Tag Archive for: renewable energy

Renewables Aren’t Renewable

/by

Today in America there are obvious disconnects between observable reality, and the narratives we get from corporate special interests that control news we consume, along with politicians that are supposedly elected to represent us.

But this is nothing new. As it has always been with most nations, elites have defined the destiny of America throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t necessarily less free or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

What may be different today, however, is the misanthropic folly of America’s current energy policies, which America’s ruling elites are not only imposing on everyone living here, but attempting to impose everywhere on earth. By now it should be beyond serious debate that “renewable” energy cannot possibly scale adequately to replace fossil fuel. Worse still, renewable energy systems are less sustainable than fossil fuel and cause more environmental destruction. And if you care about such matters, renewables even fail to offer significant reductions in carbon emissions, and in some cases actually cause more carbon emissions.

Why these facts are dismissed by America’s elites is a story of corruption, collusion, megalomania, greed, cowardice, intellectual negligence, and delusional mass psychosis. Modern political theory offers solace to those cynics who believe all democracies are actually just “managed” shams by suggesting pluralism and representative government is nonetheless at least approximated if there is competition among the powerful elites running a nation. But what if there is no interelite competition? What happens when every one of these elites believes the same thing? When it comes to “renewables” and “net zero by 2050,” that’s what we have in America today.

As a result, Americans face a future of perpetual scarcity: rationed, algorithmically micro-managed access to energy, punitive pricing for energy use over government mandated thresholds, and a wasteland of landscapes ruined by solar farms, wind farms, battery farms, distribution lines, open pit mines, evaporation ponds, and dumps; all the destructive consequences of industrial scale “renewables” development. At this rate, the blind rush to eliminate fossil fuel and rely solely on renewables will cause catastrophic worldwide shortages of energy, spawning deadly poverty and desperate wars.

Renewables Are Not Renewable

A recent post by respected investment blogger Wolf Richter, compiling data from the Energy Information Administration, reported “renewables” generated 22.6 percent of all U.S. electricity in 2022, a record high. Proponents of renewables consider this achievement as validating their strategy. But the devil is in the details.

To begin with, hydropower accounted for 6.1 percent of that total. But hydropower is under relentless assault by environmentalists, and even if more hydroelectric dams could be built, instead of demolished which is the current trend, the best sites have already been developed. But what about wind, which contributed 10.1 percent of all electricity generated in 2022, and solar, which added another 4.8 percent?

To put this question into relevant context, first consider what it’s going to take to get America’s economy to a “net zero” state by relying solely on wind and solar. To do this, you cannot merely calculate how much additional wind and solar generating capacity would be necessary to replace all other sources of electricity generation in the U.S. The residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors of the U.S. economy rely on direct inputs of natural gas and petroleum for 62 percent of the energy they require. Electricity is only used for the remaining 38 percent, which means at 14.9 percent of that, wind and solar actually only delivered 5.7 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. in 2022.

Merely electrifying the transportation sector in the U.S. would require total electricity generation to nearly double. To electrify the entire U.S. economy would require total electrical generation to triple. To do this using only wind and solar power would require the current installed base of wind and solar to expand by a factor of 18 times, and the process would involve far more than erecting 18 times more wind turbines and solar farms than we have already. There’s what’s euphemistically referred to as “balance of plant.”

In the case of wind and solar, balance of plant refers to thousands of miles of additional high voltage power lines and utility scale battery backup systems. Since most parts of the U.S., such as the densely populated Northeast, do not have reliable solar energy, nor are they the windiest parts of the country, it would be necessary to transmit wind energy from the plains states, and solar power from the southern latitudes. At the same time, hundreds, if not thousands of gigawatt-hours of battery storage would be required.

Peter Ziehen, an economist whose new book “The End of the World is Just the Beginning” ought to be mandatory reading for anyone promoting renewables, had this to say about relying on wind and solar power, along with transmission lines and battery backup: “Such infrastructure would be on the scale and scope that humanity has not yet attempted.”

The Resources Required for Renewable Energy

One of the most prolific and persuasive advocates for a realistic energy strategy in the U.S. is Alex Epstein, whose latest book “Fossil Future,” makes a compelling case for why the benefits of using fossil fuel far outweigh the costs, including the environmental costs. Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, he produced the following chart, which ought to make plain the devastation – and complete unsustainability – attendant to so-called renewable power.

Epstein’s analysis references “tons per terawatt-hour,” referring to the tons of raw materials required to construct various forms of electricity producing generating plants; natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, and wind. As can be seen, to generate the same amount of electricity, building a natural gas power plant uses only a small fraction of the raw materials required for a solar or wind system. The magnitude of the stress solar and wind would put onto mining operations is evident when calculating what it would take for them to power the entire U.S., or the entire world.

If the entire U.S. annual consumption of energy were expressed in terawatt-hours, that is, if every economic sector of the U.S. were electrified, based on the most recent data, it would take 28,500 terawatt-hours. That would equate to solar and wind farms consuming approximately 256 million tons of concrete and steel. The entire U.S. steel production in 2021 was 86 million tons. The entire U.S. cement production in 2021 was 80 million tons. Then there’s the copper, which for solar requires about 1,000 tons per terawatt-hour. This means if 50 percent of the renewables required to electrify the entire U.S. economy were via solar power, 14 million tons would be required. Total U.S. copper production is only 1.3 million tons per year. This much new solar energy capacity would use up 100 percent of our entire production of copper for 11 years.

This only begins to describe the environmental toll “renewables” are poised to inflict on the planet. What about the fact that for every person on earth to consume just half as much energy per capita that Americans consume, global energy production will have to double? To do that with wind and solar would require roughly 3.0 billion tons of cement and steel, and 30 million tons of copper. Have the renewables advocates thought this through?

All conventional power plant alternatives, using gas, nuclear and coal, require one-tenth or less raw materials to generate an equivalent quantity of electricity. For modern natural gas combined cycle generating plants, the ratio is closer to one-twentieth as much raw inputs. But when it comes to solar and wind power, which is distributed and intermittent, what about the transmission lines and the batteries? What about the service life of all this installed base, the solar panels and batteries and wind turbines that degrade after 20 years and have to be decommissioned, recycled and replaced? What about the environmental costs of extending this resource guzzling scheme to every nation on earth?

Electric Vehicles Are Not Sustainable

When discussing the sustainability of renewables, of course, an honest analysis cannot focus exclusively on the production side. If the energy consumption of an entire economy is electrified, that would include the transportation sector, where in many cases the goal of electrification is fraught with challenges. Ships at sea cannot recharge their batteries during a four week voyage on the deep ocean. Can they use hydrogen fuel cells instead? Can they can go back to relying on sails? Farm equipment that is too expensive to leave idle during harvests must operate up to 18 hours a day, so how will they recharge in only six hours? Will they swap batteries in the middle of a shift? Perhaps solutions exist. But they are expensive and they squander resources.

It is the ubiquitous automobile, at last count numbering 291 million in the U.S. alone, where “renewable” technology is most readily exposed as incredibly wasteful and destructive to the environment. From his book, here is Peter Zeihan explaining what it takes to build an all electric vehicle: “You think going to war for oil was bad? Materials inputs for just the drivetrain of an EV are six times what’s required for an internal combustion engine. If we’re truly serious about a green transition that will electrify everything, our consumption of all these materials and more must increase by more than an order of magnitude.”

Not just the environmental, but the human impact of replacing hundreds of millions of conventional automobiles with EVs is outlined in a scathing new book by Siddharth Kara, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.” When every supply chain on earth, egged on by the “climate crisis,” is furiously bulking up to source raw materials at ten times the rate they’d previously required, abuse is inevitable.

The tragedy playing out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to feed cobalt to the “green” West is almost apocalyptic. Kara describes how private militias control mining areas with child slaves picking their way through toxic pits in subhuman conditions. Environmental regulations are nonexistent. Human rights are nonexistent. This appalling drama repeats itself around the world, at the same time as slick television commercials market electric vehicles to Americans as a virtuous choice.

Alternatives to Renewable Energy That Isn’t Renewable

Current responses to the climate change “crisis” are not serving the interests of people or the environment. Even if every terrifying climate prediction were accurate, the nations of the world are not going to stop developing fossil fuel because, as we have seen, it is impossible to replace based on any existing technologies.

For this reason, the money being directed to retooling the entire energy sector to utilize “renewables” should be redirected to research and commercialize breakthrough technologies. Maybe direct synthesis of CO2 into liquid fuel, or fusion power, or factory farmed high-yield biofuel from algae. Maybe something we can’t yet imagine. If politicians are panicked over climate change, put money into research. Because today’s renewable energy technology will destroy the planet and the people.

There is an upside to green technology when it is commercially competitive. Hybrid SUVs, which carry a small battery and electric motor to recover energy from braking and downhill coasting can get 40 MPG. Advanced hybrids that might utilize onboard generators, natural gas internal combustion engines, and smaller batteries, could deliver much higher fuel efficiency. So why has the State of California banned them, instead mandating new cars have no combustion engines whatsoever?

Similarly, there are places where an all-of-the-above energy strategy can make commercial sense, but those places are limited. One of the reasons natural gas power plants are inaccurately stigmatized as not cost-competitive with solar power is because on grids with a large installed base of renewables these plants are only fired up when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, meaning their ability to earn revenue is cut in half, even though the cost to build them remains the same.

There is a staggering opportunity cost to rapidly forcing current renewable energy technology onto the American economy. The trillions of dollars in public and private investment could be redirected to upgrade badly neglected existing infrastructure and build new infrastructure in order to deliver abundant energy, water, and transportation assets to the American people. These investments in practical infrastructure during the 1930s and again in the 1950s and ’60s constituted the enabling foundation for an explosion in manufacturing productivity, well paying jobs, and affordable market housing.

There is a demographic irony here that renewables advocates fail to appreciate. Prosperous nations are experiencing unsustainably low birthrates because despite freedom from basic hunger, manufactured scarcity has made it necessary for both parents to work just to spend most of their income making mortgage payments on a ridiculously overpriced home. Many have to live in apartments and condominiums where nobody wants to raise children. When it comes to being able to form families, prosperity in developed nations is an illusion. Only with practical infrastructure development will the cost-of-living descend to the point where people in prosperous nations will again choose to start families.

At the same time, in poor nations, where labor intensive subsistence farming and child labor are how families survive, birthrates remain unsustainably high. Delivering cost-effective energy and infrastructure solutions to these nations will bring their birthrates down, as it has all over the world. Delivering “renewables,” on the other hand, forces both parents to keep working in developed nations, and condemn the people living poor nations, during even the slightest blip in imported aid, to strip the forests bare for fuel and exterminate the wild and endangered game for protein. That’s the green world fully realized. It’s a dismal scenario.

Renewables in their current form will never deliver enough energy to sustain a prosperous human civilization. But they will destroy the earth. Windfarms, onshore and offshore, wreak havoc with insect, avian and marine life, and building them will consume more cement than the world can possibly supply. Solar farms consume vast amounts of open land – where, paradoxically, environmentalists prohibit anyone from building to increase the supply of homes – and they will consume more steel and copper than the world can possibly supply. The same goes for EVs, batteries, and new high voltage transmission lines. In exchange for providing less than 2 percent of oil production, biofuel crops already consume 500,000 square miles; pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer saturated monocrops where there once was rainforest or farmland.

The pillaging of the earth to source raw materials for renewables will make the impact of human civilization on the environment to-date trivial by comparison. In a wealthy nation like America, mandated renewables will complete the destruction of the middle class and for enforcement it will consolidate the power of the surveillance state. If renewables are imposed on poor nations, it will lead to poverty, war and famine on a scale never seen in human history.

Critics of the renewables mania correctly identify climate crisis passions as a new popular religion for a post-modern culture that has lost its way. But it is the elites who have truly lost their way. Some of them have transmuted their natural human need for meaning and purpose into embracing the green religion. But for the most part, America’s elites have become intoxicated with their wealth and power; they have convinced themselves they are uniquely qualified to guide the destiny of the world; they have forgotten the lessons of history. Lost in their own hubris, they are taking this beautiful world and everyone on it straight to hell.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in American Greatness.

California Policymakers Greatly Underestimate Cost for Renewables

/by

AUDIO: Making renewable energy switch will cost a lot more than California thinks. Edward Ring on Fox Business.

https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6320403389112#sp=show-clips

Wind and Solar Energy Cannot Lift Humanity into Prosperity

/by

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.

Fossil Fuel Reality

/by

Over the weekend, the traditional Harvard versus Yale football game was interrupted during halftime by about 150 student activists, spontaneously joined by hundreds of fans, to protest climate change. Occupying the area around the 500-yard line, the protesters chanted “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Fossil fuel has got to go!” The game resumed after about 30 students were arrested and the rest left.

It would be reasonable to suppose that people who manage to gain admission to Harvard and Yale are among the most gifted students in America. But when it comes to swiftly eliminating the usage of fossil fuel, have they done their homework?

Around the world, billions of people are now convinced that catastrophic climate change is inevitable if humanity continues to rely on fossil fuel. Most developed Western nations, along with the United Nations and other supranational organizations, are promoting aggressive policies to replace fossil fuel with renewable energy. While a scientific debate remains, especially with respect to the severity of the predicted climate change, it is the economic challenges relating to rapid elimination of fossil fuel that require urgent examination.

The reason for this is simple: At this time, there is no feasible economic scenario whereby worldwide fossil fuel use does not increase steadily for the next several decades. To dispute this assertion, several indisputable facts would have to be ignored. For starters, shown below is a chart illustrating just how large a percentage of global energy remained dependent on fossil fuel over the past ten years. Using data provided by the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which is the most authoritative source available, on this chart, the total energy consumed in all of its forms – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, and renewables – are expressed as million metric tons of crude oil (MMTO).

By converting quantities of energy from various sources into a single normalized unit – the petroleum industry uses units of crude oil, economists use BTUs, scientists use joules – it is easy to see how much each type of fuel contributed to total global energy consumption over the past decade. As shown, renewables – solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass/biofuel – only comprised 4 percent of total energy consumed in 2018.

There has been strong growth in renewable energy. But absolute values also matter. Ten years ago, in 2009, renewables only contributed 1.2 percent of global energy consumed. Between 2009 and 2018, total worldwide energy consumed rose by 22 percent, or 2,502 MMTOs. Annual consumption of renewables, on the other hand, only rose by 424 MMTOs. Renewable energy only represented 17 percent of the increase in energy consumption between 2009 and 2018.

To get a better idea of exactly what type of renewables were part of the global energy mix in 2018, the next chart provides details. As can be seen, the top producer was wind at 1.7 percent, followed by solar electricity at 0.8 percent, biofuel at 0.7 percent, and all other, mostly geothermal, at 0.8 percent.

But there are serious problems with biofuel. According to the World Bioenergy Association, biofuel crops are already consuming an astonishing 550,000 square miles of land. This already represents 5 percent of all arable land area on earth – to produce less than one percent of global energy.

Solar and wind energy, while also being huge consumers of land for the amount of energy they produce, have an additional problem; there is still no cost effective way to store the energy they produce. Not only are solar and wind energy dependent on daily fluctuations of wind and sunlight, but there are seasonal fluctuations that create even greater challenges.

To account for this, either solar and wind installations must be oversized sufficiently to generate adequate daily power during the times of the year when the hours of daylight are the shortest and wind is the least reliable, or batteries and other electricity storage solutions must be deployed. These electricity storage farms would have to be capable of storing enough energy to supply large cities for literally months at a time.

According to former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who served during the Obama Administration, California’s 2050 “decarbonizing” targets “can be met only with breakthroughs in a portfolio of affordable technologies.” Meanwhile, in California and around the world, hundreds of billions are being invested each year on technologies, such as gargantuan land based and offshore wind farms, that are extremely disruptive to ecosystems. These investments only yield adequate returns when the costs to provide grid connections and upgrades, as well as backup capacity including quick start natural gas power plants are socialized onto taxpayers and ratepayers.

Despite the incredible cost, and the likelyhood that many solutions being implemented today will be obsolete within a few decades, if not a few years, political support for decarbonization remains strong. But even if tens of trillions were spent, can it be done? Here is where the algebra of energy consumption presents challenges to the decarbonizers that may be unsolvable.

The next chart shows the average amount of energy an American consumed in 2018, compared to their counterparts in China and India. A few things immediately jump out. First, it is clear that in the past ten years, Americans did not lower their per capita energy consumption, despite driving more fuel efficient cars, deployment of mass transit options and urban densification, regardless of more efficient laptop and cell phone batteries, “smart” utility meters, “connected” appliances, etc. Can Americans significantly reduce their per capita energy consumption? The most recent data does not yet show that they can.

Turning to China and India, however, highlights just how far behind the rest of the world is in terms of average energy consumption. As shown, the average person in China consumed 539 units of energy (expressed as gallons of crude oil equivalents) in 2009, and increased that to 723 units of energy by 2018. They did this at the same time as their population increased by 62 million. India logged similar progress, going from a per capita consumption of 130 units in 2009 to 184 units in 2018, at the same time as their population grew by 135 million.Based on these facts, the global energy algebra comes down to this: In the future, how much per capita energy is it reasonable for people to expect, in order for them to fulfill their aspirations to become educated, engage in productive work, afford entertaining diversions in their spare time, and raise their families in a nation where the infrastructure – all of it, from hospitals and universities, to roads and rail, airports and seaports, to a resilient water and power grid – is robust enough to support their towns and cities?

To answer this, imagine that everyone on earth used only half as much energy as Americans use. And suppose, quite optimistically, that global population stabilizes at 8 billion. To accomplish this would require worldwide consumption of energy to grow from 13,865 MMTOs in 2019 to a staggering 34,621 MMTOs. That is, for everyone on earth, including Americans, to consume half as much energy as American’s currently consume, global energy production would have to increase to 2.5 times its current output. And would that be enough? Americans, with all the emphasis and investment in energy conservation over the past ten years, have not reduced their per capita energy consumption. Shall global energy production then quintuple, so everyone on earth can use as much energy as Americans do?

Facing this enormous challenge, investments in renewables might focus on research into leapfrog technologies. The return on that investment may enable decarbonized sources of energy to arrive sooner than anyone expects, not because they were mandated, but because they truly cost less than fossil fuel. Instead, R&D focuses too much on preposterous schemes such as “sequestering” CO2 in underground caverns, or mechanically removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Perhaps not algebraic, but arguably axiomatic, is the following equation: Affordable energy equals prosperity equals literacy equals female emancipation equals voluntary family size reduction equals ZPG sooner rather than later. In the continent of Africa, where the population is currently projected to rise from 1.3 billion today to 2.5 billion within the next thirty years, either there will be cheap and affordable energy, or there will be a Malthusian event on that continent that will rival any similar such paroxysm in human history.

Looking forward, this is the moral case for fossil fuel. The fact that there is no choice. Humanity needs to develop every single type of energy it possibly can as quickly as it possibly can, because that is how everyone on earth will readily have the opportunity to enjoy first world lifestyles. Only then can people make first world choices to limit the size of their families and only then can they participate enthusiastically and effectively in efforts to preserve the environment around them. Only then will the allure of comfort and security outweigh the desperate imperatives of war. And soon enough, commercially competitive renewable energy – perhaps in forms we haven’t yet imagined – will supplant fossil fuel.

People who demand rapid elimination of fossil fuel need to either face the algebraic impossibility of doing that, or be honest and disclose their true motives.

 *   *   *

What Would it Cost for the U.S. to “Go Solar”?

/by

Proponents of renewable energy claim that wind and solar energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. According to USA Today, “Renewables close in on fossil fuels, challenging on price.” A Forbes headline agrees: “Renewable Energy Will Be Consistently Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels.” The “expert” websites agree: “Renewable Electricity Levelized Cost Of Energy Already Cheaper,” asserts “energyinnovation.org.”

They’re all wrong. Renewable energy is getting cheaper every year, but it is a long way from competing with natural gas, coal, or even nuclear power, if nuclear power weren’t drowning in lawsuits and regulatory obstructions.

With both wind and solar energy, the cost not only of the solar panels and wind turbines has to be accounted for, but also of inverters, grid upgrades, and storage assets necessary to balance out the intermittent power.

Taking all variables into account, what might it cost for the entire U.S. to get 100 percent of its energy from solar energy?

Speaking the Language of Energy and Electricity

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States in 2017 consumed 97.7 quadrillion BTUs of energy. BTUs, or British Thermal Units, are often used by economists to measure energy. One BTU is the energy required to heat one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

If we’re going understand what it takes to go solar, and usher in the great all-electric age where our heating and our vehicles are all part of the great green grid, then we have to convert BTUs into watts. That’s easy. One kilowatt-hour is equal to 3,412 BTUs. Following the math, one quadrillion BTUs is equal to 293,071 gigawatt-hours. Accordingly, 97.7 quadrillion BTUs is equal to 28.6 million gigawatt-hours. So how much would it cost for a solar energy infrastructure capable of delivering to America 28.6 million gigawatt-hours per year?

Solar panels are sold by the watt; residential systems are typically sized by kilowatt output, and large commercial solar “farms” are typically measured in megawatt output. A gigawatt is a billion watts. So generating 28.6 million gigawatt-hours in one year requires a lot of solar panels. How many?

To properly scope a solar system capable of generating 28.6 million gigawatt-hours per year, you have to take into account the “yield” of the system. A photovoltaic solar panel only generates electricity when the sun is shining. If you assume the “full sun equivalent” hours of solar production are eight hours per day (solar panels don’t generate nearly as much power when the sun is not directly overhead), then you can assume that in a year these panels will generate power for 2,922 hours. Since 28.6 million gigawatt-hours is equivalent to 28.6 quadrillion watt-hours, dividing that by 2,922 means you need a system capable of generating 9.8 trillion watts in full sun. How much will that cost?

A best case total cost for that much solar photovoltaic capacity would have to be at least $1.00 per watt. Because the labor and substrate costs to install photovoltaic solar panels have already fallen dramatically, it is unlikely to expect the cost per watt to ever drop under $1. Currently costs for large commercial systems are still just under $2 per watt. So the cost for solar panels to power the entire energy requirements of the United States would be at least $10 trillion.

But wait. There’s more. Much more.

The Other Costs Associated with Intermittent Solar Power

Renewable energy boosters use what’s called the “levelized lifetime cost” to evaluate how much wind and solar energy cost compared to what natural gas or nuclear power costs. To do this, they take the installation costs, plus the lifetime operating costs, and divide that by the lifetime electricity production. On this basis, they come up with an average cost per kilowatt-hour, and when they do this, renewables look pretty good.

What this type of analysis ignores are the many additional, and very costly, adaptations necessary to deliver renewable power. The biggest one is storage, which is breezily dismissed in most accounts as “getting cheaper all the time.” But while storage is getting cheaper, it’s still spectacularly expensive.

The only way intermittent renewable energy can function is by having “peaking plants,” usually burning natural gas, spin into production whenever the wind falters or the sun goes behind a cloud. To achieve 100 percent renewable energy, of course, these peaking plants have to be decommissioned and replaced by giant batteries.

An example of this is in Moss Landing, on the Central California Coast, where a natural gas peaker plant is being decommissioned and replaced by a battery farm that will store an impressive 2.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity. Not impressive is the fact that to-date, the installation cost for this massive undertaking has not been disclosed, despite that all these costs will be passed on to captive consumers. It is possible, however, to speculate as to the cost.

The current market price for grid scale electricity storage, based on credible analysis reported in, among other sources, Greentech Media and the New York Times is between $300 and $400 per kilowatt-hour. The installation cost for a 2.2 gigawatt-hour system would, on this basis, would cost between $660 million and $880 million. Chances are that PG&E will spend more than that, since the “balance of plant” including inverters, utility interties, and site preparation and support facilities will all be part of the capital costs. But using rough numbers, a capital cost of $500 million per gigawatt hour is not unreasonable. It might be optimistic for today, but battery costs do continue to decline, which may offset other costs that may be understated.

So based on a price of $500 million per gigawatt-hour of storage, how much money would it cost to deploy energy storage, and how much would that add to the cost of electricity?

Why Can’t We Just Use Batteries?

As noted, in 2017, if all energy consumed in the United States had taken the form of electricity, it would have been equal to 28.6 million gigawatt-hours. That comes out to 78,393 gigawatt-hours per day. But each day, it has to be assumed that the solar power is only feeding energy into the grid, at most, about half that time. Batteries are necessary to capture that intermittent power and deliver it when the sun is down or behind clouds.

It’s easier to make fairly indisputable battery cost estimates by using conservative assumptions. Therefore, assume that solar can supply reliable power 12 hours a day. That’s a stretch, but it means the calculations to follow will be a best case. If the United States is supposed to go completely solar, we would need to install grid scale electricity storage equivalent to 39,197 gigawatt-hours. In this manner, during the 12 hours of daily solar production, half of the output will be being used, and the other half will being stored in batteries. Cost? $19.6 trillion.

That’s a ridiculously huge number, but we’re not finished with this analysis. There’s the pesky problem of changing seasons.

Only So Many Sunny Hours in a Day

Even in sunny California, the difference between sunshine on the winter solstice and the summer solstice is dramatic. In Sacramento, the longest day is 14.4 hours, and the shortest day is 9.2 hours. Because there are far more cloudy days, even during a California winter, compared to a California summer, the difference is solar output in winter is less than half what it is during the summer months. Solar photovoltaic production in December typically only about one-third what it is in June.

As an aside, wind resources are also seasonal. For example, California’s state government has produced an analysis entitled “Visualization of Seasonal Variation in California Wind Generation” that makes this seasonal variation in wind resources clear. Reviewing this data reveals an obvious variation between the months of March through August, when winds are stronger, compared to September through February, when winds are considerably weaker. This seasonal wind variation, unfortunately, overlaps significantly with the seasonal solar variation. The consequences for renewable energy are huge.

Again for the sake of clarity, some broad but conservative assumptions are useful. A best case assessment of this variation would be to estimate the yield of solar and wind assets to be half as productive in the fall and winter as they are in the spring and summer. This means that to achieve a 100 percent renewable portfolio, two difficult choices present themselves. Either the wind and solar capacity has to be expanded to be sufficient even in fall and winter, when there is relatively little sun and wind, or battery capacity has to be expanded so much as to not store energy for half-a-day, each day, but for half-a-year, each year. This is a stupendous challenge.

To compensate for seasonality, supplemental energy storage would require not 12 hours of capacity, to be filled and released every 24 hours, but 180 days of stored capacity, capable of storing summer surplus energy, to be released during fall and winter. Doing that with batteries would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. It is absolutely impossible. Coping with seasonal variation therefore requires constructing enough solar and wind assets to function even in winter when there’s less sun and less wind, therefore creating ridiculous overcapacity in spring and summer.

The Cost of Going 100 Percent Solar

Even at $1 per watt installed, it would cost at least $10 trillion just to install the photovoltaic panels. Just to store solar energy for nighttime use, using batteries, would cost nearly another $20 trillion, although it is fair to assume that storage costs—unlike the costs for solar panels—will continue to fall.

Building overcapacity, probably in America’s sunny southwest, to deliver solar power through the cold winter would probably require another $10 trillion worth of panels. And to deliver power across the continent, from the sunny Southwest to the frigid Northeast, would require revolutionary upgrades to the national power grid, probably using high-voltage direct current transmission lines, a technology that has yet to be proven at scale. Expect to spend several trillion on grid upgrades.

Then, of course, there’s the cost to retrofit every residential, commercial and industrial space to use electric heating, and the cost to retrofit or replace every car, truck, tractor and other transportation assets to run on 100 percent electric power.

When you’re talking about this many trillions, you’re talking serious money! Figure at least $50 trillion for the whole deal.

Another consideration is the longevity of the equipment. Solar panels begin to degrade after 20 years or so. Inverters, required to convert direct current coming from solar panels into alternating current, rarely last 20 years. Batteries as well have useful lives that rarely exceed 20 years. If America “goes solar,” Americans need to understand that the entire infrastructure would need to be replaced every 20 years.

Not only is this spectacularly expensive, but it brings up the question of recycling and reuse, which are additional questions that solar proponents haven’t fully answered. A solar array large enough to produce nearly 10,000 gigawatts in full sun would occupy about 50,000 square miles. Imagine tearing out that much hardware every two decades. Reprocessing every 20 years a quantity of batteries capable of storing nearly 40,000 gigawatt-hours constitutes an equally unimaginable challenge.

To the extent the United States does not go 100 percent solar, wind is an option. But the costs, infrastructure challenges, space requirements, and reprocessing demands associated with wind power are even more daunting than they are with solar. Americans, for all their wealth, would have an extremely difficult time moving to a wind and solar economy. For people living in colder climates, even in developed nations, it would be an even more daunting task. For people living in still developing nations, it is an unthinkable, cruel option.

The path forward for renewable energy is for utilities to purchase power, from all operators, that is guaranteed 24 hours-a-day, 365 days a year. This is the easiest way to create a level competitive environment. Purveyors of solar power would have to factor into their bids the cost to store energy, or acquire energy from other sources, and their prices would have to include those additional costs. It is extremely misleading to suggest that the lifetime “levelized cost” is only based on how much the solar farm costs. Add the overnight storage costs. Take into account costs to maintain constant deliveries despite interseasonal variations. Account for that. And then compete.

 *   *   *