Solar and Wind Hype Will Kill a Lot of People

Kumar Thangudu

March 15, 2018

I grew up for periods of time in a country that produced less than 1 Megawatt hour per capita per a year and has an uncomfortably high infant mortality rate.[India]

The US produces 12 MWh per capita per a year.

I am relatively used to toxic skies, turning on generators, suicides, and rampant death. Suicides happen because infrastructure is broken on a legal and energy grid level.

200K Indians Die Each Month from Causes Directly Linked to Air Pollution

I’m frankly very tired of 200K Indians dying each month and feeling helpless to do anything whilst our engineering talent is fierce.

200K Indians die each month from causes directly linked to air pollution.

India is Capable

Indians power 1/7th of All US STEM jobs, there is no lack of intellectual firepower to implement solutions.

Indians go to the USA and succeed, Americans rarely come to India and succeed, they usually fail. Getting anything done in a country with <1 MWh/capita per a year is really tough.

For a viable energy parity future, the narrative must shift —

  • All supposed environmentalists and NGOs must push for fast-tracking 3rd-world energy parity through Nuclear.
  • Most things less than this are Churchill-esque Bengal-famine-1943-ish — — Bread Becomes Energy….Lives will be lost.

Thinking Big

As a systems engineer, I can’t build a performant civilization on <1MWh/capita per a year. It’s simply too damn difficult.

I need 3 things to build a modern civilization:

Countries with a half-way decent rule of law and at least 3 Megawatt hours per capita per a year are usually half way comfortable to live in.

Most countries never reach 3 or 4 Megawatt Hours per capita per year because of the way nuclear fissile material rights and politics operate or because they don’t leverage birth control and contraceptives.

Nuclear energy is the only non-intermittent baseload energy provider with the lowest pollutive rank per a joule of output.

Solar and Wind are Like The Theranos of Energy Solutions

Solar and Wind they are fully underdeveloped solutions, like homeopathy

I want Solar City to fail miserably and go bankrupt and stop invading the narrative of how India and developing countries should reach energy parity.

Why Solar and Wind Make No Sense

  1. Solar and Wind power are intermittent, when they have rapid 2–3 second downturns, they require Natural Gas Peaking plants to compensate and keep your lighting on. Natural Gas Peaking plants are the only energy source that can turn so quickly enough in compensatory action.
  2. “1 MW of wind capacity requires 103 tonnes of stainless steel, 402 tonnes of concrete, 6.8 tonnes of fiberglass, 3 tonnes of copper and 20 tonnes of cast iron.” It takes a lot of diesel to transport this material and much electricity to cast the metals.
  3. There is no safe way to dispose of solar waste. “Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.”
  4. “If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).”

I have yet to find a substantive argument against Nuclear energy in the light of pollution, death, radiation exposure, and a host of over 100 factors when deciding how to design utilitarian grids for the masses

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