It hasn’t received much play in the media, but two Google engineers assigned by the company to show how renewable energy can tackle climate change each came to a blunt conclusion:
It can’t be done.“Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach,” engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork said after analyzing a four-year project called “RE<C” — which means Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.
The goal was to show that renewables — such as solar power and wind turbines — can generate electricity cheaper than a coal-fired power plant.
But they couldn’t pull it off.
But they couldn’t pull it off.
....“My reaction was, ‘No kidding,’ ” Bryce told Watchdog.org.
The RE<C project showed renewables “could not provide the enormous quantities of energy that the world demands in anything that the time frame was required to help deal with the issue of climate change or at costs that people could afford,” Bryce said. “It’s a remarkable bit of truth-telling.”
“Unfortunately, most of today’s clean generation sources can’t provide power that is both distributed and dispatchable,” Koningstein and Fork wrote. “Solar panels, for example, can be put on every rooftop but can’t provide power if the sun isn’t shining.....”
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