'Faster Than We Thought': An Epitaph for Planet Earth

[GliderGuider]

'Faster Than We Thought': An Epitaph for Planet Earth

Sometime later this Century, a writer will sit down and attempt to document how his or her grandparents’ generation could have all but ignored the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced.

As she pieces together this saga, she’ll encounter the usual suspects.

The army of paid politicians who carried the water of the fossil fuel plutocrats. Economists, who used bizarre abstractions like discounting the future to make it seem like saving the world wasn’t cost-effective. Environmentalists, who were loath to speak the truth because they didn’t want to be accused of spreading “doom and gloom.” The IPCC and their infrequent and out-of-date on date-of-issue reports, an organization that, by design, was intended to slow-walk the science and muddle it with misguided neoclassical economic incantations.

But the one thing that will stand out as she attempts to figure out how our generation allowed the entire world to sleep walk into Armageddon will be the annual cavalcade of research and headlines saying “XXX is happening far faster than predicted.”

Didn't someone around here notice that?

[Lionessa]

1. I wish the Earth well, she'll do better without us.

There are so many ways we are screwing her and ourselves, if it isn't Climate Change, it'll be resources like potable water. Or manmade "natural" disasters, like the earthquakes around fracking, or because we suck out so much of what holds up the land plates, like oil and water and gas, we will have massive land collapses... that's if and only if, we don't all kill each other in the next world war hat so many seem itching to start.

[ladjf]

4. I've said it many times on DU, the human race is too dumb to survive. nt

[XemaSab]

2. .

[phantom power]

3. "Look your children in the eye, while you still can" --NNadir

[NickB79]

8. For all the crazy stuff that guy wrote, that one line rings true. NT

[kristopher]

5. XXX is happening faster than expected.

From the IEA's 1998 World Energy Outlook





IEA's WEO projection 2010:
Aggregate Global Renewable Capacity = 43GW
Amount generated by all renewables that year = 154TWh

IEA's WEO projection 2020:
Aggregate Global Renewable Capacity = 73GW
Amount generated by all renewables that year = 239TWh

[NickB79]

9. Table 6.1 really hammers home what a lot of us have felt for a long time here on E/E

That renewables WON'T be saving our asses.

4300 TWH (with almost all of it hydro) out of 27,000 TWH of total generation by 2020. Ouch.

[GliderGuider]

11. And as always it ignores the transportation issue...

As well as the hundreds of non-energy-related environmental and ecological issues that are destroying the planet, that are completely independent of where we get our electricity from.

[kristopher]

14. More sour grapes GG?

I'm starting to think you are addicted to those tart buggers.

[GliderGuider]

16. No, just pointing out that as usual

You look at 2% of the problem, and then have to spin even that minuscule fraction to try to blow smoke up our skirts about how things just getting better and better and better.

A lot of folks here don't buy your bland enthusiasms. We don't all shop at the same fruit stand.

[kristopher]

17. No one has overlooked anything

i've written often about transportation and many other aspects of the problem we face.

The information I posted isn't spin. It is extremely clear and unambiguous evidence that we in spite of the opposition of entrenched energy interests we are exceeding the forecasts of the agencies you base your Marvin-esque doomsaying on by leaps and bounds.

Additional good news besides the very positive implications for addressing the climate issue is that the 10 year hence improvement in market conditions the nuclear industry is planning for?

That ain't going to happen.

[kristopher]

13. Look again NickyB, and tell us truly what you see.

I think you're having a problem called confirmation bias - you only see what you want to see.

The 1998 International Energy Agency prediction in Table 6.1 compares to the real world pace of deployment in what way?

Let's look:
The prediction was 43GW by 2010, we hit that around 2003, by 2010 we were at 120+GW and we installed 60+GW of wind and solar in 2011.

We are trending towards 1200GW of combined capacity by 2020, with the declining price of solar expected to have an unsubsidized market edge on up to 1TW worth of demand.

We are, in fact, vastly exceeding expectations and are ramping up deployment of renewables far faster than was generally thought possible.

This is good news if your priority is addressing climate change.

If you are just a nuclear booster, then not such good news I suppose.

[NickB79]

35. Funny that you choose to use GW values instead of TWH values in your reply to my point about TWH's

Because using TWH numbers, the results don't look nearly as rosy as you want them to appear (but I'm sure that's purely accidental on your part).

Table 6.1's estimate was that the world would be using 20852 TWH of energy for electricity in 2010, and generating 3600 TWH of that demand with renewables.

In the real world, the world generated 4158 TWH with renewables in 2011: http://www.energies-renouvelables.org/observ-er/html/inventaire/Eng/conclusion.asp

Global energy demand for electricity appears to be 20261 TWH in 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation. I can't find any more current information with hard numbers, but from what has been reported in the media, global CO2 releases spiked in the recovery following the 2008-2010 recession so that's a good indication that global energy demand also rose rapidly. I wouldn't be surprised to see a global demand of 21000 TWH by now.

So, while renewables did grow faster than expected based on the 1998 IEA estimate, the change in TWH was not nearly as dramatic as you imply. The accelerated growth in renewables over the past decade has made a 3% difference between what the IAE predicted in 2010 and what was actually observed. While a faster than expected increase in renewables is always a good thing, the increase we're seeing is simply not enough to prevent catastrophic climate change in the little time we have left. By all means, keep building out as much solar, wind and geothermal as possible, but don't try to pretend that we are on pace to prevent 3-5C of warming by 2100. The headwinds working against us make the improvements in renewables pale in comparison.

For example, the graph I value above all else is this one: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112715708. Do you see any indication that it's levelling off? Can you make a prediction for when it will eventually peak, or how high it will go?

[kristopher]

36. Thank you. That seems a good source.

- For purposes of this discussion I wan't worried about finding a definitive source, and the main reference, which I was comfortable using, was the table Selected Indicators and Top 5 Countries p.15 from
REN21. 2011. Renewables 2011 Global Status Report
http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/Publications/GlobalStatusReport/tabid/5434/Default.aspx

- The chart I posted was a rendering that was selected because it was 1) conservative, 2) logarithmic and 3) available from Wiki commons.

- I used GW because it was there and I couldn't readily find current data for generation output.

- If you look you'll see that since I didn't know what was correct and what wasn't I've made no claims about production numbers for 2010. When GG wrote that he plugged in some 2009 numbers but failed to give either the numbers or a source, you'll see question marks in my summary of our discussion in post #29. I presumed he used valid data but since I had nothing to compare it with and since GG was focused on production, I established a ratio from the WEO projections to use in determining a production value for the 2020 projection the wiki chart pointed to. If the 2010 and 2020 ratios from the WEO are, in fact substantially in error, that error is theirs, not mine; a point supporting my view of the IEA/EIA quality when it comes to renewable forecasts. It certainly can't be seen as contradicting my belief.

- The second thing I felt it was important to draw out in the discussion was the curve associated with renewable growth. It is obvious that there are fundamental differences in the way the long term projections are calculated but insisting that the sharp ramp-up of renewables over the period covered by the WEO forecast isn't relevant simply isn't a credible position.

From your Observer source:


And then there is this - the significant undercount of both installed renewable capacity and renewable production that this table from REN21 reveals. What is your opinion of the way solar hot water is never counted?




You ask when I think CO2 emissions will peak and where. I don't know, no one does.
We are decades away from fully eliminating anthropogenic GHG emissions certainly, but I believe we are much closer to the point where the global rate starts declining than most people realize.

In return I'd like to know is how that is really relevant to the discussion at hand? I don't understand the incessant pressure to limit discussion to defeatism and alarm bordering on hysteria. It is a problem we all here accept as urgent. You don't have a lock on the concept of worry or the understanding of the stakes involved. I simply cannot empathize with those who insist on that while hectoring those who want legitimate investigation of the solutions and how we can implement them. In my view of life, that smacks of the faceless crowds that are willing to stand around watching an accident victim bleed out instead of getting to work and at least trying to help. It simply isn't the way I'm built to continue to shout about the problem when the ONLY task at hand is moving us a solution.

Thank you for the courtesy of a civil response, BTW.

[GliderGuider]

12. Let's look at the electrical generation from Table 6.1

From 2010 to 2020, they expected renewables (ex-hydro) to add 85 TWh/year. But they expected fossil fuels to add 6000 TWh, or 70 times as much. They expected fossil fuels to add 8 times as much over that period as hydro and renewables combined.

Extending the curves out another 20 years to 2040, renewables make a respectable showing, adding 1250 TWh. The problem is that fossil fuels add over 20,000 TWh - 16 times as much. And in that case hydro doesn't help - fossil fuels still add 9 times as much electricity as hydro and renewables combined.

Going by this table, fossil fuels go from generating 70.5% of the world's electricity today, to 81% in 2020, to 85% in 2040.



That table really didn't help your case.

One thing that will help, of course, is a global economic depression from about now until 2030 or so. That would cut fossil fuel use dramatically, and might give renewables a chance to catch up.

[GliderGuider]

15. Here's another version using the actual 2009 data instead of their projection

The main difference in the EIA actuals is that non-hydro renewables turned out over twice as much electricity as they estimated in 1998.

So for the following graph I used the 2009 actuals in place of the estimated 2010 values. I also boosted the 2020 estimate for non-hydro renewables from 239 TWh to 600 TWh.



The difference that makes is obvious - renewables go from about 1500 TWh in 2040 to over 5000 TWh.

The problem is that this still shows fossil fuels going from 68% of the mix today to 79% in 2040. Unless something intervenes to slow down the use of fossil fuiels quite drastically, we still lose the climate change race.

[kristopher]

19. You're just tossing out nonsense and wrapping it in a graph...

Again.


Are you really so desperate that you have to resort to this type of posting?

[joshcryer]

20. Amusing that you were fine with the graph that was based on 1998 WEO.

But when a graph was charted using the same exact comparison based on actual real world consumption, oh it's just "nonsense wrapped up in a graph."

[kristopher]

23. Are you all right? There is no graph for the 1998 WEO forecast.

There is, however, a graph showing the data points for cumulative global capacity of wind and solar from 1992 through 2012.



Using the rate of growth established by these data points a curve is derived that shows where we will be i we keep going.

Do you understand how to read this graph?

I don't see how you could think it is charting this data:

[joshcryer]

24. Are you all right? GG posted the graph he made in #12.

He's basing it on the 1998 WEO projection.

The key is that even with actual real world data, the overall trend is not significantly different.

You're overhyping the actual trend that 1998 WEO missed.

edit: you seem to be failing to understand that GG is pointing out electrical generation expansion, which WEO 1998 got extremely accurate (for being so far in the past). He plugs in the actual data, and it shows that the overall trend is hardly helped by renewables.

It's a damn convincing graph and if you cannot understand it then I suggest you try to do so and provide a comprehensive reason why it is "wrong."

[XemaSab]

25. Given that you seem awfully concerned about what sources other people are using...

...one might hope that one wouldn't have to ask you what your sources are.

[GliderGuider]

27. ???

The graph is based on actual electrical generation data from the EIA (no nonsense numbers, those), along with the WEO's 2020 projection you felt was acceptable when you posted it. My only contribution was to extend the curve out by one more step to 2040 to demonstrate the trends

I have no idea where the desperation you smell is coming from, but I notice that all you've offered so far in rebuttal are ad hominems.

[kristopher]

29. I was waiting for your unruly 'children' to go to bed

In my initial post demonstrating the problem with EIA/IEA methods, I compared the projection of the WEO to the actual performance of wind and solar.
I added nothing, I speculated on nothing.

The only thing not controlled for was the content of what was being compared. For the WEO it was "other renewables"; a category poorly defined that appears to include not only solar PV and wind but also solar thermal, geothermal, and whatever else they saw on the horizon.

The achieved numbers reflect solar and wind only, are measured, and span 20 years with 20 individual evenly spaced data points.

Therefore the exercise I presented erred on the side of being conservative in regard to the point being made; which was that the forecasts from the EIA and the IEA are, in relation to the performance of renewable energy, invalid.


**********************


Here is your description of what you'd done:
Post 12

[font size="1.5"]Let's look at the electrical generation from Table 6.1. From 2010 to 2020, they expected renewables (ex-hydro) to add 85 TWh/year. But they expected fossil fuels to add 6000 TWh, or 70 times as much. They expected fossil fuels to add 8 times as much over that period as hydro and renewables combined.
Extending the curves out another 20 years to 2040, renewables make a respectable showing, adding 1250 TWh. The problem is that fossil fuels add over 20,000 TWh - 16 times as much. And in that case hydro doesn't help - fossil fuels still add 9 times as much electricity as hydro and renewables combined.
Going by this table, fossil fuels go from generating 70.5% of the world's electricity today, to 81% in 2020, to 85% in 2040.[/font]

To create your slopes you used the WEO data from a summary table, which means you covered 49 years with 4 points of data - 2 real and 2 hypothetical. (That's 49 years with 4 data points vs 20 years with 20 data points)

The gap between the 1st/2nd point was 24 years, between the 2nd/3rd was 15 years;and between the 3rd/4th was 10 years.

This means you were trying to establish a complex set of trend lines only two real data points.

With this you make the point (I suppose you saw it as a point anyway) that the relative share of renewables is not adequate to be meaningful.

Your errors are clear.

Your sample size was small and the period you extrapolated to was large.

You used 4 points - 2 real and 2 hypothetical - over a 69 year period. Essentially giving you only a straight line between those first 2 measured points from which to derive the slope of the next 45 years from the remaining data (that you knew to be compromised at least in the area of renewables).


**************************

You obviously realized there were problems so you then did this in post 15:

[font size="1.5"]Here's another version using the actual 2009 data instead of their projection. The main difference in the EIA actuals is that non-hydro renewables turned out over twice as much electricity as they estimated in 1998.
So for the following graph I used the 2009 actuals in place of the estimated 2010 values. I also boosted the 2020 estimate for non-hydro renewables from 239 TWh to 600 TWh.[/font]

What that amounts to is that you:
a) removed hypothetical 3rd data points to use the actual numbers and;
b) addressed your error in using known false renewable data through inflation of the final renewable data point by 250%.

While a) is commendable it still leaves you with extremely poor granularity for your slopes and, more importantly there is a problem with your assumption about the amount of renewable generation in 2020.

We don't need to wing it, we can make the fit more accurate by recognizing the firmly established trend that is pretty created by the performance of solar and wind between 1992 and 20012.

The numbers below are year, capacity and amount generated for renewables from the WEO table:

1971 - 0
1995 - cap 13 gen 49
2010 - cap 43 gen 154
2020 - cap 79 gen 239

You changed it to:

1971 - 0
1995 - cap 13 gen 49
2009 - cap ?? gen ??
2020 - cap 79 gen 600

The slope established by the 20 data points predicts that instead achieving 79GW of installed renewable capacity by 2020 we are on track to hit 1200GW of solar and wind by 2020.

That suggests the WEO projection for 2020 is <6.5% of what we might expect given the limits of out modeling here.

In other words you have flattened your renewable curve by using a number the data does not support. You recognize that 239TWh is ruled out, but 600TWh is hardly better.

As the installed capacity numbers show, accurately plotting the trend line over the last 7 years gives us a lot of confidence that the 600TWh 2020 projection is woefully inadequate.

Since we don't have the latest globally aggregated production numbers, we can use the ratio WEO has established for us between cap/gen and carry it forward as a point of departure. Remember, the 1200GW is only solar and wind, thus we have some degree of buffering as the mix changes and small scale hydro , geothermal, storage etc. increase their effect on the overall capacity factor. (We'll leave out the recent crash in solar costs that is expanding the unsubsidized solar PV market to between 600 - 1000GW by 2020.)

That would make your final projected data point for renewables about 3676TWh, wouldn't it?
79/1200 = .065
239/.065 =3,676

The EIA and the IEA are not reliable predictors, they are owned by the established energy system and their forecasts are based on what makes that system work. They are structurally incapable it seems of altering their methods to explore the economics of an energy system that reduces the significance of the old to 20% or so of its present glory.

What this argues for is that in reviews like this the optimistic trajectories, which DO focus on what happens when there is an evolution in the system, are more likely correct than those that are shackled to EIA type assumptions about the future value of the present infrastructure.

IPCC on Renewable Energy
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by
renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112715489

[GliderGuider]

30. TL; DNR

Sorry, it's just more bla bla. know you hate arguing with me kristopher, but all the Asperger's in the world doesn't help to make your case.

It doesn't get to the bottom line, which is that we humans have eaten our Mother Earth. You can't cover that up with words.

[kristopher]

31. Did you flatten the curve deliberately or is it too complicated for you.

You underestimated the data point for renewables by 600%.

Why would you want to portray renewable generation and the trends falsely?

[GliderGuider]

32. The renewables curve was an exponential trend line.

It wasn't the best fit to the existing data and the 1998 WEO estimate for 2020 (the best fit was a second-order polynomial), but it gave the highest end result for renewables.

The thing to keep in mind is that anything beyond the actual data is an estimate, subject to change at any time from a myriad of factors, and bracketed by widening error bars over time.

The most we can use such projections for is to get a feel for the relative performances of the sources. The value of the chart is not numeric. It's in generating the understanding that unless something happens to slow down the expansion of fossil fuels, we're in for a world of climatological hurt. Hurt that the current deployment rate of renewables may not be able to offset.

Let's look at the effects of error bars.

• If the deployment of renewables were to double compared to the trend line shown - to 10,000 TWh in 2040 - and FF were to rise to only 35,000 TWh, we'd still be in a world of hurt - the additional contribution of FF to the mix would have risen by 10,000 TWh more than renewables, compared to today.
  
• However, if the deployment of renewables doesn't keep pace with the projection, and rises to only 3,000 TWh while FF rises to 42,000, the situation would be much worse. The additional contribution of FF to the mix would have risen by 27,000 TWh, or about nine times as much as renewables.

The point is not whether renewables can or can't replace FF. I'm convinced they can, if we were confine our discussion to the technical issues. However, the shape of the future curves doesn't depend on technical feasibility - it depends on politics, economics, finance and logistics.

Because of the non-technical factors I'm not convinced that renewables actually will replace FF before we hit 600 ppm or so, however. And I'll keep raising that possibility, along with all the other damage we're doing to the planet that has nothing whatsoever to do with the source of our electricity - and which we're also doing nothing about.

[kristopher]

33. You understated a key data point by 600% to grossly understate the renewable trendline

You know it and you knew it at the time.

Which is why I wrote post 19: "You're just tossing out nonsense and wrapping it in a graph... Again. Are you really so desperate that you have to resort to this type of posting?"


In the eyes of any observer it creates a completely false belief about what the state of development is of our renewable energy rollout. It really is hard to fathom why someone would want to do that or why, once the error was pointed out they would refuse to acknowledge it...

[GliderGuider]

34. Please try to understand

Last edited Thu May 24, 2012, 05:39 PM - Edit history (1)

just how little I care about your whining.

I chose a lower number than you think is appropriate. As an estimate 10 years out into a recession. Sorry, until the TWh are actually generated, I get to have my own opinions about how things are going to unfold.

I hope to create realistic expectations in the eyes of observers to counter your tendency towards faith-based pronouncements on renewable energy.

If you wish, you may read the above sentence as "I hope to create absurdly pessimistic expectations in the eyes of observers to thwart your desire to move the yardsticks of renewable energy forward."

I really don't care, and it really doesn't matter. This is just E&E, not the IPCC or the IEA or the DOE. It's also not the private fiefdom for a single opinion-set.

[joshcryer]

22. Thank you for charting the data, GG. It shows quite nicely that while...

...WEO 1998 was "off base" it wasn't off where it matters; that is, the consumption of fossil fuels and the emission of CO2 into our atmosphere.

[kristopher]

18. All you've done is illustrate my point

Going by this table, fossil fuels go from generating 70.5% of the world's electricity today, to 81% in 2020, to 85% in 2040.

That's WTF I was telling you. The EIA and the IEA are not reliable predictors, they are owned by the established energy system and their forecasts are based on what makes that system work. They are structurally incapable it seems of altering their methods to explore the economics of an energy system that reduces the significance of the old to 20% or so of its present glory.

What this argues for is that in reviews like this the optimistic trajectories, which DO focus on what happens when there is an evolution in the system, are more likely correct than those that are shackled to EIA type assumptions about the future value of the present infrastructure.

IPCC on Renewable Energy
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by
renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112715489

[joshcryer]

21. Wait, I thought that was nonsense wrapped up into a graph?

The point is that, factually, objectively, renewables have grown much slower than coal in the same time frame. Coal rules the planet. Renewables aren't going to make a dent in that fact for a long time to come.

[GliderGuider]

28. At least somebody gets the point...

Based on actual, historical data we're fucked unless something comes along to dramatically slow the growth of FF use. The only "something" that is in evidence yet is economic recession. Since we keep fighting not to have one of those, it will have to be - what? Peak Coal? The nations of the world deciding voluntarily to freeze in the dark? The Transcendent Miracle of Incremental Policy Improvements? A deus ex machina?

And this still ignores The Litany: the deforestation, the pollution of land, air and water, the overpumping of aquifers, the strip-mining of topsoil, the overfishing of the oceans, the planet-wide destruction of natural habitat, the extinction of other life forms, the walling-off of wildness both outside and inside.

We have almost achieved the goal of our species - we may not have quite conquered Nature yet, but we are sure beating her into a pulp of submission at every turn. For now.

[GliderGuider]

6. These graphs from New Scientist always drove the point home for me.

[Nihil]

26. Nah ...

... they're obviously just someone tossing out nonsense and wrapping it
in a lot of graphs ...

[bvar22]

7. This time, no lifeboats... even for the RICH.

[Odin2005]

10. I'm not that pessimistic, but the old Chinese curse still applies.

May you live in interesting times...