Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.

But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.

“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore told Reuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.”

Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.

In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.

But the apocalyptic rhetoric detracts little from the heart of the documentary, which exposes the complicity of climate activists including Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Sierra Club’s Executive Director, in promoting pollution-intensive biomass energies, as well as natural gas. //

Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste. “You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” said one expert, “instead of just playing pretend. We’re basically just being fed a lie.”

The man noted that Koch Industries provide many of the materials used to build solar panels and industrial solar farms. “The funny part is that when you criticize solar plants like this you are accused of working for the Koch brothers,” he laughs. “That’s the idiocy. This relies on the most toxic industrial processes we’ve ever created.”

What drives people who believe they want to save the environment into destroying it? The filmmaker hints that the desire for “sustainability” is really a desire for a kind of immortality. “What differentiates people is that we know we’ll die someday,” says a sociologist. “We enveloped ourselves in belief systems and worldviews.” //

The good news, the man says, is that “once you come to terms with death, anything is possible.”

Tesla is working on a bid to deploy one of the biggest battery systems in the world with 244 Megapacks, Tesla’s latest giant battery system, on an island in Hawaii. After a lot of rumors and anticipation, Tesla launched its “Megapack” last year. It’s the company’s latest energy storage product, after the Powerpack and the …

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“Brand is powerful — after a house and a car, a PV/storage system worth tens of thousands of dollars is one of the larger purchases a family will make.”

French energy giant eyes demonstrator that could be massively scaled up at facilities including Hinkley Point and Sizewell

Putting solar panels on your roof is probably a good investment, no matter where you live. But adding a home battery may do more harm than good. //

The energy produced over the lifetime of rooftop solar panels more than makes up for the energy it takes to make, mount, and eventually recycle them. But adding a home battery can lower those dividends, new research finds. //

Previous studies estimated the energy output at about nine times the energy invested in solar panels. The new study, which appears in Sustainable Energy & Fuels, however, examined the output from a typical rooftop system installed in five diverse American states. Researchers found that the energy payout ratio ranges from a low of 14 in Alaska to a high of 27 in sunny Arizona—but only when homeowners are able to send surplus power to the grid.

When homeowners install a battery and charge it with excess electricity before sending leftovers to the grid, however, the energy return on investment for the entire system is 21 percent less than solar panels alone, researchers found.

When homeowners have no battery and no grid outlet, it just wastes extra electricity. Then, the system’s return on invested energy falls to seven in Alaska and a high of 14 in Florida—on par with earlier studies. Because homeowners in that scenario need to purchase electricity during the evening, adding a standard lithium-ion home battery improves the energy payback. //

Adding batteries to a home photovoltaic system reduces the energy payback of the entire system by 21 percent on average due to two factors. First, adding batteries means more energy in the form of fossil fuels invested in making the entire system. Second, a battery discharges 8 percent less electricity than the amount of electricity required to charge it—a loss compared to sending electricity directly to a larger electricity system with customers who can use the power immediately.

The current study acknowledges the dilemma. “As rooftop solar and large, photovoltaic power stations grow, electricity grids will not be able to accept more afternoon power, unless new uses of cheap afternoon electrons grow,” Benson says.

"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.

Download a free e-copy of Craig’s first book, a #1 best-seller in energy on Amazon.com: “Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies.”

Want to understand the thorny challenges in technology, economics, and politics that face the clean energy industry? Download the book.

Japan is pushing ahead with a fuel source that’s exacerbating climate change. //

The reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant automatically shut down in response to the earthquake, but the tsunami overtopped the plant’s seawall, stalling the backup generators that were providing vital cooling to the idled reactors. The lost coolant led to meltdowns and explosions at the plant, releasing dangerous radioactive material.

In response, more than 150,000 people were evacuated from the region. While there were some increases in ambient radiation exposure, the main harms from the disaster stemmed from relocating so many people, ranging from worsened illnesses from loss of access to health care to mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, Japan’s entire nuclear power fleet, providing one-third of the country’s electricity, was taken offline for safety inspections and updates. Before the disaster, Japan was looking to ramp up its share of nuclear energy to 53 percent.

The impacts of the disaster rippled out other countries too. Germany was also preparing to build more nuclear power plants before the 2011 earthquake. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany pulled a 180 and decided to embark on ending its use of nuclear power entirely.

Nine years later, the impacts of the earthquake continue to rock Japan. The country has or will decommission 24 reactors, 40 percent of its total. Of the remaining reactors, fewer than half have been restarted. Nuclear’s share of electricity generation has now fallen to 3 percent, with fossil fuels largely filling the void. //

The Japanese government is more worried about the economy than the environment //

But across Japan as a whole, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower generation provide just 17 percent of the country’s electricity. As a densely populated island country, Japan has run into land use constraints around deploying large-scale wind and solar plants. //

That pretty much leaves nuclear as Japan’s remaining option for carbon-free electricity. But the public is resolutely against it. “Nuclear has a pretty bad reputation in Japan,” said Scott Harold, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. //

The rise of China threatens Japan, and so it wants to use coal to solidify and expand its influence
Behind India and China, Japan is the world’s third-largest coal importer. About two-thirds of Japan’s coal is from Australia, a country that is also facing climate-linked disasters and is struggling to curb its economic reliance on coal.

But Japan is also a major exporter of coal technology, and its government has used these power plants as a means to exert soft power. Through government institutions like the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the government has financed new coal power plants in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

A vanadium/mining industry PR firm has visited the site of an in development 200MW/800MWh vanadium flow battery in Dalian, China and noted that site work is ongoing. They also stated that most of the product that will fill the site – the vanadium batteries – is already built in the manufacturer’s nearby factory.

This battery is currently the largest planned chemical battery in the world, and part of a Chinese government investment to spur the technology.

The 200MW/800MWh vanadium flow battery (VFB) is manufactured by Rongke Power. Note in the featured image, which is the manufacturer’s facility, there are many solar panels, and a car port – probably has electric car charging spots under there as well.

The battery’s purpose is to provide power during peak hours of demand, to enhance grid stability and deliver juice during black-start conditions in case of emergency. The system is expected to peak-shave about 8% of Dalian’s expected load when it comes online in 2020. //

Right now [2017], it seems tech savvy people always bring up flow batteries when talking about large-scale grid applications. No degradation over 20 years is a pretty impressive feat from the perspective of an electricity utility or a financial analyst. 15,000 cycles – one per day – would be 41 years of usage. And from what I’ve read, you can repair the pieces that break.

I’ve also read that vanadium flow batteries already cost well below $500/kWh – and that some hope to see $150/kWh by 2020. That’s a competitive product. And if utilities like it better because it scales easier and has a longer lifetime, renewables will benefit.

The Green New Deal is anything but 'clean' or 'green.' Even the relatively modest numbers of solar and wind installations in the United States today are causing serious environmental damage. //

A few minutes of serious thought from self-described environmentalists would prompt a realization that if the Green New Deal, a program championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were implemented, it would create an environmental disaster.

In recent decades, policymakers have forced public utilities to generate increasingly more electricity from fashionable “renewable energy” sources, especially wind and solar, and pushed automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles. Their chief goal is to eliminate reliable, affordable, generally clean fossil fuels, including natural gas, even though they generate most of America’s electricity and power most U.S. transportation.

Environmentalists claim to worry that carbon dioxide from these fuels will cause devastating global warming. Many would also eliminate nuclear power, which they say is inherently unsafe. //

environmentalists have paid too little attention to the serious harm Green New Deal policies would inflict on the environment — including scenic lands, wildlife habitats, and threatened and endangered species. Implementing the Green New Deal would undermine the very values environmentalists have espoused for decades.

America faces a dilemma. Will it focus on real environmental problems that do measurable harm to human and ecological wellbeing, or will it mandate policies to head off climate disasters that are based on warming predictions have been repeatedly proven wrong by real-world empirical observations? Will it recognize that harnessing intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy requires enormous amounts of raw materials and mining, resulting in massive land-use impacts and human rights abuses, and is anything but clean, green, renewable, and sustainable? Or will it ignore all this? //

Solar farms generate only 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity and would be an inefficient way to generate the more than 8 billion megawatt-hours of power that fossil fuels and nuclear provide each year to meet industrial, commercial, residential, and automotive transportation needs and charge backup-power batteries. Using cutting-edge Nellis Air Force Base solar panels to generate that electricity would require completely blanketing 57,000 square miles of land — equivalent to the land area of New York and Vermont — with 19 billion photovoltaic solar panels. //

Turbines ruin scenic views, kill countless birds and bats, and harm marine mammals, which is why environmentalists — and even the late leftist icon Sen. Ted Kennedy — have long opposed the planned Vineyard Wind facility off the Massachusetts coast. To provide enough power for the country, Green New Deal advocates would have to build hundreds of thousands of truly gigantic offshore turbines. //

Solar panels require many toxic materials, and wind turbines require enormous amounts of steel, concrete, copper, and rare earth elements. Storing a week’s worth of power for periods when the sun is not shining or the wind isn’t blowing would require some 2 billion half-ton Tesla car battery packs. Meeting these needs would require a massive expansion of mining for lithium, cobalt, and other substances in the United States or in Asia, Africa, and South America. Operations in the latter countries involve extensive child labor, create environmental disasters, and even lead to premature death.

What’s more, disposing of obsolescent solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries is already causing problems in the United States and in countries such as Germany. Green New Deal advocates ignore this problem, which would multiply substantially under their plan.

Powering up our world

with cheap, reliable, CO2-free electric power, now.

What is ThorCon? ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current nuclear reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. It can be moved around with a pump and passively drained. This 500 MW fission power plant is encapsulated in a hull, built in a shipyard, towed to a shallow water site, ballasted to the seabed. Visit Design.

Ready to Go. ThorCon requires no new technology. ThorCon is a straightforward scale-up of the successful United States Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). A full-scale 500 MW ThorCon prototype can be operating under test within four years. After proving the plant safely handles multiple potential failures and problems, commercial power plant production can begin. Visit MSRE.

Rapidly Deployable. The complete ThorCon is manufactured in 150 to 500 ton blocks in a shipyard, assembled, then towed to the site. This produces order of magnitude improvements in productivity, quality control, and build time. A single large reactor yard can turn out twenty gigawatts of ThorCon power plants per year. ThorCon is a system for building power plants. Visit Production.

Fixable. Everything in the fission island except the structure itself is replaceable with little interruption in power output. Every four years the entire primary loop is changed out, returned to a centralized recycling facility, decontaminated, disassembled, inspected, and refurbished. Incipient problems are caught before they can turn into casualties. Upgrades can be introduced without significantly disrupting power generation. Visit Fuel.

Walkaway Safe. ThorCon fuel is in liquid form. If the reactor overheats for whatever reason, ThorCon will shut itself down, and passively handle the decay heat. No power, no machinery, no operator action is required. This is built into the reactor physics. The operators can do nothing to prevent safe shutdown and cooling. ThorCon has at least three gas tight barriers between the fuelsalt and the atmosphere. The reactor operates at garden hose pressure. In the event of a primary loop rupture, there is no dispersal energy and no phase change. The spilled fuel merely flows to a drain tank where it is passively cooled. The most troublesome fission products, including Sr-90 and Cs-137, are chemically bound to the salt. They will end up in the drain tank as well. Visit Safety.

The public discussion of energy options tends to be intensely
emotional, polarized, mistrustful, and destructive. Every option is
strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal,
anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrage, anti-fuel-duty, and
anti-nuclear.

We can't be anti-everything! We need an energy plan that adds up.
But there's a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy.
Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an
impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid
thoughtful discussion.

My motivation in writing "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air"
(available both on paper, and for free in electronic form
[withouthotair.com]) is to promote constructive conversations about
energy, instead of the perpetual Punch and Judy show. I've tried to
write an honest, educational and fun book.[2] I hope the book will help
build a cross-party consensus in favour of urgently making an energy
plan that adds up.

"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" presents
the numbers that are needed to answer these questions:

• How huge are Britain's renewable resources, compared with our current
  energy consumption?

• How big do renewable energy facilities have to be, to make a
  significant contribution?

• How big would our energy consumption be if we adopted strong
  efficiency measures?

• Which efficiency measures offer big savings, and which offer only 5
  or 10%?

• Do new much-hyped technologies such as hydrogen or electric cars
  reduce energy consumption, or do they actually make our energy
  problem worse?

Hon. Orison M. Amu and Hon Samuel D. Tweah Jr signed the Financing Agreement for Renewable Energy Electricity in Liberia MONROVIA – The Government of Liberia and the African Development Bank (AfDB) have signed Financing Agreements for two Projects ... //

According to the Agreement, the value of the REEL Project is US$33.74 million and is expected to be implemented over a 4-year period.

The Agreement mentions the development of a hydropower plant on the Gbedin Falls on the St. John River in Nimba County as the main objective of the REEL Project. The dam is expected to have a capacity of 9.34 megawatts and will serve as a source of reliable, sustainable and affordable power in the region thus enabling the power grid expansion to isolated localities and remote areas, and encourage the connection of a increased number of households, schools, health centers, businesses and industries to the national grid.

New figures show we’re using more energy and still pumping out more emissions—so why aren’t we moving the dial? //

renewables mainly picked up market share forfeited by another source of carbon-free power, rather than seizing it from fossil fuels. Once you add that to the increasing use of natural gas and coal use to fuel economic growth, it’s no surprise that the world still isn’t making a real dent in energy emissions, decades after the threat of climate change became clear. //

Many nuclear power stations around the world, however, are due for retirement or are already being decommissioned. Meanwhile, little new capacity is coming online thanks to tougher regulations and safety concerns intensified by Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, as well as steep operating and development costs //

As things stand, the world’s retiring plants will remove around 200 gigawatts by 2040. That will make it nearly impossible to reach those targets unless companies and policymakers decide to extend the life of those facilities, or get busy building many more.

Abstract. Political flexibility brings about trade-offs for policy-makers aiming to support the deployment of renewable energy sources (RES). On the one hand,

In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.

The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control. //

In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population. //

Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.

If we expect to create a prosperous future fueled by low-cost, clean energy, it’s time to recalibrate the way we think about renewables. That requires us to move beyond the once cutting-edge view that solar power is a key ingredient in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, a frequent target of environmentalists, Duke Energy, is showing us that’s not the case. In fact, Duke documents show the negative impact of deploying solar power on the electric grid.

Reporting by North State Journal revealed Duke is asking North Carolina regulators to ease air quality emission limits for some of Duke’s combustion turbine facilities. The utility is trying to reduce air pollution it says is due to the increased penetration of solar power. North Carolina ranks second in the nation, behind only California, in the amount of installed solar plants.

Duke’s problem shows what happens when basic science collides with operational reality. Solar energy is intermittent. Until a reasonable storage technology is available, natural gas plants must operate when solar is brought on and off the grid. Put simply, the gas plant is generating power when the sun isn’t shining. Duke’s applications reportedly show that, due to the see-saw effect of deploying solar, emissions of the pollutant nitrogen oxide have increased, even though the level is lower than emissions from purely coal-based energy.

North State Journal also reported on Duke’s concerns about the potential reversal of reductions in another pollutant, carbon dioxide, if North Carolina continues to impose its renewables mandate on utilities. Such a reversal is possible if regulations force Duke to reduce nuclear plant output because it must accept solar electricity instead. It turns out that when zero-emission nuclear plants are dialed back to make room for solar, greenhouse gas-emitting plants must be employed to give nuclear plants time to ramp back up when the sun goes down. That’s not exactly the results environmentalists were expecting from the push to adopt solar power.

let’s embrace clean nuclear energy now and in the future. North Carolina’s Duke Energy operates six nuclear plants, a small portion of a considerable fleet that has served the nation well. They have years of useful life remaining, but ensuring their long-term future requires a lengthy relicensing process by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

We must incentivize utilities to relicense their plants rather than retire them. Publicly owned, regulated utilities typically don’t receive a rate of return on assets that have fully depreciated. This is not to say utilities are retiring coal and nuclear plants after paying off mortgages simply because the plants no longer earn a return. Still, the lack of additional incentive is a reality.
A recent study from the Institute for Energy Research revealed that the cost of power produced by an old nuclear plant is more than 30 percent cheaper than new natural gas, the next cheapest option.

If we allow nuclear plants to be retired under current economics, some combination of natural gas combustion turbines and renewable sources such as solar or wind will replace them. This means a zero greenhouse gas-emitting source that doesn’t spew nitrogen oxides or other pollutants will be replaced with a source that does, and at a higher cost as well

An obscure technology from the past has the potential to change the world's future.

"This is the future of aviation," Oskar Meijerink tells me in a café in Rotterdam airport.

His company, in partnership with the airport's owners, is planning the world's first commercial production of jet fuel made, in part, from carbon dioxide (CO2).

Based at the airport, it will work by capturing CO2, the gas which contributes to global warming, from the air.

In a separate process, electrolysis splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is mixed with the captured CO2 to form syngas, which can be transformed into jet fuel.

The pilot plant, which aims to produce 1,000 litres of jet fuel a day, will get its energy from solar panels.

The partners in the project hope to produce the first fuel in 2021.

They argue that their jet fuel will have a much smaller CO2 impact than regular fuel.

Oskar admits that the fuel has a long way to go before it is competitive.

"The main element is the cost," Oskar Meijerink, from SkyNRG, concedes.

"Fossil jet fuel is relatively inexpensive. Capturing CO2 from the air is still a nascent technology and expensive."

Other companies are working on similar direct capture systems, including Carbon Engineering in Canada and US-based Global Thermostat.

But environmental campaigners are highly sceptical.

"It sure does sound amazing. It sounds like a solution to all of our problems - except that it's not," said Jorien de Lege from Friends of the Earth.

"If you think about it, this demonstration plant can produce a thousand litres a day based on renewable energy. That's about five minutes of flying in a Boeing 747.

While companies are experimenting with high tech ways to capture CO2 from the air, there's already a very simple, efficient way to do it - growing plants. And aircraft are already flying on renewable fuels made from plant biomass.

Sugar cane, grasses or palm oil, and even animal waste products - effectively anything that contains carbon - can be processed and used. ///

It isn't possible to grow enough volume of biofuel feedstock to supply conventional fuel demands.