A Christmas Post: The Miracle of Renewables

by Ugo Bardi

This is a post that I wrote for the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." For this reason, it is simplified and short, yet it says what's needed to understand the revolution we are going through that will change the world in the coming years. If you are interested in the source of the data on which I am basing my considerations, you can find them on Lazard.com. So, Merry Christmas, and never despair. Sometimes, miracles happen! 

Miracles are not so frequent and, if one has serious health problems, it is not probable that a swim in the Lourdes pool will solve them. However, it is also true that sometimes things change quickly, opening up new possibilities. That's what's happening with renewable energy. Talking about a "miracle" is a bit much, I know, but recent technological developments have made available to us a tool that until a few years ago we didn't even dream of having. And this could solve problems that once seemed unsolvable.

For years, I've been lecturing about climate change and other looming worries, such as oil depletion. Usually, the people who came to listen to me were prepared for a message that was not exactly reassuring, but the question was what to do about it. At the end of the conference, a debate normally ensued in which the same things were said: ride a bicycle, turn down the thermostat in the house, install double glazing panes on the windows, use low energy light bulbs, things like that.

It was a little soothing ritual but, in reality, everyone knew that these weren't real solutions. Not that they're useless, but they're just a light layer of green on a system that continues to depend on fossil fuels to function. We have been talking about double glazing and bicycles for at least twenty years, but CO2 emissions continue to increase as before. Actually, faster than before. If we don't go to the heart of the problem, which is to eliminate fossil fuels, we will get nowhere. But how to do it? Until a few years ago, there seemed to be no way except to go back to tilling the fields by hand, as our ancestors did during the Middle Ages.

But today things have changed radically. You probably didn't notice it, caught up in the debate on politics. But it doesn't matter whether the right or the left wins. Change, the real one, is coming with renewable technologies. Wind and photovoltaic plants have been optimized and scaling factors have generated massive savings in production costs. Today, a kilowatt-hour produced by a photovoltaic panel costs perhaps a factor of 5-10 less than a kilowatt-hour from natural gas (and maybe a factor of 5 less than a nuclear kilowatt-hour) (source). We used to call renewables "alternative energy," but today all others are "alternative."

Furthermore, producing energy with modern renewable technologies does not pollute, does not require non-recyclable materials, does not generate greenhouse gases, does not generate local pollution, and nobody can bomb the sun to leave us without energy. Now, don't make me say that renewables have automatically solved all the problems we have. It is true that today they are cheap, but it is also true that they are not free. Then, investments are needed to adapt energy infrastructure throughout the country, to create energy storage systems, and much more. These are not things that can be done in a month, or even in a few years. There is talk of a decade, at least, to arrive at an energy system based mainly on renewables.

But it is also true that every journey begins with the first step. And now we see ahead of us a road ahead. A road that leads us to a cleaner, more prosperous, and hopefully less violent world. I haven't stopped going around giving conferences but, now, I can propose real solutions. And it's not just me who noticed the change. In the debate, today you can feel the enthusiasm of being able to do something concrete. Many people ask if they can install solar panels at home. Others say they've already done it. Some mad (and rightfully so) at the bureaucracy that prevents them from installing panels on their roof or in their garden. You see the changed trend also on social media.

There is always someone who speaks out against renewables reasoning like the medieval flagellants who went around shouting "remember that you must die". But there are also those who respond in kind, like, "good riddance, live happily in your cave together with the other cavemen." If you have a south-facing balcony (and if your municipality doesn't sabotage your idea), you can already install photovoltaic panels hanging from the railing that will help you reduce your electricity bill. No paperwork needed! (another small miracle). One step at a time, we will succeed!

A debate on renewable energy with Max Kummerow, Christian Breyer, and Ugo Bardi

We had an interesting debate on renewable energy in the forum 100%renewables, so I thought I could reproduce it here. Those who intervened were Max Kummerow, Christian Breyer, and Ugo Bardi. (their picture, above, are in the same order as the names are written. If you are interested in joining the forum, write to ugo.bardi(thing-a-ling)unifi.it 

 
On 04/09/2022 20:00, Max Kummerow wrote:


I am not clear why nuclear can't be part of the mix for base load, making the transition require less investment? Maybe that question answers itself--it might cost more to build nuclear plants than to oversize RE and build a more sophisticated grid and demand management approach. Anyway, Bill Gates is onto the cheaper, safer nuclear idea. Wish him luck.

A second quibble is that there are many processes, notably the manufacture of NH3 fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch process using CH4, cement manufacture, and cattle raising that generate greenhouse gasses, Also hundreds of other industrial processes, ag practices (soil abuse), forest clearing, etc. that cause emissions. Most of these can be addressed by improved technologies, I believe, but they are important. Half the world's food supply (grain yields, most used to feed livestock) goes away without N fertilizers. P and K are also essential plant nutrients with supply problems looming. So 100% RE is complicated.

But elephant in the room is growth. At present, world population is growing at 1%, and per capita incomes (equal to economic output/population) averages near 2% despite the economic cycle and pandemic variations. That adds up to approximately 3% growth in the human economy, doubling time 24 years. Say efficiency gains in use of energy and materials shave 1% off that, demand still doubles in 36 years. About 3 times per century. And then, of course, you have to double it all again in the first third of the next century. At some point about 1973, I think, this stopped working. Climate change can be looked at as a consequence of a supply constraint due to the limited size of the planet's atmosphere. Exponential growth goes from "abundant" to "all gone" in the last few doublings: Two from 25% to 100%. So hitting the wall is sudden and unexpected.

So why isn't everybody talking about reversing growth as the fundamental long-run solution for a prosperous, habitable, beautiful planet with abundance rather than scarcity? Reversing growth makes RE so much easier and a permanent solution.

I think the answer is that ending growth requires a shift in mindset, culture, practice, ideology, religion, worldview even more fundamental than the shift from the geocentric cosmology to the heliocentric solar system. Which took at least 150 years. Copernicus 1543 (sold by his editor as "another model, just a hypothesis"), Brahe data/Kepler theory, a better model, 1600, Giordano Bruno, 1600 "our sun and planets just one of many," Bruno tortured and burned as a heretic), Galileo (look through the telescope, moons of Jupiter, etc., threatened with torture and shut up), Newton, 1687 (Principia, calculus, law of gravity, laws of motion). And, by the way, 1992, Catholic Church admits it was wrong about Galileo, the earth does revolve around the sun. My point is that a major change in perspective takes a long time and has enormous consequences. We lost the divine right of kings as well as the Church as the monopolist divine authority. Science doubled life expectancy and increased incomes ten-fold, while population increased 16 times, so far (500 million in 1700, 8 billion in 2022, doubled in just 48 years from 4 billion in 1974.

The end of the growth forever meme began, maybe in Greek times (Ugo will know), but kicked off in modern times with Franklin who in 1751 wrote that doubling of population every 25 years in the colonies couldn't continue forever. Then Malthus proposed exponential growth encountering limits, 1798. J.S. Mill advocated on quality of life grounds for "the stationary state" in 1848. In the rush to invent technologies, mine coal, and steal whole continents from native peoples, Mill was Ignored, despite Jevons worries about British coal running out (it did, Maggie giving it the coup de grace)). Boosterism accelerated with 3 trillion a year (an old number, it's more now) paying for messages that mostly say "buy something, consume more, get richer." Economics and politics obsessed with economic development and growth. Then the ecologists with their depressing density dependent mortality, niche's, carrying capacity, limits to growth. The biophysical economists. But again, pro-growth didn't burn the MIT modellers at the stake after the Limits to Growth projected collapse in the 21st century, but they certainly did get dismissed and ridiculed and rebutted. I'm leaving out various scientists' warnings to humanity and other "growth has to stop" messages from scientists.

But the decroissance position is right. .There is no substitute for water. The planet is no bigger with 8 billion people than it was with 500 million 300 years ago. Growth has to stop. Relevant to the 100% renewables debate, so far, emissions have kept rising, more than doubled since 1990. So far RE has accommodated part of the rising demand. If demand were falling, the % of RE would be higher, dirtiest coal fired plants retired and a feasible target for 100% RE in sight. With growth continuing, 3x in a century, then 6x, 12x, 24x in the next century, I think we really do run out of lithium and cobalt. Or something else. The key insight of the 1972 LTG study was that a system dynamics modeling approach that linked various issues showed that if one thing doesn't get you, another will. Did anybody tell us about the ongoing extinction event? I'm a hobby farmer in Illinois on some of the best dirt in the world. I can tell you we are using it up. Unless we can lighten pressure on the earth, humanity is headed for collapse.

It took a couple of centuries, the Reformation, a few civil wars and several revolutions to move the earth out of the center of the universe. The Catholic Church, by the way, is playing a similar science denial role in the present transition to the no-growth version of humanity on a small home planet. The Church's irrational opposition to contraceptives and abortion leaves the world still growing at 80 million/year and poverty, violence and shorter lives the path to ending population growth. It is nice that they don't burn people like Aldo Leopold, Charlie Hall, or Ugo Bardi at the stake anymore.

Attached is a draft chapter from a book I'm working on that argues for completing the half-completed global fertility transition. About half of the world's countries (and population) have fertility rates less than replacement. Most of those are still growing due to 50 years of "population momentum" before young populations age after fertility falls. The other half still have more than 2.1 kids. Getting birthrates down in failed states where the medical system is dominated by the Catholic Church will be a challenge. So Africa's solution may be migration and higher mortality rather than birth control. Europeans would be wise to support global family planning initiatives. Africa is projected to double population from 1.3 to 2.6 billion by mid-century. I don't think Europe is prepared to accept the overflow.

The numbers in my Kaya projection table may be wrong or need updating. Help with that would be appreciated. Future growth rates are, of course, inherently uncertain in principle (see Popper on historicism). Opinions will differ and then reality will do something else. But I think the conclusion that ending growth will be necessary for the transition to RE to occur in time is becoming more likely as the world dallies.

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Comment by Christian Breyer

Dear Max,

renewables have NOT to be oversized. We regularly find a curtailment of about 3-5% of a well-balanced sector coupled with 100% renewable energy systems. That’s no oversizing, the self-consumption of thermal power plants is higher …

New nuclear power is simple extremely expensive, it costs 2-3 times what 100% renewables cost (including storage, grids, and curtailment). Why huge resources shall be wasted? Why not use such ‘extra’ resources for better education and health services?

Why 100% renewables should be complicated with respect to fertilizers? That can be done with renewable electricity, water, and air. That’s nowadays the least-cost solution and also the reason why green e-ammonia projects mushroom right now. More details can be found here (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920315750). Bioenergy can be used for 100% renewables, but optionally – it is not necessarily needed.

Let’s not quarrel on growth, since we agree that we disagree.

The Kaya identity is one of the most important equations of all. This is the fundament of my research. What we learn there: the poor in the world have to become rich as soon as possible since rich societies have typically 1.5-1.8 kids per woman, that leads automatically first to population stabilization, then population decline. Integral international policy has to be to get the poor as fast as possible rich, and of course that on sustainable energy basis, and as soon as possible on a full circular economy.

The beauty of the Kaya identity is that we ‘only’ have to use CO2-free energy, then the (energy-industry related) CO2 emissions are zero. That’s the by far simplest way to get climate stabilization, all other parts of the equation are by orders more complicated to bring in the right direction.

We get by a factor 500-1000 more energy from the sun as a civilization ever needs, year by year. Based on that the energy-industry energy needs and emissions can be fixed, and finally we can switch to net negative emissions to get the mess tidied up again. That’s also not that energetically expensive, as the latest research reveals.

Some more details here:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

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Comment by Ugo Bardi


Max, your reflections are similar to many things which have been said and promoted during the past 50 years or so. Already in 1972, "The Limits to Growth" had identified growth as the source of all problems and proposed to reduce it.

It didn't work -- not just that: it may have backfired when it generated a vicious backlash from many people who felt threatened. Imagine having to do with an addict and threatening him to cut his supply of cocaine. His reaction may well be to create a stock of it as large as possible.

We are slowly learning how to manage complex systems, but it is something that will take a long time to complete, and perhaps it will never be. The main point is, I believe, that we have limited power to manage such enormous systems as the ecosphere and the human economic power. The only hope we have is to identify trends and encourage them or discourage them. There is just no way to force the system into what we want it to be. It is what Jay Forrester had named "pulling the levers in the wrong direction." The more you push, the more the system drags its enormous (planetary scale) feet. Try it with your dog, and you'll see how it works, even though the dog has much smaller feet.

So, I think there are two major trends that we can encourage -- and even if we don't, they will encourage themselves well enough.

One is the demographic transition. It is a small miracle that it exists: it was never planned and a lot of people opposed it as much as they could. And they still do. But to no avail. Birthrates are dropping like stones: right now we are at 2.4 children per woman, the trend is very clear, even in African countries, although they are arriving later than in the other continents. The population is going to stabilize and then, hopefully, will slowly decline. Every time I think of this, I am amazed. Think of what the world would be if every woman, everywhere, wanted to have 10 children as their grandmother did! I don't know if there is an inner wisdom in the human species that's being tapped right now, or if it is a gift that Mother Gaia gave to us, who knows? But it is like that. We don't need to do anything about that, just wait for the trend to unfold.

The other trend is renewable energy. Another miracle. Think if it didn't exist, if it was still true that renewables would cost 50 times more than fossil fuels, as was the case 50 years ago (more or less). What would we do now? Would we have to go for a plutonium-based economy as it was fashionable at that time? Think of what's happening near the nuclear plant in that unnameable place in Ukraine. Then multiply that by a factor of 1000, and add that the plants would be fueled with plutonium. Unimaginable, or perhaps even too imaginable. Instead, we have an energy source that not only is cheap and efficient, but -- and this is the true miracle -- it is self-limiting! You can't go in overshoot with renewable energy, You have limits to the area you can cover with panels. So, you can have a large amount of energy, and you can also afford to leave in peace a very large fraction of the ecosystem to stabilize itself and provide us with those (horrible name) "ecosystem services" that nobody cares about, but will when they are not available anymore.

So, what do we have to do, in practice? Regarding population, there is little that we can do, but I think we have to explain that, even though there is such a thing as "overpopulation," there is no such thing as "population overgrowth." We have already seen in a not-so-remote past how easy it is to get into "extermination mode" when people were convinced (maybe even in good faith) that there existed such a problem as the lack of "vital space" (call it "lebensraum" or "posto al sole" as you like). If the meme of lebensraum starts diffusing again, then it is not impossible that someone will concoct again some kind of "final solution" and try to put it into practice. Hopefully, that won't happen, but it might.

Then, mostly, we can and we ought to push for renewable energy. We can do that, and I see that people understand what I am telling them when I speak about renewable energy (not all of them, but the smart ones. And they are not a minority). And after that I have explained to them the idea, they ask me what they can do to install PV panels on their roof, or invest in renewable energy. Compare this with what happens with climate change. People may (sometimes) understand what you are telling them. Then they will go home with their SUV and turn the TV on. And they won't do anything against climate change, because there is really nothing that they can do, except cosmetic actions of no importance on the overall effect. But every PV panel installed, is a small, but effective, step to limit global warming. And the natural stabilization of the growth of PV panels will also limit and eventually stop, economic growth, at least intended as the growth of material consumption.

Is all that enough? No, but in this way, it is realistically possible to have an impact. Once people have renewable energy, that will generate a market for a more efficient distribution system, for storage facilities, and all that. Then, the market for fossil fuels will gradually vanish We can use electric power to make fertilizers, in a stabilized economy, that will also reach a stable level, reducing the damage created by eutrophication. And stabilization will also make water available not such a pressing problem as it is now. No more wars? Probably not: humans are warlike creatures. But for sure, most recent wars have been for fossil energy.

Overall, I think that during the past two decades or so we have seen the opening of possibilities undreamed before. We have a chance. A fighting chance. We have to fight for it. And we can even win the battle!

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"Space Fusion Power:" Energy Too Cheap to Meter

 

The energy genie in Walt Disney's movie "Our Friend the Atom"

Do you remember that old prediction saying that nuclear technology would bring us energy "too cheap to meter?" It was said about nuclear fusion in a 1954 speech by the then-Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss. Over the years, it was widely mocked and taken as an example of technological over-optimism. It was the opposite of the predictions of the 1972 report "The Limits to Growth," ridiculed for being too pessimistic.  

Well, it seems that more than one prediction that went out of fashion is being revised and reconsidered. For one thing, the limits to growth are being reached right now (and peak oil, too!), but at the same time, the idea of "energy too cheap to meter" is becoming true -- with just one small change: the nuclear plant that will produce it is not located on Earth, but safely kept at some 150 million km from here. 

We call this energy "renewable" when we collect it using photovoltaic technologies (or, indirectly, using wind plants). Strictly speaking, it is not renewable: it will be available at most for a few billion years in the future. Nevertheless, that should be a time span long enough for most of us. For the time being, we can call it "Space Fusion Power." It is power from nuclear fusion, it comes from space, so, why not? 

Space Fusion Power is not yet too cheap to meter, but surely very cheap, and heading in that direction. 

Look at this table:

Image from "World Nuclear Report" -- the data are updated to 2020. Today, with the cost of natural gas increased of a factor of about 10, there is no comparison anymore. Renewables beat everything else in terms of cost. Yet, plenty of people still haven't realized how the rules of the game are changed and still reason on the basis of the situation of 10 years ago. A few, though, are starting to open their eyes to the new reality. History is on the side of renewables and they will forever bury fossil fuels (and nuclear, too). 

 

How about storage? That's becoming very cheap, too!  (image source).

But we need too much space for the solar light collectors, don't we? Oh, yeah? Take a look at this image from a recent article by Jacobson et al. 

It refers to an energy production comparable to the current one. Can it be optimistic? Maybe, but not too much. 

Let me pause for a moment to let commenters scream, "renewables will never work because of this and that."  With "this and that" anything from rare earths, copper, intermittency, not liquid fuels, planes, whatever you have.  I know. Nothing comes for free. But think about that for just a moment: if renewable power comes for a tenth of the cost of fossil-generated power, it means that renewables require less effort, fewer resources, and fewer complications than fossil fuels. And storage is not a problem when energy is very cheap, as it is becoming. 

So, we have to get used to the idea that renewables are cheap. Very cheap. So cheap that they may soon become "too cheap to meter." The idea is slowly diffusing in the collective Western consciousness, despite the social Alzheimer's syndrome that seems to be affecting everyone, everywhere. But, once it penetrates the cerebral cortex, some people are even able to reason about it! If renewables have become 10 times cheaper than any other kind of power generation technology, the consequence is:..... Ah....  

All our problems are solved, then? Well, no.... In a complex system (and we are living in one), there are no such things as problems and solutions. There are only potentials and feedbacks. More simply: in a complex system, there is always change. You may like the change or not, but that's how things are: the system couldn't care less about what we humans think are "problems." It will change when and if it decides to do so. 

And things are going to change. Things are going to change a lot. Things are going to change much more than you can imagine. 

How are they going to change? What kind of world will be one where we have abundant and nearly free energy from space? Good question. We'll have to see....

To know more on this subject, see these papers

https://rethinkdisruption.com/next-economy-growth-degrowth/

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

A new Revolution in China!

 

Unnoticed, unreported, sometimes despised, the renewable revolution is coming. And, soon, it will be unstoppable. China is leading the way. 

From Taiyang news

"While the capacity it would bring online is not clear, one can safely assume it would be somewhere in the higher double digit or even 3 digit GW level. It would be a great help for the country as it makes efforts to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060"

We must do more to promote renewable energy. Otherwise, we risk losing the battle

 

Above, you can see the answer to a question about renewable energy given by the "Leonardo" AI system, one of the best available to the public. Leonardo works by parsing a huge database downloaded from the Web, searching for an answer on the basis of the popularity and the reputation of the sites it examines. So, you can see it as a special kind of search engine that will focus on a specific question and give you an answer weighed for relevance and diffusion. You can also see it as an instant "opinion poll" that tells you what the opinion leaders are thinking. 

This answer about renewables is deeply worrisome. It means that the opinion leaders believe the legend (*) that renewable energy is an appendage of fossil fuels and that it cannot stand by itself without the support of fossil energy. It confirms what you can note if you examine what is being said in the social media: a large number of "environmentalists" seem to have engaged in a personal crusade to denigrate renewables. 

In Sweden, where elections will be held in September, one of the main issues right now is the centre/right promise to build 10 new reactors and to finance the investment partly by obliging wind and solar power systems to pay an extra fee. Nobody among the proposers seems to be worried about how long it will take to build these reactors, and where the uranium needed to power them will come from. This is not just worrisome. It is a tragedy in the making. 

The problem, here, is that Leonardo (just like the general public) has no access to the data published in scientific journals, usually kept hidden behind paywalls. Which means, in practice, that Leonardo does not parse the high quality information of refereed scientific journals. The result is that Leonardo makes the same mistakes many people do, swayed by the by special interest lobbies, such as the fossil fuel industry. 

Once more, humans show their capability of shooting themselves in their feet. Governments pay huge amounts of money to scientists to develop and evaluate renewable energy technologies. Scientists give to publishers their results for free, then the publishers make these results available to the public at exorbitant fees, even thought the public has already paid for these results with their taxes. 

We have to rethink of what we are doing as scientists, researchers, and developers. It is not possible to waste so much effort because of these absurd rules, especially in a moment when renewable energy is desperately necessary in a world where the combined action of climate change and resource depletion is destroying the wealth of entire nations. 

We can't reform science in a single day, but I invite my colleagues to come down from the ivory tower and engage in informing the public about the real value and effectiveness of renewable energy. Do it. It is your duty as scientists, and as human beings. The battle is not lost, yet, but it will be if you don't engage in it. 

 h/t Anders Wijkman and Domenico Rutigliano (developer of the Leonardo program.)

(*) If you believe that the idea that renewables cannot support themselves is not a legend, write me. I'll send you a preprint of our recent paper on the subject. (ugo.bardi(whirlywhirl)unifi.it)

Humankind's Tragic Mistake: How we Blew our Chances of Survival

 

A chronicle of how our civilization (if we want to call it in this way) blew its chance of survival. If we had invested in what really mattered, energy, we could have made it. But we preferred to invest in the toys we like so much: military hardware. And think that these 6 trillion dollars of hardware were used to make sure that some foreigners would send us the energy the US needed. With the same money, we could have had the same amount of energy produced at home. So much money thrown away, and that doesn't count the damage done on the receiving end. And now we are throwing away another good chunk of our remaining resources to follow the impossible hydrogen dream

 

An amazing article by Paul Gipe.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/19/beating-swords-into-plowshares-or-wind-turbines-solar-panels-we-could-have-done-it/

 

 

We Could Have 100% Renewable Electricity If We Had Invested in Wind and Solar Instead of War in the Middle East

Yes, the United States could be generating 100% of its electricity from renewable energy if we had used the money spent on our ill-advised wars in the Middle East to build wind and solar systems, as well as battery storage, here at home.

That’s the startling conclusion of a simple calculation my colleague Robert Freehling and I made after the latest reports on the economic cost of our wars in the Middle East.

This is, after all, not rocket science. Money spent on war–anywhere–is money lost. It’s not an investment in the future. It’s money quite literally that goes up in smoke.

In contrast, money spent on building wind and solar farms or putting solar systems on rooftops is money invested in the future that will be earning returns–in the form of electricity–for 20 to 30 years.

I’ve followed this topic since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I posted my first article on this subject on July 4, 2005, and I’ve been updating that article periodically since then as the cost of our wars continued to grow.

On the anniversary of September 11th this year, news articles on the cost of the war in Afghanistan prompted me to take another look at our lost opportunities to invest in infrastructure here at home for the direct benefit of Americans.

What I learned shocked me. Using what I call a back-of-the-envelope method, I calculated that we could have installed enough wind turbines to more than provide 100% of our electricity with what we’d spent on war.

That just didn’t seem right. These are big numbers and it’s easy to get them wrong. After all, we’ve been told for decades that it’s simply too expensive to install that many wind turbines and solar panels. We could never afford it, critics warned.

So I called my colleague and renewable energy analyst Robert Freehling for help. I’ve relied on Freehling to sort out such thorny problems in the past.

His conclusion? Yes, we could be generating 100% of our electricity in this country from just wind and solar; that is, not counting existing hydro, geothermal, or biomass generation. Freehling, though, goes even further. We would be generating so much renewable electricity that we could store huge amounts in batteries–electricity storage that also would be paid for with our “war savings.”

How did we reach such a conclusion? Did we use a supercomputer to calculate all the possible permutations of what a renewable electricity supply would look like?

No. We kept it simple. We looked at two respected estimates of what our wars have cost in economic terms to the US taxpayer, not what they’ve cost in human suffering, nor what they’ve cost the countries on the receiving end of our expenditures.

The National Priorities Project calculates that the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost $4.9 trillion, a sum that continues to rise. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates $5.9 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. Their latest estimate raises that to $6.4 trillion through FY 2020.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, “A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” For a sense of perspective, one billion is 1,000 million. Thus, a trillion is one million million. That’s a one with twelve zeros behind it–a very big number.

We made no attempt to match the annual costs of the wars to the deployment of wind and solar. Again, we kept it simple. We simply prorated the costs over two decades with the exception explained below.

Freehling’s simple spreadsheet model assumes ramping up installations from a low base over a decade to reflect the necessity of scaling up manufacturing to meet the demand. Then he held installations constant for another decade until he reached 100% renewable generation from wind and solar. If we had started in 2001, the whole conversion would be accomplished by 2020.

Shockingly, there was a lot of money left over. So Freehling plowed the remainder into battery storage using the same approach as with wind and solar. He scaled installations up from a low base until the industry was likely to reach maturity.

Existing renewable generation from hydro, geothermal, and biomass was then shunted into the mass of new storage. Batteries would be used to equalize the grid when winds were light or the sun had set. The remainder could then be used to charge electric vehicles.

Wind and solar are cheap today. That was not so, two decades ago. Freehling accounts for this by using historical figures for the cost of wind and solar.

He dropped the initial cost of wind from $2,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity in the year 2000 to about $1,400 today.

Solar has seen a dramatic drop in cost during the past two decades. Freehling used $12,000 per kilowatt as the cost of solar capacity in 2000 and dropped it to nearly $1,500 per kilowatt in 2020.

We apportioned how much wind and how much solar were built, based on the work of my French colleague Bernard Chabot. He found that for a temperate climate, such as the United States, the optimum mix of generation is 60% wind and 40% solar energy. This mix minimizes the amount of storage needed.

Batteries are still expensive. The cost of battery storage, however, has fallen 80% in the past decade alone notes Freehling. He suggests that the cost of battery storage would have fallen even more rapidly through economies-of-scale if we had begun deploying them at scale sooner. Batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) would also be cheaper today if we had plowed some of our war savings into battery development.

Here in California, the Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) requires 4-hours of storage for it to reliably meet peak demand.” Our scenario calls for one million megawatts of wind and another one million megawatts of solar. This scenario uses some 700,000 MW of batteries to store 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) or 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The amount of storage is approximately enough to meet the peak electricity demand for the entire United States for a period of 4 hours.

All together, wind, solar, and storage would be capable of providing 4,400 TWh per year–the amount of electricity generated annually in the United States–for an investment of $6 trillion over two decades.

The United States produces more than 700 TWh per year–about 17% of annual electricity generation–from existing wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass. Existing renewables would be capable of powering more than one-third to as much as one-half of the entire US passenger vehicle fleet with electricity.

If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.

Incredible.

What a lost opportunity.
———-
Paul Gipe is a renewable energy analyst and the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for the past four decades.

• United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion

• Cost of National Security, National Priorities Project

• Watson Institute of Public Affairs, Brown University, Economic Costs of War

• Beating Swords into Wind Turbines–or Solar Panels if You Like, December 29, 2007. This op-ed was originally posted on July 4, 2005 and then appeared at Renewable Energy Access.com (Now RenewableEnergyWorld.com) on July 11, 2005. This version has been updated with current figures for the cost of the war and estimates of its total direct and indirect costs (to the USA only).

 

 

 

 

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

 

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don't need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium). 

In other words, renewables can't be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, "disruptive" technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.  

Tony Seba -- sharp as always -- has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba's ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline -- actually a collapse -- of the industrial civilization during the next few decades. 

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a "dip" in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world. But we might not be able to avoid total collapse if we don't keep investing a significant fraction of the available resources in the transition.

Unfortunately, this idea faces stiff opposition from various industrial lobbies, and especially from a diehard section of environmentalism that remains stuck to ideas that have been shown several times to be ineffective: exhortations for good behavior, individual energy saving, carbon taxes, and the like. All these things have been proposed for decades and failed to make a dent in the predominance of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases. In part, the opposition takes the form of wasting resources for technologies that are known to be inefficient (carbon sequestration) or useless (hydrogen), or both things at the same time. We need to do better than that. We need something different. 

If we want something to change, we need to change something. 

We can make it!!

Government of the lobbies, by the lobbies, for the lobbies. How can we hope to ever move in the right direction?

 

Above: a tweet by the French Minister of Transportation on June 14, 2021 -- translated into English. 

This post is not directly about hydrogen, but it deals with the capability of our politicians of planning on any field related to energy. Mr. Djebbari shows such a total misunderstanding of the quantitative aspects related to the energy transition that goes beyond mere incompetency. It cannot be a bug, it must be a feature of the system.

Djebbari's tweet was noted by Jean-Marc Jancovici, who posted a comment on Linkedin. Here it is, translated into English.

Our Transport Minister sent a tweet last night (French time) to rejoice in the upcoming flight of an A320 with only biofuels, calling it "ecology": https://lnkd.in/dWp-NpK

A few things will help to put this information in context:

- on the day the tweet was sent, there were 85000 commercial flights worldwide (https://lnkd.in/dBFQaXx). If, in order to repay a debt of EUR 85000, you tell your banker that you have found EUR 1 of income, it is unlikely that he will consider that this fundamentally changes the problem.

 

- currently, deforestation is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This deforestation has one main determinant: to remove forests to obtain agricultural land. Therefore, a question arises: does not any area devoted to energy crops be tantamount to exacerbating deforestation, by domino effect? If this same area were devoted to food, would we not avoid the associated deforestation? However, if it induces deforestation (directly or indirectly), the production of an agrofuel generates more emissions per liter than oil.

 

In its report "being able to fly in 2050", The Shift Project and SUPAERO DECARBO (which is made up of former students of ISAE, and currently working in the aeronautical sector, so they are not "painters" it seems to me) recalled that, even by selecting all the technical improvements to come in a very, very optimistic way, air traffic had to decrease for this sector to comply with the Paris Agreement. If this conclusion does not seem to you to be well-founded, it should be refuted with convincing "counter-calculations", and nothing else.

And I think it is enough to understand how wrong was Djebbari in praising Airbus and Safran for having engaged in a task that's nothing more than a good example of a greenwashing stunt. Air travel will never be based on biofuels, at least not on this planet. But just in case you would like to have some more detailed data, take a look at this post where I try to estimate how many people would die of starvation according to the fraction of the world's food supply would be allocated to produce aviation fuels. 

The situation with hydrogen is not very different, although there is no obvious limit to the amount that could be produced using renewable energy, the problems involved in converting the aviation industry to using hydrogen as fuel are nightmarish, to say the least.

Whether we deal with biofuels or with hydrogen, I think there are at least 4 hypotheses to frame the issue

1. Politicians are truly unable to grasp the simplest quantitative aspects of energy production. They are truly ignorant and careless and they refuse to be taught by those who know more than they do. That's called at times the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," but no matter how you call it, it is very common. 

2. Politicians know that they are lying, but they lie for political reasons ("white man speak with two forked tongue") In this case, the French Minister Djebbari thought he could gain a little visibility for himself by means of a potshot at Greenpeace and it is just what he did. 

3. Politicians lie because they are on the payroll of powerful lobbies. In this case, we would have to imagine that the aviation lobby, or the fossil fuel lobby, organized a little PR stunt by flying a plane on 100% biofuels and they enlisted the transport minister to give visibility to it. Of course, in this case, everybody knows it is a scam, but then this is how PR works. 

4. All the three hypotheses above are true to a certain extent.

 

So, given the situation, our government system can be defined as "by the lobbies, for the lobbies, in the name of the lobbies." I don't have to tell you that the challenge to to solve problems that are not just urgent, but vital is a little difficult.