables almost for free. But energy has never been unchained from cost. And although the cost of renewables have been declining, existing fossil fuel (including coal and nuclear) sources remain the cheapest sources of energy. That is true both for electrical generation and transportation – not least because the Sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, making these intermittent sources of energy unreliable, as Germany discovered last winter.
Political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. has stated: “It is quite intuitive for people to understand that there is a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.” But the Sun does not shine at night and the wind blows strongest at night in the winter when the electricity that it produces is not needed. Simply put, renewables are intermittent and they are far less concentrated than fossil fuels are.
In America, different states are following varied energy paths, providing us with an invaluable 50-part experiment. California is the most committed jurisdiction to the adoption of renewable energy and its citizens are being hit hard in their wallets. Take the U.S. West Coast as a comparison. Consumers in Washington state on average pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for the electricity they use. In Oregon, the average household pays 13 cents per kilowatt-hour used. Now look at California where people must endure an average cost of electricity of 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and they suffer from rolling blackouts and brownouts. The cost of their electricity has risen three times faster than the rest of the nation. Even California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has admitted that “we failed to predict and plan”. California’s recent spate of wildfires has been attributed by some to the state’s overloaded power grid.
The ‘lifting cost‘ of a land-based barrel of oil in the U.S. is under $40 for existing wells and about $60 for new wells. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review asserted that wind energy is now competitive with the cheapest fossil fuels even without Government subsidies – but this analysis did not consider the cost for each electric utility to keep a ‘spinning reserve‘ that burns natural gas as back-up in order to maintain grid integrity.
An article in One Finite Planetput its finger on the nub of the problem. “Solar and wind have proven to be successful partial cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are stored energy, and solar and wind are not.”
Temperatures plunged last week across Europe and the wind stopped blowing for a number of days. Without gas- and coal-fired turbines coming immediately to the rescue, thousands of people could have perished in the bitter cold. Yet natural gas is being legislated out of existence as a source of electricity across the continent. The black lie at the heart of Net Zero energy fantasies is that there are workable back-ups for intermittent wind and solar. Apart from oil and gas, there are none. Once politicians remove them from the mix – if elected, the British Labour party plans this in barely 60 months – the old and the infirm will shiver and die when a windless electricity grid produces negligible amounts of crucial power.
Exaggeration? Not really. Earlier this year, Lord Frost delivered the annual GWPF lecture on Net Zero which he titled ‘Not Dark Yet, But’s It’s Getting There’. He felt that members of Western governments “actively prefer to live in complete cognitive dissonance rather than confront what they know in their hearts: that they are pursuing unfeasible and internally contradictory policies”. There can be no excuse for what Lord Frost describes as “high status” opinions on Net Zero. The lack of ‘green’ back-up for intermittent power is becoming obvious to all but the most blinkered and boneheaded. But a wilful refusal to confront the issue is the current default ‘settled’ position. If the grid collapses in a few years’ time, the politicians and all their trusted messengers in the media will have a great deal of explaining to do. As the frozen bodies pile up, their trite, pseudoscientific, ‘saving the planet’ political slogans will be found somewhat wanting.
The idea that we can power most of our energy from the wind and the sun has been kept afloat by the promise of massive battery storage. There can be no further excuse for peddling this delusion. Earlier this year, the U.K. Royal Society published a wide-ranging storage paper pointing out that current batteries cannot possibly store more than a fraction of the energy needed to support the grid when wind fails. And fail it does, not just during spells of extremely cold weather but, as the Royal Society pointed out, during past annual low wind speed periods. Desperate to keep the Net Zero fiction alive, the Royal Society promoted hydrogen as a back-up, an idea only slightly less dumb than digging up the planet to produce vast quantities of limited life batteries.
Highly explosive, expensive to extract, weak kinetic energy compared to natural gas, difficult to store and move around – there is no end to the disadvantages of hydrogen. The Royal Society seems to envisage a new nationwide complex of storage and pipes that would likely cost hundreds of billions of pounds. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian noted that the Royal Society’s paper contained valuable information, but was “actually useless for any public policy purpose”.
Wherever you look, promoters of green energy engage in largely unchallenged deceptions. To coincide with COP28, Channel 4 is running a ‘climate emergency’ season. “With their combined, deep expertise, Kevin McCloud, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Mary Portas will front a powerful three-part series aiming to kickstart real change, by identifying the practical steps that governments and big business can take to eliminate our carbon emissions,” reads the press release. It’s an odd choice of “deep expertise” on offer, namely, the Grand Designs TV host, a TV cook and a shop window dresser. Within minutes into the first programme, the zombie statistic that wind was nine times cheaper than gas last winter was trotted out. In fact, this occurred only briefly with a number of abnormal wholesale price spikes in electricity in the wake of developments in Ukraine. Suggesting that wind is nine times cheaper than gas is as wilfully misleading as stating that wind was infinitely more expensive when oil prices turned negative at the start of global Covid lockdowns.
Without reliable back-up, subsidy-hunting promoters can add as many windmills as they like, but it will not make any difference when there is no wind. Last week, wind struggled to provide 3% of Britain’s electricity. As the investigative climate journalist (and former accountant) Paul Homewood is fond of noting – twice nothing is still nothing. In the meantime, British electricity users are set to pay almost £100 billion in subsidies for renewables supplying the grid over the next six years. Even when the wind is blowing, this growing subsidy covers barely 5% of total U.K. energy, since the grid only accounts for 25% of consumed energy. Last week’s dismal contribution brought that down to almost zero.
The true insanity of Net Zero has yet to be faced by global elites seeking to ‘transform’ human societies in collectivist ways never attempted in the past. Since this is a political project, truth is the first casualty in the war on wicked humanity. Nobody is paying much attention to the work of the Government-funded U.K. FIRES that notes that the U.K. is likely to have barely a quarter of the energy promised by the Government and the Climate Change Committee in 2050 if all legal obligations of Net Zero are followed. In its latest energy review, U.K. FIRES writes that the “whole excitement“ of its project has been to recognise that such a shortfall is close to a certain reality. As the Daily Sceptic has reported, U.K. FIRES bases it findings on a brutally honest reality. It does not assume that technology still to be perfected, or even invented, will somehow lead to minimal disturbance in comfortable industrialised lifestyles. A world of little energy means no personal transport, no flying and shipping, freezing homes, meat-free diets and dwellings made of “rammed” Earth. And, probably, far fewer humans.
In his recent paper, Lord Frost identified a current active determination across politicians and opinion formers not too look too closely at all the Net Zero issues. This was worrying, he commented, adding the words of the political and economic writer Sir Alfred Sherman: “You can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The 30% increase in administrative strike prices for solar power, a 66% increase for onshore wind, and a 52% increase for floating onshore wind aim to restore confidence in the Contracts for Difference (CfD) regime.
Both house systems are close to as optimised as we can get them and represent a total investment of around $160,000. Renewable energy systems should more honestly be called replaceable energy systems. None of the components can be expected to work for more than 25 years and often a much shorter time than that.
When we moved to our farm on the coast in Victoria Australia over 20 years ago our mains power was delivered by a single wire earth return (SWER) power line and we were the second to last house connected to it. This was just after the misguided privatisation of the power grid delivered this lifeline of civilised existence into the greedy hands of ‘competing’ power companies.
The previously state owned ‘Gold Plated’ system now had to turn a profit for investors so preventative maintenance services were cut.
We began to experience power outages, these were usually brief but occurred at least weekly. They would sometimes extend for hours and more than once for more than a day. With rainwater tanks and an electric pressure supply we couldn’t fill a kettle or flush a toilet.
The first response to this was to install a 5,000 litre tank on a hill 15 metres above the house with a 40 mm pipe to the house. We kept it full and only used it when we had to. One problem solved, but we were still sometimes reduced to kerosene lamps and candles after dark and couldn’t reliably run a freezer to store the food we produced.
So we decided to go off grid. It was a few years before we were fully independent of mains power.
Our system grew over time as finances permitted, technology improved and our experience and knowledge grew.
Now we have two three-bedroom houses 800 metres apart. One is 35 years old and only moderately energy efficient the other is eight years old and optimised for passive solar with excellent insulation, double glazing etc.
Both homes have wood-burning kitchen stoves with boilers for hot water in winter and for hydronic heating. They also have bottled gas stoves and solar hot water with instantaneous gas boost, which is almost never required because the heat exchanger on-stove boiler keeps the tank hot all winter. When the stove is not in use the solar hot water system with its heat exchanger does the job.
We grow all our own firewood. Providing around 100 kg of seasoned hardwood per house per week for the colder months is labour intensive and requires petrol powered chainsaws and a wood splitter.
Each house has its own completely separate power system, each with 30 solar panels of 300-440W capacity, MPPT solar controllers and a 1 kW wind turbine on a 19 metre mast of 80 mm diameter steel tube, stabilised by about 100m of 10mm steel cables and 3.6 cubic metres of concrete.
Running 24 hours a day the wind generators can sometimes equal the total daily solar input.
The power storage systems consist of a total of 60 German made lead acid gel 2V 600 amp hr batteries, shared between the houses (24 and 36). Each of these batteries weighs 48 kg and currently retails for $474 (AUD). They are rigged in series to provide 24 V power to a computer controlled DC linked inverter/charger. Each house also has an interconnected AC linked inverter/charger that sends 240 V AC power from part of the solar array directly to the house switchboard and also contributes DC charge to the battery bank.
In theory we have three to four days of zero input power supply if we were to flatten the batteries, but in practice we don’t let the batteries drop below 70% capacity in order to protect them and make them last as long as possible. So we are limited to about one day of stored capacity.
Both house systems are close to as optimised as we can get them and represent a total investment of around $160,000.
So how do they perform?
In summer perfectly. We don’t have to do much other than check in with the laptop once a week to monitor the system, and we often take the wind generators offline for extended periods.
In winter, when solar energy input per square metre drops to about 30% of peak summer level and then for only a few hours a day, the systems still work pretty well but require more monitoring involvement.
To some extent power usage can be matched to storage levels and fluctuating input from the wind generator. However, the total renewable input is just too patchy and unreliable so petrol or diesel powered generator backup is absolutely required.
It’s not just in winter, but in autumn especially and sometimes in springtime too. When cloudy skies and windless days persist we need to make recourse to our petrol generators, sometimes everyday for a week at a time to keep the batteries charged and provide peak load supply. The inverters are linked to auto-start the generators as required when the battery voltage drops below a set level or demand rises too high. They often come on in the evenings and have to be sited to minimise noise.
In the early days it was a case of dishwasher now, washing machine later, maybe tomorrow etc. and minimal use of electricity to heat things. Nowadays such restrictions on usage are limited to days when the generator starts to automatically kick in – we take that as a signal to check the system and ease off to save on fuel.
The generators have to be looked after and kept fuelled-up ready to go at all times. We have several of them, including a 70-year-old Lister JP 1/9 Startomatic – a 9 hp single cylinder water-cooled diesel running a 1,500 rpm 6.25 kVA generator that was retrieved from a sheep station in NSW. I recently substantially rebuilt it in my workshop with original spare parts. It is a magnificent 1.4 tonnes of the best of British engineering; it works perfectly and will soon be connected. The other repurposed diesel generator I’m working on is a solid old 1,500 rpm ST-6 designed for nonstop use in a commercial fishing boat. It will be driven by a 10hp air-cooled Yanmar L100N until I can find another auto-start Lister diesel for it. These will both soon take over from two two Honda 6kVA petrol gensets currently connected to the systems and will be about half the cost to run. Most years the annual generator run time is around 60-100 hours at each house but it’s as unpredictable as the weather.
After 20 years the first of our solar panels have started to fail and have been replaced. Rather than dump them into landfill because they can’t be recycled, I’m planning on using them to make north-facing sun traps for heat loving plants in our big vegetable garden.
Renewable energy systems should more honestly be called replaceable energy systems. None of the components can be expected to work for more than 25 years and often a much shorter time than that.
It is the journey as much as the destination. Producing our own power fits with our overall ethos of self reliance. We produce our own free range poultry and eggs and, in a good year, most of our fruit and vegetables. We breed Wiltshire sheep and buy in beef weaners, then we butcher, pack and freeze our own meat supply which we can supplement with hunting and offshore fishing.
Extrapolating from our renewable energy experience, anyone who thinks that a modern society can function with a power grid that runs on just solar and wind power without fossil fuel or nuclear backup that’s able to immediately provide up to 100% of power needs on cloudy, still days and dark, windless nights, is totally deluded!
And getting grid-scale lithium ion battery storage to provide the sort of supply time that we have on our farm would cost trillions of dollars, deplete the planet’s non-renewable resources to the point of imminent exhaustion and then it would have to be done all over again in 10 years.
It matters nought that you have massive renewable generation capacity if you can’t store power for extended periods.
So you can have all the wind and solar farms you want, but without fossil fuel or nuclear back up you’ll need to buy a good supply of warm blankets and candles if you don’t want to be spending a lot of time shivering in the dark.
The author was a part-time specialist medical practitioner until he refused to be injected with the experimental gene-based Covid vaccines just over two years ago and was sacked. Now he’s a fulltime peasant farmer who values his privacy and prefers to remain anonymous.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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