Uncertain Climate Predictions and Certain Energy Progress – Part 7
How certain are we that wind and solar can provide the energy needed to maintain and improve humanity’s standard of living?
In previous essays we looked at the significant uncertainties inherent in climate change computer predictions. But what if we just assumed they were correct, and that we really needed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (and our use of energy) such that the most commonly cited emission reduction goals are met? Could wind and solar power allow us to accomplish that, without requiring us to drastically reduce our standards of living?
Robert Bryce, in his book “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations,” writes:
Since the 1970s, mainstream environmental groups and the Democratic Party have been united on one energy issue more than any other: that we should not be using nuclear energy and that we should be using far more renewables than we are now. For instance, Greenpeace claims that renewable energy, “smartly used, can and will meet our demands. No oil spills, no climate change, no radiation danger, no nuclear waste.” A similar all-renewable-no-nuclear vision is being pushed by the Sierra Club, one of America’s biggest environmental groups … Another big environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, also opposes nuclear energy, claiming the technology poses too many risks and, until those issues are addressed, “expanding nuclear power should not be a leading strategy for diversifying America’s energy portfolio and reducing carbon pollution.” … For four decades, the Democratic Party has either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. The party’s 2016 platform said that climate change “poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.” The platform contains thirty-one uses of the word “nuclear,” including “nuclear proliferation,” “nuclear weapon,” and “nuclear annihilation.” But it doesn’t contain a single mention of the phrase “nuclear energy.” The last time the Democratic Party’s platform contained a positive statement about nuclear energy was way back in 1972.
Are these reasonable approaches? As Bryce continues:
[D]espite their widespread popularity, renewable energy sources alone will not be enough to meet the world’s soaring demand … Despite the attractiveness of the all-renewable concept to voters, activists, politicians, and corporations wanting positive media coverage, here’s the truth: Renewables aren’t going to be enough to meet the Terawatt Challenge. Not by a long shot. Four factors will prevent renewables from taking over our energy and power systems: cost, storage, scale, and land use … A key reason why attempting to rely solely on renewables is so costly is that doing so would require enormous batteries to overcome seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar output. For instance, in California, wind- and solar-energy production is roughly three times as great during the summer months as it is in the winter. Storing summer-generated electricity and saving it until it’s needed in winter months would require batteries, batteries, and more batteries. According to a 2018 analysis done by Stephen Brick, an energy analyst at the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston- based energy- policy think tank, for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables, the state would need about 9.6 terawatt-hours of storage. It’s difficult to get a handle on what that number means. Therefore, Brick put it into more easily digestible terms: the number of Tesla Powerwalls that would be needed to store that quantity of electricity. (In 2015, Tesla, the same company that makes electric cars, began producing lithium-ion battery packs for use in energy-storage systems. The newest model, the Tesla Powerwall 2, can hold about 13 kilowatt- hours of energy.) By my calculations, storing the 9.6 terawatt-hours of electricity needed for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables would require the state to install more than seven hundred million Powerwalls. That would mean every resident of California would need roughly eighteen Tesla Powerwalls. A full 100-percent-renewable electricity mandate would require even more batteries: some 36.3 terawatt- hours of storage, or about seventy-one Tesla Powerwalls for every resident. At roughly $ 6,700 per Powerwall, that much storage would cost each Californian about $ 479,000. Brick’s estimates are similar to the findings of four American energy analysts who published a 2018 report, which concluded that attempting to obtain all US electricity from renewables would require overcoming “seasonal cycles and unpredictable weather events,” which in turn would necessitate having “several weeks’ worth of energy storage and/or the installation of much more capacity of solar and wind power than is routinely necessary to meet peak demand.” The quantity of storage needed “would be prohibitively expensive at current prices.” How expensive? Using the cheapest batteries available, it would require spending roughly $1 trillion. That would mean a bill of roughly $3,000 for every citizen of the United States. And remember, that sum doesn’t include the cost of all the wind turbines and solar panels needed to charge those batteries. Finally, and this is no small matter, batteries have a relatively short life span, and that life span can be reduced if the batteries are charged and discharged frequently. Lead-acid batteries, like the ones commonly used in conventional automobiles, last three to five years. Tesla offers a ten-year warranty on its Powerwalls. Thus, providing enough battery storage to offset the seasonal variation of renewable sources like wind and solar would also require an ongoing battery inspection and replacement system involving millions upon millions of individual batteries. Storing enough electricity to fuel the entire US economy is yet more daunting. In 2019, Mark P. Mills of the Manhattan Institute noted that Tesla’s $5 billion Gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, is one of the world’s largest battery-manufacturing facilities. “Its total annual production could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand,” Mills explained. “Thus, in order to fabricate a quantity of batteries to store two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of Gigafactory production.”
The main problem with renewable energy is that, because it depends on ever-changing weather, it’s an inherently unpredictable source of power when power availability is something that needs to be wholly reliable. An unreasonable reliance on wind power even caused power outages in Texas in 2021. As the Wall Street Journal explained, “The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces.”
Further, many people don’t realize the scope and scale of the resources that would be necessary to use renewables to meet energy demands. As Bryce writes:
In addition to the cost and storage problem, renewables are not scaling fast enough to meet global electricity demand growth. Understanding the scale challenge requires only that we do the math. Between 1997 and 2017, global electricity production increased by an average of 571 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding about one Brazil (which used 591 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2017) to the global electricity sector every year. What would it take solely to keep up with that growth in global demand by using solar? We can answer that question by looking at Germany, which has more installed solar-energy capacity than any other European country, about 42,000 megawatts. In 2017, Germany’s solar facilities produced about 40 terawatt-hours of electricity. Thus, just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, the world would have to install fourteen times as much solar capacity as now exists in Germany, and it would have to do so every year. Prefer to use wind? Fine. Let’s look at China, which has more installed wind capacity than any other country— about 164,000 megawatts. (That’s roughly twice the amount installed in the United States.) In 2017, China produced about 286 terawatt-hours of energy from all that wind capacity. Recall that global electricity use is growing by 571 terawatt-hours per year. Thus, just to keep pace with electricity demand growth, the world would have to install twice as much wind-energy capacity as China has right now, and it would have to do so annually.
But it gets worse. As Bryce explains:
While cost, storage, and scale are all significant challenges, the most formidable obstacle to achieving an all-renewable scenario is simple: there’s just not enough land for the Bunyanesque quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to meet such a goal. In fact, deploying wind and solar at the scale required to replace all of the energy now being supplied by nuclear and hydrocarbons would require paving state-size chunks of territory with turbines and panels … [Lee] Miller and [David] Keith [both of Harvard] determined that “meeting present-day US electricity consumption, for example, would require 12 percent of the continental US land area for wind.” A bit of math reveals what that 12 percent figure means. The land area of the continental United States is about 2.9 million square miles (7.6 million square kilometers). Twelve percent of that area would be about 350,000 square miles (912,000 square kilometers). Therefore, merely meeting America’s current electricity needs would require a territory more than two times the size of California! The notion that the United States would be willing to cover two Californias with wind turbines—and remember, that much territory would be needed just to provide for our electricity needs, forget the liquid and gaseous fuels needed for transportation, home heating, and industry—is nonsense on stilts.
As explained in the Great Courses series The Science of Energy, different means of producing energy have various costs and benefits. To produce one Gigawatt of electricity, for example, it takes the following to do it with different methods of generating electricity. Some methods cause some pollution. Others produce less pollution but require large amounts of land to be directed to the sole use of producing energy, to the exclusion of land use for other things like growing food or housing people.
And the land use doesn’t even include the resources that would have to go into making and maintaining the wind and solar equipment. As Bryce explains:
Making solar and storage work at the terawatt scale will require billions of tons of material to be mined, transported, and recycled. Those materials include silica, copper, lead, zinc, and lithium, as well as enormous quantities of rare-earth elements and cobalt. Mining and smelting all that stuff will have significant impacts on people and the environment. Much of the cobalt used in lithium-ion batteries is produced in the Congo, with a major portion of that supply coming from mines that use child labor. (CNN did an excellent series on this topic in 2018, called “Dirty Energy.”) In addition, hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, and other green technologies require large quantities of rare earth elements. China controls an estimated 80 percent of the market in rare earths, which include elements like neodymium, dysprosium, terbium, yttrium, lanthanum, and praseodymium.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at the prospects for natural gas and nuclear power in allowing humanity to maintain its standards of living while also reducing global warming emissions.
Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9.