You’re a superb addition to Substack. Your work is excellent. We will link to this piece in a post about how Substack content creators mauled legacy media to death covering the Spain fiasco.
One day splinter groups are all going to come together and work to improve economies. An economy definition being the improvement of the quality of life of those living within the state or environment.
At the moment the measurement of success, at the micro and macro levels, is the distribution of FIAT currencies. Once this changes and the real definition of an economy is re implemented these problems will be solved.
The future of energy supply is not renewables. It is not Nuclear. It is not synthetics or Coal. It is a mixture of all.
The average human being believes that a better quality of life, the basis of an economy, is the ability to be amused to death.
Green insanity…… critical thinking has been eroded by the climate catastrophe narrative. NONE of their radical claims of the Inconvenient Truth have ever happened. We will only succeed if we adapt as necessary to an ever changing climate rather then believing we can alter it.
“At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption.”
Isn’t that always the case. Failure in the technology is evidence of needing more of that technology. “Show me the money and I’ll show you the incentive.”
Notable that neither you nor the author are mentioning that overall energy consumption has increased by 15% over the same period. So a real reduction of 16% in fossil fuel use compared to a no renewable scenario. Almost like you don't want anyone to know the true picture.
As I see it, the whole issue boil down to the fact that we collectively want to believe (or at least we are easily convinced by our corrupted leaders) that it is possible to fix the climate issue as easily as it has been broken without giving up the comfortable lifestyle that the whole process allowed us to enjoy.
There's a fundamental contradiction here. And at some point, something will have to give. But we can always hope that it won't happen tomorrow. Or at least nothing than cannot be fixed in a few hours. Until the next time...
When driving up a hill one depresses the accelerator to maintain speed. If the hill is steep enough at some point one runs out of accelerator travel and the car slows down. In a generating system, frequency is a product of the rotational speed of the generating equipment, as the load increases more steam / water is fed into the turbine to maintain speed, at some point the supply maxes out and frequency begins to drop. The frequency dropping is not the cause of an outage, it is a symptom of demand exceeding capacity, much as your car losing speed on a hill is a symptom of insufficient horsepower.
Prior to the outage the Iberian peninsula was experiencing an excess supply of electricity, which caused the market price of power to drop to near zero, which negatively impacted the profitability of nuclear and gas producers (there are apparently some nuances in Spanish tax law that aggravated the situation), as a result these producers curtailed production. Then the renewable production dropped off and there was insufficient baseload capacity to cover demand. Due to the high load on the baseload generators the frequency of their output began to drop. Renewable power inverters are electronic devices that convert the DC power from renewables to AC power to feed into the grid. To feed efficiently into the grid the inverter synchronizes its switching frequency to the grid, while simultaneously matching the voltage present at the inverters grid connection point. At some point the load presented to some inverter exceeded what it could provide with it's renewable power input resulting in an overload being detected and the inverter switched off line. This increased the load presented to other inverters, resulting in a cascade of tripping events and the near instantaneous loss of renewable power feeding into the grid. This overloaded the remaining base load generators, they disconnected from the grid and darkness reigned supreme. It was insufficient baseload combined with insufficient battery storage to keep the renewable power flowing while turbine sources came on line that led to the outage. Frequency had nothing to do with this, frequency is a symptom, not a root cause. The short term fix is to cap the renewable power flowing into the grid to maintain sufficient base load generation, longer term is to massively increase storage. Increasing storage has been politically uncomfortable as it undermines the lie that "renewables are the cheapest source" since terawatt level storage is very costly.
I don’t see your point. You agree climate change is a reality, so we must act. Nuclear is very expensive and not adequate to global scale. Which means there is only renewables left for addressing the bulk of decarbonization. Furthermore, they are now cheap. If we need to put some extra money to let some inertia wheels on the grid and ensure system stability let’s do it. It adds only 1-5€/MWh according to the literature so renewables still remain the best economic option (even without considering the climate argument, since gas is no longer cheap in Europe).
Renewables are not cheap, reliable, or a good return on investment. Renewables can only be entertained in a system with a meaningful form of base load power generation such a natural gas, coal, or nuclear. For this fact, we will never see a large population run on 100% wind/solar (unless society wants to have a 1700s lifestyle).
Im not a fan of the Chinese government, but we only need to look at what they are doing regarding energy. China leads in development of solar technology and supply chain, yet they have 55 operation nuclear plants, 22 under construction, and are aiming to initiate another eight per year for the foreseeable future.
Also, China gets about 80% of its energy from fossil fuels and has no intention of stopping. In 2022, it started two large coal plants per week. As I wrote in the piece: the fossil fuels Europe shuns are simply burned elsewhere.
Whilst true, it's also worth noting that despite this increase in coal-fired generating capacity, according to World in Data, the percentage of electricity generated from coal in China has fallen from around 77% in 2010 to about 60% in 2023. Much of this displacement has come from Hydropower, but wind and solar PV have also increased rapidly.
Expressing your views don’t make them a reality, and I don’t see any proof of your thesis. Why couldn’t an economy run on renewables? Intermittency can be handled with storage and biogas for instance. Some grids already rely on decent amounts of renewables (CAISO, ERCOT, even Europe to some extent). Plus China aims at decarbonizing their grid, and green tech is already 10% of their GDP… they clearly bet on clean techs.
I understand your perspective, but I do not agree it is a possibility on a grand scale.
A few points.
1. My views are guided by math. Let’s use solar as an example. The efficiency of solar is incredibly low even if you assume placement in an ideal location like a desert in the southwest United states. Even if the sun shines 365 days per year, it will only shine for 8 hours. Of those 8 hours, the solar intensity is only at a max level for a couple hours. In order to deal with the low efficiency and hours no sun is shining, the grid would have to develop backup sources of power generation such as solar from a different state which assumes that state does not have the same inefficiencies of your state or batteries (how many batteries would a small city require!!).
Ok, why not use the excess solar energy to make “green” hydrogen or biofuel? How much green hydrogen is required to run your society, without interruption during those hours when the sun is not shining? How energy intensive is production of this fuel (note: this part of the equation is never addressed by the “renewables are cheap crowd”)? Let’s look at Germany that is losing heavy industry after loss of cheap natural gas from russia (a problem of their own making by putting all their eggs in one basket). Despite having spent billions of euros on solar (solar in Germany is such a dumb idea) and wind, they decided to demolish a wind farm to ......mine coal!
2. We must realize that a successful economy/civilization demands cheap and reliable energy. A wealthy civilization with a low energy output simply does not exist thus we must ask ourselves, “In what society do we want to live?”. If the answer is a first world country with reliable infrastructure, bullet trains, data centers, gas and/or electric cars, a strong national defense, manufacturing employment opportunities for citizen, then you simply cannot have renewables as your sole energy source. For illustration, the energy return on energy invested for solar is equal to burning wood.
3. The china GDP part was answered already. However, it is important to know that making solar panels is incredibly energy intense. China generates the energy required to fabricate the poly silicon wafers with coal plants., not solar farms. Ironically, western countries are happy to export pollution to China and India where environmental protections do not exist.
3. If global warming is a problem and if carbon dioxide is the chief villain, (I don’t agree with this statement, but many do) then the only solution is to use an energy source that does not emit CO2. That dense energy source is uranium. Uranium is so energy dense that 1 lb of uranium would be sufficient to fuel your entire energy intensive life. An interesting point is that the addition of nuclear to china’s grid is a form of decarbonization.
4. Finally, if solar and wind were so efficient, and companies could make large profits (without government subsidies), then the oil and gas majors like Exxon, Chevon, and Shell, would stop investing in their oil and gas businesses (which require hundred of billions of annual capex) and would be building solar farms.
In an abstraction, renewables sound great, but the reality is very different.
Sorry for any typos, I wrote this message from my phone.
Thanks for your detailed comment, I will try my best to answer to all but know that your points are known by both sides of the debate, whether it is the intermittency of solar, EROI, the fact PV production today needs coal, uranium superiority in terms of energy density or the fact oil majors don’t invest massively in renewables.
Short answer:
1) when you run an investment model for electricity generation with todays costs for all technologies in Europe you find the model to invest massively in renewables. Despite the intermittency, even when including the cost of carbon embodied in PV production (so EROI) etc. Why? Because wind and solar complement well each other (wind blows in the winter and at night, solar is the opposite). The model invest in Batteries but also gas backup obviously but I insist, no cost efficient solution would display only fossil, except if you price carbon at 0€/t and allow massive use of coal. At 50€/t coal disappear from the optimal mix an leaves room to renewables.
For the nuke debate, nobody says renewables don’t come with their challenges in terms of raw material or land use and nuclear is a relevant option in that regard. But nuclear is today very expensive (2-10 times more expensive than in the 1970s). The energy density argument is not enough to make it economically sound compared to renewables. Even when considering the higher end of cost estimates for these externalities (NIMBY, material use etc) nuclear is still too expensive.
Finally majors don’t invest in renewables and it’s a good research question actually. A notable exception is offshore wind since it uses the same technology as offshore platforms for oil. I’ve read interesting posts about that. My view is that it’s just not the same business, different skills and know hows. Also this argument can be used against your position as even if oil majors do not invest, other firms do. In Texas for instance the market is very free and liberalized and we see massive investment in wind… because it’s good business, not ideology. Wind farms show zero variable costs and can make substantial profits when gas plants clear the market, ie almost all the time. The direct consequence is a drastic reduction in carbon emission.
Finally I would just remind you that the scientific consensus on carbon dioxyde and climate change is now clear and leaves little room to doubt.
+1 for the American Psycho reference and I very much appreciate the civil discussion. It seems lately that the ease of communication is indirectly proportional to the civility of said discussion.
Very briefly:
1. I’ll not dwell on the CO2 part but simply say that science is never settled. Experimental results can support or deny a hypothesis, but the conclusion is one experiment away from being permanently dismantled. I say this comment as an organic chemist who is skeptical of his own experimental results.
2. To quote Warren Buffet “Investment in wind farms only makes sense with tax credits.”. Many wind companies are abandoning projects (In the US) because they unable to get the large rate increases required to make/keep their projects profitable.
3. I appreciate your inclusion of models, but we all know models are only as good as their inputs. Certainly they can be used as a guide for investment by providing an IRR or NPV value, but they have their limitations. Even if we compare two projects, solar vs nuclear (in perfect locations for each) and the model yields a more favorable outcome for solar, the solar outcome still relies on backup that needs to be factored into the equation (not telling you anything your don’t know). Even if the nuke plant was 2 or 3 times more expensive for the same GW rating, the fact it has next to zero intermittency makes it a better, practical solution (how does one price reliability? What is the value of the loss of productivity in Spain?)
4. Lastly, all the renewable team needs to do to convince skeptics like me is to perform the experiment in real time. Run a small city with light/medium industry on 100% renewables using whichever renewable backup technology the model decides is best (green hydrogen, biofuel, etc...) and demonstrate that the society can not only survive, but thrive under those conditions. If that experiment can be run, I will concede that I am wrong and will be an advocate for alternative energy.
Now if you excuse me, I have a reservation at Dorcia. :))
Enjoyed yalls debate. As a former energy trader who had direct control over peakers, PV plants, Wind, and BESS, I side with Psycho here. Especially with his final point on 100% renewables. From my little research, it seems South Australia (territory/province??) can consistently get up to 60-70% renewable generation with a pop. around ~1mil~. Until I see a large population run 100% renewables for some time, I will remain a heavy skeptic.
That being said I thought Ange brought up some great points that I will look further into. Yalls discourse is what makes substack great. Thank you.
Honestly Ange listen to your own words. Expressing your view doesn’t make it a reality. Renewables are expensive, not at the point of generation but at the point of consumption. The double or tripling of capacity to do with intermittency, the massive increase in transmission costs as we move a whole system from hub and spoke distribution to a spiderweb model.
You can drink the cool aid of the government people, the financiers or the profiteers or you can listen to the engineers and understand physics.
We will get to a high percentage of renewables in the long run as humans are really ingenious but we don’t have the technology yet to do it without creating instability, duplication and unreliability based on current technology. This means massive increases in costs for poorer performance under the current religious fervour. And like the inquisition times woe behold the heretic who even questions the religious dogma. Especially with facts and physics instead of blind adherence to the Faith.
- Storage needs (and associated costs) tend to be vastly underestimated. I live in an area with poor wind potential and hydro is fully subscribed. Near by is a 2.5GW coal fired plant that is scheduled for decommissioning and the activist community is lobbying for solar. In a pure renewable scenario one need to address both the obvious night/day intermittency and seasonal effects since shorter days and cloud cover reduce solar output by nearly 50% in winter while heating loads tend to be highest. The coal plant is capable of producing 21.6TWh of power annually if run 24/7 (it isn't, but it's a starting point), that would require around 15.9 GW of installed solar (using NREL's PV Watts) to generate an equivalent amount of power and roughly 2.2TWh of storage, which is more than has deployed the the U.S. to date - for one power plant.
- Using a NREL paper for reference around 125 square miles would need to be cleared for the array (we live in a heavily wooded area) with more required for storage equipment.
- Renewable energy has a lower return on invested energy than fossil sources (it was this high return on invested energy that sparked the industrial revolution), one writer likened it to being equivalent to what the Romans achieved with slaves and oxen. Right now the vast majority of the renewable hardware is being built using fossil derived energy, it is unclear that we could produce enough energy to both manufacture more renewable hardware and power our modern industrial society in an all-renewable scenario.
- It is indeed possible to use electrolysis to split water & produce hydrogen as a storage mechanism. However, the hydrogen bond is very strong and it takes a great deal of energy to break it. Once broken the gas has to be compressed for storage, then converted back to electricity via a fuel cell - estimates are that the round trip efficiency is about 37%. This means you loose nearly 2/3 of you energy in the process and it moves the return on invested energy closer to unity for the overall system - basically treading water.
- The highest near term payoff for cleaner energy is to get a LOT better at building nuclear power plants. We currently spend around a decade in an adversarial siting process featuring complex environmental reviews and litigation that continues even after the plant is built - need to fix this. Each plant we build is unique, which involves massive upfront engineering costs (and cost overruns) and zero learning curve for the folks that build them. Operationally, it means unique plant specific operator training and custom spare parts for every plant. We could follow the South Korean model, where they build multiple copies of a common plant design on schedule and on budget. The NRC is a bureaucratic behemoth that slows the siting & commissioning process, dealing with the NRC is so burdensome that advanced nuclear power work is done outside of the US to avoid dealing with the NRC. Figure out how to reform this bureaucracy while not compromising safety.
- Nuclear waste often comes up, currently spent fuel assemblies sit in cooling pools at nuclear plants around the U.S., this is more of a political issues than a technological barrier. The U.S. built the Yucca Mountain storage facility to store high level nuclear material, politics has kept it stalled since 2018. Since spent fuel assemblies still retain over 90% of their original energy one could follow the lead of France and Russia and reprocess them into new fuel assemblies, but a Carter era law prohibits this. Or one could implement breeder reactor technology that can use current spent fuel assemblies as fuel.
Do renewables run non-stop? Does wind blow 24/7? Does the sun never set in Spain? And what about clouds? Ever seen gray skies for days at a time in central EU?
And China is successfully betting that they can sell green tech to the subsidizers in EU and US.
You’re talking about intermittency. It’s a real issue and the subject of my PhD, but it’s manageable with storage and biogas as I said. Humans are good at solving such technical issues, we have landed men on the moon, remember?
Yes, we landed a handful of people on the Moon. The last one was some 50 years ago and it's not being repeated because it was extremely expensive and likely not worth the risk. Renewables will likely be considered the same way for the next 50 years
Look at the facts, more than 95% of new generation in the US last year was renewables. PV costs declined by more than 90% in the last 20 years, same for batteries. You live in the past.
You’re absolutely right except you don’t give numbers. But some research has been done on that topic (which is called integration cost of renewables btw). The findings are that at low penetration renewables cost around 50$/MWh and the cost increase with their relative share in the mix. The trend is linear up to 80% of renewables and the cost reaches around 100$/MWh at that point. This is still cheaper than flexible nuclear which lies at 100-120€/MWh. Source: Reichenberg, 2018
« Introducing the LFSCOE-95, which assume that up to 5% of the annual demand can be supplied by a very inexpensive dispatchable source of electricity, we show that reducing the responsibility of intermittent renewables to supply only 95% of the demand will cut the system costs in half. This observation is supported by existing literature criticizing any 100% emission-free approaches by pointing out the enormous costs of supplying the last 5%. »
Nobody considers a full PV system. There are complementary between PV and wind, and of course, biogas or even natural gas will still be needed to supply the last 5-10% of demand and provide flexibility. Anyway as they say in the study you cite : The high LFSCOE for renewables like wind and solar should not be misinterpreted. As of now, no power system is supplied entirely by wind or solar. As long as their market share is relatively small, the “true” costs are closer to LCOE than to the LFSCOE.
Ange, have a good look at the record and you might find that the warming since the Little Ice Age has been beneficial for life on earth and the extra CO is greening the planet and boosting crop yields. Why would we want less warmth and less plant food in the air?
You’re a superb addition to Substack. Your work is excellent. We will link to this piece in a post about how Substack content creators mauled legacy media to death covering the Spain fiasco.
Great work!
Psycho agrees with this comment.
Thank you! Truly honored and looking forward to your post. 🙏
You have Psycho and ‘Mental as subscribers. Don’t be too honored! 😉🤣
😂
Having me around is not a fact to be celebrated. ;)
One day splinter groups are all going to come together and work to improve economies. An economy definition being the improvement of the quality of life of those living within the state or environment.
At the moment the measurement of success, at the micro and macro levels, is the distribution of FIAT currencies. Once this changes and the real definition of an economy is re implemented these problems will be solved.
The future of energy supply is not renewables. It is not Nuclear. It is not synthetics or Coal. It is a mixture of all.
The average human being believes that a better quality of life, the basis of an economy, is the ability to be amused to death.
Putting Lysenko and renewables together is 👌🏻👌🏻
Thank you this is great!
Thank you for reading!
Green insanity…… critical thinking has been eroded by the climate catastrophe narrative. NONE of their radical claims of the Inconvenient Truth have ever happened. We will only succeed if we adapt as necessary to an ever changing climate rather then believing we can alter it.
Adaptation is what humans do best. unless you worship at the Church of Carbon, then it’s heresy.
So true. El Gato Malo had a great piece yesterday about the 2nd world.
Will check it out.
Jeff Currie in 2022
“At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption.”
“Just a few hundred billion more, and we’ll succeed. Pinky promise!”
Isn’t that always the case. Failure in the technology is evidence of needing more of that technology. “Show me the money and I’ll show you the incentive.”
Notable that neither you nor the author are mentioning that overall energy consumption has increased by 15% over the same period. So a real reduction of 16% in fossil fuel use compared to a no renewable scenario. Almost like you don't want anyone to know the true picture.
Yes, I'm afraid you're right.
As I see it, the whole issue boil down to the fact that we collectively want to believe (or at least we are easily convinced by our corrupted leaders) that it is possible to fix the climate issue as easily as it has been broken without giving up the comfortable lifestyle that the whole process allowed us to enjoy.
There's a fundamental contradiction here. And at some point, something will have to give. But we can always hope that it won't happen tomorrow. Or at least nothing than cannot be fixed in a few hours. Until the next time...
Clever title and great read.
thank you! 🙏
When driving up a hill one depresses the accelerator to maintain speed. If the hill is steep enough at some point one runs out of accelerator travel and the car slows down. In a generating system, frequency is a product of the rotational speed of the generating equipment, as the load increases more steam / water is fed into the turbine to maintain speed, at some point the supply maxes out and frequency begins to drop. The frequency dropping is not the cause of an outage, it is a symptom of demand exceeding capacity, much as your car losing speed on a hill is a symptom of insufficient horsepower.
Prior to the outage the Iberian peninsula was experiencing an excess supply of electricity, which caused the market price of power to drop to near zero, which negatively impacted the profitability of nuclear and gas producers (there are apparently some nuances in Spanish tax law that aggravated the situation), as a result these producers curtailed production. Then the renewable production dropped off and there was insufficient baseload capacity to cover demand. Due to the high load on the baseload generators the frequency of their output began to drop. Renewable power inverters are electronic devices that convert the DC power from renewables to AC power to feed into the grid. To feed efficiently into the grid the inverter synchronizes its switching frequency to the grid, while simultaneously matching the voltage present at the inverters grid connection point. At some point the load presented to some inverter exceeded what it could provide with it's renewable power input resulting in an overload being detected and the inverter switched off line. This increased the load presented to other inverters, resulting in a cascade of tripping events and the near instantaneous loss of renewable power feeding into the grid. This overloaded the remaining base load generators, they disconnected from the grid and darkness reigned supreme. It was insufficient baseload combined with insufficient battery storage to keep the renewable power flowing while turbine sources came on line that led to the outage. Frequency had nothing to do with this, frequency is a symptom, not a root cause. The short term fix is to cap the renewable power flowing into the grid to maintain sufficient base load generation, longer term is to massively increase storage. Increasing storage has been politically uncomfortable as it undermines the lie that "renewables are the cheapest source" since terawatt level storage is very costly.
I don’t see your point. You agree climate change is a reality, so we must act. Nuclear is very expensive and not adequate to global scale. Which means there is only renewables left for addressing the bulk of decarbonization. Furthermore, they are now cheap. If we need to put some extra money to let some inertia wheels on the grid and ensure system stability let’s do it. It adds only 1-5€/MWh according to the literature so renewables still remain the best economic option (even without considering the climate argument, since gas is no longer cheap in Europe).
Renewables are not cheap, reliable, or a good return on investment. Renewables can only be entertained in a system with a meaningful form of base load power generation such a natural gas, coal, or nuclear. For this fact, we will never see a large population run on 100% wind/solar (unless society wants to have a 1700s lifestyle).
Im not a fan of the Chinese government, but we only need to look at what they are doing regarding energy. China leads in development of solar technology and supply chain, yet they have 55 operation nuclear plants, 22 under construction, and are aiming to initiate another eight per year for the foreseeable future.
Also, China gets about 80% of its energy from fossil fuels and has no intention of stopping. In 2022, it started two large coal plants per week. As I wrote in the piece: the fossil fuels Europe shuns are simply burned elsewhere.
Whilst true, it's also worth noting that despite this increase in coal-fired generating capacity, according to World in Data, the percentage of electricity generated from coal in China has fallen from around 77% in 2010 to about 60% in 2023. Much of this displacement has come from Hydropower, but wind and solar PV have also increased rapidly.
Expressing your views don’t make them a reality, and I don’t see any proof of your thesis. Why couldn’t an economy run on renewables? Intermittency can be handled with storage and biogas for instance. Some grids already rely on decent amounts of renewables (CAISO, ERCOT, even Europe to some extent). Plus China aims at decarbonizing their grid, and green tech is already 10% of their GDP… they clearly bet on clean techs.
Hi Ange,
I understand your perspective, but I do not agree it is a possibility on a grand scale.
A few points.
1. My views are guided by math. Let’s use solar as an example. The efficiency of solar is incredibly low even if you assume placement in an ideal location like a desert in the southwest United states. Even if the sun shines 365 days per year, it will only shine for 8 hours. Of those 8 hours, the solar intensity is only at a max level for a couple hours. In order to deal with the low efficiency and hours no sun is shining, the grid would have to develop backup sources of power generation such as solar from a different state which assumes that state does not have the same inefficiencies of your state or batteries (how many batteries would a small city require!!).
Ok, why not use the excess solar energy to make “green” hydrogen or biofuel? How much green hydrogen is required to run your society, without interruption during those hours when the sun is not shining? How energy intensive is production of this fuel (note: this part of the equation is never addressed by the “renewables are cheap crowd”)? Let’s look at Germany that is losing heavy industry after loss of cheap natural gas from russia (a problem of their own making by putting all their eggs in one basket). Despite having spent billions of euros on solar (solar in Germany is such a dumb idea) and wind, they decided to demolish a wind farm to ......mine coal!
(https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Germany-Is-Dismantling-A-Wind-Farm-To-Make-Way-For-A-Coal-Mine.html).
2. We must realize that a successful economy/civilization demands cheap and reliable energy. A wealthy civilization with a low energy output simply does not exist thus we must ask ourselves, “In what society do we want to live?”. If the answer is a first world country with reliable infrastructure, bullet trains, data centers, gas and/or electric cars, a strong national defense, manufacturing employment opportunities for citizen, then you simply cannot have renewables as your sole energy source. For illustration, the energy return on energy invested for solar is equal to burning wood.
3. The china GDP part was answered already. However, it is important to know that making solar panels is incredibly energy intense. China generates the energy required to fabricate the poly silicon wafers with coal plants., not solar farms. Ironically, western countries are happy to export pollution to China and India where environmental protections do not exist.
3. If global warming is a problem and if carbon dioxide is the chief villain, (I don’t agree with this statement, but many do) then the only solution is to use an energy source that does not emit CO2. That dense energy source is uranium. Uranium is so energy dense that 1 lb of uranium would be sufficient to fuel your entire energy intensive life. An interesting point is that the addition of nuclear to china’s grid is a form of decarbonization.
4. Finally, if solar and wind were so efficient, and companies could make large profits (without government subsidies), then the oil and gas majors like Exxon, Chevon, and Shell, would stop investing in their oil and gas businesses (which require hundred of billions of annual capex) and would be building solar farms.
In an abstraction, renewables sound great, but the reality is very different.
Sorry for any typos, I wrote this message from my phone.
Enjoy your Sunday!
🫳🎤
Hi Patrick Bateman,
Thanks for your detailed comment, I will try my best to answer to all but know that your points are known by both sides of the debate, whether it is the intermittency of solar, EROI, the fact PV production today needs coal, uranium superiority in terms of energy density or the fact oil majors don’t invest massively in renewables.
Short answer:
1) when you run an investment model for electricity generation with todays costs for all technologies in Europe you find the model to invest massively in renewables. Despite the intermittency, even when including the cost of carbon embodied in PV production (so EROI) etc. Why? Because wind and solar complement well each other (wind blows in the winter and at night, solar is the opposite). The model invest in Batteries but also gas backup obviously but I insist, no cost efficient solution would display only fossil, except if you price carbon at 0€/t and allow massive use of coal. At 50€/t coal disappear from the optimal mix an leaves room to renewables.
For the nuke debate, nobody says renewables don’t come with their challenges in terms of raw material or land use and nuclear is a relevant option in that regard. But nuclear is today very expensive (2-10 times more expensive than in the 1970s). The energy density argument is not enough to make it economically sound compared to renewables. Even when considering the higher end of cost estimates for these externalities (NIMBY, material use etc) nuclear is still too expensive.
Finally majors don’t invest in renewables and it’s a good research question actually. A notable exception is offshore wind since it uses the same technology as offshore platforms for oil. I’ve read interesting posts about that. My view is that it’s just not the same business, different skills and know hows. Also this argument can be used against your position as even if oil majors do not invest, other firms do. In Texas for instance the market is very free and liberalized and we see massive investment in wind… because it’s good business, not ideology. Wind farms show zero variable costs and can make substantial profits when gas plants clear the market, ie almost all the time. The direct consequence is a drastic reduction in carbon emission.
Finally I would just remind you that the scientific consensus on carbon dioxyde and climate change is now clear and leaves little room to doubt.
A good Sunday to you too
Dear Ange,
+1 for the American Psycho reference and I very much appreciate the civil discussion. It seems lately that the ease of communication is indirectly proportional to the civility of said discussion.
Very briefly:
1. I’ll not dwell on the CO2 part but simply say that science is never settled. Experimental results can support or deny a hypothesis, but the conclusion is one experiment away from being permanently dismantled. I say this comment as an organic chemist who is skeptical of his own experimental results.
2. To quote Warren Buffet “Investment in wind farms only makes sense with tax credits.”. Many wind companies are abandoning projects (In the US) because they unable to get the large rate increases required to make/keep their projects profitable.
3. I appreciate your inclusion of models, but we all know models are only as good as their inputs. Certainly they can be used as a guide for investment by providing an IRR or NPV value, but they have their limitations. Even if we compare two projects, solar vs nuclear (in perfect locations for each) and the model yields a more favorable outcome for solar, the solar outcome still relies on backup that needs to be factored into the equation (not telling you anything your don’t know). Even if the nuke plant was 2 or 3 times more expensive for the same GW rating, the fact it has next to zero intermittency makes it a better, practical solution (how does one price reliability? What is the value of the loss of productivity in Spain?)
4. Lastly, all the renewable team needs to do to convince skeptics like me is to perform the experiment in real time. Run a small city with light/medium industry on 100% renewables using whichever renewable backup technology the model decides is best (green hydrogen, biofuel, etc...) and demonstrate that the society can not only survive, but thrive under those conditions. If that experiment can be run, I will concede that I am wrong and will be an advocate for alternative energy.
Now if you excuse me, I have a reservation at Dorcia. :))
Enjoyed yalls debate. As a former energy trader who had direct control over peakers, PV plants, Wind, and BESS, I side with Psycho here. Especially with his final point on 100% renewables. From my little research, it seems South Australia (territory/province??) can consistently get up to 60-70% renewable generation with a pop. around ~1mil~. Until I see a large population run 100% renewables for some time, I will remain a heavy skeptic.
That being said I thought Ange brought up some great points that I will look further into. Yalls discourse is what makes substack great. Thank you.
Of course, it was a pleasure, have a good dinner :)
Honestly Ange listen to your own words. Expressing your view doesn’t make it a reality. Renewables are expensive, not at the point of generation but at the point of consumption. The double or tripling of capacity to do with intermittency, the massive increase in transmission costs as we move a whole system from hub and spoke distribution to a spiderweb model.
You can drink the cool aid of the government people, the financiers or the profiteers or you can listen to the engineers and understand physics.
We will get to a high percentage of renewables in the long run as humans are really ingenious but we don’t have the technology yet to do it without creating instability, duplication and unreliability based on current technology. This means massive increases in costs for poorer performance under the current religious fervour. And like the inquisition times woe behold the heretic who even questions the religious dogma. Especially with facts and physics instead of blind adherence to the Faith.
A couple of point to consider
- Storage needs (and associated costs) tend to be vastly underestimated. I live in an area with poor wind potential and hydro is fully subscribed. Near by is a 2.5GW coal fired plant that is scheduled for decommissioning and the activist community is lobbying for solar. In a pure renewable scenario one need to address both the obvious night/day intermittency and seasonal effects since shorter days and cloud cover reduce solar output by nearly 50% in winter while heating loads tend to be highest. The coal plant is capable of producing 21.6TWh of power annually if run 24/7 (it isn't, but it's a starting point), that would require around 15.9 GW of installed solar (using NREL's PV Watts) to generate an equivalent amount of power and roughly 2.2TWh of storage, which is more than has deployed the the U.S. to date - for one power plant.
- Using a NREL paper for reference around 125 square miles would need to be cleared for the array (we live in a heavily wooded area) with more required for storage equipment.
- Renewable energy has a lower return on invested energy than fossil sources (it was this high return on invested energy that sparked the industrial revolution), one writer likened it to being equivalent to what the Romans achieved with slaves and oxen. Right now the vast majority of the renewable hardware is being built using fossil derived energy, it is unclear that we could produce enough energy to both manufacture more renewable hardware and power our modern industrial society in an all-renewable scenario.
- It is indeed possible to use electrolysis to split water & produce hydrogen as a storage mechanism. However, the hydrogen bond is very strong and it takes a great deal of energy to break it. Once broken the gas has to be compressed for storage, then converted back to electricity via a fuel cell - estimates are that the round trip efficiency is about 37%. This means you loose nearly 2/3 of you energy in the process and it moves the return on invested energy closer to unity for the overall system - basically treading water.
- The highest near term payoff for cleaner energy is to get a LOT better at building nuclear power plants. We currently spend around a decade in an adversarial siting process featuring complex environmental reviews and litigation that continues even after the plant is built - need to fix this. Each plant we build is unique, which involves massive upfront engineering costs (and cost overruns) and zero learning curve for the folks that build them. Operationally, it means unique plant specific operator training and custom spare parts for every plant. We could follow the South Korean model, where they build multiple copies of a common plant design on schedule and on budget. The NRC is a bureaucratic behemoth that slows the siting & commissioning process, dealing with the NRC is so burdensome that advanced nuclear power work is done outside of the US to avoid dealing with the NRC. Figure out how to reform this bureaucracy while not compromising safety.
- Nuclear waste often comes up, currently spent fuel assemblies sit in cooling pools at nuclear plants around the U.S., this is more of a political issues than a technological barrier. The U.S. built the Yucca Mountain storage facility to store high level nuclear material, politics has kept it stalled since 2018. Since spent fuel assemblies still retain over 90% of their original energy one could follow the lead of France and Russia and reprocess them into new fuel assemblies, but a Carter era law prohibits this. Or one could implement breeder reactor technology that can use current spent fuel assemblies as fuel.
Do renewables run non-stop? Does wind blow 24/7? Does the sun never set in Spain? And what about clouds? Ever seen gray skies for days at a time in central EU?
And China is successfully betting that they can sell green tech to the subsidizers in EU and US.
You’re talking about intermittency. It’s a real issue and the subject of my PhD, but it’s manageable with storage and biogas as I said. Humans are good at solving such technical issues, we have landed men on the moon, remember?
Yes, we landed a handful of people on the Moon. The last one was some 50 years ago and it's not being repeated because it was extremely expensive and likely not worth the risk. Renewables will likely be considered the same way for the next 50 years
Look at the facts, more than 95% of new generation in the US last year was renewables. PV costs declined by more than 90% in the last 20 years, same for batteries. You live in the past.
Unreliable Renewables are very cheap as marginal complements to a system that provides ubiquitous, reliable, affordable electricity.
Renewables are astronomically expensive as a substitute that must provide ubiquitous, reliable electricity.
You’re absolutely right except you don’t give numbers. But some research has been done on that topic (which is called integration cost of renewables btw). The findings are that at low penetration renewables cost around 50$/MWh and the cost increase with their relative share in the mix. The trend is linear up to 80% of renewables and the cost reaches around 100$/MWh at that point. This is still cheaper than flexible nuclear which lies at 100-120€/MWh. Source: Reichenberg, 2018
“although the LFSCOE for wind and solar drop significantly, even a storage cost reduction of 90% is insufficient to make wind or solar PV competitive”
—Idel, 2022
« Introducing the LFSCOE-95, which assume that up to 5% of the annual demand can be supplied by a very inexpensive dispatchable source of electricity, we show that reducing the responsibility of intermittent renewables to supply only 95% of the demand will cut the system costs in half. This observation is supported by existing literature criticizing any 100% emission-free approaches by pointing out the enormous costs of supplying the last 5%. »
Nobody considers a full PV system. There are complementary between PV and wind, and of course, biogas or even natural gas will still be needed to supply the last 5-10% of demand and provide flexibility. Anyway as they say in the study you cite : The high LFSCOE for renewables like wind and solar should not be misinterpreted. As of now, no power system is supplied entirely by wind or solar. As long as their market share is relatively small, the “true” costs are closer to LCOE than to the LFSCOE.
“As long as their market share is small”…
Put a number on that market share.
Ange, have a good look at the record and you might find that the warming since the Little Ice Age has been beneficial for life on earth and the extra CO is greening the planet and boosting crop yields. Why would we want less warmth and less plant food in the air?