Australia’s Giant Green Gamble on Solar Energy Toys
By the time solar energy reaches Earth’s surface it is spread very thin – even midday sunshine will not boil the billy or make toast.
And solar collectors will only convert about 20 percent of that weak energy into electricity. Thus thousands of solar panels are needed to collect significant energy, and lots more to charge the expensive batteries needed to maintain electricity supply overnight and during cloudy weather.
Despite these disadvantages, force-feeding of “green” energy by all levels of government has given Australia nearly three million solar collectors (mainly imported from China).
It requires scads of land to generate significant electricity from the sun’s weak rays. But even in sunny weather they produce nothing for 16 hours every day. And a sprinkling of dust, pollen, ash or salt, or a few splatters of poop from birds or flying foxes can reduce output by 50 percent, while night, snow or heavy cloud cover snuffs them out completely.
Solar energy collection is maximised if the panels face the sun exactly and follow the daily and seasonal movements of the sun across the sky. No rooftop collectors and only 40 percent of ground facilities can do this. Thus to produce the planned energy requires an even bigger area of collector panels, covering even more land.
More interested in propaganda than science, greens call land-based arrays “solar farms” suggesting they are plant-friendly places. However solar panels steal sunlight, leaving real plants beneath them to die. Solar “farms” have nothing in common with real farms except the need for large areas of open countryside – usually consuming valuable flattish cleared farmland or open grassland.
In fact growing plants are a liability to solar “farms” because they can block solar energy, so the operators must prevent grass, weeds and bushes from shadowing the panels and stealing their sunshine. Thus most plant-life in solar “farms” is killed – either by the blocking of the sun, or by regular applications of herbicide, or by roadways.
A big solar “farm” in Australia could contain one million solar panels and smother 2,000 acres of land. Each operation also needs miles of cleared access roads and transmission lines to maintain the facility, collect the electricity and transmit it to urban demand centres. Most of the time these transmission lines are operating well below capacity, creating an expensive web of inefficient maintenance liabilities.
Australia is also a world leader in installing subsidised rooftop solar. But a quick drive around the suburbs will show that few panels have the size, the ideal orientation or the cleanliness to be efficient collectors of solar energy – they are green status symbols designed to collect subsidies.
Many will fail to recover the real cost of manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance and restoration. They destabilise the electricity network and elevate average electricity prices for industry and for those who cannot afford a house, let alone one with its own solar panels.
All for ZERO climate benefits.
Intermittent “green” energy forces coal and gas plants to operate at full capacity to cover peak demands around sunrise and sunset, but to wind back or shut down when solar energy pours into the system around midday.
Recently in just one week in South Australia (Australia’s green energy guinea pig), electricity generation went from “over 130 percent renewables to less than four percent, renewables with everything in between”.
Despite South Australia being home to “the biggest battery in the world”, the energy regulator has been forced to lease diesel back-up generators and to order gas-fired plants to stand by in case the wind suddenly drops – this encourages mechanical and financial breakdowns, and high electricity costs.
Europe has also gone out onto the green energy limb, but this is no comfort for Australians who cannot import nuclear power from France, gas from Russia or hydro-power from Scandinavia.
Every solar installation consumes energy to mine metals, manufacture, transport and erect panels and to build access roads and transmission lines over long distances. Careful analysis will show an energy deficit over their short lifetimes. And when an earthquake, hailstorm, cyclone or hurricane smashes these exposed rows of solar panels, rubbish dumps of mangled trash will be left.
Most of this debris cannot be recycled and tonnes of metals, glass and plastic are destined to end their life as toxic, non-degradable land fill.
Bureaucrats will try to force solar operators to clean up, but smart operators will have bankruptcy petitions prepared for such emergencies.
Proven and reliable electricity generators, driven by coal, gas, hydro or nuclear, with a small land footprint and housed in storm-proof structures, are far less damaging to the green environment than these landscapes of inefficient, intermittent, expensive plant-killing “farms”.
Where are the Green objectors now?
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Allan Shelton
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Those people pushing solar and wind will not be convinced until there is a giant “FAIL”.
OR… They are voted out of office.
Or both.
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Tom O
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So called “green energy” was always intended to cause energy poverty when the next ice age, probably 20 years or so away now, starts to show it’s true face. We are already feeling it, really, but the MSM doesn’t tell us, and the government agencies that can see it, just keep adjusting the data to pretend it isn’t happening.
Real global warming will show its face more in the summer than just in the winter. We see fewer summer time new highs, and we wouldn’t be, if there truly was global warming. Look at the Arctic data. When the Sun is shining 24 hours a day, the average temperature is hanging at or below normal. Does that really make any sense? If we were trapping more heat, the summer temperatures would be rising and yes, we would see that ice free Arctic in the summer, but it obviously isn’t happening.
So if you convert all the high latitude nations to “solar and wind,” the first cloudy, windless and bitter winter will kill millions of people with hypothermia. Just like with the covid shot, the intent always has been to get rid of the “useless eaters” so that “the important people” will have all they want as the usable Earth surface grows less and less. but pointing out the obvious seems to be a waste of time now as the deep indoctrination and dumbing down of the populace has made common sense and intuitive thinking a rare commodity. Instead we have howling fruitcakes like dear Greta or Al Gore being idolized.
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James
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Dopes anyone compare the value of crops lost against power gained, in photoelectric projects? How do you cut the grass/trees etc underneath. Can trees destroy the panels. What long-term effects on the water cycle below the panels. Do they encourage plant growth below, so helping to transform deserts into forests? Can we just let them get on with it and let the growing forests destroy the panels?
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Kai
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Yep. Solar requires rare earths which have to be mined, then processed by conventional means.
The household panels don’t track and they are connected to the grid via SMART Meters.
I know people who are totally off grid but the batteries are very expensive to run a house plus appliances. So without batteries they wouldn’t have enough energy to run all the creature comforts.
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Tom
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No one ever accused the green progressives as being smart. Solar panels might work in individual cases, but never for the energy grid.
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