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18 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Ten Reasons Intermittent Renewables (Wind and Solar PV) are a Problem
1. It is doubtful that intermittent renewables actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
It is devilishly difficult to figure out whether on not any particular energy source has a favorable impact on carbon dioxide emissions. The obvious first way of looking at emissions is to look at the fuel burned on a day-to-day basis. Intermittent renewables don’t seem to burn fossil fuel on day-to-day basis, while those using fossil fuels do, so wind and solar PV seem to be the winners.
The catch is that there are many direct and indirect ways that fossil fuels come into play in making the devices that create the renewable energy and in their operation on the grid. The researcher must choose “boundaries” for any analysis. In a sense, we need our whole fossil fuel powered system of schools, roads, airports, hospitals, and electricity transmission lines to make any of type of energy product work, whether oil, natural gas, wind, or solar electric–but it is difficult to make boundaries wide enough to cover everything.
The exercise becomes one of trying to guess how much carbon emissions are saved by looking at tops of icebergs, given that the whole rest of the system is needed to support the new additions. The thing that makes the problem more difficult is the fact that intermittent renewables have more energy-related costs that are not easy to measure than fossil fuel powered energy does. For example, there may be land rental costs, salaries of consultants, and (higher) financing costs because of the front-ended nature of the investment. There are also costs for mitigating intermittency and extra long-distance grid connections.
Many intermittent renewables costs seem to be left out of CO2 analyses under the theory that, say, land rental doesn’t really use energy. But the payment for land rental means that the owner can now go and buy more “stuff,” so it acts to raise fossil fuel energy consumption.
1. It is doubtful that intermittent renewables actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
It is devilishly difficult to figure out whether on not any particular energy source has a favorable impact on carbon dioxide emissions. The obvious first way of looking at emissions is to look at the fuel burned on a day-to-day basis. Intermittent renewables don’t seem to burn fossil fuel on day-to-day basis, while those using fossil fuels do, so wind and solar PV seem to be the winners.
The catch is that there are many direct and indirect ways that fossil fuels come into play in making the devices that create the renewable energy and in their operation on the grid. The researcher must choose “boundaries” for any analysis. In a sense, we need our whole fossil fuel powered system of schools, roads, airports, hospitals, and electricity transmission lines to make any of type of energy product work, whether oil, natural gas, wind, or solar electric–but it is difficult to make boundaries wide enough to cover everything.
The exercise becomes one of trying to guess how much carbon emissions are saved by looking at tops of icebergs, given that the whole rest of the system is needed to support the new additions. The thing that makes the problem more difficult is the fact that intermittent renewables have more energy-related costs that are not easy to measure than fossil fuel powered energy does. For example, there may be land rental costs, salaries of consultants, and (higher) financing costs because of the front-ended nature of the investment. There are also costs for mitigating intermittency and extra long-distance grid connections.
Many intermittent renewables costs seem to be left out of CO2 analyses under the theory that, say, land rental doesn’t really use energy. But the payment for land rental means that the owner can now go and buy more “stuff,” so it acts to raise fossil fuel energy consumption.
The whole article is a good look at a system-level assessment of the situation. And that last paragraph in the excerpt? Astute readers will notice, once again, the much-maligned shadow of "Wild Bill" Jevons lurking in the background.
There's lots more of note in the article, including this:
9. My analysis indicates that the bottleneck we are reaching is not simply oil. Instead, a major problem is inadequate investment capital and too much debt. Ramping up wind and solar PV tends to make those problems worse, not better.
Have a nice day.
Number five on that list is especially risible, so let's go with that.
The author of that drivel states:
5. Wind and solar PV don’t ramp up quickly.
After many years of trying to ramp up wind and solar PV, in 2012, wind amounted to a bit under 1% of world energy supply. Solar amounted to even less than that–about 0.2% of world energy supply. It would take huge effort to ramp up production to even 5% of the world’s energy supply.
After many years of trying to ramp up wind and solar PV, in 2012, wind amounted to a bit under 1% of world energy supply. Solar amounted to even less than that–about 0.2% of world energy supply. It would take huge effort to ramp up production to even 5% of the world’s energy supply.
I'm sure you know where to find EIA's Monthly Energy Review. I think both you and I know the US is not exactly a paragon of renewable energy generation.
Here's three graphs from their Primary Energy Consumption by Source data (Table 1.3):
You can tell from the scale which is which, but just in case: number one is the sum of three renewables: wind, solar and geothermal. Number two is the sum of fossil fuel use, and number three is total primary energy consumption. In each case this is since 2000, so 1 = 2000, and 14 = 2013, which is slightly confusing, but I did this real quick as I already knew what it would show.
Renewable adoption is parabolic at the moment. No one knows how long that will go on for, but there is zero sign of that rate of increase in adoption slowing down. At that rate all fossil fuels would be replaced in about 10 years, last time I did the numbers. I'm not expecting that outcome of course, but that's just to illustrate how fast the rate of adoption has been. The idea that renewables don't scale is refuted by the data.
The third graph, which is all energy used in the US, is meant to refute the idea that energy consumption increases as renewable adoption increases. Nope.
The second is fossil fuel use by itself. Fossil fuel use, once again, didn't increase as renewable energy use increased. Simply not true. Not in the data.
Note that each of these has a trend line drawn in, and that the only one with a positive trend line, by a pretty wide margin, is renewable energy.
Replying with China is invalid. China is growing at a ridiculous pace, and has responded to its own problem by adopting renewables at an even faster pace than we are, at a faster pace than anyone in the world, as a matter of fact. Their goal, not so secret, is to replace as much coal as they can, if not all of it. I have no doubt they'll succeed.
The reason has to do with why economies grow in the first place: import substitution. This is Jane Jacobs stuff. Simply put, economies grow by doing for themselves what they formerly had to import, and so shifting their imports to other things that they either can't replace or simply prefer to have. NYC, for instance, replaces massive amounts of car imports by its outstanding mass transit system, which allows its citizens to afford all kinds of other goods and services that citizens of other cities can't, because they're spending that money on cars.
Renewables are import substitution on a truly huge scale. What is happening, and what you are fundamentally misunderstanding, is that renewables replace fossil fuels, which is evident in the above graphs. That replacement drops the import bill for those fuels for the cities within any nation, which is where most economic activity, and certainly the most valuable ones, take place. Not having to import fuels, whether from within a country or outside it, also allows for insulation from the legendary instability of energy supply regions, a good which is really almost invaluable, as Western Europe is now finding in re its relationship to the horrendously obsolete Russian economy and its equally obsolescent foreign policy, or as the rest of the US occasionally realizes re Texas and its own particular brand of craziness, or Alberta re the rest of Canada.
Given that latter incentive, the idea that human ingenuity won't find a way to get rid of dependence on places like Russia or Saudi Arabia is, quite simply, nuts. The incentive is way too big, and the reward is monstrous.
The rest is the usual static analysis based on current practices, or practices that are somewhat obsolete already, which is what all of these "limits" things depend on: taking the past and extrapolating it into the future ad infinitum.
As I've said before, islands will disappear. Coastlines will be inundated. All kinds of horrible things are going to happen. But man is going to just keep right on going. That's simply a description of the way it is, not a menu of desirable outcomes. Denying it by saying that man is going to disappear too is simply not going to happen. Men, deer, crows, dogs, adaptable mammals who are for the most part omnivores and scavengers, are going to keep right on going, along with the cockroaches and mosquitoes and Burmese pythons, and the only way to even mitigate a small part of the damage that will be done is by taking action.
