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progree

(11,463 posts)
9. Nothing is completely green, not even green paint
Tue Oct 1, 2024, 09:42 PM
Oct 1
Well, not buying for a New York Minute that so called "renewable energy" is, um, "green,"

I've never said that, although my excerpts did use the word green without qualification, which is problematic.

ALL sources of energy, including nuclear, have some greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental costs over their life cycles.

I did use the word "green(er)" in #7 above, the " (er) " part is in acknowledgement that it's all relative, and nothing is completely green, even green paint.

..I really, really, really, really am being dishonest in believing that the majority of this bullshit is anything but "an accounting trick," i.e. that these people whose hydrogen station blew up after a week, thus eating all of the external costs to build it, have shut their electrolyzers during long periods of dunkelflaute, and rush out, when the wind comes up to try to get the electrolyzers to get past the thermodynamic and economic penalty of electrolyzer hysteresis for a few hours, I admit that I am as unable and unwilling to provide an answer these quibbles that any quibbler is likely to accept.

I'm sure with that accident after just a week of operation, they aren't going to claim that they netted out carbon neutral or anything like that.

I read about gasoline station fires too. I haven't read that they are less common or more common than hydrogen station fires on a per station basis, so whatever.

Terrible about that electrolyzer hysteresis and all that (and the exergy and all that), but there's penalties and inefficiencies in gasoline production and usage too. Since nothing is 100% whole and pure, what I try to do is compare the full lifecycle of greenhouse gas emissions of gasoline fueling vehicles -- with hydrogen (produced from solar or wind, with payback of any fossil-fuel-produced electricity used) Dunkleflauts and nighttime's and all.

I'm certainly not going to waste time "auditing" anyone to find out if their Potemkin hydrogen plant for fueling 40 or 50 vehicles ... is really run on so called "renewable energy," because long experience - which may go beyond knowing what the person in the next office over is doing - tells me it's a waste of time. I have, for myself at least, a fairly reliable sense of bullshit.

Well, you got me there. Yes, the time I spent getting my M.S.E.E. in the power engineering field, and professional experience in the generation and transmission planning and operational planning departments and working in and researching in that field for decades, admittedly just all boil down to knowing what's going on in the office next door.

The planet is burning, and all the quibbles, and all the half a century of pursuing the putative hydrogen economy, which I am unwilling to stop asserting will not come

I'll just respond that I'm not a fan of hydrogen, since I haven't said that before. I've posted about the negatives of hydrogen before. I just don't have patience with the argument that boils down to almost all hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, therefore it's all produced by fossil fuels, and anything that says otherwise is just an exercise in accounting tricks. That's not the argument of a scientist, but rather of a polemicist ideolog.

Interesting that everything you oppose, other than nuclear, seem to be very popular with the current administration. Here is just one example since the topic is hydrogen.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-releases-first-ever-national-clean-hydrogen-strategy-and

And I can't resist this example from our Secretary of Energy Granholm -
“When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills.”

I stand by my remarks, the hydrogen game, like the "renewable energy" game it pretends is its source, is useless, if one defines, as I do, being useful as doing something to address extreme global warming. I am unconvinced that it is anything but fossil fuel apologetics.

So the solar and wind electricity produced hasn't reduced fossil fuel consumption at all? I explain here that any electricity that enters the grid causes dispatchable units (mostly fossil) to reduce their outputs. And that's not an accounting trick that I learned from the office next door, it is the reality of the situation, physics and all that. https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127175065

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