Green New Deal is madness

Epoch Times:

Green New Deal-style plans to decarbonize economies by 2050 are “madness” and their effects on an economy would be “like the coronavirus all over again,” a British engineering expert says.

Michael Kelly, professor emeritus of technology in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, made the statements about legislation passed in 2019 that requires the UK to bring all greenhouse gas (carbon) emissions to net-zero by 2050. With broadly similar energy—and transport—challenges facing both the UK and the United States over the next 30 years, his study (pdf) asserts that “the costs of decarbonizing will be ruinous of our current standards of living.”

British decarbonization plans haven’t been thought through, systems engineering expertise is notably absent from technological considerations, and constraints posed by critical materials, cost, and massive infrastructure requirements mean that such plans are virtually impossible to implement, he says.

However, U.S. proponents of similar elements of the Green New Deal (pdf)—such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—and, now, presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” insist that reaching net-zero carbon emissions will be a boon for the U.S. economy.

Biden notes the “existential threat” of climate change can be turned into “an opportunity to revitalize the U.S. energy sector and boost growth economy-wide,” invigorating U.S. manufacturing, and creating “high-quality, middle-class jobs in cities and towns across the United States.”

According to Kelly, plans to decarbonize the UK economy (as with Green New Deal-type plans in the United States) aim to electrify the transportation of both persons and freight, as well as to shift the provision of industrial and domestic heat to electricity (or, for the United States, to a mix of electricity and hydrogen gas) from natural gas. The electricity would come primarily from wind and solar facilities, with wind and other renewable energy produced at night stored in batteries for peak demand situations during the day.

While the Green New Deal doesn’t touch on nuclear power as a source of zero-emission electrical energy, the Biden plan brings up the use of smaller, modular nuclear reactors and proposes a research agenda to “identify the future of nuclear energy.” Biden’s plan doesn’t, therefore, confirm the future of the existing U.S. fleet of 95 reactors, which currently produce 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, including some 55 percent of its so-called emissions-free electricity.

Decarbonizing the economy also would necessitate the upgrading of electricity grids—”from top to bottom”—as huge increases in electricity flow patterns would be inevitable. Some 49 percent of U.S. households would have to transition to heating their homes with electricity or geothermal heat pumps from using natural gas. End-users charging millions of electric cars outside their homes and in their garages would also overwhelm current grid infrastructure, making reinvestment essential.

The cost would be “extraordinary,” Kelly says.
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“So if you wanted to be able to cover a week’s power outage after a major storm, it would cost around 1,300 times as much using batteries as it would with diesel generators,” he said. “The idea is ludicrous, and it would be equally foolish to apply batteries anywhere else on this scale.”

Batteries also require large quantities of critical metals and minerals. Just for the United Kingdom—an economy slightly smaller than that of California—the widespread introduction of electrical vehicles would render current mining, processing, and recycling systems for such materials completely inadequate.
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There is more.

We already know that wind and solar energy take about 500 times the mass of fossil fuel generators and that they lack the ability to scale up or down to meet demand.  In other words, they are at best a supplementary power supply and would be a disaster if that is all we had.  We also know they are not reliable and are vulnerable to extreme weather.

What Biden is proposing is not intelligent or feasible and he is misleading voters to suggest otherwise.