Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Can the world rely on renewable energy? | Future Earth | BBC News" video.

  1. The Royal Society recommend the UK should have 100TWh of energy storage (it's currently 39.3 GWh from 4 pumped storage facilities). That's over a 2,500 fold increase. That means building 10,000 pumped storage facilities or 400 every year. A typical pumped storage facility has a 300 to 400m dam built to hold back 10 million cubic metres of water, with a fall to the turbines below of about 400 metres. That's at the same time as increasing wind power generation from 75TWh (in 2020) to 665TWh (in 2050 - these are UK National Grid figures). That's around 100,000 giant wind turbines. And by the time you get to 2050, the 4,000 wind turbines you needed to install in 2025 would have reached the end of their working lives and will need to be buried in landfill, and replaced with another 4,000. It's all impossible and absurd. The cabling and additional structures to connect all this together will essentially require the UK consuming all of the current global supply of copper and other rare metals for the next 25 years. The cost will be unaffordable and the skilled manpower levels unattainable. And that is just to eliminate the less than 1% of the global CO2 emissions that the UK is responsible for. So times that by 100 for the whole Earth going Net Zero. Good luck with that.
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