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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Good news from Italy: The 30 MW Wind Plant on the Appennini Mountains has been approved

It is with immense joy that I learn and share:

"The council of the ministers, after a proposal by president Mario Draghi, has approved the project of the new wind plant "Monte Giogo di Villore" of 29.6 MW of total power to be located in the towns of Vicchio and Dicomano, including the associated infrastructure to be built in the towns of San Godenzo, Rufina, and Dicomano, as proposed by AGSM AIM S.p.a.

And, with immense gratitude, I thank the many passionate people who spent their time to support this project!

Marco Giusti, director of engineering and research in the AGSM AIM s.p.a 

When Horses can Beat Tanks -- Renewable energy against the fossil lobby.

 

The fossil lobbies are fighting for their survival. They are facing a competitor, renewable energy, which is less expensive, more efficient, less polluting, and less prone to create wars, you would think that they would give up. But, no, they are fighting a slick and well-financed propaganda war. 

Look at the image above, it comes from the "Empowerment Alliance." Do take a look at their website. It is an enlightening experience on the current propaganda techniques. They are not very sophisticated: you may think that the image above is gross and that no one would be so easily swayed by it. Yet, these techniques are known to be effective. 

The renewable industry isn't even remotely able to match this tsunami of propaganda. They seem to believe, naively, that they can win the battle against the fossil lobby just by the quality of their products. Maybe, but often the real world doesn't work in that way. Otherwise, people wouldn't prefer concoctions of sugar and artificial coloring to plain water. 

So, we are fighting a difficult battle for clean energy. A little like fighting tanks with horses. But, you know, there is a chance for horses to win: it is when the tanks run out of fuel!

 

"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

The Solar Revolution Moves on!

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china-installed-31-gw-solar-pv-in-h1-2022/

China Installed 31 GW Solar PV In H1/2022

by Anu Bhambhani

The China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) says during H1/2022, China installed 30.88 GW of new solar PV capacity, growing 137.4% annually over 14.1 GW reported for the same period last year (see China May Exit 2021 With Up To 65 GW New PV: CPIA).

The association counts 13.21 GW installed in Q1/2022, followed by another 17.67 GW added in Q2/2022 of the total. Cumulative installed PV capacity of the world’s largest solar market at the end of June 2022 increased to 340 GW, at the same level as wind power (see China PV News Snippets).

CPIA’s Honorary Chairman Wang Bohua said they forecast China to exit 2022 with 75 GW annual installations under a conservative scenario, and 90 GW under its optimistic scenario, which will be in any case much higher than the 54 GW installed in 2021. However, CPIA has not increased its forecast range for 2022, a level it already forecasted in Feb. 2022 (see Up To 90 GW New Solar In China In 2022). For 2023, the association predicts between 80 GW to 95 GW new installations.

Further growth can be expected during the country’s 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) that’s supposed to run between 2021 and 2025 as 392.16 GW of total PV capacity is targeted to be installed by 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions during the period. CPIA specified that in the next 4 years, 344.48 GW is to be added.

Bohua also shared an update on the Chinese plan to use its desert regions including Gobi Desert to install 97.05 GW new wind and solar capacity. It said up to now, work on more than 95 GW has been started.

The association acknowledged that the market share of large size silicon wafers has expanded rapidly with some companies having converted all their production lines to produce 182mm and 210mm sized products. However, some firms have tried to replace diamond wire process with tungsten wire which the CPIA believes is expected to further refine the wire diameter and promote thinner wafers, from 165μm to 160μm.

Even in terms of module power thanks to tenders in China, 540W+ has become the mainstream product in the market, something that even EnergyTrend also pointed at in its recent report (see 80% Chinese Producers Get 210mm Capability).

Demand for n-type products is also on the rise as n-type cell expansion projects account for 1/3rd of total expansion capacity. Announced demand for n-type modules has exceeded 4 GW, which is a 4-fold increase compared to entire 2021.

The association also reiterated solar production capacity data for H1/2022 as released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) (see China’s Solar PV Production Capacity In H1/2022).

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)