Planet of the Humans (Michael Moore) is free to watch for 30 days
youtube.com
youtube.com
The film makes bold claims, but I have trouble locating sources for these claims.
Some are verifiable easily, like Al Gore selling his TV channel to Al Jazeera and thus taking a huge chunk of money coming directly from fossil fuels.
Others are harder to verify: solar panels and wind do cost more energy (fossil/coal) overall to make (from resource extraction at the mine to final product installation) than they will ever make over their lifetime. I found some claims one way or the other for this, but they're not very substantiated either way (ans a lot come from solar panel installer blogpost type of article that say it's not true... well of course they'd say that)
Other parts, unless they were heavily edited, do seem real: asking where the energy comes from to power GM's electric car at their fanfare annoucement and finding out it's coal. Or asking all the leaders for seemingly green lobbying efforts what they think of biomass (basically chopping down the forest arount the power plan to then feed it the trees to produce energy: a huge net waste of energy vs coal or gas or oil) and have them all blank out or don't instantly say they are against it.
So, has anyone any insight on these claims? Where do we stand?
I think the overall message that there is no way exponential growth on a finite planet is anything else than suicide, no matter what theater politics and initiatives we use to hide the fact that we are using up the planet is worth listening to. I'm just analyzing this movie the same way I assess crazy and anti-science claims like 5G is harmful or anti-vaxxers which usually rely on bogus studies, bad science, and plain unfounded claims.
So far, we don't have a "green" way to heat our homes. Currently my house is heated with natural gas. I did some math to work out how much it would likely cost in electricity at our current rates, using heat pumps with a generous CoP of 2.0 at our coldest point, and my December and January electricity bills would be approximately $750/month. A solar array for the house that would be net-zero over the span of a year would cost about $43,000 to cover just heating, and for a system with enough capacity to handle the peak heat demand in the winter (with the sun low in the sky) would cost about $134,000. Those, compared to NG, have payoff periods of approximately 30 and 91 years, respectively.
In the research I was doing, I was surprised to discover that the local (government-owned) power company currently gets 5% of its generation capacity from wind! The overall make-up is 20% hydro, 34% coal, 40% natural gas, 5% wind, and 1% "other". The gas company simply provides natural gas. As far as overall energy goes, the gas company provides approximately 2x the energy that the power company does (we really do need a lot of energy to heat our homes...)
For the sake of curiosity, I also looked at biomass, just to see. Cost-wise, burning trees is actually somewhat viable here! Depending on where it's sourced from, I came up with -$656 to +$2,010 annual difference burning trees instead of natural gas here... but that does come with CO2 problems, just like fossil fuels. I didn't look at Agricultural biomass.
On the storage front, batteries are terrible still, both in their overall capacity and in the chemistry that goes into making them. And for pumped hydro... we live in the prairies, and hills, let alone mountains, are very hard to come by.
The overall conclusion I came to was basically, at the current state of tech: solar doesn't really seem particularly viable here; wind might have potential, although there would need to be some kind of storage if it were a significant fraction of our total generation capacity; biomass is an ugly but maybe selectively useful source of energy here; and the big elephant in the room: there was no mention of nuclear in the documentary at all!
I sketched out nuclear for the province using numbers from SMR marketing material, enough nuclear generating capacity to cover the province's entire current load would cost, over 20 years, about $800M/yr. The electric company currently spends about $710M/yr on fuel ($2.5B/yr gross revenue). That seems, by far, the easiest way to get to low-carbon power generation. Expanding that to provide enough energy to also heat our homes would get expensive (not to mention retrofitting the entire province to use heat pumps). The gas company currently purchases $396M of natural gas/yr; nuclear for replacing the gas company would be a pretty hard sell.
I don't really like any of these conclusions!