Renewables, are not just inefficient, unnecessary, and deadly to wildlife, but they were also a disaster of planning and management. The list of dollars and euros destroyed in the Glorious Renewables Quest has gone “nuclear”. The World Economic Forum estimates $100 billion Euro has been wasted, but its even worse than it looks. I had to read their opening sentence twice. I thought it read “European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient energy source.” I was thinking they could have saved that sort of money by using coal instead of windmills… but no, those huge savings would be over and above those ones. The WEF is talking about money saved if “badly managed renewables, had been “well managed ones”.
The inefficiency here is the scale only big-government could achieve.
Europe Loses Billions in Badly Sited Renewable Power Plants
European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient capacity given their renewable energy resources, that is, by installing wind turbines in windier countries and solar power plants in sunnier places.
But why would we be surprised?
The people who pushed renewables onto Europe were never doing it for pragmatic or practical reasons. The numbers never made sense on any level — not for electricity-made, not for global “cooling”, nor species saved, nor jobs created. The numbers didn’t work for “energy independence” and they certainly didn’t add up to a profit.
Since the point wasn’t about electricity, or the environment, it didn’t really matter if the solar panels were not in sunny spots, and the wind towers were not in windy places. If those things mattered, the Greens would have been apoplectic at this waste. How many children could have got access to clean water instead? All of them. WHO estimates the cost of clean water globally at $30b.
The sticker shock of the odd 100b has worn off, but we’re talking of one hundred thousand million Euro.
The WEF are a pro-renewables lot too. They want renewables to work.
The $100b figure was not surprisingly, not in the executive summary, but on page 14.
For example, it is obvious to most European citizens that southern Europe has the lion’s share of the solar irradiation while northern Europe has the wind.
But the EU’s investment in renewables does not reflect this: where Spain has about 65% more solar irradiation than Germany (1750 vs 1050 kWh/m2), Germany installed about 600% more solar PV capacity (33 GW vs 5 GW). In contrast, whereas Spain has less wind than countries in the north, it has still installed 23 GW of wind capacity.
Such suboptimal deployment of resources is estimated to have cost the EU approximately $100 billion more than if each country in the EU had invested in the most efficient capacity given its renewable resources. And by looking across borders for the optimum deployment of renewable
resources (with associated physical interconnections), the EU could have saved a further $40 billion.
And if the EU had coordinated across boundaries (isn’t that what the EU is for) they could have saved another $40b on top of that.
h/t tovthe GWPF
REFERENCE
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) latest “Future of Electricity” Report