by Alex Epstein
Every energy process requires taking a form of raw energy—there is no ready-made machine energy—and transforming it into usable form so that it becomes the heat in our homes, the mechanical power of our cars, and the electricity that powers the Internet. This is a process that takes time and resources, and the key is to make it take as little time and as few resources as possible, so that it can be workable (including reliable), cheap, and plentiful.
Workable is a challenge. Cheap and plentiful are an incredible challenge.
Hazelnut energy is workable; it just isn’t likely going to be cheap and plentiful.
Another related challenge is dealing with risks and by-products. Every time energy is transformed, there is the risk of something going wrong (explosion, electrocution), and there are by-products that can be harmful (such as sulfur dioxide from coal or radioactive waste generated when mining the metals that go into windmills).
Let’s look at which technologies work worst and best at providing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy—and by plentiful I mean on the scale of billions of people. For each one, I’ll give a brief summary of how it works, how successful it has been at producing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, and how it is positioned for the future. I’ll start with the most culturally popular energy technologies: solar and wind.
THE EFFICIENCY PROBLEMS OF SOLAR AND WIND: DILUTENESS AND INTERMITTENCY
Solar and wind energy both work with energy flowing directly from the sun; solar through sunlight and wind through the sun’s heating of different parts of the atmosphere, which is the main cause of wind.
Solar energy typically works in one of two ways: solar photovoltaic (abbreviated solar PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP). Solar PV generates electricity through a phenomenon, discovered around 1839 by Edmond Becquerel, called the photovoltaic effect, by which certain materials emit electrons when hit by light. Through extremely impressive feats of engineering involving precision (and often expensive) materials, solar PV can generate an electric current when it is exposed to sunlight. The first “solar cell” was patented in the United States in 1888. CSP, by contrast, concentrates sunlight into heat, much as a child with a magnifying glass does when he uses the sun to ignite a dried leaf. Using, in effect, a massive array of magnifying glasses (in this case, mirrors), CSP concentrates sunlight into heat, which is used to heat a liquid, which generates steam that can power an engine.
Wind electricity works when high-velocity wind turns the blades of a wind turbine, which are connected to a generator that converts the wind’s power into electric current.
In practice, solar and wind technologies have, as we saw before, produced very, very little energy.
The top five countries ranked by solar energy consumption are Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and China. The percentage of each country’s electricity that comes from solar energy is, respectively: 4.5 percent, 6.3 percent, 4.0 percent, .09 percent, and .6 percent.12
The top five countries ranked by wind consumption are the United States, China, Spain, Germany, and India. Faring slightly better than solar, the percentage of each country’s electricity that comes from wind energy is, respectively: 3.3 percent, 2.03 percent, 16.5 percent, 7.44 percent, and 2.96 percent.13 (If this seems impossibly low, because we frequently hear numbers such as “50 percent solar and wind,” stay tuned.)
Don’t let the 16.5 percent in Spain mislead you. Spain suffered financial devastation from its investment in wind, among other bad investments.14 But more important, certain fundamental problems with solar and wind mean that the more energy they attempt to produce, the more of a problem they create.
Why?
The basic problem is that the process for solar and wind to generate reliable electricity requires so many resources that it has never been cheap and plentiful. In fact, modern solar and wind technology do not produce reliable energy, period.
Traditionally in discussions of solar and wind there are two problems cited: the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem.
The diluteness problem is that the sun and the wind don’t deliver concentrated energy, which means you need a lot of materials per unit of energy produced. For solar, such materials can include highly purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and compounds like titanium dioxide, cadmium telluride, and copper indium gallium selenide.15 For wind, they can include high-performance compounds (like those used in the aircraft industry) for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, high-performance magnets, as well as the steel and concrete necessary to build thousands or tens of thousands of structures as tall as skyscrapers.16
Figure 2.2 indicates how steel (and iron) intensive it is to generate electricity from wind as compared with coal, nuclear, or natural gas.
Figure 2.2: Steel and Iron Required per Megawatt for Wind, Coal, and Natural Gas
Sources: ALPINE Bau GmbH, July 2014; Peterson, Zhao, Petroski (2005); Wilburn 2011
Such resource requirements are a big cost problem, to be sure, and would be one even if the sun shone all the time and the wind blew all the time. But it’s an even bigger problem that the sun and wind don’t work that way. That’s the real problem—the intermittency problem, or more colloquially, the unreliability problem.
As we saw in the Gambian hospital, it is of life and death importance that energy be reliable. There are some situations where it isn’t, to be sure, and solar has a place there—such as solar hot water heaters or swimming pool heating systems. But for just about everything we do, reliable, on-demand energy is vital—and without it, our electricity grid blacks out.
We know from experience that the sun doesn’t shine all the time, let alone with the same intensity all the time, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time—and leaving aside the assurance that the sun will be “off” at night, they can be extremely unpredictable.
To hear opponents of fossil fuels discuss the issue, though, the unreliability of solar and wind is no obstacle at all, as evidenced by, above all, the success of Germany in powering itself via solar and wind. In late 2012, Bill McKibben described “what’s going on in Germany” as “un-[expletive]-believable” and said “there were days this month [December] when they got half their energy from solar panels.”17
And it appears that the news is just getting better. The Center for American Progress reported on May 13, 2014, that “Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent of Power Needs from Renewable Energy.”18 But taking a look at Germany’s official energy statistics tells a very different story. Figure 2.3 shows how much of Germany’s energy actually came from solar and wind throughout 2013, compared with how much was typically needed during each month.19 Notice how unreliable the quantity of solar and wind electricity is. Wind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing nearly completely, and solar produces very little in the winter months, when Germany most needs energy.
Figure 2.3: Solar and Wind Provide a Small, Unreliable Fraction of Germany’s Electricity
Sources: European Energy Exchange Transparency Platform Data (2013); Federal Statistical Office of Germany
How, then, can so many say that solar or wind generates over 50 percent of Germany’s energy? What they are referring to is the fact that because solar and wind are so variable, at any given moment solar can generate 50 percent of the electricity being used. It can also generate 0 percent of the electricity generated at any given moment. Here is a graph of German solar and wind production in April 2013 based on the average amount of electric power generated every fifteen minutes. Notice that sometimes the combined output of solar and wind is relatively high—and sometimes it is nothing; that is the nature of an intermittent, unreliable source.
Figure 2.4: Solar and Wind: The Closer You Look, the Less Reliable They Are
Sources: European Energy Exchange Transparency Platform Data (2013); Federal Statistical Office of Germany
As you look at the jagged and woefully ins
ufficient bursts of electricity from solar and wind, remember this: some reliable source of energy needed to do the heavy lifting. In the case of Germany, much of that energy is coal. As Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars to subsidize solar panels and windmills, fossil fuel capacity, especially coal, has not been shut down—it has increased.20
Why? Because Germans need more energy, and they cannot rely on the renewables.
In a given week in Germany, the world leader in solar and number three in wind, their solar panels and windmills may generate less than 5 percent of needed electricity.21 What happens then? Reliable sources of energy, in Germany’s case coal, have to produce more electricity. For various technical reasons, this is even more inefficient than it sounds. For example, because the reliable sources have to move up and down quickly to adjust to the whims of the sunlight and wind, they become inefficient—just like your car in stop-and-go-traffic—which means more energy use and incidentally more emissions (including CO2). And what about when there’s a particularly large amount of sunlight or wind? For an electric grid, too much electricity will cause a blackout just as too little will—so then Germany has to shut down its coal plants and be ready to start them up again (more stop and go). In practice they often have so much excess that they have to pay other countries to take their electricity—which requires the other countries to inefficiently decelerate their reliable power plants to accommodate the influx. This is obviously not scalable; if everyone’s electrical generation was as unreliable as Germany’s, there would be no one to absorb their peaks.
The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful, reliable sources of energy would be to combine them with some form of extremely inexpensive mass-storage system. No such mass-storage system exists, because storing energy in a compact space itself takes a lot of resources. Which is why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them require backup—except that “backup” implies that solar and wind work most of the time. It’s more accurate to say that solar and wind are parasites that require a host.
Here’s an analogy. Imagine you have a company of highly productive, efficient, reliable workers. Then there is an initiative to bring in “renewable” workers, who will supposedly live forever, but they are expensive and you don’t know when they’ll show up. A document produced by them is not as valuable as a document produced by someone else—because you don’t know when theirs will arrive. A company can handle a few such workers, but it can’t be run by them.
I remember watching an interview of a doctor in Kenya who had to try to run his practice with renewable energy. His clinic was run on solar and could not produce enough electricity to keep both the lights and the refrigerator on at all times, so he had to choose one or the other. When he tried switching on both, an alarm sounded, signifying “out of power.”22 Out of power is exactly the danger to the extent we try to substitute solar and wind for fossil fuels.
Another Kenyan, James Shikwati of the Inter Region Economic Network, explains why he resents programs to encourage underdeveloped countries to use solar or wind.
The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival. I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway network, it might work, maybe, to power a small transistor radio.23
Why do environmentalists focus so much on solar and wind, despite their intractable problems? The traditional explanation is that they don’t generate CO2—leaving aside the coal and oil needed to manufacture them (you can’t build a windmill with a windmill). But as we’ll see later, there are other, much more scalable forms of energy that don’t generate CO2 (hydroelectric and nuclear), which environmental leaders oppose.
Regardless of one’s views on the risks of fossil fuels, it is profoundly irresponsible to claim, as many advocates of solar and wind do, that they are powering Germany, let alone supplying 50 percent of the power. Energy is a life and death issue—it is not one where we can afford to be sloppy in our thinking and seize upon statistics that seem to confirm our worldview.
It seems that there’s more focus on getting energy directly from the sun, which is often considered “natural,” than there is on getting it in a way that will maximize human life. It is deeply irresponsible and disturbing that environmental leaders are telling us to deprive ourselves of fossil fuels on the promise of what can charitably be described as a highly speculative experiment, and can less charitably be described as an ill-conceived, resource-wasting, perennial failure.
There is one much more reliable source of renewable energy that is endorsed by many environmental leaders, though with some reluctance: biomass energy. For example, in order to meet renewability mandates, which usually exclude hydroelectric power, Germany and various other countries are turning to a renewable biomass fuel from the past to make up for the fact that solar and wind scale so poorly: wood.
THE PROBLEMS WITH BIOMASS: PROCESSING AND SCALABILITY
Biomass energy is derived from plant or animal matter, whether wood, crops, crop waste, grass, or even manure. Biomass includes biofuels, which are liquid fuels, usually alcohol, derived from these sources and used for mobile power. Other forms of biomass are used for fixed electrical power or directly for heat (such as wood or animal dung burned to stay warm).
In practice, biomass has, like solar and wind, produced a small amount of energy worldwide—although considerably more than solar and wind.
Why?
Biomass is renewable and natural, because the energy comes from the sun—but not all the inputs in the process can scale. It resembles hazelnut energy; in fact, hazelnut energy is a form of biomass energy.
To its credit, biomass has a storage system, unlike solar and wind—plants store energy from the sun through photosynthesis. The problem is, it takes a lot of resources to grow them—namely the resources involved in farming, including large amounts of energy, land, machinery, water, fertilizer—just like it takes a lot of water to build solar and wind installations. But while solar and wind installations can be built in many places (though part of their problem is that northern and southern latitudes don’t give them good sunlight for many hours), biofuels need to be grown on relatively scarce farmland, which starts to bring us into hazelnut energy territory. It means that biomass scales badly—often, the more of it we try to produce, the more scarce and expensive the inputs become, and the more expensive our energy becomes.
Biofuels like ethanol from corn or sugarcane, or biomass from wood, compete with cropland or forest land, driving prices up for both fuel and food.24 Scalability has been the problem for every biofuel that works (the Bush administration tried to force us to use cellulosic ethanol, a form of ethanol from nonfood sources that has been promoted since the 1920s but still doesn’t work) at a smaller scale. But even if nonfood biomass worked better than it does, it would still be extremely resource intensive to regrow over and over.
A thought: Throughout history it has been a challenge for human beings to produce enough crops to feed us, because agriculture requires a lot of resources just to produce our meager number of calories. We need many dozens of times as many calories for our machines as we do from our food! If we could eat oil or electricity, we would, because it’s much cheaper per unit of energy. Why should we feed human food to machines with hundreds of times our appetites?
Already, the increased use of biomass energy has strongly correlated with a rise in food prices—see Figure 2.5. The idea of scaling it ten times or more, to even make a dent in fossil fuels’ energy production, is unthinkable, given all of the evidence we have.
According to a recent report from the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World,
High and volatile food prices are likely to continue. Demand from consumers in rapidly growing economies will in
crease, population continues to grow, and any further growth in biofuels will place additional demands on the food system.25
Figure 2.5: Comparison of Food Price Index to Biofuel Production
Sources: index mundi Commodity Food Price Index, 2014; BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
Biomass energy is not providing scalable energy, but it is making it difficult for farmers to provide scalable food.
Here’s the bottom line with solar, wind, and biofuels—the three types of energy typically promoted in renewables mandates. There is zero evidence that solar, wind, and biomass energy can meaningfully supplement fossil fuel energy, let alone replace it, let alone provide the energy growth that is desperately needed. If, in the future, those industries are able to overcome the many intractable problems involved in making dilute, unreliable energy into cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a world scale, that would be fantastic. But it is dishonest to pretend that anything like that has happened or that there is a reason to think it will happen.
To be sure, solar, wind, and biomass may have their utility for niche uses of energy. If you’re living off the grid and can afford it, an installation with a battery that can power a few appliances might be better than the alternative (no energy, or frequently returning to civilization for diesel fuel), but they are essentially useless in providing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people—and to try to rely on them would be deadly.
And yet our leaders propose massive bans on fossil fuels with the promise that these radically inferior technologies will be replacements. That reflects an ignorance of, or indifference to, the need for efficient energy and the value of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. Any leader who is thinking about making policy decisions with our energy, and ultimately the energy and therefore the opportunities of 7 billion people, had better take the truth about renewables into account.
