New Years Day 2025
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December 31, 2024 at 08:03AM
https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1873752918353936578
Do you like math? Do you like making climate activists cry? If so, this post is for you. 
They advertise utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind as being “eco-friendly” energy technologies because they emit less CO₂ over their total lifecycle. Emissions is all the “greens” like to jack their sausage holsters about. But, when you point out to them just how land intensive their “green” energy technologies are, they squirm trying to justify being vehemently opposed to nuclear fission — a near-infinite, carbon-free, energy-dense electricity source — and working to destroying the landscape with massive amounts of solar cells and wind farms to save the planet.
Let’s run the numbers, shall we?
𝐍𝐔𝐂𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐑 𝐅𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 
The standard nuclear reactor has a 1,000-megawatt (MW) rating. This means that each plant is, on average, installed with 1,000 MW of power capacity. A 1,000-MW nuclear facility occupies, on average, just over 1 square mile (640 acres) of land.
To figure out just how many homes a single 1,000 MW plant could power, we can start by using the following equation,
𝑬 = 𝑷 × 𝒕, where,
• 𝑬 = energy (megawatt hours, MWh)
• 𝑷 = power (MW)
• 𝒕 = time (hours, hr)
If we assume a 1,000 MW nuclear reactor operates at FULL power during an entire calendar year, it will produce ~8.76 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year.
𝑬 = 1,000 MW × 24 hr (1-day) × 365 [days] (1 yr) = 8.76 million MWh / yr (8.76 TWh / yr)
However, reactors do 𝒏𝒐𝒕 operate at full power 100% of the time because they come offline for refueling or to undergo maintenance. Therefore, we must take the capacity factor into consideration in our calculation.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of any electricity generation source in the U.S. at 0.93 in 2023.
https://eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_08_b.html
What this value means is that nuclear reactors in the U.S. operated at full installed power for about 93% of the calendar year in 2023.
So, to figure out how much electricity that each plant produces in a year, we must multiply the previously calculated value of 8.76 TWh by the capacity factor of 0.93. If we do that, we get,
𝑬 = (8.76 TWh / year) × 0.93 ≈ 8.15 TWh / yr
Now, to determine just how many homes this powers, we must divide 𝑬 by the average amount of electricity U.S. homeowners purchase in a year. According to the EIA, that number is ~10,500 kilowatt-hours (KWh) or 1.05 × 10⁻⁵ TWh.
https://eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php
Thus, dividing 8.15 TWh / yr by 1.05 × 10⁻⁵ TWh / yr gives us about 776,190 homes.
Therefore, a 1,000 MW nuclear electricity generation station occupying one square mile of land, operating with a capacity factor of 0.93, can power more than 775,000 homes throughout the course of a year based on U.S. data.
Now that is pretty energy-dense, eh? Why would any climate activist be opposed to that?
Let’s now compare nuclear to the greens’ preferred solar and wind technologies.
𝐒𝐎𝐋𝐀𝐑 𝐏𝐕
A utility-scale solar PV array requires at least 1 MW of installed power.
https://cleanpower.org/facts/solar-power/
A1 MW solar PV array requires about 5-7 acres of land according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).
https://seia.org/initiatives/land-use-solar-development
And, according to the EIA, solar had a capacity factor of 0.232 last year in the U.S., by far the 𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒔𝒕 of any energy source. What this means is that solar PV arrays only operated at full power 23.2% of the year in 2023 due to variable weather conditions and sky cover.
By using the same calculations as above, a 1,000 MW solar PV array would occupy some 5,000-7,000 acres of land (mean of ~6,000 acres), all the while powering 193,523 homes, some 582,667 fewer homes than if it were nuclear power.
Yikes, that doesn’t sound very efficient. 
𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐃 A single utility-scale wind turbine occupies ~80 acres of land, which each turbine given a 2.5 MW rating.
A 1,000 MW onshore wind farm would require about 400 2.5-MW turbines occupying some 32,000 acres of land area.
And, according to the EIA, wind had a capacity factor of 0.332 in 2023, meaning that U.S. utility-scale wind farms operated at full power capacity for 33.2% of the year last year.
If we employ the same methods as before, we’ll find that a 1,000 MW wind farm could power about 277,143 homes for one year. Therefore, a 1,000 MW wind farm would power 499,047 fewer homes than a 1,000 MW nuclear facility while occupying over 50 times as much land area.
That’s not exactly efficient either, now, is it?
𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐙𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐔𝐏
In order to power the same number of homes that a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant can, it would require either:
• For 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐏𝐕: Approximately 4,000 MW of installed power (equivalent to four nuclear facilities) and 24,000 acres of land (some 37.5 × as much land area than a nuclear plant).
• For 𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝: Approximately 2,800 MW of installed power (equivalent to 2.8 nuclear facilities) and 89,600 acres of land (some 140 × as much land area than a nuclear power generation station).
But, I should caution you that these estimates are in fact conservative. Why? Because they do 𝒏𝒐𝒕 take into consideration land area required for battery storage due to their intermittency in overcast sky conditions, low wind speed and/or overnight.
Based on land requirements alone, if climate activists were serious environmentalists, they would support deployment of more nuclear power. Some of them do, but most I have interacted with don’t and find terrible excuses to support massive amounts of solar PV and onshore wind farm construction.
Nuclear power represents both continued economic growth and a clean energy future.
But, many climate activists don’t want continued economic growth. They want to abolish capitalism and overturn western culture.
https://twitter.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1873752918353936578
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via Watts Up With That?
December 31, 2024 at 08:03AM
Related links: Bloomberg article | Washington Post article
via JunkScience.com
December 31, 2024 at 06:51AM
By Paul Homewood
Time for a closer look at the Climate and Nature Bill, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago:
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3707
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Just to recap, this Private Members’ Bill aims to lay down statutory obligations to reduce UK emissions in line with the “1.5C” objective , supposedly agreed at Paris in 2015. In particular, it would also mandate that all consumption emissions are included in the provisions, not just territorial ones. This would mean that imported emissions along with shipping and aviation have to be counted in our carbon budget allowances.
The Bill deliberately avoids specific numbers for emission targets; as it points out, what matters is cumulative emissions, not annual targets. But the Bill’s campaign group, Zero Hour, make it clear that UK emissions would quickly have to fall to a tiny fraction of what they are now.
And they also reveal that territorial emissions, the only ones counted in our Carbon Budgets at the moment, account for little more than a half of total emissions:
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We can, however, flesh out some of the numbers.
Zero Hour, for instance, reckon that our projected carbon footprint for 2020 to 2050 is more than double the 1.5C based target:
https://zerohour.uk/downloads/ambition-gap.pdf
In total emissions terms, 49 tonnes per capita equals about 3381 tonnes, and 110 tonnes equals 7590 tonnes, both over the full 30 year period. The former works out at just 112 tonnes a year on average.
We don’t have the latest official data for imported emissions, but Zero Hour believe UK total emissions are probably around 800 Mt. At that rate, our total allowance would be more than used up between now and 2030!
The official Fifth Carbon Budget, which covers the years 2028-32, is set at 345 Mt a year, while the Sixth from 2033-37 goes down to an annual figure of 193 Mt. Remember that neither of these include imported emissions.
It is therefore glaringly obvious that both those budgets will have to be slashed to near zero, if the Bill is passed into law. This quite simply would be impossible in such a short time scale. Even Miliband has been forced to accept that we will still need gas power for the next decade or more. Homeowners will still need to heat their houses with gas and there will still be millions of cars, lorries and buses on the road using petrol and diesel.
Zero Hour say that the Fifth Carbon Budget is already 36% too high for the 1.5C target – in other words it must drop to 254 Mt a year, less than a third of current total emissions. This is plainly not achievable in the space of just five years.
Given the sheer impossibility of reducing territorial emissions to such a degree in the next ten years, the axe would have to fall on imports. There would have to be a virtual ban on all imported goods and food, and even that would get us nowhere near mandated targets.
So what would such a ban look like?
Food
Let’s start with food.
The UK produces about 54% of its food consumption, with imports amounting to £21 billion last year. Imported food would have to be one of the priorities of an emissions mandate, given that our total consumption of food accounts for a third of UK emissions.
Quite how would manage to feed ourselves with half of our food supply gone does not seem to have occurred to the authors of the Bill. According to Zero Hour, we would have to survive on “low carbon fruit, veg, nuts, pulses and grains”!
No doubt a lot of what we eat is not exactly nutritious, but I don’t think the public would welcome a return to Second World War style rationing, which would be necessary.
Given that the UK livestock industry would have to be shutdown too, and arable farming decimated by the inevitable ban on fertilisers, both in the pursuit of Net Zero, people will literally starve to death.
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Imported Goods
In 2023, the UK imported £581 billion worth of goods, including these key sectors:
| |
£ billion |
| Cars and other road vehicles | 65 |
| Electrical equipment | 56 |
| Telecoms | 17 |
| Metals | 33 |
| Industrial machinery | 23 |
| Scientific instruments | 12 |
| Office machinery | 13 |
| Aircraft | 12 |
| Cleaning supplies | 8 |
| Organic chemicals | 11 |
| Paper | 7 |
| Minerals | 7 |
| Oil and gas | 75 |
Imports of cars will, of course, be a non starter, given their carbon footprint. Even European made ones will still be built with high carbon footprint steel, plastics and rubber along with batteries made in China. Equally of course, UK made cars will rely on imported steel, as our steelworks will no longer be able to supply a high enough quality. They already rely on imports of many components. As a result the UK motor industry would quickly collapse.
We will become a modern day Cuba, with thirty year old cars clogging up the roads.
Then there’s important stuff like electrical equipment, industrial machinery, computers, specialist metals and so on. We tend to import much of this because we don’t have the specialised expertise and equipment necessary. In a sane world, countries import what they cannot make as well themselves, and specialise in what they are good at instead.
Without access to the best equipment and technology, the UK economy would quickly go downhill.
In addition, raw materials, though less visible, are also of vital importance – chemicals for example. The Bill demands that the production and import of fossil fuels be ended “as rapidly as possible”, which begs the question of how we will make all of things that are a part of everyday life, but which need fossil fuels for their manufacture.
Forget the idea that Europe might become miraculously carbon free any time soon, and that we could import from them. Most of their steel will still come from blast furnace iron, gas and coal power will still be significant, and the continent will carry on importing much of what it needs from Asia.
But what about the UK manufacturing all the things we currently import?
Zero Hour blithely talk about “new jobs in the low carbon economy”. But you cannot simply set up whole new industries at the flick of a switch.
How, for instance, will we be able to build the factories needed without access to cement (too carbon intensive) or steel? And where will we get the machinery to fill them with, given that we cannot import it and do not have the manufacturing capacity ourselves? Then there are all of the diggers, bulldozers, dumper trucks and other construction equipment needed, all running on diesel.
We would also need the appropriate expertise and skilled labour, which we probably don’t have now.
Perhaps the biggest irony is that Ed Miliband would not be able to import solar panels from China, or components for his beloved wind farms.
It is crazy, but also frightening, that 192 MPs actually plan to vote for this Bill.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
December 31, 2024 at 04:21AM
