Recently I have been reminded again about “GREENWASHING”. Reading through many news articles, scientific papers, and business proposals on a daily base I discovered that whenever people talk about renewable energy the topic “storage” comes up. Often one can read and hear that the biggest disadvantage of renewables like solar power or wind is the storage because it leads to additional costs.
Hm? But aren’t there also storage costs for oil, gas, and coal? For sure there are, and a lot!
We know, but often forget, conventional energy resources require various forms of “storage” to be workable for the conventional energy system. And yes, all that “storage” comes with costs AND emissions that incur additional costs. Amongst them are predominantly
- Resource deposit (the initial storage) (e.g. the coal mine, oil field itself, …), the
- Resource deposit site storage (The raised coal, oil, … at or close to the deposit), the
- Resource transportation (Transporting of coal, oil, … as a form of storage), the
- Intermediate resource storage (Temporary storage of the transported resource), the
- Resource processing storage (The storage of the resource after preparing for power generation), finally the
- Power generation,
Such multi-stage storage is required, to produce conventional energy smoothly.
According to the “70th edition of the BP statistical review of world energy 2021” China is emitting >30% of the global CO2 Emissions!
Media report, that proponents – mostly from the US-led oil and gas industry – suggest that the overall coal “storage system” in China was responsible for 40% of all CO2 emissions of China in 2020.
This translates to 12% of global CO2 emissions, attributable to the “storage system” or more than EUROPE’s 11,1% of overall CO2 emissions in 2020.
Is this discussion real? Or is it just a very bad joke? Because what the proponents of the oil and gas industry insinuate is that coal as a fuel resource shall be substituted by oil and gas as a fuel resource due to its high emissions.
This discussion is totally wrong from the very onset!
They deliberately obstruct the discussion about the energy transition by discussing the poisonous effects between 2 poisons – which one is more poisonous – is this real?
Hey, guys are you serious?
In contrast to the written above, RENEWABLE ENERGY RESOURCES definitely have NO emissions at all hence there is NO storage nor conditioning nor transport of the resources necessary.
RENEWABLE ENERGY RESOURCES are provided everywhere by nature, WITHOUT the need of any resource STORAGE system – NO resource TRANSPORT system, NO resource storage EMISSION!
So, what’s next???
by Gerald Tychtl, 25 March 2022
featured image on top: creative commons 2.0 by Petteri Sulonen, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hanasaari_coal_heap.jpg