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> The percentage of power generated from wind globally, currently, rounded to the nearest decimal place is zero.

This is just not true. I'm not sure what it is globally, but in the US it's several percent (which is not zero percent under any rounding I'm aware of). More to the point, it produces more than 10% of the electricity in five U.S. states. It's also the fastest-growing energy source in the world, even faster than natural gas.

> Trillions of dollars have been spent on windfarms and solar panels around the world, and, as the article notes, it has made zero difference to the overall energy mix.

Nowhere near "trillions of dollars" have been spent on wind farms. You're just making things up.

> Yet it has affected national economies in real ways - the bankruptcies in Germany, Spain and elsewhere have real costs, as does taking the most basic economic input - energy - and making it more expensive for zero environmental gain at the global level.

The bankruptcies in Germany, Spain, etc, are the fault of alternative energy?

> Despite the countless examples of failures to point to, the boosters insist that it's the right course, when any plain analysis shows the exact opposite.

The analysis of the "skeptics" almost always leaves out the vast externalized costs of traditional energy sources. E.g. if hundreds of billions of dollars of externalized costs from coal were factored into the price of coal, coal power would be more expensive than wind power: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal....

> But you have to be a starry-eyed believer who trusts in state-coerced solutions

There is nothing starry-eyed about the economists who point out that the free market naturally underproduces fundamental R&D. Pick up an Economics 101 book sometime.

- Globally wind power produced < 0.5% of energy last year. Most people forget, or don't realise, that the current obsession with alternative energy is limited to parts of Western Europe and parts of the USA. It has virtually no traction elsewhere in the world.

- You're right, I should have written billions instead of trillions, though I'd be surprised if it hasn't reached a trillion by now. It's still an insane amount of money.

- Bankruptcies in Germany and Spain by solar companies are very much the cause of bad policies - by pumping up a sector with unsustainable subsidies, then being forced to remove subsidies precisely because they are unsustainable. This creates a bubble into which resources rush, which then bursts and creates a lot of problems.

This is the fundamental problem, of trying to coerce a particular set of technologies into place when they aren't suitable for it. The correct response is to admit there is no current technical solution to affordable energy without burning stuff. There is a noisy subset of people who don't agree with this position, and that's fair enough. History has always proven that major advances come from unexpected areas, and tend to render prior technologies obselete almost overnight.

There are many available technical solutions, is just that the majority aren't as cheap as burning oil or gas yet, at least for most situations.

It's not just that. It's also that the majority aren't as heavily subsidized, both directly and indirectly, as burning coal or oil.

In the U.S. more than half our electricity comes from coal. When the enormous external costs of coal mining and burning are factored in (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/harvard-study-coal...) the per-kilowatt hour cost of coal should be more than double the artificially low cost we see today. And in certain parts of the country (particularly the midwest), wind power is already within a factor of two in price.

These comments are not necessary exclusive. Parent said electricity while brc indicates globally wind power produced < 0.% of <energy>.

Of course, no thermal plant has been built in the US in the past 50 years without some subsidies -- both direct and indirect. So, it's a bit of a red-herring argument.

The "no subsidies" bit is really a massive red-herring.

Even without taxes, fossil fuels are hugely subsidized. The lack of effective legal frameworks to prevent e.g. coal plants from shifting the inherent costs of coal power onto people in surrounding neighborhoods is an implicit subsidy. Letting them shift $100 of environmental damage onto the residents of West Virginia is exactly the same as giving them a $100 check.

> Globally wind power produced < 0.5% of energy last year. Most people forget, or don't realise, that the current obsession with alternative energy is limited to parts of Western Europe and parts of the USA. It has virtually no traction elsewhere in the world.

Who cares about places that aren't Western Europe or the USA? Those places are technology followers. 15 years ago, the internet was only a statistically significant phenomenon in Western Europe and the USA. Yet other countries are now reaping the benefits of that technology. So to will be the case with energy technology.

> - Bankruptcies in Germany and Spain by solar companies are very much the cause of bad policies

This argument is non-sensical. STD's and babies are both caused by sex, that doesn't mean that STD's are the fault of babies.

> The correct response is to admit there is no current technical solution to affordable energy without burning stuff.

"Affordable" is a very relative term, especially when you look at true costs, including externalities, rather than just observed costs. Where I live (Illinois) wind power is approaching a factor of two of our average electricity price. Is that affordable? Almost certainly.

"the current obsession with alternative energy is limited to parts of Western Europe and parts of the USA. It has virtually no traction elsewhere in the world"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_People%27s_Re...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India

"The correct response is to admit there is no current technical solution to affordable energy without burning stuff"

And, from there, the correct conclusion must be that we should continue burning stuff at ever faster rates?

IMO, we should start using renewable sources ASAP, start using less energy, and work on energy-efficient ways to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases released (IMO, building factories to pump CO2 into the ground is not the best solution here)

The analysis of the "skeptics" almost always leaves out the vast externalized costs of traditional energy sources.

Yes, this is the chief fallacy in the article and it deserves to be highlighted. Fossil fuels are even more heavily subsidized than alternative energy sources, but the subsidies are hidden in other expenses such as medical costs and drought-driven food prices. There is after all a reason that we're looking for alternative energy, and it's because we're finding the true cost of fossil fuels is much too high, regardless what the subsidized price may be.

I disagree. The article reads to me like a partisan anti-renewable energy opinion piece with the facts chosen to fit the author's point of view. A scientific examination of the issue value would evaluate a hypothesis, not state the viewpoint at the outset.

It might also use actual numbers for solar radiation in Bavaria instead of childhood recollections.

Bavaria is surprisingly not terrible for solar power. Most of Bavaria gets 2/3 the solar radiation of the best spots in Spain, and is even about 50% of the best spots you'll find (like in Chad, but then you'd have electrical power in Chad instead of Germany.)

http://solargis.info/imaps/ lets you poke around much of the world for your dream solar farm.

Germany is actually great for solar power, like the American midwest. The reason is that it's not just about average solar radiation, but also about average temperature. Solar cells are much more efficient when it's cold than when it's hot. Excelon recently built a huge solar facility up in Chicago, and it generates something like 80-90% as much power as plants in much sunnier places, because Chicago is so cold for so much of the year.

Indeed. I got as far as the author dismissing solar and wind on the basis of "capacity factor" (average output over peak output), which is completely meaningless. That "peak output" number has no relevance to anything. What matters (all that matters, in the context of the article) is obviously cost (in money, perhaps corrected for things like real estate occupied, etc...) per net power. And it doesn't even get mentioned. Yawn.

Still, it's better than the really awful junk Burt Rutan wrote last year.

I found this piece to be depressingly pessimistic and downright whiny. Many people have argued that humanity has become excessively risk-averse and in-ward looking. "It's hard" is no longer a challenge to be overcome, but a reason to sit back and kick the can down the road.

If only the laws of physics could be repealed with guts and hard work.

It's not about something not being possible. It's about something not being "commercially profitable". We could abandon all the coal and oil in a decade or two and move completely onto renewable energy sources, it is possibe - it's just nobody gives a damn about it, because it would have a dent in quality of life, especially in western countries.

It's our selfishness and greed holding us back, rather than laws of physics.

humanity has become excessively risk-averse

Well exemplified by our incredible fear of nuclear power

nuclear power. In Germany just lately there was another (though as always shortlived) surge of news about how politicians played their games with nuclear waste. Our final storage of nuclear waste is a joke from the past by corrupt politicians.

When you can't trust people to think about the (instead of their) future it's hard not to fear nuclear energy.

I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).

it is theft

Blinding flash of insight for you little brother: there is no "theft" without the state.

I assure you, theft predates states. Hell, it predates our species.

It's not theft without a state to make it wrong. It's natural right.

In the countries that actively pursue renewables, they take a good share of the energy mix. Germany went from 6% of renewable electricity (nearly all hydropower) in 1990 to 21% in 2011 and about 24% now, and from 3% of overall energy mix (including heating, fuels, etc., not just electricity) in 1990 to 12% now. And current rates of adoption is at least 2% per year for electricity and 1% for overall mix. That's a big deal. Most renewables have already worked themselves out to be competitive.