No-Truth, Half-Truths, and Whole-Truth about globalenergy planning (Jon Boone, John Shanahan) USofA

No-Truth, Half-Truths, and the Whole-Truth About Global Energy Planning Jon Boone, Maryland, USA and John Shanahan, Colorado, USA March 29, 2019 Electricity is a form of energy crucially important to the creation, maintenance, and enhancement of modern society. Where there is abundant, reliable, secure, affordable electricity, average lifespans treble and quality of life, including personal and community health, is improved immeasurably.

The use of energy dense fuels, such as those known as conventional generation--coal, natural gas, nuclear, and water impounded in massive reservoirs, is the key to making electricity reliable, secure, affordable (scalable), and immediately responsive to demand at all times, night or day. Such fuels provide what engineers call firm capacity, allowing proactive machine performance whenever, wherever, it is desired. Rational electricity policy must insist upon the use of energy dense firm capacity sources of power, since they are the lynchpins of our modernity. The use of diffuse, zero capacity junk energy will only contribute to our undoing.

This crucial significance about the necessity of firm capacity should be kept uppermost in mind as one evaluates various truth claims about energy policy. Examples include: Untruths About Energy involve support of any kind for diffuse, zero capacity wind and solar energies and opposition to firm capacity fossil fuels, hydroelectric and nuclear.

Half-Truths About Energy involve support for fossil fuels or nuclear but not both.

Even more misleading are half-truths supporting the Big Tent proposition that includes fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, wind/solar, and unscalable energy sources like geothermal.

This “all-of-the-above” mix is particularly loathsome, given that virtually all the Big Energy corporations (e.g., Areva, Shell, BP, etc.), politicians, policy wonks, and even energy regulators abet it. The reason: the more wind and solar, the more need for conventional fuels. The renewables du jour enhance the market share of conventionals, increasing profits—at everyone else’s expense. This entire confabulation is a howler. But funny only to those who are cynically craven.

Beyond this, support for wind especially is “replete with Owellian doublespeak.”

Consider this (something Jon Boone wrote long ago): Despite the promise of many jobs in the USA, for example, wind provides almost no permanent employment while most wind manufacturing will migrate to China, as much of it has already. Despite the bellyfeel assertion that wind is an environmental 1

savior, it is in fact an environmental wrecking ball. Contrary to the proposition wind can back down the coal industry, in most areas of the country, it may actually increase coal consumption. However, nothing about wind is more Orwellian than the term windpower. Despite its pervasive use and casual acceptance, windpower as a contemporary expression of reality is quite at odds with itself, particularly in technologically advanced societies.

"Widespread misunderstanding about the difference between energy and power has given cover to charlatans like wind salesman who pretend their wares provide something they do not. We are all familiar with blackwhite PR jargon that characterizes wind projects as mills, farms, and parks, despite the looming industrial presence of 450-foot tall turbines propelling rotors at tip speeds of nearly 200-mph for many miles along terrain or seabed. But for sheer oxymoronic audacity, nothing beats the trickeration of the term windpower, since the technology is the very antithesis of modern power performance. In fact, wind provides no modern power. Rather, it throws out spasmodic, highly skittering energy that cannot by itself be converted to modern power.”

The half-truths/untruths embedded in all this are legion. As Jon Boone also wrote nearly 20 years ago, the renewables du jour are enabled by a few truths and an avalanche of half-truths, seasoned with some veritable whoppers—all for the purpose of building a house of lies. That powerful odor of mendacity….

Whole-Truths About Energy involve support for firm capacity fossil fuels, hydroelectric and nuclear as a gracefully pragmatic way to achieve a prosperous, environmentally sound, even peaceful world.

The new website: allaboutenergy.net will support the Whole Truth About Energy and discuss the shortcomings of No Truth and Half Truths about Energy planning.

Many countries choose to live in a make-believe-world about energy of all types: wind, solar, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. This new website will work to promote the truth.

The story about energy from coal in Germany is an excellent example of the contradictions in German energy planning. While Germany claims that the world must stop using fossil fuels because of unsound beliefs in catastrophic man-made global warming and demands to switch to wind and solar, it continues heavy reliance on domestic use of fossil fuels and dependence on fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear from neighboring countries. That is No-Truth-At-All. Same with all countries that are marching to supposed 100% reliance on wind and solar energy. They are following a modern Pied Piper.

The Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Germany in 1284 AD will be repeated by stories of the No-Truth and Half-Truth energy recommendations from 21st Century Europe and North America.

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The world needs sound energy planning based on the Whole Truth About Energy. The website allaboutenergy.net tells this to the world.

Cities need plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels, hydro-electric and nuclear. Quito, Ecuador with active volcano, Pichincha is one of thousands of cities that need sound energy planning for more than a thousand years.

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