Most new wind and solar projects will be cheaper than coal, report finds

[Resurgence]

Almost two-thirds of wind and solar projects built globally last year will be able to generate cheaper electricity than even the world’s cheapest new coal plants, according to a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).

The agency found that the falling cost of new windfarms and solar panels meant 62% of new renewable energy projects could undercut the cost of up to 800 gigawatts (GW) worth of coal plants, or almost enough to supply the UK’s electricity needs 10 times over.

Solar power costs fell by 16% last year, according to the report, while the cost of onshore wind dropped 13% and offshore wind by 9%.

In less than a decade the cost of large-scale solar power has fallen by more than 85% while onshore wind has fallen almost 56% and offshore wind has declined by almost 48%. 

Francesco La Camera, Irena’s director general, said the agency’s latest research proved the world was “far beyond the tipping point of coal”.

He said: “Today renewables are the cheapest source of power. Renewables present countries tied to coal with an economically attractive phase-out agenda that ensures they meet growing energy demand, while saving costs, adding jobs, boosting growth and meeting climate ambition.”

In Europe, the cost of a new coal plant would be well above the cost of new wind and solar farms including mandatory carbon prices. The report found that in the US renewable energy could undercut between three-quarters and 91% of existing coal-fired power plants, while in India renewable energy would be cheaper than between 87% and 91% of new coal plants.

Replacing hundreds of existing coal plants with unsubsidised renewable energy sources could save $32.3bn (£22.8bn) every year in energy system costs and avoid about 3 gigatonnes of CO2 annually, the report said.

The carbon saving from phasing out 800GW of coal power capacity would be the equivalent of shaving 9% from the world’s energy-related emissions last year, according to the report, or 20% of the carbon savings needed by 2030 to help limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The report predicts the cost of renewable energy will continue to fall in the coming years. Over the next two years three-quarters of all new solar power projects will be cheaper than new coal power plants, and onshore wind costs will be a quarter lower than the cheapest new coal-fired option.

“The trend confirms that low-cost renewables are not only the backbone of the electricity system, but that they will also enable electrification in end uses like transport, buildings and industry and unlock competitive indirect electrification with renewable hydrogen,” the report said.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...oal-report

[ill88eagle]

Everybody interested in this subject should at least watch this clip



The full movie is freely available on youtube as well.

Point in case: there is no green or sustainable energy model on the market. All models rely on heavy duty industry with toxic chemicals and world wide co2 heavy mining, transport and construction (not to mention exploitation of child workers in conflict zones). And all of this fancy tech has a consumer society lifespan after which it gets discarded and ends up guess where? 3rd world land fills off the green grid.

I hate to spoil the party but whatever green story they smack on their business models it's still business as usual...

[Resurgence]

Everybody interested in this subject should at least watch this clip

The full movie is freely available on youtube as well.

Point in case: there is no green or sustainable energy model on the market. All models rely on heavy duty industry with toxic chemicals and world wide co2 heavy mining, transport and construction (not to mention exploitation of child workers in conflict zones). And all of this fancy tech has a consumer society lifespan after which it gets discarded and ends up guess where? 3rd world land fills off the green grid.

I hate to spoil the party but whatever green story they smack on their business models it's still business as usual...

You will need more substantive sources than a Michael Moore documentary if you wish to derail the GLOBAL advancement of sustainable technologies.



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Michael Moore’s latest film is riddled with errors — and millions are watching

by Shannon Osaka


Published April 29, 2020



Green energy is a sham. Solar panels and wind farms cause hidden environmental destruction. Renewable energy isn’t perfect — so why bother with it at all?

These are the strange takeaways from a video released last week on YouTube that currently has over 3 million views — and no, it’s not a Koch brothers propaganda film trumpeting the merits of oil. It’s Planet of the Humans, a new 100-minute climate change documentary executive-produced by Michael Moore, well-known political contrarian, and written and directed by Jeff Gibbs, a filmmaker who has worked with Moore in the past.

Climate change documentaries are kind of old news at this point. In 2006, Al Gore converted his scary global warming PowerPoint presentation into a surprise blockbuster film, An Inconvenient Truth. In the 2016 film Before the Flood, actor Leonardo DiCaprio intoned, over a photo of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” that the earth was a “paradise that had been degraded and destroyed.”

Moore and Gibbs’ film does something different — but not in a good way. The YouTube film is ostensibly about climate change, but in reality Gibbs spends most of the “documentary” — if you can even call it that — railing against the problems of renewable energy and spinning out conspiracy theories about Gore and other environmentalists. The handful of good points in the movie are largely drowned out by garbled science and hand-wringing over global population growth. It’s not that renewables don’t have any negative impacts on the environment; they do. But using that as a reason to abandon green energy sort of throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Early on in the film, Gibbs, speaking in his trademark robotic monotone, attends a press conference for the newly released Chevrolet Volt in Lansing, Michigan. As a General Motors spokesperson plugs the car in, a utility representative explains that the Lansing electricity grid powering the vehicle is about “95 percent coal.” Gibbs, startled, muses if electric vehicles help the climate at all.

This is trademark Planet of the Humans. Across the United States, about 40 percent of electricity is generated by renewables or nuclear energy — and comprehensive studies have shown that electric cars ultimately result in lower CO2 emissions. Gibbs either doesn’t know this or doesn’t care to point it out. Throughout the film, he overlooks substantive research, preferring to cherry-pick facts, make sweeping generalizations, and engineer “gotcha” moments on camera.

In the first half of the film, Gibbs visits green energy projects accompanied by Ozzie Zehner, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University who wrote a book called Green Illusions. Zehner is not a scientist. In fact, to my count, Gibbs doesn’t interview a single climate scientist in the entire movie, preferring anthropologists and sociologists. While these disciplines have an important role to play in addressing climate change, if you’re trying to assess the environmental impact of renewables, why not ask the people who study it for a living?

In one shot, Zehner stands in the desert in front of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in Southern California. Because the facility uses some natural gas in its operations, he says, “you would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels to begin with.” This analysis is demonstrably false. Even taking into account the manufacturing and fuel requirements of wind, solar, and nuclear plants, these renewable technologies have a far lower climate impact than oil or gas. In another segment, the camera zooms in on power lines connecting Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory to the electrical grid — and assumes that this means Elon Musk must be lying about his factory’s commitment to 100 percent renewable energy. (It doesn’t.)

Indeed, the documentary is so misleading in places that some activists and scientists are calling for it to be removed from online platforms. Josh Fox, director of the anti-fracking documentary Gasland, wrote an open letter arguing that the movie “employs specious techniques of misinformation to deliver a deeply cynical and misleading message.”

There are occasional moments of clarity. Gibbs critiques the extractive mining practices that are required to build solar panels and lithium batteries (accompanied by an intense montage that makes manufacturing a solar panel look like a trip to the fires of Mordor). He also persuasively argues that burning trees for biomass should not be considered a “renewable” energy source because it can lead to deforestation.

The difficulty of Planet of the Humans is that Gibbs mixes these legitimate concerns with more bizarre complaints. He is shocked to find out that solar and wind power are “intermittent” — that is, that there’s no solar power when the sun sets and there’s no wind power when the breeze stops — and thus have to be supplemented by other energy sources, like nuclear or fossil fuels.

The second half of the film is a jumbled and garbled set of conspiracy theories relating to the Koch brothers, the Sierra Club, Al Gore, and other prominent environmentalists. There is also a legitimate critique, made in the film’s last half-hour, that corporate America is currently engaged in a practice known as “greenwashing”: Companies increasingly tout their “sustainability” initiatives while continuing to pollute the environment behind the scenes, and the environmental movement has, in some cases, staked out an easy alliance with big business (perhaps under the assumption that something’s better than nothing). “Environmentalists are no longer resisting those with a profit motive,” Gibbs intones, “but collaborating with them.”

But even this valuable critique is largely lost in the weeds of the documentary’s troubling framing. The real problem, according to Gibbs, is the human race itself. “It’s not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet,” he narrates. “It’s us.” He stops short of overtly advocating for population control, preferring to rail against human consumption in the abstract. Still, it gives the film a chilling undertone. At one point, a psychologist Gibbs is interviewing quotes the French philosopher Albert Camus: “There’s only one liberty, to come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”

Gibbs and Moore certainly did not expect Planet of the Humans to come out in the midst of a global pandemic rapidly claiming lives around the world. But Gibbs sees the coronavirus as proof of the ideas he put forth in the film. “The fact that within days animals are coming back and the skies are blue tells us that we don’t have to build a million square miles of solar panels or buy a zillion electric cars,” he told Reuters last week. “If we just slow down and stop we can make a tremendous difference instantly.”

Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Despite the global lockdown, we’re still on track to release 95 percent of our normal carbon dioxide emissions. 

The thing that could make all the difference? Renewable energy.



https://grist.org/energy/michael-moores-...-watching/