The top-tier Google engineers released a sobering analysis after spending years attempting to find ways to improve technology for renewable energy sources. According to the UK Register, the two researchers bluntly point out that renewable energy resources (such as wind, solar and hydroelectric energy) will never cut carbon emissions to the levels environmentalists seek. The Register article states:

Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.

The RE<C project failed to achieve its mission and was subsequently closed down by Google four years after it started. The Register advises that Doctors Koningstein and Fork wrote an article for the engineering publication IEEE Spectrum. The two men point out:

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Both gentlemen know their stuff when it comes to their fields of expertise. They both received PHD’s at Stanford University. Ross Koningstein’s doctorate is in aerospace engineering, while his colleague, David Fork, received his PHD in applied physics. They both meticulously studied renewable energy technologies and both men are knowledgeable about difficult math and physics.

The reality is renewable energy sources are a nice idea in theory but lousy in practice. It would take vast amounts of wind farms, for example, to achieve the kind of capacity to satisfy people’s energy needs. Energy use itself is one of the foundations of a civilization since using it enables humans to live and thrive. The fact that countries that use renewable sources still rely on fossil fuels when they can’t meet capacity negates any claim renewables are better than carbon-based sources.

Environmentalists who propose using renewable power know this but intentionally avoid this fact because at their core they are anti-industry and anti-civilization. If we want abundant sources of energy at lower cost, the solution is not replacing fossil fuels but enhancing our access to them for our use and let consumers decide which energy sources they want. A good start would be to reject the hype climate alarmists and environmentalists make along with their call to restrict carbon-based energy use.