Why "green" energy will never work; unless of course we want to return to using horses

The Manhattan Institute has a nice new paper describing how ideas like the "Green New Deal" are based on fantasy not reality.

Unless we run out of oil and/or natural gas, which won't happen for over 100 years at which point we'll probably have nuclear fusion, the two types of renewable energy, wind and solar, that the environmental leftists like--they hate hydro power because they think dams are evil--will always be much more expensive than hydrocarbons.

For example an investment of $1 million in renewable energy will produce about 50 million kilowatt-hours(kWh) a similar investment in a shale rig to produce natural gas will produce 300 million kWh.  Which means that if we're forced to abandon hydrocarbons like the Democrats want you can expect your energy costs, which means the cost of everything you use, to go up significantly.

This chart shows just how much infrastructure would have to be built to achieve the insane objective of replacing hydrocarbons in our energy economy:

Yep to achieve the Green New Deals goal we'd have to increase wind + solar by roughly a factor of 20 in 10 years. Aside from the insane cost of that what people forget, and what the #FakeNews media  doesn't tell you, is that while solar power might work great in Arizona it's not so wonderful in Minnesota during the winter.  Similarly wind energy is highly dependent on specific micro climates.

What does the uncertain nature of wind and solar energy mean to consumers?  Basically it means that either we pay for two energy systems, hydrocarbon and "renewable", or we accept the idea that we will be without power for long stretches of time.

Batteries won't save us since with the technology we have today and expect to have it would take us more than a hundred years to produce enough batteries to store 2 days worth of the US energy consumption. Also it would be an ecological disaster because batteries use toxic and hard to mine chemicals.

When leftists estimate the cost of renewable energy they ignore the need to actually provide power 24/7.

Finally the report shows how the laws of physics mean that there are no significant factor of 2 improvements possible in the efficiency of either solar or wind power plants.  Hence what while we might see 50% improvements, at a very high cost, there is no way that improved technology will get the left out of this problem.