"Wind and wave energy are not renewable after all"

Think of Wind/Wave energy as a bucket.
We can take some water out of the bucket and it will be continually refilled and so there will be no real affect on the system (the bucket).

However if we start taking water out of the bucket at a massive rate then the natural refilling of the bucket will not be able to keep up, and there will be a macroscopic change on the system.

It is renewable in that it will always (ignoring what's going to happen in a few billion years time) be renewed, but if we take too much of the energy then it will have massive effects on our planet, which obviously doesn't sound too good.


I would be interested if they have made similar studies into the effects of Nuclear Fusion power.
For those who don't know, fusion would basically be infinite in that a tiny about of Hydrogen (which we can make as much as we like of) will produce, using the technical term, a **** load of energy.
That said, if we want 20-30TW of electrical power, that means producing 100-150TW of heat energy from fusion. This is heat that would otherwise never be released into the system (fusion does not occur naturally on Earth), and would normally remain safely tied up as mass.
So, what is the effect of producing an extra 100-150TW of heat in our system? Is that enough to change our planet as a whole?
I bloody hope someone has asked this question high up, because clearly they didn't think through Wind power that thoroughly.

As a side note, Fission is definitely not the way forward in the long term because, contrary to popular belief, there is not actually that much fissionable material out there. Less than 100 years of Uranium at current consumption (which is set to sky-rocket), although I don't know how much of the other materials we could use we have left.

some solar (although perhaps not in the U.K).

Why not the UK? Germany are the biggest investors in solar and they're in no better posistion than us. Solar seems like one of the more viable future solutions even for the UK. Prices are artificially inflated currently but will come down especially with the prospect of mass produced printed panels in the not to distant future.

I've always wondered about this. Surely any method of generating usable energy will have some impact on the environment because it's got to be taken from somewhere. I don't think there is such thing as perfectly "green" energy. Anything we do is going to use up some natural resources.

Is the amount of energy extractable by wind turbines (which are obv only a few 100's feet tall) enough to cause the problems this guy is talking about... even if we covered the coastlines of the world with them?

I still think it's an april fool tbh. though I'm not touting wind energy as the answer to our energy problems cos it's not.

I think what green energy means is making use of all of the wasted energy in the environment. Plants have been getting their energy from sunlight for billions of years yet we haven't caught on to that yet.

But how much of that energy is really wasted? The Earth is pretty delicately balanced, if you start taking that energy from where it normally is, it's going to have some impact somewhere. If you use too much wind energy, that's going to have an effect on the weather. If you set up massive solar panels, all that land underneath them is no longer getting any sunlight. The question is can we generate all the power we need without it having a significant impact?

If you put the solar panels in an area where life is flourishing like the Amazon rainforest then I'd agree. There's plenty of barren deserts in the world which are sterile because life simply cannot exist due to the extremely hot and dry environment. Taking some of that wasted energy and redistributing to areas in need of that warmth for e.g. heating makes sense. It's a bit like a welfare system for the world.

Yeah I get that, putting loads of them up in the Sahara probably won't have a very big impact. But if you completely covered the whole desert in them, it is going to have some knock on effects.

As does pretty much anything we do as humans. Building big cities has effects on all sorts of things but we do it. The idea that we should be careful about using wind turbines and solar panels because the wind will "run out" or that some poor ground somewhere wont get heated seems absurd to me. We've messed about enough with the environment just by virtue of our industrial and technological expansion, it seems a bit crazy to shy away from ever affecting the planet now that we might be able to put some of that right. But yeah fusion etc all good too imo.

Yeah totally agree. We can't avoid having an impact on the environment and climate. Even if we all got on a spaceship and left, or all committed suicide at the same time, our absence would probably really screw things up too. I think it's just important to remember that nothing comes for free.

Is the amount of energy extractable by wind turbines (which are obv only a few 100's feet tall) enough to cause the problems this guy is talking about... even if we covered the coastlines of the world with them?

I still think it's an april fool tbh. though I'm not touting wind energy as the answer to our energy problems cos it's not.

To be fair, the level of wind/wave capture required to a) supply our needs b) cause the problems outlined here is never going to happen. They're just not that efficient/numerous.

We'd need something like a wind turbine over every square meter of the ocean. This report, whilst probably true, is like saying that a Dyson sphere (a giant solar panel that completely surrounds the sun) would 'adversely affect the environment of the solar system.

I'm going to go on record and doubt the credentials of the author. For an alleged physicist he sure seems to be confused over the technical definition of "free energy".