The Green Air Bubble

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Way back in 1954, Willy Ley wrote about the Aerogenerator (now misnamed a wind turbine) in his book ‘Engineers’ Dream.’ Construction of a wind-powered electricity generator had been proposed as far back as a century ago, 1925. In 1941 there was a small-scale attempt in Salach, Germany. At the same time, in the USA the Federal Power Commission funded a study of aerogenerators when construction plans had been sent to them. The use of wind power was thought of as being too risky, owing to the inherent instability of wind. Nothing has changed.
For electricity derived from sunshine, Ley noted that in 1625 it had been first used, to power toys, and in 1864 the first sun-heated steam engine was built. ‘Solar Boiler‘ plants came into limited usage. However, for solar ‘fuel’ (power), despite its cheap cost, Ley noted its low operational efficiency because of the intermittent supply and associated huge energy storage costs. Nothing has changed – except promotional terminology, renaming industrial power generating stations as farms and parks.
We simply cannot alter the weather for enough wind or solar electricity generation to supply the nation. Solar ‘parks’, wind ‘farms’, thousands of miles of new pylons, substations and associated energy ‘parks’ for battery storage can never supply the 365-day, 24/7 electricity needed for the huge ‘strategic’ adoption of electric cars, nor supply the ongoing increase in data centres that require enormous amounts of power. Those with ‘smart’ meters (- another misleading term, like ‘smart’ motorways) will have to suffer unscheduled power cuts, to keep these data centres operational. Meanwhile, England will see, like Wales and Scotland, their countryside being covered with a permanent new infrastructure that can never be returned to nature. Farms, landscapes, water tables, hedges and wildlife will have disappeared, replaced with leaching chemicals and a deserted concrete-skinned land. Everything will change.
In 20 years or so, apart from hundreds of thousands of rotting unrecyclable turbine blades and towers, all on billions of tonnes of concrete and rubble pits, countless millions of unrecyclable Chinese mirrors on concrete bases will have to be disposed of. How and where? As for hundreds of enormous battery parks each storing temporary energy, there have been major inextinguishable fires in the USA and Australia, owing to the inherent flammability of lithium batteries (as seen with electric cars, scooters and bikes spontaneously combusting or exploding). What happens to these thousands of massive batteries, each inside a shipping container, at end of life? The subsidised foreign owners of nearly all of this new infrastructure can never keep promises to remediate the land, it will be impossible. They will merely sell the sites on to an unknown company in a tax shelter which will promptly dissolve. Do politicians ever think beyond the next few years in power? So-called ‘green’ energy schemes all will leave the greatest environmental pollution that is possible in peacetime.
China has a virtual monopoly of the upstream and downstream supplies of lithium, and it is estimated that demand will reach more than 3 million metric tons of lithium batteries by 2030. Six of the world’s top 10 lithium-ion battery manufacturers are Chinese companies, and China is the centre of lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery production and refining. With less than 7 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, China has an 80 percent share of global lithium chemical production, because of its control of the supply chain. However, on 29 January 2025, it was reported that China was urging its people to trade in their lithium-ion battery-powered electric bikes for newer models using sealed lead-acid (SLA) batteries. With 350 million e-bikes on the road, China is placing safety for its citizens as a priority. However, China is still exporting Li-ion bikes across the globe – and we buy them. For cars, lithium-ion batteries typically increase weight by 40% and weight by 50% in like-for-like models, and replacement batteries are incredibly expensive, hitting second-hand demand. However, because lead-acid (Absorbed Glass Mat – AGM) batteries have a shorter life-span and are heavier, major Chinese battery and Japanese electric vehicle (EV) makers are working on sodium-ion batteries to approach the weight and life-span of lithium, but being cleaner, far safer, unaffected by cold and with sodium being cheaply extracted from seawater. China has already opened its first large-scale sodium-ion battery energy storage station, which could pave the way for next-generation EV batteries that do not rely on lithium. Its Ministry of Commerce recognises that lithium is the past, not the future, and is assisting companies to develop alternative battery technologies to keep its global lead. In 2024 Toyota announced that it would halve the size, cost and weight of batteries for its EVs, following a breakthrough in solid-state batteries. And in April 2024 Nissan also announced that its new solid-state batteries were safer, lighter and with a longer range than traditional Li-ion batteries. In that same month, China’s EV maker Nio became the first manufacturer to commercially roll out solid-state batteries in their cars, promising that they are fully replaceable. Lithium is being overtaken by less dangerous and cheaper technologies, so why is the Western world wasting money on lithium-based intermittent renewables when cheaper and cleaner forms of technology are replacing them?
The UK is responsible for under 0.75% of global emissions, and the top three emitters with 34%, are China, India and the USA, each daily increasing their pollution percentage. China alone emits 15bn tonnes of carbon a year, a quarter of the global total, and is constantly building massive coal power stations, despite building solar and wind power plants. You may ask why – and the answer is that intermittent renewables cannot ever solve growing electricity demand. We are a tiny, vastly overpopulated nation with few resources, with most of our great companies foreign-owned, and with an increasing and unrepayable National Debt. The British press used to headline National Debt figures, but for decades, politically-influenced, all the news is about GDP, Gross Domestic Product. This is meaningless as for a huge proportion of what we make, the profits are repatriated, via transfer pricing and other mechanisms by foreign companies. Britain only profits because they employ workers. Fifty years ago, the vast majority of Government income came from its nationalised industries and British companies exporting and paying taxes in Britain. Now the vast majority comes from the taxpayer, as income from nationalised industries and companies has all but vanished. The UK simply cannot afford the trillions of pounds on outdated technology to achieve an unreachable net zero. Unless we stop now, we are heading for a truly horrendous economic disaster – forget the little 1720 South Sea Bubble – future historians will shake their heads and may call these pre-crashed economy decades the Green Air Bubble or Green Power Bubble – take your pick.
Terry Breverton

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