Gates on renewables: How would Tokyo survive a 3 day typhoon with unreliable energy?

Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.

He quotes Vaslav (possibly Vaclav Smil?):

Here’s Toyko, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.

As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.

Bill Gates on renewables (part 1). I’ve never seen him so animated. His Tokyo in a cyclone scenario is interesting. pic.twitter.com/N2nhl2u9Ut — David Michie (@dmichie66) December 9, 2018

h/t Craig KellyMP

During storms clouds cut solar panel productivity (unless hail destroys it) and wind turbines have to shut down in high winds.

The whole interview was part of a presentation at Stanford late last year:

Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill Gates

The interview by Arun Majumdar, co-director of Stanford Energy’s Precourt Institute for Energy, which organized the conference, can be watched here.

When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”

“The idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we could just beat on them and put (solar panels) on our rooftop—that is more of a block than climate denial,” Gates said. “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.”

If he only looked at the numbers in the climate science debate…

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