Renewables Are Our Present and Our Future

Is it unreasonable to expect politicians to have a reasonable sense of vision, a clear idea of where things are going? Shouldn’t they have an understanding of the factors that will determine our future, which concepts are absolute and indisputable truths, and which reactions are simply due to fear of change?

For instance: “the sun doesn’t shine all the time.” A statement of such obvious simplicity as to be frightening. Politicizing energy policy by dismissing solar energy as “left-wing” is, to say the least, a dangerous game and not the direction we want to go.

Only the irresponsible or ignorant still insist that there is any other future for energy than renewables. In fact, for some time now, they have been the present, and without a shadow of a doubt, the cheapest way to produce energy. And given the economies of scale of the technology, they will become more and more so. Any other energy generation policy than renewables is the wrong policy.

Dismissing renewables because “the sun doesn’t shine at night” or “the wind doesn’t always blow” reflects a lazy mind: should we turn the coal-fired power plants back on, or even build more, like the “visionary” Poles?

The amount of energy the sun sends to our planet is more than enough to supply our entire needs several times over… but since it doesn’t shine at night, we dismiss it. The reality is that electrical energy can be converted into many things, and many of them can be stored easily. When people deny the importance of energy storage technologies it’s usually because they have murky interests. The future is that the enormous surplus of solar energy produced by oversized solar plants can be stored not only in batteries, a technology still in development and from which higher and better yields are expected, but also by pumping water to high places, stacking concrete blocks, heating molten salt reactors, or generating green hydrogen.

Hydrogen gets a bad press because, until now, the vast majority of hydrogen produced has been a dirty by-product of the oil industry. But hydrogen can be produced using surplus renewable energies, it can be easily stored, and to think that a country like Spain, with its abundance of sun and coastline, cannot devote itself to synthesizing hydrogen to convert it into electricity for when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing is to ignore one of the main competitive advantages this country has.

Spain should be building solar power plants like there’s no tomorrow until we have a huge surplus, creating offshore wind farms along our entire coastline, and putting solar panels with their corresponding domestic batteries on every rooftop. If you you can’t see the sense in this, then take the time to learn the facts, because there is no other way. Renewables are our only viable option.

Do we want nuclear power? That’s debatable. But in addition to the fact that they are frighteningly expensive to build and that nobody, absolutely nobody wants them in their back yard, we are talking about facilities that, in a world with an increasingly destabilized and unpredictable climate, pose an unacceptable risk. Dismantle the existing ones, which have been operating for years? Perhaps not. But why build new ones if so many studies show that using the resources at our disposal can cover all our needs?

The idea that solar energy is somehow part of a left-wing conspiracy is worthy of that idiot who almost had to be led out of the White House in handcuffs after attempting a coup d’état. Following Trump’s path will lead nowhere good. When he said “my wife wants to turn on the TV, but it’s nighttime and there’s no sun or wind”, he was actually revealing a total ignorance about the future of energy generation.

No matter how we look at it, the age of fossil fuels which caused our climate emergency (which some still deny, or attribute to left-wing conspiracies), is over. The next age will be that of green, sustainable and renewable technologies. And politicians who can’t see this are simply in the way.

Spain’s best bet is to over-dimension the resources it has in abundance, and use the multiple technologies that allow their continuous use. Renewables are the present and, above all, the future, the only viable future we have. Even if the sun doesn’t shine at night.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM. and is republished with permission.

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