The Sustainable Alternative to Renewables in California

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Anyone serious about ushering California into an electric age, much less the entire world, faces immutable facts that are indifferent to passions and principles. With algebraic certainty, these facts lead to uncomfortable conclusions: It is impractical if not impossible to achieve an all-electric future by relying on solar, wind, and geothermal power, supplemented by more novel power generation technologies such as harvesting the energy in waves and tides. And even if it were done, it might not be the optimal solution for the environment.

A few years ago, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson, completed a report that quantified what it would take, in terms of the installed base of renewable generating and storage assets to move California to a 100 percent net zero energy economy. Relying primarily on over 20,000 wind turbines with an average capacity of 5 megawatts each, along with utility scale solar farms, an analysis published in March 2022 by the California Policy Center estimated the land requirement for this undertaking at over 10,000 square miles on land, mostly for wind farms, and over 15,000 square miles offshore, also for wind farms.

In theory, Jacobson’s recommendations would work, insofar as this stupefying quantity of wind and solar power, properly buffered with battery storage assets, would nearly double the capacity of California’s energy grid. Jacobson’s scheme estimates California’s average electricity output expanding to just over 100 gigawatts. In 2019, the most recent year for which complete data is available, California’s electricity grid produced, on average, 54 gigawatts.

To understand why a credible best case scenario would only require Californians to double their electricity output in order to go all electric, the following chart, prepared by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, can be helpful.

A detailed review of the data on this chart can be found in a July 2022 California Policy Center analysis, but for the moment, three critical variables are explanatory. California’s total energy consumption of 7,352 trillion BTUs, the “rejected energy” of 4,842 TBTUs, and the “energy services” of 2,510 TBTUs. What this describes is the overall efficiency of energy use in California. Of the energy Californians consume to power their residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors, 34 percent actually performs a service – heating, cooling, illumination, pumping, traction, etc. – and 66 percent (the “rejected energy”) is lost through friction, heat, wasted motion, leakage, etc.

The promise of electricity is that it can stand this ratio on its head. The appeal of electric power lies in its efficiency in conversion. Electric transmission losses are about 5 percent, with another 10 percent lost in a modern onboard battery’s charge/discharge cycle and the electric motor’s conversion of electrons into traction. Compare the electric car’s overall 85 percent efficiency to a gasoline powered automobile, which at best can achieve efficiencies of 35 percent.

The 2,510 TBTUs of energy Californians consumed in 2019 equate to 735 terawatt-hours, which in turn equates to an average output on the electricity grid of 84 gigawatts. This means that if every energy service in California were using electricity at 85 percent efficiency, a grid capacity of 100 gigawatts would be sufficient to power all of it. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the ballpark. It would require extraordinary engineering achievements as well as aggressive energy conservation programs. It is therefore the absolute minimum amount of electricity required for California to go 100 percent electric.

Disrupting the dream of accomplishing this goal while relying almost exclusively on wind and solar energy, however, are cold facts: Renewables aren’t renewable, and they aren’t sustainable. The footprint of wind and solar facilities on land and ocean, the battery farms to buffer their intermittency, the raw materials necessary to build them all, the maintenance, replacement, and recycling costs, are far in excess of anything Californians should have to endure, and far in excess of what the world’s resources have to give.

Imagine, for example, if the materials necessary for these wind, solar and battery assets were sourced here in California. Why not? California has many of the necessary raw materials ready for extraction. Are Californians willing to mine the lithium and quarry the concrete? More generally, are Californians willing to confront the fact that renewable energy technologies use orders of magnitude more natural resources than conventional energy?

The alternative to massively subsidized wind, solar and battery farms that despoil literally thousands of square miles of land and ocean is far more practical. Develop energy generation capacity using proven technologies, and further improve them. Californians should be pioneering the installation of the most advanced combine cycle natural gas generating plants and nuclear power plants. Instead of mandating all-electric cars, we should permit within the new mandates hybrid cars that retain range-extending advanced internal combustion engines. We should be allocating billions to upgrade our existing and proposed reservoirs to incorporate pump storage, which is still the most cost-effective way to store large amounts of renewable electricity.

This all-of-the-above approach to energy, on the surface, seems to be moving slightly away from climate purity. But a cradle-to-grave assessment of renewables may belie that first impression. Moreover, if California is serious about setting an example for the world, which after all will yield far more planetary benefits than going it alone, we must develop energy technologies that are practical.

There is enough wealth, and enough political will, for Californians to actually inflict upon themselves an all-electric future that rejects natural gas and nuclear power, rejects pump storage, and rejects advanced hybrid vehicles. But where the climate purists and their special interest puppeteers see a grand vision, history may only recognize hubris and corruption. Californians must put their impressive wealth and willpower into researching breakthrough technologies, while remaining practical in the meantime. That is how California can more effectively demonstrate effective leadership, and set an example for the world to follow.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Solar Farms Should Not Displace Prime Farmland

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Successfully coping with severe droughts in California and the Southwest requires tough choices, all of them expensive and none of them perfect. But taking millions of acres out of cultivation and replacing them with solar farms is not the answer.

California produces over one-third of America’s vegetables and three quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts – more than half of which is grown in the San Joaquin Valley. According to the California Farmland Trust, the San Joaquin Basin contains the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, which is the best there is.

Putting solar farms in more than a small fraction of this rich land will not only displace farming, but have a heat island impact in the enclosed valley. That would be unhealthy for the farms and people that remain, and could even change atmospheric conditions over a wide area, worsening the drought.

If new solar farms are destined to carpet hundreds of square miles of land, they should be dispersed throughout the state and near already existing high voltage lines. Or, they should be concentrated in California’s abundant stretches of uninhabited land such as the Mojave Desert.

With food shortages worsening throughout the world, Californians should be focusing on how to preserve agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. Why, for example, are spreading basins being proposed to allow runoff from atmospheric rivers to percolate when flood irrigation used to replenish aquifers while also growing food? Why isn’t that practice being evaluated and supported wherever appropriate?

Much of the depletion of groundwater aquifers that led to passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was caused because farmers had their allocations from rivers reduced, which forced them to pump more groundwater to irrigate their crops. Drought was a factor, but cutbacks in surface water deliveries and the abandonment of flood irrigation is what made groundwater pumping unsustainable.

The motivation to protect ecosystems during a drought is commendable. But there are solutions that don’t have to destroy the agricultural economy on what is the richest farmland in the world. Some of the environmentalist goals, such as maintaining a year-round flow in the San Joaquin River, have no precedent in history.

When there were severe droughts, that river often dried up in the summer.

Recognizing this highlights a larger reality. The civilization we’ve built has permanently altered nature, and returning it to a pre-civilization state is not an option. For example, because we suppress natural wildfires, we have to log timber or the forests become overgrown tinderboxes. Searching for the optimal balance between a thriving civilization and healthy ecosystems requires accepting limits in both directions.

With this in mind, there’s an irony in the environmentalist-inspired regulations that require water, stored in reservoirs behind artificial dams, to be released downstream in order to maintain year-round flows in rivers that used to run dry in dry years.

The solution to meeting the water requirements of farms, cities and ecosystems is to build more water supply infrastructure, not fallow millions of acres of prime farmland during a world food crisis. Capturing storm runoff through a combination of more off-stream storage and aquifer recharge can increase available water to farms and cities.

With wastewater recycling, less water has to be imported to cities, and in the San Francisco Bay region, less water would have to flow through the Delta to flush out the nitrogen currently being discharged. Desalination can also deliver a drought-proof supply of new water.

Investing in water supply infrastructure creates options for Californians that do not require undermining an industry that helps feed the world. Build the solar farms in the hot Mojave, and save the valley farms.

This article originally appeared in Cal Matters.

How Much Fossil Fuel is Left?

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Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse engulfs the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies, and in 2020 fossil fuel continued to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide.

This basic fact, that maintaining a reliable supply of affordable fossil fuel is a nonnegotiable precondition for the survival of civilization, currently eludes far too many American politicians, including the president. Quoting from energy expert and two-time candidate for Governor of California Michael Shellenberger, “One month ago, the Biden administration killed a one million acre oil and gas lease sale in Alaska, and seven days ago killed new on-shore oil and gas leases in the continental U.S. In fact, at this very moment, the Biden administration is considering a total ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling.”

Another basic fact, easily confirmed by consulting the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, is that if every person living on planet earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would have to nearly double. Instead of producing 547 exajoules (the mega unit of energy currently favored by economists) per year, energy producers worldwide would have to come up with just over 1,000 exajoules. How exactly will “renewables,” currently delivering 32 exajoules per year, or 6 percent of global energy, expand by a factor of 30x to deliver 1,000 exajoules?

The short answer is it can’t. Despite the fanatical, powerful group-think that calls for abolition of not only fossil fuels, but also most hydroelectric power and all nuclear power, the reality is that most nations of the world are going to continue to develop every source of energy they can, and they’re going to do it as fast as they can. Renewables may have a growing role in that expansion, but renewables are decades away from providing more than a fraction of total global energy production.

How much fossil fuel reserves are there?

The argument against fossil fuel rests on two premises. The first is that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel is causing a climate emergency. Without (for now) arguing against the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is going to destroy the planet, suffice to say that we’d better adapt to whatever climate change is coming, because the only nations even semi-serious about eliminating use of fossil fuel are Western nations. Once again, recent events have demonstrated that fossil fuel isn’t going anywhere, and nations that renounce its use condemn themselves to deindustrialization and eventual irrelevance.

The other premise underlying the drive to eliminate fossil fuel is more pragmatic. We are reaching “peak oil,” and there simply isn’t enough of it to last much longer. Oil, natural gas, and coal are all nonrenewable resources, with finite reserves. This argument is worth examining in depth.

The next chart shows how much fossil fuel is left in the world in the form of proven reserves (the blue bars), as well as how much, by fuel, was used up in 2020 (red bars, which are so short you can hardly see them). As shown on the chart, in 2020 174 exajoules of oil was burned, with 10,596 exajoules remaining – a 61 year supply. Also shown on the chart, as of 2020, and at current rates of consumption, there is a 208 year supply of worldwide coal reserves, and a 50 year supply of natural gas.

These proven reserves, also reported in the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, don’t tell the whole story. There are “unproven” reserves, which would very likely double the amount of fossil fuel energy available for extraction, and possibly much more.

To understand this, first note that predictions of “peak oil” have been consistently wrong. In a well known early example, back in 1956 economist M. King Hubbert presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute where “he noted that the rate of consumption of these fuels was greater than the rate at which new reserves were being discovered.” Hubbert predicted U.S. oil production would peak in the 1970s, and indeed there was a peak in 1971, at just over 10 million barrels per day. By 2008, total U.S. production had fallen to as little as 4 million barrels per day. But thanks to the introduction of fracking and deregulation, by 2019 domestic oil production had risen to a new peak of over 12 million barrels per day. New technologies and new exploration resulted in a major expansion of proven reserves.

Another indication of how much energy may remain out there in unproven reserves that are waiting to be tapped is in this 2022 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It estimates America’s total proven natural gas reserves at 473 trillion cubic feet, but estimates additional unproven reserves of natural gas to total another 2,867 trillion cubic feet – six times as much.

Finally, consider this map of the Sub Saharan portion of the African continent. Consider the scale of this map; this continent is over 4,600 miles across at its widest point, compared to the lower 48 of the United States at only 2,800 miles wide. As depicted on the map, promising regions for onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration amount to hundreds of thousands of square miles. Africa is a massive continent, with massive reserves of oil and gas. Now consider this report on “Natural Gas Reserves By Country.” Despite its vast potential, the first Sub Saharan nation on the list is Angola, at number 40, with proven gas reserves equal to 0.14 percent of total global reserves. That’s probably a minute fraction of what Africa’s got.

Africa isn’t the only place where fossil fuel reserves have been barely tapped. Expect deposits to be found as needed pretty much everywhere, from the polar regions to countless offshore sites on the continental shelf, and elsewhere.

The current energy crisis is going to harm nations in Africa, and in other developing regions, far more than it will harm Western nations, and that’s saying a lot, considering how cold it’s going to get in places like Berlin and Copenhagen if Russian gas is turned off this winter. But in African nations, the primary source of affordable energy is “biomass.” Put less euphemistically, and to this day, hundreds of millions of Africans still desperately strip the forests in order to gather fuel to cook food, because Western nations and Western dominated banks have prevented them from developing clean natural gas.

This humanitarian folly is multi-faceted. In 1950, there were 227 million people living in Africa. Today, there are 1.4 billion Africans, and by 2050 Africa’s population is projected to be 2.5 billion. On what had been a stable population for centuries, this population explosion was facilitated by Western aid which reduced infant mortality and, overall, provided food aid and healthcare. But now, Western nations are denying Africans the prosperity and self-sufficiency that comes with affordable energy, supposedly to avert climate disaster.

This absurdity ignores the catastrophic impact of a burgeoning population denied access to fertilizer, industrial agriculture, and a reliable power grid, because these are byproducts of fossil fuel. Deliberately denying Africans the fundamental prerequisite for prosperity means their population will continue to explode at the same time as millions of them, desperate for food and fuel, will continue to strip the forests of wood and wildlife. On the flipside, as has been proven worldwide without a single exception, when prosperity is introduced to a culture, the population stabilizes and begins to decline.

There is plenty of fossil fuel

According to the most authoritative source on energy in the world, as noted, total proven reserves of fossil fuel currently total 49,023 exajoules. This means that just with proven reserves, and if only fossil fuel were used, and if global energy consumption were doubled to 1,000 exajoules per year, there would still be a 50 year supply of energy. How much more fossil fuel can be extracted from unproven reserves is anybody’s guess, but it is a safe bet that twice as much more is available, meaning there’s at least another century worth of fossil fuel even if we used nothing else to power civilization.

The benefits of abundant cheap energy are obvious: prosperity and voluntary population stabilization. In the decades to come, other forms of energy will also be further developed. If hydroelectric power doubles, while nuclear power and renewables both go up by an order of magnitude, the three together would provide 636 exajoules of power per year. Under that scenario, fossil fuel use could remain near current levels, and total global energy production would still double to 1,000 exajoules.

What is impossible, however, is for renewables alone to achieve this level of growth. To begin with, more than half of renewable energy today comes from biofuel and biomass, which – and this is yet another irony alert – is already wreaking havoc across the tropics as hundreds of thousands square miles of rainforest are incinerated to make room for cane ethanol and palm oil plantations. And then there are the minerals required for the wind turbine towers, the silicon photovoltaics, and the billions of megawatt-hours of battery farm capacity. Where are the Malthusians when you need them?

Humanity can adapt to climate change, if there is sufficient prosperity and political will. We are already on the brink of commercializing innovations to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. Should atmospheric CO2 be the horrific pollutant that so many claim it to be, it can be removed from the atmosphere and converted into fuel to drive our trucks around.

Until that time, fossil fuel isn’t going anywhere.

References on CO2 conversion:

How to turn carbon dioxide into fuel | Carbon Engineering

Artificial photosynthesis turns CO2 into sustainable fuel | Freethink

Recycling CO2 into fuels – Dimensional Energy

Solar Powered Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Conversion

Turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Stanford engineers create a catalyst that can turn carbon dioxide into gasoline 1,000 times more efficiently

Breakthrough in converting carbon dioxide into fuel using solar energy

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 

Wind and Solar Energy Cannot Lift Humanity into Prosperity

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A recent article in the New York Post nicely encapsulates the latest developments in the ongoing debate over climate and energy. In his article entitled “If the Ukraine war hasn’t scared the West straight on energy, nothing will,” author Rich Lowry reminds us “The world hasn’t embraced fossil fuels out of hatred of the planet but because they are so incredibly useful.” He goes on to accurately observe that fossil fuels are used to produce 84 percent of global energy.

If there is only an alleged consensus on the potentially catastrophic threat represented by fossil fuel, there is widespread agreement on the direct connection between energy and prosperity. With that in mind, and to make clear how critical it is to produce more energy worldwide, much more, here’s an immutable fact, courtesy of data in the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy: For everyone on earth to have access to half the energy, per capita, that Americans consume, global energy production will have to double.

Meanwhile, according to BP, wind and solar power accounted for 5.0 percent of global energy production in 2020. Five percent. And yet, unless you are a climate contrarian, also derisively referred to as a “denier,” wind and solar are not merely the favored solutions to global energy challenges, they’re the only solutions. But what’s wrong with this picture? Go wind. Go solar. Why not?

To appreciate what it’s going to take to create a global economy powered by nothing more than wind and sunshine, look no further than California, where the state’s policymakers are embracing these energy technologies to the exclusion of all others. The are undeterred by geopolitics, economic cost, social cost, or environmental impact. It almost appears that in their zeal to save the planet, they must destroy civilization.

California Leads the World in Ongoing Renewables Delusions

If you live in California, by now you’ve probably seen the ads, either on prime time television or online, exhorting you to “Power Down 4 to 9PM.” These ads are produced by “Energy Upgrade California,” paid for by “investor-owned energy utility customers under the auspices of the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission.”

According to the mission of Energy Upgrade California, they are “a statewide initiative committed to uniting Californians to strive toward reaching our state’s energy goals,” and those goals include “getting 33% of our electricity from renewable resources by 2030.”

And it doesn’t end there. Over the past twenty years, through increasingly ambitious legislation and executive orders, California’s official state policy now aims to “achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2045.”

The misanthropic cruelty of these laws ought to be obvious. Normal people need more electricity between 4 and 9 PM, and no amount of public education can overcome that circadian fact. This is the time of day when normal people complete their daily work, prepare and eat dinner with their families, complete routine and necessary chores from doing the laundry to packing lunches for the next day. This is the time of day when people want to heat or cool their homes to a comfortable temperature, and power up all the countless electronic gadgets which are now required for everything from homework to paying the bills. They don’t want to wait till 9 PM to do any of this. By 9 PM they want to relax.

Normal people may also be forgiven if they don’t want to jump through the preposterous hoops required of “programmable” appliances, such as washing machines that will defer ignition until the spot price of electricity drops below a specified threshold. The fact that every major appliance now requires internet connectivity and comes with an instruction manual that rivals Lord of the Rings in scope and word-count is not a sign of progress. It is fetishistic excess. Future generations will marvel at the absurdity of this maddening, mandated attention to technology-driven minutia, and attribute it to the hubris of our times.

But beyond the fact that Californians remain quiescent while algorithms, megalomaniacal bureaucrats, and fanatical green nihilists take over and run their lives, there is the sheer impracticality of achieving “net zero” by 2050, if ever. In a narrowing of options that borders on perversity, the current vision for accomplishing this goal rejects any additional hydropower, requires the decommissioning of existing nuclear power plants, and the abandonment of all fossil fuel. Is that possible?

Accomplishing “Zero Air Pollution and Zero Carbon” in California

A professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson, completed a series of simulations, culminating in a report released in December 2021 “that demonstrate the ability of California to match all-purpose energy demand with wind-water-solar (WWS) supply, storage, and demand response continuously every 30 seconds for the years 2050-2051. All-purpose energy is energy for electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry.”

In this relatively unheralded study, Professor Jacobson has done Californians a huge favor, whether or not they support renewables. Because he has quantified a version of exactly what it would take, in terms of the installed base of renewable generating and storage assets to move California to a 100 percent net zero energy economy. Take a look at what Jacobson’s study envisions:

The first thing to note about Jacobson’s selection of renewable systems is that in theory, they would provide sufficient power to replace all legacy systems. The yields (column 4) assigned to each technology are reasonable, which means the total projected annual output as expressed in gigawatt-years, is also a reasonable estimate. Most economists measure total energy produced and consumed in quadrillion BTUs (British Thermal Units), and 101.4 gigawatt-years equates to 3.0 “quads.” In 2018, Californians generated 7.4 quad BTUs, but only consumed 2.5 quad BTUs. The rest was expended as “rejected energy,” primarily through the heat loss when using combustion based power systems including electric generating stations as well as individual vehicles. All-electric systems are far more efficient, and the implied 82 percent efficiency of an all-electric economy from source to user is not outlandish. So Jacobson’s numbers are tight, and assume – presumably via more conservation – no growth in energy consumption between now and whenever total renewable power is achieved, but they are nonetheless in the ballpark.

The other salient take-away from Jacobson’s renewables plan is that it’s all about wind and solar. Other renewables account for very little of the total; hydropower at 5.4 percent and geothermal at 3.0 percent.

Beyond considering the fact that the numbers probably work, however, is a more fundamental question: Do Californians want to live with 8,860 onshore 5 megawatt wind turbines, and another 12,884 of them floating or anchored offshore? Wind turbines of this size are truly monstrous, with a standard rotor diameter of 126 meters, i.e, 410 feet. Imagine a football field, including both end zones and then some, twirling around atop a tower more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, and you’re visualizing just one of these. They need a lot of land.

Rather than calculate merely the footprint of the wind tower, a more useful assessment of the land required for these wind turbines is the recommended spacing. An analysis published last year in the trade publication Energy Follower challenged the conventional spacing guidelines, which call for wind turbines to be spaced apart by a distance equal to seven times the rotor diameter. That alone calls for a stupendous amount of land, since that spacing would permit a maximum of four wind turbines per square mile. Citing work by Charles Meneveau, a mechanical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, the analysis went on to report that based on Meneveau’s analysis of the performance of utility scale wind farms, for maximum efficiency, “the suggested recommended separation of each turbine being 15 times the rotor diameter away from its nearest neighbors.” That equates to one wind turbine consuming 1.2 square miles.

Wind Power is a Grotesque Waste of Space

A legitimate conclusion that might be drawn from this data is that wind energy is not a desirable choice for Californians. To install 8,860 land based wind turbines would consume between 2,614 and 10,455 square miles, in order to produce only 15 percent of the required total energy in an all-electric economy. To put this in perspective, you could put 10 million new residents into homes, four per household, on half-acre lots, and you would only use up 1,953 square miles. Put them on still very spacious quarter acre lots, with an equal amount of land allocated for roads and commercial/industrial areas, and you’ve still only used up 1,953 square miles. California’s entire urbanized land only consumes around 8,300 square miles. To install these 5 megawatt wind turbines in a manner calculated to optimize their performance, a space greater than the footprint of every town and city in the state would be consumed. And this land would be uninhabitable – anyone who disagrees is invited to live on a wind farm. There will not be many takers.

When reviewing the above chart which estimates the land required for renewables, what is striking is the tremendous difference between the land required for wind farms versus the land required for solar installations. In order to generate 33 percent of the total energy, wind installations propose to consume over 10,000 square miles of land, and over 15,000 square miles of offshore ocean. By contrast, to produce 58 percent of the required energy, solar installations would consume just over 1,000 square miles, and much of that would be on top of existing roofs. Why not just use nothing but solar?

Answering that question goes to one of the hearts of the controversy over renewables, which is its intermittency. The need to balance between wind and solar, to slightly oversimplify, is that the wind blows more in the winter when there aren’t as many hours of sun, and during the summer doldrums when the wind is relatively still, there is plenty of sunshine. This seasonal variation is a bigger problem than the daily variation which underlies the “Power Down Between 4 and 9 PM” campaign, because there aren’t enough batteries in the world to store power collected during, for example, July to be discharged in January, and there never will be.

Viewing maps of wind resources indicate onshore wind energy in California is a poor choice. Far better wind resources are found in the nation’s midsection, assuming that state-of-the-art wind turbines can reliably wrangle tornadoes and ice storms. Possibly more viable is the offshore wind potential in California, especially in the far north of the state, but whether or not offshore wind installations are truly cost-effective is a question that requires far more thorough analysis than we’ve seen to-date.

Ultimately, Californians may want to think very carefully about Jacobson’s analysis, since it is one of the few fully realized and thoroughly vetted visualizations of what it’s going to take to convert to an all-electric, renewables based economy. Set aside the staggering economic cost, and the necessity to import most of the raw materials and even most of the manufactured systems. Set aside the undeniable environmental and social cost of sourcing rare earth metals from nations with an appalling lack of human rights and from mining and manufacturing operations controlled by America’s strategic rivals. For the moment, don’t think about the impact of wind turbines on birds, insects and bats. Never mind the fact that the embodied energy represented by these massive manufactured systems requires years to earn its “carbon payback,” if it ever does. And then contemplate the army of “carbon accountants” and bureaucrats, siphoning a stupefying quantity of wealth out of the economy merely to administer the new scheme.

Never mind all that. Just consider the aesthetic footprint.

Think about what it would be like to have 8,860 wind turbines, each of them twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, scattered throughout the state. Imagine 1,160 “wave” generators and 60 “tidal” generators, actually sneaking past a coastal commission that ties anything going up near the coast in decades bureaucratic delays. And as for over 15,000 offshore wind turbines, with the requisite undersea foundations and power cables and onshore maintenance facilities. Does anyone think any of these will ever be built, much less 15,000 of them?

California’s energy economy, like that of the world, needs to reject narrow solutions. To produce the economic resilience and fulfill the obligations of a responsible government, California’s legislature needs to restore an all-of-the-above approach to energy. It needs to reembrace natural gas power and explore promising new ways to use it even more efficiently. It needs to approve nuclear power plants using the latest technologies. It needs to consider new sources of hydroelectric power – especially for pump storage on off-stream reservoirs which is one of the most cost effective ways to store surplus renewable power. It needs to weigh the total impact of wind energy taking into account its insufficiently acknowledged environmental, economic, social, and aesthetic cost. And it needs to nurture solar energy development, but not to the exclusion of conventional sources of energy.

It is ridiculous that Californians, living in the wealthiest, most innovative place on earth need to “power down” during precisely the moments in their daily lives when they need to power up. It’s time for California’s policymakers and opinion leaders to acknowledge this, and start acting on behalf of the citizens they serve, instead of special interests and their activist cheerleaders.

The Agenda of California’s Ruling Class is No Joke

Before merely laughing at California’s folly, recognize that this state is home to Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Twitter, Google, Intel, and a host of related social media and technology companies which collectively represent the largest concentration of wealth in one place in the history of the world. It is also home to Hollywood, which remains the primary arbiter of mainstream culture in the United States. California may be diminished by its government’s unrelenting hostility to business and working families, but an emaciated eagle still dwarfs the sparrows.

The model for governance that California is implementing, with the wholehearted approval and complicity of other blue states accompanied by the elites of most of the Western World, is oligarchy. They have determined that a middle class lifestyle cannot be sustained in America, much less exported to the aspiring nations of the world, and oligarchy, or neofeudalism, is their answer.

The conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, and the energy shortages that are its inevitable result, may awaken Americans to the futility of moving headlong into an energy future that excludes every form of energy apart from wind and solar. But that awakening needs to embrace not merely opposition to the green tyranny with its epicenter in California. It needs to embrace a moral crusade to double the energy produced in the world as soon as possible. In this quest, all fuels should be used, incorporating the cleanest technologies possible. At the same time, but over generations instead of within a few urgent years, new technologies can be developed that will eventually replace fossil fuel.

That is the path to peace and prosperity.

An edited version of this article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Examining California’s Renewable Energy Plan

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If you live in California, by now you’ve probably seen the ads, either on prime time television or online, exhorting you to “Power Down 4 to 9PM.” These ads are produced by “Energy Upgrade California,” paid for by “investor-owned energy utility customers under the auspices of the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission.”

According to the mission of Energy Upgrade California, they are “a statewide initiative committed to uniting Californians to strive toward reaching our state’s energy goals,” and those goals include “getting 33% of our electricity from renewable resources by 2030.”

And it doesn’t end there. Over the past twenty years, through increasingly ambitious legislation and executive orders, California’s official state policy now aims to “achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and no later than 2045.”

The misanthropic cruelty of these laws ought to be obvious. Normal people need more electricity between 4 and 9 PM, and no amount of public education can overcome that circadian fact. This is the time of day when normal people complete their daily work, prepare and eat dinner with their families, complete routine and necessary chores from doing the laundry to packing lunches for the next day. This is the time of day when people want to heat or cool their homes to a comfortable temperature, and power up all the countless electronic gadgets which are now required for everything from homework to paying the bills. They don’t want to wait till 9 PM to do any of this. By 9 PM they want to relax.

Normal people may also be forgiven if they don’t want to jump through the preposterous hoops required of “programmable” appliances, such as washing machines that will defer ignition until the spot price of electricity drops below a specified threshold. The fact that every major appliance now requires internet connectivity and comes with an instruction manual that rivals Lord of the Rings in scope and word-count is not a sign of progress. It is fetishistic excess. Future generations will marvel at the absurdity of this maddening, mandated attention to technology-driven minutia, and attribute it to the hubris of our times.

But beyond the fact that Californians remain quiescent while algorithms, megalomaniacal bureaucrats, and fanatical green nihilists take over and run their lives, there is the sheer impracticality of achieving “net zero” by 2050, if ever. In a narrowing of options that borders on perversity, the current vision for accomplishing this goal rejects any additional hydropower, requires the decommissioning of existing nuclear power plants, and the abandonment of all fossil fuel. Is that possible?

Accomplishing “Zero Air Pollution and Zero Carbon” in California

A professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, Mark Jacobson, completed a series of simulations, culminating in a report released in December 2021 “that demonstrate the ability of California to match all-purpose energy demand with wind-water-solar (WWS) supply, storage, and demand response continuously every 30 seconds for the years 2050-2051. All-purpose energy is energy for electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry.”

In this relatively unheralded study, Professor Jacobson has done Californians a huge favor, whether or not they support renewables. Because he has quantified a version of exactly what it would take, in terms of the installed base of renewable generating and storage assets to move California to a 100 percent net zero energy economy. Take a look at what Jacobson’s study envisions:

The first thing to note about Jacobson’s selection of renewable systems is that in theory, they would provide sufficient power to replace all legacy systems. The yields (column 4) assigned to each technology are reasonable, which means the total projected annual output as expressed in gigawatt-years, is also a reasonable estimate. Most economists measure total energy produced and consumed in quadrillion BTUs (British Thermal Units), and 101.4 gigawatt-years equates to 3.0 “quads.” In 2018, Californians generated 7.4 quad BTUs, but only consumed 2.5 quad BTUs. The rest was expended as “rejected energy,” primarily through the heat loss when using combustion based power systems including electric generating stations as well as individual vehicles. All-electric systems are far more efficient, and the implied 82 percent efficiency of an all-electric economy from source to user is not outlandish. So Jacobson’s numbers are tight, and assume – presumably via more conservation – no growth in energy consumption between now and whenever total renewable power is achieved, but they are nonetheless in the ballpark.

The other salient take-away from Jacobson’s renewables plan is that it’s all about wind and solar. Other renewables account for very little of the total; hydropower at 5.4 percent and geothermal at 3.0 percent.

Beyond considering the fact that the numbers probably work, however, is a more fundamental question: Do Californians want to live with 8,860 onshore 5 megawatt wind turbines, and another 12,884 of them floating or anchored offshore? Wind turbines of this size are truly monstrous, with a standard rotor diameter of 126 meters, i.e, 410 feet. Imagine a football field, including both end zones and then some, twirling around atop a tower more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, and you’re visualizing just one of these. They need a lot of land.

Rather than calculate merely the footprint of the wind tower, a more useful assessment of the land required for these wind turbines is the recommended spacing. An analysis published last year in the trade publication Energy Follower challenged the conventional spacing guidelines, which call for wind turbines to be spaced apart by a distance equal to seven times the rotor diameter. That alone calls for a stupendous amount of land, since that spacing would permit a maximum of four wind turbines per square mile. Citing work by Charles Meneveau, a mechanical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, the analysis went on to report that based on Meneveau’s analysis of the performance of utility scale wind farms, for maximum efficiency, “the suggested recommended separation of each turbine being 15 times the rotor diameter away from its nearest neighbors.” That equates to one wind turbine consuming 1.2 square miles.

Wind Power is a Grotesque Waste of Space

A legitimate conclusion that might be drawn from this data is that wind energy is not a desirable choice for Californians. To install 8,860 land based wind turbines would consume between 2,614 and 10,455 square miles, in order to produce only 15 percent of the required total energy in an all-electric economy. To put this in perspective, you could put 10 million new residents into homes, four per household, on half-acre lots, and you would only use up 1,953 square miles. Put them on still very spacious quarter acre lots, with an equal amount of land allocated for roads and commercial/industrial areas, and you’ve still only used up 1,953 square miles. California’s entire urbanized land only consumes around 8,300 square miles. To install these 5 megawatt wind turbines in a manner calculated to optimize their performance, a space greater than the footprint of every town and city in the state would be consumed. And this land would be uninhabitable – anyone who disagrees is invited to live on a wind farm. There will not be many takers.

When reviewing the above chart which estimates the land required for renewables, what is striking is the tremendous difference between the land required for wind farms versus the land required for solar installations. In order to generate 33 percent of the total energy, wind installations propose to consume over 10,000 square miles of land, and over 15,000 square miles of offshore ocean. By contrast, to produce 58 percent of the required energy, solar installations would consume just over 1,000 square miles, and much of that would be on top of existing roofs. Why not just use nothing but solar?

Answering that question goes to one of the hearts of the controversy over renewables, which is its intermittency. The need to balance between wind and solar, to slightly oversimplify, is that the wind blows more in the winter when there aren’t as many hours of sun, and during the summer doldrums when the wind is relatively still, there is plenty of sunshine. This seasonal variation is a bigger problem than the daily variation which underlies the “Power Down Between 4 and 9 PM” campaign, because there aren’t enough batteries in the world to store power collected during, for example, July to be discharged in January, and there never will be.

Viewing maps of wind resources indicate onshore wind energy in California is a poor choice. Far better wind resources are found in the nation’s midsection, assuming that state-of-the-art wind turbines can reliably wrangle tornadoes and ice storms. Possibly more viable is the offshore wind potential in California, especially in the far north of the state, but whether or not offshore wind installations are truly cost-effective is a question that requires far more thorough analysis than we’ve seen to-date.

Ultimately, Californians may want to think very carefully about Jacobson’s analysis, since it is one of the few fully realized and thoroughly vetted visualizations of what it’s going to take to convert to an all-electric, renewables based economy. Set aside the staggering economic cost, and the necessity to import most of the raw materials and even most of the manufactured systems. Set aside the undeniable environmental and social cost of sourcing rare earth metals from nations with an appalling lack of human rights and from mining and manufacturing operations controlled by America’s strategic rivals. For the moment, don’t think about the impact of wind turbines on birds, insects and bats. Never mind the fact that the embodied energy represented by these massive manufactured systems requires years to earn its “carbon payback,” if it ever does. And then contemplate the army of “carbon accountants” and bureaucrats, siphoning a stupefying quantity of wealth out of the economy merely to administer the new scheme.

Never mind all that. Just consider the aesthetic footprint.

Think about what it would be like to have 8,860 wind turbines, each of them twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, scattered throughout the state. Imagine 1,160 “wave” generators and 60 “tidal” generators, actually sneaking past a coastal commission that ties anything going up near the coast in decades bureaucratic delays. And as for over 15,000 offshore wind turbines, with the requisite undersea foundations and power cables and onshore maintenance facilities. Does anyone think any of these will ever be built, much less 15,000 of them?

California’s energy economy, like that of the world, needs to reject narrow solutions. To produce the economic resilience and fulfill the obligations of a responsible government, California’s legislature needs to restore an all-of-the-above approach to energy. It needs to reembrace natural gas power and explore promising new ways to use it even more efficiently. It needs to approve nuclear power plants using the latest technologies. It needs to consider new sources of hydroelectric power – especially for pump storage on off-stream reservoirs which is one of the most cost effective ways to store surplus renewable power. It needs to weigh the total impact of wind energy taking into account its insufficiently acknowledged environmental, economic, social, and aesthetic cost. And it needs to nurture solar energy development, but not to the exclusion of conventional sources of energy.

It is ridiculous that Californians, living in the wealthiest, most innovative place on earth need to “power down” during precisely the moments in their daily lives when they need to power up. It’s time for California’s policymakers and opinion leaders to acknowledge this, and start acting on behalf of the citizens they serve, instead of special interests and their activist cheerleaders.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Solutions to Top Issues That California Needs to Fix

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AUDIO/VIDEO: We’re all aware by now of the problems facing California, but there isn’t enough discussion of practical solutions. This interview is a review of a nine-part series written for the California Policy Center that offers policy solutions to seven critical challenges: Energy, Water, Transportation, Housing, Homeless and Law Enforcement, Forestry, and Education. Edward Ring with Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/top-issues-that-california-needs-to-fix-edwards-ring_3990334.html

An Agenda to Fix California

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As a recall election looms and embattled Governor Newsom fights for his political life, the political ads, as usual, are expensive pablum. That’s what we’ve come to expect, of course, but this election is nonetheless more than a referendum on a failing governor and failing policies. It’s a chance to think about what California could be. Instead of candidates pledging to “lower taxes on the middle class,” which obviously isn’t a bad idea, contenders for governor might discuss very specific policies they would champion.

Moreover, as voters cast their ballots and decide whether or not to keep Newsom in office, they might think about which candidates they’ll support in the future. Do they want to continue supporting political mannequins? Talking puppets that spout focus group tested cliches when you pull a string in their back? Or candidates that may be a little rough around the edges, but possess the courage, the vision, and the attention to detail that California needs now more than ever?

Here, being as brief but as specific as possible, are some ideas to solve some of California’s biggest problems. Most of them are controversial. It would be nice to find a politician with the guts to espouse all of them, without equivocation and without exception.

Problem: Unreliable and expensive energy:

Solution: Upgrade California’s natural gas powerplants to run at maximum efficiency and without being shut on and off. End the restrictions on natural gas hookups in new construction. Keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. Streamline the permit process for additional natural gas and nuclear power plants. Allow additional extraction of California’s abundant reserves of natural gas and oil. Relax if not repeal the CO2 emissions targets pursuant to AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Continue to provide incentives for renewables, but recognize that an all-of-the-above energy strategy is an unavoidable necessity for developing nations with massive populations. Show the world how to do it in the most responsible manner possible. Restore abundant, affordable energy to Californians. Click here for more.

Problem: Scarce, expensive, rationed water:

Solution: Allocate a fixed percent of the state general fund to finance new investments in water infrastructure. Like energy, pursue an all-of-the-above strategy – runoff capture and storage, potable reuse of urban wastewater, off-stream reservoirs and expansion of existing reservoirs, percolation basins for aquifer recharge and recovery, and desalination. Invest enough to make the entire urban megapolis in Southern California independent of imported water. Streamline the punitive processes that make it take multiple decades to get projects approved. With all of this, again, set an example to the world of how to do it right. Restore abundant, affordable water to Californians. For more, go here, here, here, and here.

Problem: Congested, dilapidated, inadequate roads and freeways.

Solution: Recognize that smart roads are the future of transportation, not the past. Upgrade and widen all of California’s freeways. Recognize that automotive technology is in flux and repeal the zero emissions targets that prevent development of advanced hybrids. Develop protocols to designate smart lanes where next generation vehicles can convoy at high speeds. To make these investments cost-effective, reform the California Environmental Quality Act to reduce the time and expense of approving projects, and restructure CalTrans to outsource engineering and construction work to private contractors. For more, go here, here, here, here, and here.

Problem: Homes cost too much.

Solution: Increase the supply of homes by increasing density in the urban core, and building entire new cities along the 101 and I-5 freeway corridors and elsewhere. Quit pretending that California, a vast state that is only 5 percent urbanized, is running out of room for people. Leave existing suburbs alone and leave zoning decisions to local elected officials. Recognize that wood framed homes with reasonable outdoor space are what most families prefer, and that these homes are less expensive than metal and concrete multi-story structures.  It takes two weeks to get a subdivision approved in Texas, but it takes twenty years to do it in California. End the war on suburbia and eliminate the outrageous costs and delays for building permits. For more, go here, and here.

Problem: There is a crisis of law and order and homelessness.

Solution: Restore the ability of police and courts to criminally prosecute and incarcerate citizens for selling hard drugs, public intoxication, and petty theft. For those homeless that haven’t committed crimes, construct centralized shelters in less expensive parts of cities and require job training and sobriety as a condition of entrance. California has wasted tens of billions constructing shelters and “supportive housing” at a cost that averages nearly $500,000 per unit. This is incredibly corrupt and utterly futile. Use that money to build safe barracks and pay counselors and vocational instructors. Reopen the fire camps for the able bodied criminal homeless and put them back on the fire lines. Take back our streets. For more, go here, and here.

Problem: Our forests are incinerating themselves and the air is unbreathable.

Solution: Bring back California’s timber industry, which as recently as the 1990s was harvesting 6.0 billion board feet per year from California’s forests. Today, barely 1.5 billion board feet come out. Why weren’t there massive fires every year back in 2000? Because logging was keeping up with regrowth as recently as ten years earlier. But now, for over thirty years, it has been nearly impossible to log, to thin, or do controlled burns, at the same time as our fire suppression industry has become incredibly effective. The result is overgrown forests of tinder dry, overcrowded and stressed trees. Of course they burn like hell. The solution is to let timber companies reopen mills and start logging responsibly again. They will clear the powerline corridors and maintain the fire roads and fire breaks, just like they used to, in exchange for logging rights. Prevent fires. Create jobs. Generate tax revenue. Supply affordable, in-state lumber for housing. Win, win, win, win. Click here for more.

Problem: Our schools are failing low income communities.

Solution: Stand up to the teachers’ unions, by creating competition in public instruction. This can be accomplished by making it easier to open charter schools, and taking away the cap on how many charter schools can operate. It can be accomplished by creating education savings accounts for every parent of a K-12 student, allowing those parents to use that money for the school of their choice – public, charter, private, parochial, or even homeschool. Theoretically, such a program could be revenue neutral or even save the state money. At the same time, reform the public schools by requiring a longer period before teachers can earn tenure, by favoring merit over seniority in layoffs, and by making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. Other ways to rescue K-12 education in California would be limit union negotiations to pay and benefits and outlaw teacher strikes, and to empower parents to opt-out of exposing their children to sexually explicit or politicized instruction. Click here for more.

The tragic reality in California today is that an entire complex – progressive billionaires, public sector unions, powerful environmentalist lobbyists and litigators, with nearly universal support from the legacy media, social media, and academia – considers most of these solutions, if not all of them, to be extreme. They’re not. They’re moderate, common sense solutions to serious problems that are obviously not being adequately handled based on what this complex considers to be the conventional wisdom.

Imagine California’s future if these policies became reality. The solutions suggested here for energy, housing, and forestry would actually generate tax revenue, along with hundreds of thousands of good jobs. The solutions suggested for education are revenue neutral. To supplement private investment, the economic boom these solutions would impart to the state overall would generate the tax revenue necessary for public investment in water and transportation infrastructure.

Imagine a state where instead of importing energy from Venezuela, or electricity from coal burning states, or lumber from British Columbia, or lithium from West African mines owned by the Chinese Communist Party, we would be producing all of these essential resources right here. Imagine the prosperity this would create. Californians consume these resources. That is reality. And even if we streamline what are currently crippling regulations, extraction operations located here in California will respect workers and the environment far more than they are being respected anywhere else in the world.

On a foundation of new and broad based prosperity, California can then afford to leapfrog other states and nations. California can innovate with transportation tunnels under its cities. California can innovate with passenger drones occupying aerial lanes above its cities. California can fund research into fusion energy and satellite solar power stations. California can solidify its position as one of the wealthiest and most innovative places on earth, but at the same time a place where ordinary families have a chance again.

California can be a place where there is abundance instead of scarcity, pragmatism instead of ideology, and optimism instead of pessimism. These values used to define California. They can do so again. California’s future can be very bright indeed.

This is the conversation California’s candidates for governor should be having.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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Fixing California – Part Two, The Electric Age

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If energy were abundant, clean, and sustainable, nearly every other daunting challenge facing humanity would be much easier to solve. Insufficient water? No problem. Pump more water around via inter-basin transfers and build more desalination plants. Can’t convert the transportation sector to all-electric vehicles? You can if energy is abundant. Generate all the electricity you need.

Energy solves almost every other resource-related challenge facing humanity. The more energy the better. As with water, energy abundance brings with it not only more practical options in almost every economic sector, and at a lower price, but it brings resilience as well.

On the other hand, pushing all excess out of the system via conservation mandates that amount to increasingly severe rationing leaves the system—and everything that depends on it—vulnerable to catastrophe under what might otherwise be a minor disruption.

The strategic goal of California’s energy planners is for the state to become “carbon neutral” as soon as possible. They view this both as an existential necessity and an achievable utopian dream. To accomplish this, California’s determination to be the first developed economy in the world to go fully electric is well established. Governor Gavin Newsom has decreed via executive order that new passenger car and truck sales have to be all-electric by 2035. In this he has the enthusiastic support of the state legislature. At the same time, the legislature is making it nearly impossible to install gas appliances in new homes. Expect that effort to only intensify in the coming years.

No gasoline allowed. No natural gas allowed. With those constraints, how will California ever achieve energy abundance? Gasoline, used almost exclusively as a transportation fuel, was responsible for 22 percent of the totalenergy consumed by Californians in 2019. In that same year, natural gas, which provided fuel for 43 percent of California’s total electricity generation, supplied 33 percent of the total energy consumed by Californians. Overall, natural gas and gasoline, the forbidden duo, provide over half of the energy on which Californians currently rely.

To create energy abundance without natural gas or gasoline, production of every other fuel Californians use would have to double. But what are these fuels? Are they acceptable? Not really. Additional fossil fuel sources include jet fuel at 8 percent, with other petroleum and distillate fuel oil adding another 12 percent. Despite all the work of recent decades, fossil fuel is still powering well over 80 percent of California’s economy.

The challenge doesn’t end there. Also out of favor is nuclear power, despite providing another two percent to the total energy Californians consume, and hydroelectric power, which adds another four percent. The favored few—biomass, solar, geothermal and wind—altogether account for only five percent of California’s total energy production. As for the rest, fully nine percent of California’s energy comes in the form of electricity imported from other states.

Understanding California’s Energy Landscape

These facts represent a reality that ought to have California’s legislators scratching their heads, instead of plunging headlong into additional renewables mandates and conservation schemes.

The underlying strategy is absolutely clear, but rarely expressed openly: Make energy cost so much that bleeding edge technologies can be mandated and the financing to pay for them will be covered by the consumer. And if the consumer can’t afford it, special government programs will subsidize those lower income households. Middle class Californians thus get a double hit—once as ratepayers for needlessly expensive energy, and again as taxpayers who have to pay to subsidize the less fortunate.

To get an idea of how complex the process is of getting from raw energy sources—fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar—to actual electrons running appliances or furnaces heating homes, Lawrence Livermore Labs and the U.S. Department of Energy have produced a flow chart that merits close study.

While there is a lot to digest in this energy flow chart, it offers valuable insight even without bombarding the observer with numbers. On the left, source fuel inputs are depicted, with the thickness of the lines (not the boxes) denoting the relative quantities of each fuel. Because electricity is not a source fuel, but has to be manufactured either using solar photons, or using a generator turned by wind, water, or fossil fuel, the box “Electricity Generation” shows up in the center left of the flow chart, in order to aggregate and redirect the quantities of source fuels that were converted into electricity. Further to the right, four boxes are used to aggregate and categorize what sectors make use of the various fuels including electricity, they are “Residential,” “Commercial,” “Industrial,” and “Transportation.”

It is immediately obvious that solar (yellow line) and wind energy (purple line) currently contribute an insignificant share of the total. Moreover, the method used by the study’s authors  to estimate the amount of solar energy contributed to the grid greatly overstates the actual amount. Their error was to take the amount of actual solar electricity generated in 2018, 27.5 gigawatt-hours which converts to 93 TBTU (trillion British thermal units), and improperly inflate it.

Instead of recognizing that photovoltaic power generation is directly transmitted to the grid without loss, the amount of solar power shown in the yellow box on the upper right of the flow chart declares 382 TBTUs of energy flowed into the grid. The reason for this error, based on a flawed assumption that is explained in the footnotes on the flow chart (which I confirmed with an electricity grid expert at the California Department of Energy), was to assume that solar power is subject to the same conversion inefficiencies as burning fossil fuel.

The implications of this are interesting. Out of 7,404 TBTUs (adjusted for the error, 7,115 TBTUs) of raw source fuels consumed, only 93 TBTUs came from solar electricity; that’s 1.3 percent. That means Californians are a long way off from entering the solar electric age.

And yet the fact that solar electricity loses very little power when going from photovoltaic power to the grid to an EV battery to an engine is an encouraging fact. Electric transmission losses are about 10 percent, with perhaps another 10 percent lost in the onboard battery’s charge/discharge cycle and the electric motor’s conversion of electrons into traction. Compare photovoltaic electricity’s 80 percent efficiency getting from source to end-user to the average natural gas power plant, which can only achieve efficiencies of around 42 percent, or a gasoline powered automobile, which at best can achieve efficiencies of 35 percent.

The consequences of energy inefficiency—the amount of source fuel inputs that are lost to excess heat and friction—are seen on the far right of the flow chart, in the box “rejected energy,” which is twice as much as the box “energy services.” Of the estimated 7,404 TBTU of source fuel consumed by Californians in 2018, 4,907 TBTUs were wasted, and only half that much was enjoyed by Californians in the form of lighting, heating and air-conditioning, vehicular traction, and so on. By how much could Californians reduce the amount of fuel input, while keeping level or increasing their actual energy services, if they went totally electric?

Understanding Units of Energy Measurement

Anyone who has spent enough time reading the publications and reports that tout a clean energy future sees the marketing images: windmills presiding benignly over green pastures, solar panels glinting in the sunlight, row after row, set against a scenic horizon. But how many of California’s politicians, much less the marketing consultants and graphic artists who are selling this dream, have actually tried to parse gigawatt-years into quadrillion British thermal units? It’s not tough math. But it’s awfully tedious.

Policymakers, along with anyone with strong opinions on California’s energy policies, are encouraged to wade through these calculations, because they are crucial variables affecting the future of every Californian.

The first variable to understand is quadrillion BTUs. A BTU, or British thermal unit, is a measurement of energy typically used by economists. It is the amount of energy required to heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. Economists refer to the total energy consumption of entire states and nations in “Quad BTUs,” which refers to 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) BTUs. California, in 2019, consumed 7.8 Quad BTUs of energy (up five percent from 2018). Another common term is TBTU, which stands for “trillion British thermal units” (1,000 TBTUs equals 1 Quad BTU).

The second variable to understand is gigawatt-years, which is a measurement unit used to measure large amounts of electricity. A gigawatt-year is the amount of electric energy that would be produced by a one gigawatt power plant, operating continuously for one year. Economists, energy planners, and utility executives typically prefer to report terawatt-hours, probably since most consumers understand kilowatt-hours. But gigawatt-years is a more useful measurement of electric power.

Conceptually, these units of energy measurement are all convertible. Which is to say that one Quad BTU is equivalent to 33.4 gigawatt-years, and one gigawatt-year is equivalent to 8.8 terawatt-hours. For all units of energy, from horsepower to joules, to kilowatt-hours to British thermal units, or cubic feet of natural gas to barrels of oil, there are conversion constants that allow any unit of one form of energy to be expressed using units of another form of energy. Understanding how BTUs of natural gas or gasoline convert into electricity is necessary in order to estimate how much electricity is required to eliminate natural gas or gasoline.

The other essential concept is conversion efficiency. If every form of energy converted into another form of energy with 100 percent efficiency, the conversion constants would be all that was ever needed. But as previously noted, natural gas converts into electricity in a modern power plant at about 42 percent efficiency. Gasoline converts into traction in modern automobiles at around a 35 percent efficiency. And solar electricity can be delivered through the grid to an EV and converted into traction at around an 80 percent efficiency.

It is a fair bet that most of California’s state legislators and their staffs haven’t got the slightest idea how all of this works, which is why lobbyists for special interests and their useful cadres of fanatical activists (equally ignorant of energy dynamics) are so powerful.

Is a Solar Electric Economy Possible?

If you fly from California’s capital city, Sacramento, southeast into Los Angeles, you’ll see a growing number of sparkling greyish silver patches occupying sections of what previously was irrigated farmland in the San Joaquin Valley. These are photovoltaic arrays, ordered in row after row like crops, tracking the sun, each of them making their contribution to California’s electricity grid. And catching up fast are battery farms, many of them located on the sites of decommissioned natural gas power plants, designed to soak up and store the surplus electricity generated during the hours of peak sunlight, for discharge typically in the early evening when grid demand goes up as the sun goes down.

It would go well beyond the scope of this analysis to try to precisely estimate how many TBTUs of energy input would be required to create energy abundance in a purely electric economy. But it is a relevant question to ask, since that’s where current policies are taking Californians.

For a rough estimate, therefore, take the amount of actual “energy services” consumed by all four sectors of California’s economy—residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation—during 2017. Assume that in an all-electric economy, instead of the reported 2,497 TBTUs of useful output requiring three times that amount of fuel input, based on the relative inefficiency of fossil fuel conversion to the various energy services, assume that only 25 percent more is required. Convert that to an electrical unit of measurement and you’ve got 104 gigawatt-years. Round that up to 125 gigawatt-years to be absolutely certain to achieve energy abundance.

The next thing to take into account, something heard incessantly from solar skeptics, and with good reason, is the expected amount of sunlight. Solar electricity capacity in California in 2019 was 14 gigawatts (almost all via photovoltaics, but including 1.2 gigawatts of solar thermal generating plants). But the solar electric output in that year was only 3.4 gigawatt-years. This disparity is due to the unfortunate reality of clouds and nighttime. By using gigawatt-years as the unit to measure total output, it is easy to see that the collective yield of California’s solar arrays is only 24 percent. It’s even less than that during the shorter daylight of winter. According to sources at the California Energy Commission, the average performance for the large photovoltaic farms (10 megawatts and up) is an impressive 38 percent in June and July, but a dismal 13 percent in December and barely improved 16 percent in January.

What this means is that for solar power to do the whole job, the size of the solar arrays have to be scaled to generate 125 gigawatts of continuous power in January. We may assume that battery substations on every street corner, power walls behind every garage, and 15 million electric vehicles with onboard batteries will guarantee continuous power on the smart grid. That’s part of the plan. But if the sun is only delivering 13 percent efficiency, that means you need an array of photovoltaic panels big enough to collect and store enough excess power while the winter sun does shine to discharge at a rate of 125 gigawatts all day and all night. That means the capacity of the collective solar arrays in an electrified California would have to be 125/.13, or 961 gigawatts.

This is an almost unimaginably large quantity of solar panels. Modern photovoltaic panels will produce about 15 watts per square foot in full sun. Allowing for panels sufficient to generate 961 gigawatts, while allowing an equal amount of space for access roads, transmission lines, and other balance of plant necessities, it would take 4,600 square miles of California’s land to replace natural gas and gasoline.

Can that be done? Is there room? Certainly. The sunny Mojave Desert occupies 50,000 square miles, with about half of that within California. The sunny San Joaquin Valley is 10,000 square miles. California has 25,000 square miles of grazing lands. To suggest there isn’t room for all these solar panels would be disingenuous. Skeptics of photovoltaic power because of the space it takes up should not be suggesting there’s plenty of space for new suburbs. Advocates for an explosion of photovoltaic farms should not be suggesting there is no room for new homes. California is a vast, nearly empty state. Surprisingly, because it was settled relatively late, California’s 40 million people are more concentrated in urban areas than any other state.

But is this desirable? Do we want to carpet an area roughly the size of Connecticut with solar panels?

Sure, solar panels could sit atop every roof and parking structure, but that wouldn’t accommodate more than maybe 20 percent of the required total and those installations would be far more expensive. Yes, improvements to the photovoltaic substrate may eventually yield panels that can produce 20 watts per square foot in full sun, chopping the land required down to 3,449 square miles. That’s still an awful lot of territory. And what about the heat island impact of thousands of square miles of heat absorbing dark solar collectors?

Sensible proponents might suggest limiting the state’s solar share of electricity generated to the amount required during summer. In June and July, 1,573 square miles of photovoltaic arrays would fulfill 100 percent of electrified California’s energy requirements, and during the rest of the year, wind power could make up the difference. But wind energy, notwithstanding the 200 tons of concrete required per tower; or the avian, insect, and bat slaughter; or the psychosis inducing thrum; or the hideous visual blight; is also intermittent.

The problem with intermittent power is that, to the extent you build intermittent power generation from wind or solar, you have to build backup systems. It would be nice to suppose that winter winds and summer sun perfectly balance the intermittency of wind generators with the intermittency of solar panels, but they don’t. Whatever else you build, therefore, incurs a capital cost for continuous operation, but can only be turned on when the favored forms of electricity generation cannot deliver. Batteries can mitigate daily cycles, but not seasonal ones.

The redundant systems needed to produce electricity during, for example, windless nights in winter, don’t cost less to build just because they only get turned on part-time. California’s natural gas peaking plants in 2019 had a capacity of 39.4 gigawatts, but they only delivered 10.5 gigawatt-years of power. That is, they were shut down 73 percent of the time. They still cost the same amount to build. Disingenuous foes of natural gas claim electricity from natural gas is expensive. It is. But the reason is that the construction costs are being amortized over 73 percent less operating revenue than if those plants were run continuously.

The cost of a solar electric California, taking into account not only solar panels but also battery farms, conventional backup power plants, and a much more robust transmission grid, is already felt in the average retail price Californians pay for electricity. At 22.7 cents per kilowatt hour, California shares the top spot with Connecticut. Other big states come in much cheaper. In Texas, consumers pay 11.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Even New York charges less, at 18 cents per kilowatt hour. And it doesn’t end there.

To accomplish California’s broader energy strategy, every home with a gas heater or gas water heater would have to be retrofitted and every gasoline powered automobile would have to be replaced. Electric charging stations would have to replace gas stations, everywhere. The total cost would be in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, and the ordinary consumer would foot the bill. The sheer space required for these photovoltaics, taking into account their poor performance in the winter months when there is less daylight, has to be reckoned with in any honest appraisal of solar.

How Can Energy Abundance Be Achieved?

The good news in all of this is that energy abundance is possible, and can actually be achieved at far less expense. If we strike a balance between rapid, renewables-driven electrification and an all-of-the-above approach that phases in renewable energy over a longer span of time, we can achieve energy abundance without paying exorbitant prices. California is in no danger of losing her leadership in renewables deployment, even if we slow things way down.

The urgency of the “climate emergency” inspires California’s political leaders to demand precipitous changes, both to set an example to the world, and to perfect the technologies that we will roll out to the rest of the world. But developing nations are on a path towards achieving abundance for their citizens that will embrace an all-of-the-above strategy, not a strict renewables strategy. That reality is beyond serious debate. To face that reality squarely, California should set a stellar example of an all-of-the-above energy strategy. There are many elements to this.

Clearly the role of photovoltaic power is set to increase. Costs for solar panels and batteries continue to drop, at the same time as the efficiency of solar panels and the energy density of batteries continue to increase. California’s legislature should fast track private development of the state’s ample deposits of lithium, and confront the regulatory barriers to in-state manufacturing. To go renewable, California currently outsources labor exploitation and environmental havoc. Bring it home, and do it right. Set the example. And face the increased costs, which ought to curb the enthusiasm for treating solar power and batteries as the one and only solution.

The concept of implementing a clean and enlightened all-of-the-above strategy as an example for the world means that California should build more nuclear power plants, embracing new technologies including reprocessing the waste and commissioning large-scale as well as smaller modular plants. Instead of dismantling its natural gas infrastructure, California should be rebuilding it, possibly taking into account that this extensive network can eventually be repurposed to transport hydrogen. California should continue to develop geothermal power, and rebuild its biomass generating capacity.

Instead of shutting down natural gas power plants, California should be converting them all to combined cycle where the excess heat drives a parallel steam turbine, allowing efficiencies of up to 60 percent. California should then export these clean, ultra efficient technologies to nations like Indonesia, which isn’t about to abandon fossil fuel.

California should be developing its reserves of oil and natural gas; oil because pumping it here is better than importing it from Venezuela, natural gas because it is the cheapest, cleanest fossil fuel. Embracing nuclear power and clean fossil fuel as part of a portfolio of energy options is a practical route to affordable energy abundance.

Looking to the future, California should be sponsoring research into commercializing fusion energy, satellite solar power stations, hydrogen storage solutions, and next-generation biofuels that are grown and processed in factories, to name a few examples of what could come next. More generally, California’s policymakers must recognize that innovation is going to deliver energy solutions in the next few decades that we can’t imagine today. These unforeseeable energy innovations are coming, and they will not vindicate a one-dimensional renewables strategy. Rather, endless expanses of land covered with solar farms and wind turbines will be rendered obsolete, and revealed as a tremendously destructive waste.

From an economic standpoint, the strategy of rationing supply to raise prices, which in turn enables the financing of mandated, narrow solutions, is misanthropic and regressive. It is antithetical to solutions that are pragmatic, optimistic, and embrace abundance. In some cases, enabling infrastructure to create abundance requires socializing costs through general obligation bonds, which are in turn largely paid for by high income taxpayers. That is a progressive tax framework that delivers essential public amenities while sparing the low and middle income consumers. That solution may be necessary for transportation and water infrastructure. In the case of energy, however, it is largely unnecessary.

A measured all-of-the-above strategy for energy can be primarily accomplished by deregulating nuclear and natural gas energy solutions, allowing them to compete with the emerging solar, geothermal, and biomass solutions. Affordable, abundant, sustainable energy is a realistic, moral choice. It is an example California can set that the aspiring nations of the world will emulate instead of resist. And with abundant, affordable energy, everything else is possible.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Electric Age is Coming to New York

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Working its way through the New York state assembly right now is bill number 4302, which requires “that one hundred percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks shall be zero-emissions by two thousand thirty-five.” Sponsored by Democrat Steve Englebright, this law is New York’s answer to a nearly identical mandate stalking Californians via a recent executive order from their embattled Governor Newsom.

It would be easy enough to suggest these politicians are jumping onto a green bandwagon without fully understanding the consequences. But their actions are consistent with the goals of some of the most powerful companies on earth. With a market value of over $600 billion, newcomer and electric vehicle pioneer Tesla is now well established. High tech industry heavyweights including Apple and Sony are developing electric vehicles. Taiwan’s Foxcon is partnering with Fiat Chrysler to develop all electric vehicles, and China’s search engine giant Baidu is working with Volvo. And as for legacy automakers, General Motors, attempting to lead the way, has declared they will sell only electric vehicles by 2035.

If electric cars are the corporate choice, destined to be the only consumer option within barely more than 13 years, New York better get ready. This is especially the case if, as appears likely, America’s corporate giants have decided not only to precipitously usher in an all-electric age, but do so with only renewable energy. But are politicians right to follow the lead of these corporate initiatives? Is this green symbiosis between corporations and politicians yielding policies that are in the best interests of New Yorkers? Will these policies help the environment, taking all impacts into account? Are they even possible?

A totally electrified transportation sector within a generation, while concurrently moving to completely renewable sources of electricity. Have Assemblyman Englebright and his colleagues really thought this through? The first thing proponents of an electrified transportation sector should consider is what sort of energy options are available. Solar power, which Englebright has been pushing ever since the 1990s, is a good place to start. Solar power is not a good bet in the State of New York. It never was. It never will be.

New York even at its southernmost extremity is north of the 40th parallel. This means that in winter, most New Yorkers get barely nine hours of daylight. Moreover, with an average of 121 days of year-round rain, even in the summer, sunlight is unreliable in the Empire state. Of course there’s also wind energy. Will that be enough? How much electricity do New Yorkers consume, how do they currently generate it, and how much more would they have to generate if they were to truly enter the electric age?

Electrons vs Combustibles – A New York Overview

According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NSERDA), which offers historical data up through 2017 on electric generation in New York, for the past few years total electricity consumption has been in slight decline. The peak year was 2005, when New York’s consumers purchased 150 terawatt-hours of electricity. By 2017, presumably thanks to improved energy efficiency, that total dropped to 145 terawatt-hours. And of that total, a mere 2.8 terawatt-hours were for transportation.

Meanwhile, overall, the transportation sector is one of the biggest consumers of energy in New York State. Overall, again per NSERDA, 32 percent of all energy consumed in New York is for transportation, and only two-tenths of one percent of the transportation sector is powered by electricity. Clearly New York is going to need an awful lot more electricity, if it intends to electrify its transportation sector.

To get an idea of how complex the process is of getting from raw energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar to actual electrons running appliances or furnaces heating homes, NSERDA has produced a chart that merits close study. Presumably, policymakers such as Assemblyman Englebright have taken a good hard look, and decided they understand the challenges.

While there is a lot to digest in this energy flowchart, it offers valuable insights without having to bedazzle the observer with numbers. On the left, raw energy inputs are depicted, and it is immediately obvious that solar and wind energy, occupying the bottom left corner of the graphic, contribute an insignificant share of the total. In the upper middle, electricity is depicted, properly situated as neither a primary energy source nor as an end-user. Electricity must be generated using some raw fuel input. As can be seen, only a small fraction of the source energy for electricity is contributed by wind.

Two other observations must be made from this flowchart. First, that the transportation sector, represented by one of the blue boxes to the center right on the chart, is by far the largest single consumer of energy in New York. Second, and more subtle, is the grey shading on the right edge of the chart, showing how much energy input ended up as energy used vs energy lost. Everyone knows that energy is lost between the raw fuel input and the actual consumption in the form of traction, light, or heat, but the extent of this loss is significant. For every bit of energy embodied, for example, in a combustible fuel, as shown coming in on the left edge of the chart, about two-thirds of it is ultimately lost in transmission or dissipated heat, as shown on the upper right edge of the chart.

Understanding this is key to understanding one of the biggest challenges facing electrification of transportation. The two biggest categories of energy loss are in generating electricity and in burning transportation fuel. While electric motors are far more efficient than gasoline engines, unless efficient means of generating electricity are developed, the losses will just be transferred upstream, and electrifying New York’s transportation sector will not yield energy savings.

Electrifying Transportation Requires How Much More Electricity?

Diving into the numbers to answer this, New York’s transportation sector is estimated to consume about 1.2 trillion basic thermal units, which equates to 352 terawatt-hours. But since the efficiency of charging and discharging an onboard battery and converting that electricity into traction is now being achieved at efficiencies approaching 90 percent, and if one assumes comprehensive grid balancing – which might be facilitated if New York’s entire vehicle fleet is electrified – the actual energy expended in the form of traction to move New York’s mostly combustion powered engines may be estimated at around 250 billion basic thermal units, or 73 terawatt-hours. That’s still a tremendous amount of electricity.

The chart below, using information from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, depicts what fuel inputs are used to generate electricity in New York, as measured in terawatt-hours (column one). Shown in column two is terawatt-hours converted into gigawatt-years. This conversion allows a quick comparison of output capacity, also expressed in gigawatts (column three) to actual output per year. The actual output divided by the capacity is shown in column four. This yield shows what percent of each year these power generators, according to fuel input, are actually active.

With this in mind, note the last row of data in column one, which shows “electrifying transport” requiring 73 terawatt-hours per year. As shown in column two of the same row, 73 terawatt-hours equates to 8.3 gigawatt-years. If New York’s transportation sector goes electric, that’s how much continuous new electrical output would be required to keep all the new EV wheels turning.

What is immediately clear is that while 8.3 gigawatts of continuous output may not be much compared to New York’s 43.1 gigawatts of installed capacity, it is a great deal when compared to New York’s 15.1 gigawatt-years of actual output. The only source of electricity that shows a high yield, at 82 percent, is nuclear, which is because nuclear power plants run all the time. Natural gas plants have low yields because they are turned on and off to cover fluctuations in other sources of power or in consumer demand. Coal and petroleum generators have low yields because they are being phased out.

Evaluating which sources of fuel for power generation have high vs low yields lends additional insight into the challenge posed by renewables. For example, if, by 2035, the number of registered electric vehicles in New York rises from today’s 56,000 to several million – there are 11 million registered vehicles in New York State – generating the needed additional electricity could be possible simply by running natural gas peaking plants at full capacity. But that would accomplish nothing with respect to the ultimate reason for mandating electric vehicles, which is to reduce emissions.

The only way to reduce emissions is to replace fossil fuel power plants, which generate almost exactly half of the terawatt-hours consumed in New York, with the rest coming from nuclear, hydro-electric, and “other” which is solar and wind. Note the yield on solar and wind power. At 19 percent, this represents the amount of time the wind is actually blowing or the sun is actually shining. At such a low yield, consider what it would take in terms of installed capacity to replace the 65 terawatt-hours currently delivered by fossil fuel in New York, much less add another 73 terawatt-hours to electrify the transportation sector.

This is the reality that makes requiring all new cars to have zero emissions to be a daunting proposition. It is unlikely that hydropower solutions can be significantly expanded. Nuclear power, at least for now, remains a political impossibility. Solar power is barely viable during the New York winter. Just exactly how many wind farms are New Yorkers prepared to take? Because to get from here to there, wherever you see one wind turbine, imagine fifty of them. That’s what it would take to eliminate fossil fuel, electrify transportation, and begin to cut back on nuclear power in New York State.

Other Challenges Presented by Electrifying the Transportation Sector

Some of the typical objections to electric transportation are being addressed. The ability to quick charge an electric vehicle is clearly a major impediment to rapid adoption. How fast a battery recharges can be expressed in miles of range per minute of charging. Top of the line cars, using an 800 volt fast charger, deliver much better results than affordable EVs using standard chargers. Porsche and Tesla have models that can charge at a rate of 15 miles per minute using a fast charger. A Nissan Leaf, on the other hand, charging at home, may store as little five miles of range per hour.

It would be a mistake, however, to write off the potential for ongoing breakthroughs in charge-time however. Lucid Motors, a Silicon Valley startup, has announced its debut vehicle will be able to charge at a rate of 20 miles per minute. At that rate, EVs begin to approach refill times comparable to gasoline engines. Five minutes at the gas pump enables a 300 mile range; 15 minutes at a fast charger does the same.  According to Business Insider, a Chinese company has just announced an EV battery that can be fully recharged in five minutes.

Another objection to EVs, possibly more problematic, has been the sourcing and disposal of the battery materials. The cost for the raw materials used in EV batteries, lithium and cobalt, has dropped in recent years. But when there are 250 million EVs plying the highways of America, replacing all gasoline powered cars, with similar market upheaval all around the world, how will that affect the price of these materials?

In China, as reported in February, the price of lithium surged by over 40 percent compared to the same month in 2020. This means the price of this battery metal has made up for ground lost during the pandemic and is now well ahead. Cobalt, also a critical battery metal, has also begun to recover after hitting a low in 2019. But short-term forecasts for this metal do not begin to account for what happens if demand skyrockets, which is is going to happen if the number of battery powered EVs worldwide, not quite six million today, swells to hundreds of millions within the next decade. What will the impact on prices for battery metals be if the demand increases by a factor of twenty times or more?

The uncertainty of raw material inputs for EVs is not merely a function of demand potentially outstripping supply, because that assumes a normal market. But battery metals are primarily sourced from nations that are either politically unstable or potential adversaries. The biggest source of cobalt in the world is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The biggest owner of lithium mines and processors in the world is China. EV batteries, cheaper than ever but still very expensive, are currently priced at rates that may reflect a historic low in the value of battery metals. Imagine the U.S. cost for batteries if there is escalating tension with China, and that nation still controls most of the world’s mining and battery manufacturing capacity.

Something insufficiently addressed by environmentalists keen on electric cars and renewable energy is the environmental cost of batteries. Like wind energy, which despoils landscapes and slaughters raptors, bats and migrating insects, battery production is problematic for the environment. Unlike wind energy, sourcing battery materials are also a human tragedy. Cobalt mines in West Africa are cesspools of environmental and human degradation.

A Financial Times analysis published in July 2019 found that 30 percent of all cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was “artisanal” in origin. Translation: This ore is gathered by individual laborers, often children, always underpaid, working in appalling, hazardous conditions. According to the report, there are over 200,000 “informal” miners working in the DRC, with 72 percent of the world’s cobalt coming from that country. Like so-called blood diamonds, the world’s cobalt is washed in the blood of exploited miners, at the same time as the rivers and estuaries downstream from these mines are fouled by utterly unregulated toxic runoff. What’s going to happen when the world’s appetite for lithium and cobalt increases by two orders of magnitude?

In 2002 the noted environmentalist William McDonough published a book entitled “Cradle to Cradle.” It has become a landmark reference that explores how human civilization can move to an economy that recycles literally everything, eliminating the concept of waste. This core value of environmentalism is another example of how EVs are not ready for the level of environmentalist enthusiasm they generate. It isn’t merely the destroyed land, fouled rivers, or abundant greenhouse gas that are all byproducts of mining and refining cobalt and lithium. It’s what to do with these materials once the battery is depleted.

If every new car will be an EV by 2035, then by about 2045, there will be roughly 15 million EV batteries per year that will be at the end of their useful life. Entrepreneurs are racing to come up with ways to process the coming deluge. One strategy, which merely postpones the reckoning, is to use these batteries for stationary storage. No longer retaining enough charge to merit being dead weight on a vehicle, they’ll enjoy a second life connected to the grid. This buys another ten years, but doesn’t solve the problem. It does call attention to the other sleeping elephant in the room, however, which is the plan afoot to replace natural gas peaking plants and absorb surplus renewable energy with giant battery farms. These batteries as well will have limited useful lives and will require recycling.

While it’s a mistake to bet against emerging technologies that may enable total battery recycling, it’s also presumptuous to mandate 100 percent EV sales by 2035 without having a clear picture of how that is going to be accomplished. Conventional technologies only recover about 60 percent of the materials inside an EV battery. A new process being developed by Volkswagon can recover up to 95 percent of the materials in an EV battery pack, but it is labor and energy intensive and is still being tested.

There may be promising, cost-effective ways to recycle EV batteries, but at present, less than five percent of EV batteries are recycled. Ironically, if battery manufacturers succeed in developing a battery that does not require cobalt, there will be almost no economic incentive to recycle EV batteries since its most valuable element is no longer present. It is a safe bet that EV batteries will eventually be cradle to cradle products, subjected to advanced recycling processes, and the cost will added to the price of the vehicle.

The Consumer Cost, the Opportunity Cost

As it is, EVs are coming down in price, but still cost far more than conventional gasoline powered cars. A report from the NRDC, an organization that undoubtedly advocates for more EVs, stated “the average sticker price on an electric car is $19,000 higher than an average gasoline-powered vehicle.” Depending on how much electricity costs, EV owners get some of this back in fuel savings, but not nearly enough to offset the higher purchase price. There is evidence that EVs incur lower maintenance costs as well, although an estimate from AAA only puts the savings at $330 per year.

What consumers will ultimately pay to drive EVs will have to take into account the cost – either factored into the purchase price or socialized through higher taxes – to build out a network of public charging stations and recycle the batteries.

Equally significant, the consumer will confront the possibility of much higher costs for electricity. In New York, as previously noted, electrifying the transportation sector will require annual output to increase from 132 trillion terawatt-hours to 205 terawatt-hours. This 55 percent jump will be necessary even if there is no reduction in power generation from fossil fuel, which currently supplies half of New York’s electricity.

Should New York’s legislature continue to display the same enthusiasm for solar and wind energy as it does for EVs, and the same antipathy for nuclear and natural gas energy as it does for gasoline powered cars, the price of electricity for the average consumer is going to soar. New York’s legislators, starting with Assemblyman Englebright, need to confront these challenges before accepting the momentum of the green movement, the other blue states, and the big automakers.

If New York is going to help blaze the trail into the electric age, how are they going to rely on solar power when there is no viable solar energy during their northern winters? Do they intend to eliminate nuclear power, or develop more nuclear power? Will they resist pressure from environmentalists to demolish hydroelectric dams? Will they tolerate natural gas power plants? Do they actually think wind energy can be the state’s primary source of electricity? And if so, what are they smoking?

Before mandating that all new cars sold have to be EVs by 2035, legislators in New York, as in all blue states, have to come to terms with the energy realities that inform any serious attempt to convert their economy to run on mostly electricity. They have to make hard decisions involving controversial compromises, or the policies they inflict on their constituents will result in punitive, needlessly costly electricity, impoverishing millions of households. For example, as the percentage of EVs grows, gas tax revenues will decline. But rather than imposing a vehicle miles traveled tax on all cars and trucks, limit that new tax to EVs, since only EVs avoid paying the gas tax.

Similarly, New York state legislators should envision a New York electricity grid where wind energy provides all the additional energy required by EVs, while also covering the deficits caused by retiring natural gas power plants. They should research and disclose exactly how many battery farms and wind farms would be required to make this work, where they would be located, and how much that would impact electricity prices.

New York’s legislators also need to recognize that the sources of materials for EV batteries remain problematic, fraught with labor and environmental abuse and vulnerable to unstable political conditions. Perhaps they should evaluate what it would take to bring more lithium mining and processing onto U.S. soil. They need to accept that the bugs haven’t been worked out of the battery recycling processes and refrain from glibly assuming everything will take care of itself.

And if New York’s legislators refuse to renounce the optimism that might inform their blithe promotion of EVs at any cost, they might apply that same optimism towards other possible solutions, and make sure their edicts don’t preclude or defer the near-future realization of better-faster-cheaper innovations that none of us can presently imagine.

What if a breakthrough in direct synthesis enables production of vehicle fuel directly from CO2 gas, rendering combustion engines clean and carbon neutral? What if onboard storage of hydrogen gas is rendered cost-effective, and new technologies render combustion engines powered by hydrogen gas as better and cheaper solutions than using hydrogen fuel cells to power electric motors? What if natural gas powered engines operating as range extenders – sort of like a next-generation Chevy Volt – put new versions of near zero emission vehicles on the road, allowing drivers to choose their fuel depending on price and duty cycle? What if, gasp, there is a credible fracture in the alleged scientific consensus on the dangers of anthropogenic CO2 emissions?

The pages of history are littered with examples of governments that tried to roll out a solution that felt like a compelling moral choice at the time, yet turned out to be foolish and wasteful in retrospect. If EVs are compelling choices for economic reasons, then let them compete against gasoline vehicles without mandates. If and when nuclear fusion becomes a commercial reality, or, for that matter, when satellite solar power stations begin to rain terawatts onto grid connected receiving stations down here on earth, the electric age will be upon us. By then, whether stored via hydrogen electrolysis or charged batteries, EVs can own the roads. Until then, proceed with caution.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Abundance, Not Scarcity, Can be the Immediate Future for Humanity

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Assume for a moment that regardless of what really happened, or what should happen, Joe Biden occupies the White House on January 20th. What are some of the biggest issues and initiatives that we can expect from his administration? What are the underlying themes and premises that will inform his agenda?

When considering these questions, equally relevant is how much of Biden’s agenda will be Biden’s agenda? Say what you will about Biden’s many flaws, at least he is an amiable glad-hander whose career has been defined mostly by hewing to the political center. But Biden is way past his prime, and when he’s having another “lid” day, his energetic sidekick Kamala Harris – along with her entire Silicon Valley entourage – will be wide awake.

What this California democrat brings to Washington DC is a culture of almost unbelievable arrogance. Some of it is earned. For at least forty years, and now more than ever, Silicon Valley has been the global epicenter of high-tech innovation and the principle repository of the trillions in wealth that its innovation has generated.

Wealth. Power. Arrogance. Hubris. This is a dangerous combination when wielded on such a scale, and especially if some of its fundamental premises are wrong. And the biggest, almost horrifyingly wrong premise that informs the culture of Silicon Valley is that we are in what Jerry Brown, in his first stint as governor back in 1976, called “the era of limits.”

It’s paradoxical that such a value might come out of the Silicon Valley, a place that has nurtured inventions that have transformed the world. But Kamala Harris, along with the big tech CEOs, Bay Area Democratic politicians, and almost every venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, share a hectoring, monolithic world view that boils down to this: humans are parasites on the earth, especially Americans, and their consumption of everything has to be dramatically reduced.

California is still paying the price for what Jerry Brown did back in the 1970s to enforce his era of limits – cancelling the completion of California’s water infrastructure and selling off the right-of-ways the state had acquired to construct additional freeway corridors. But the era of limits has morphed, thanks to climate change alarm and the opportunistic expansionist plans of high tech firms, into what is becoming a green police state. To enforce limits, to reduce consumption, cities will no longer be allowed to expand out, only up. Water infrastructure will not be expanded, instead water rationing will be enforced using the internet of things. Similar measures will curb energy use and transportation options. This is Kamala Harris’s Brave New World. This is the so-called Cleantech Revolution.

The consequences of getting this wrong are impossible to overstate. The example set by the United States, and the investments made by American corporations inside and outside the U.S., are going to greatly influence economic growth around the world. The policies the U.S. advocates in the United Nations, and through the many supra-national institutions where Biden/Harris will forcefully reengage, will also greatly influence economic growth around the world.

But the world doesn’t need more solar and wind farms. It needs big infrastructure. Nuclear power. Hydroelectric power. Aqueducts and pumping stations to enable massive interbasin transfers of fresh water. These projects will accelerate economic growth everywhere, and as has been proven without exception over the past few decades, as prosperity increases, population growth slows. The Kamala Harris vision, and the Silicon Valley agenda it represents, will not liberate the people of the world, nor will it save the planet.

Questioning the Era of Limits

With the Silicon Valley’s cleantech revolution about to acquire new momentum in Washington DC, and with environmentalist values set to again command unprecedented influence on federal policy, it is more important than ever to have a vigorous national and global dialogue as to what constitutes clean technology, and what constitutes a legitimate continuum of environmentalist values.

How these questions are answered will have profound impact on the nature and speed of economic growth all over the world, as well as the quality of our lives and the quantity of our individual rights and freedoms. There are two fundamental assumptions that govern environmental values today: (1) use of fossil fuel should be phased out as soon as possible, and (2) resource scarcity is an inevitable reality that will not be overcome for generations. To this end, massive reallocations of wealth are being enacted to subsidize alternatives to fossil fuel, and rationing of resource use is becoming policy in the areas of energy, water and land. But what if both of these assumptions are completely wrong?

There is a case to be made that resource abundance, not scarcity, can be the immediate destiny of the human race, and that scientific innovation combined with free markets are the keys to realizing this optimistic scenario. In every fundamental area, energy, water and land, there are promising trends – unfolding with breathtaking speed – that provide humanity with the opportunity to realize global wealth and prosperity within a generation.

Probably the most difficult notion to intuitively fathom is that land will become abundant again, but for several important reasons, that is precisely what is going to happen. The primary reason for this is that human population growth is finally leveling off. From today’s total of 7.7 billion people, projections now indicate human population will peak at slightly over 9.0 billion around 2050, an increase of only around 20 percent. While this seems like a lot, it is important to remember that in 1970, the world population was only 3.7 billion, meaning the last 40 years has registered a human population increase of 80 percent. We have already seen the dramatic growth in population, and are now in the leveling off phase.

The reason this slowdown and leveling of human population will result in more abundant land is because at the same time as human population growth slows down, human migration to cities continues to accelerate. In 1970 only 1.3 billion people lived in cities, 35 percent of the world’s population. Today 55 percent of the world’s population live in cities, 4.2 billion people. Over the past 40 years the world’s overall population has increased 80 percent, but urban population has increased by 160 percent. Urbanization is accelerating, and is depopulating rural areas faster than projected remaining overall population growth is filling them. Forty years from now, there will be more open land in the world than there is today. And these twin phenomenon, urbanization and population stabilization, are completely voluntary, inexorable, and are occurring at rates that are, if anything, underestimated.

If land abundance on planet earth is going to be achieved by a stabilized population living mostly in megacities, how will we build these cities? How will we transform our cities, already swarming with far more people than they were originally designed to hold, into 21st century magnets for humanity, offering economic and cultural opportunities instead of merely a last destination for the destitute? Here is where Malthusian assumptions, combined with a misguided environmentalist ideology that condemns development, have conspired to stifle the building of next generation infrastructure. The good news is these delays have also allowed us the time to develop better-than-ever technology.

From high-rise agriculture to high-speed rail, from advanced water recycling to ultra-efficient energy conduits and appliances, from cars that are clean, smart and safe, to new roads that convert pavement heat into utility-scale electricity and convey vehicles that drive themselves, hyperlanes for ultra fast cars, passenger drones, cities of the future can be built today – but not if the wealth we need to pour concrete and smelt steel is spent instead on environmentalist lawsuits, and not if the market incentives that animate billions of construction entrepreneurs are squelched because instead we gave the work to government bureaucrats. Creating abundance is human nature – but only individual liberty, property rights, and free markets will enable this nature to be realized. Governments enforce the rules, but only a free people can play the game.

Abundant water is just around the corner because of several interrelated technological opportunities. The most promising of all is the potential of smart irrigation. Primarily this means using drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation, but this also refers to no-till farming, new crops that consume less water, inter-cropping, and advanced irrigation management, where irrigation timing and volume are precisely coordinated with weather conditions. Smart irrigation techniques could reduce the volume of water required for global agriculture by 40-50 percent.

Other means to create water abundance span the gamut from traditional methods – contour berms to catch and percolate runoff, urban cisterns to harvest rainwater, or where necessary, massive new infrastructure projects to move large volumes of water from water rich areas to water poor areas. To save ecosystems and restore fisheries, why not build a canal connecting the massive Ob-Irtysh River to the Aral Basin? Diverting only a small fraction of the Ob-Irtysh’s annual flow would make a decisive contribution to restoring the Aral Sea. Why not divert a small percentage of the Ubangi River north to refill Lake Chad?

Finally, water reuse and desalination will guarantee water abundance in urban areas. High-rise agriculture, for example, can use gray water to irrigate hydroponic gardens at a commercial scale, and the transpiration these plants emit within these enclosed spaces can be harvested to yield pristine drinking water. Desalination is no longer a technology reserved for energy rich nations – it now only takes 2.0 kilowatt-hours to desalinate a cubic meter of seawater. Desalination already provides over 1 percent of the fresh water used world wide, over 30 km3 per year, and this total is rising fast. But water reuse is the most promising source of urban water of all – technologies now exist to create essentially a closed loop in urban areas. Water is used for drinking, then treated and piped back to use for irrigation and to refill reservoirs, then after percolating and filtering back into aquifers, is pumped up, treated, and used again for drinking.

Water abundance will enable us to grow all the food we want, using new strains of crops and new agricultural techniques that are enabling another revolution in yields, guaranteeing abundant food. Water abundance will allow us to finally begin refilling our depleted aquifers, restore our vanished lakes, and never have to wonder whether or not the next war might be fought to quench a nation’s thirst.

To create water abundance, however, and to build megacities, to create 21st century civil infrastructure, and to deploy advanced technologies, we will need wealth and prosperity, and more than anything else, the enabler of wealth and prosperity is energy production. World energy consumption today is not evenly distributed. But energy consumption equals wealth. Even with extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency, say, twice what we enjoy today, for 9.0 billion people to average only half the per capita energy consumption of residents of the Americans, global energy production would have to more than double.

To aggressively curb further development of fossil fuel, instead of promoting it as part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, is to condemn humanity to misery. Let them strip the forests bare for fuel. Let their industry stagnate. Keep them poor. This is the true impact of demanding renewable energy. Using fossil fuel until leapfrog technologies such as commercial fusion power is available is not just an economic choice. It’s a humanitarian choice, it’s a environmentalist choice, and it’s a moral choice.

The challenge to achieve resource abundance is not impossible; it is within our grasp. Despite heartbreaking examples of lingering poverty all over the planet, the fact is the overall condition of humanity is remarkably better now than it was 40 years ago, 400 years ago, 4,000 years ago. Disease and starvation remain endemic, but by all objective measures, and despite setbacks, they are on the retreat. This is the trend the future holds, if we seize the opportunity. But to achieve this bright future, we must ask these questions:  What is clean technology, and what are legitimate environmentalist values?

To create prosperity, for example, given 85 percent of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuel, and given there is a staggering abundance of remaining fossil fuel reserves in the form of heavy oil, coal, and natural gas, do we really want to stop using fossil fuel? What if the imperatives of “clean” technology stopped at the point where harmful pollutants were reduced to parts per billion through advanced filtration and efficient burning, instead of having to make that gigantic leap beyond simply eliminating unhealthy emissions to requiring zero emissions of CO2? Given the certain and devastating price humanity will pay in the form of ongoing poverty and escalating tensions over resources – especially if we precipitously abandon developing new sources of fossil fuel – do we really want to stop emitting CO2?

What if solar cycles indeed are all there is causing climate change? What if climate change isn’t anything but normal fluctuations? What if rainforest destruction and aquifer depletion, dried up lakes and misused lands are the reasons for regional climate change? What if we can’t do anything at all about climate change anyway? If you believe the worst scenarios, it is too late – but what if the models are simply wrong? If they’re right, it’s too late, and if they’re wrong, it doesn’t matter. So why on earth would we consign humanity to much higher probabilities of poverty and war, instead of developing clean fossil fuel, at the same time as we systematically develop advanced, alternative sources of energy?

Abundance is the Solution, Not Scarcity

There are vital environmentalist values that everyone should embrace, such as practicing sustainability, eliminating genuine pollution, and taking reasonable steps to protect species and ecosystems. But without the energy, without the mines, without the steel mills, without the paved roads and poured concrete and power plants and pumping stations and water treatment plants and countless other ecologically disruptive activities, humanity will struggle to realize their destiny of prosperity.

Kamala Harris and the people she’s bringing with her to the White House, are going to exert tremendous influence over the doddering Biden. The Silicon Valley mentality they’re bringing with them has a monolithic opinion on issues that strike to the heart of how the United States and the rest of the world will develop over the next few decades. Their wealth and power is matched by their intolerance for dissenting points of view. But if they are allowed to stifle the aspirations of humanity, enforcing rationing, scarcity, micromanagement, technology driven surveillance, and billions for the bureaucrats and litigators, instead of for the bulldozers and builders, their legacy will be one of destruction and decline.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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