Comment by dTal
3 years ago
The only thing that matters for climate change is the amount of gas burned - the efficiency with which we turn it into work is irrelevant. If we reduce the amount of gas burned, at a cost of burning the remaining gas less efficiently, that's still a win.
In a certain sense one should expect lowering usage to inevitably lower efficiency, as a sort of inverse corollary to Jevon's paradox (which states that as efficiency rises, total usage does too).
You are right up to a point.
The problem is that building wind turbines in Britain has opportunity costs.
For simplicity: assume a status quo of 100% gas. We are burning 100 units of gas for that per year.
Now assume by building a crazy amount of wind turbines we could satisfy 95% of the UK's power demand with renewable. However, for the remaining 5% we'd need to burn 50 units of gas.
In this scenario, efficiency of burning gas drastically plummeted, but so did overall gas use.
However now the question is: for the resources invested into building all those turbines, could we have gotten a better climate bang than 50 units of gas saved?
(All numbers made up, obviously. In practice, we can probably make the economics work. Though we might need to deregulate the grid. It's crazy to pay wind turbines for not running. At least mine bitcoin or smelt aluminum or something.)