A 100 Percent Renewable Energy World?

I recently posted a lengthy piece in which I reviewed the familiar charges made by detractors of renewable wind and solar energy against the possibility of its playing a significant role in the energy mix during the coming decades.

Examining their charges with regard to price, subsidies, pollution, land use, I have been singularly unimpressed. For all their imperfections, they remain cheaper and less taxing to the environment in these respects than more established sources, often significantly. ("Wind power requires fossil fuels," the detractors whine--yes, in production and installation, and just that, so that its carbon footprint is about 1 percent that of a coal plant, 2 percent of a natural gas plant, which I suppose is why they don't usually get around to talking numbers.)

I remain unsure as to the real value of the EROEI calculations we have. These estimates often seem to me a case of impressive-seeming precision with much more doubtful accuracy. But the assessments are far from being altogether damning.

It also seems the matters of the intermittency, compensatory energy storage, and raw materials consumption get played up excessively. However, here I concede that the problems, past a certain point, are more substantial.

For example: it is clear that the intermittency of wind and solar creates challenges for those seeking to derive a large part of their electricity from them. However, we also know that modern, flexible, sufficiently connective grids can deliver reliable electrical output with a far higher proportion of intermittent wind and solar in the grid than the naysayers imagined. Twenty percent as the limit? The Germany and Danish grids are among the most reliable around with twice that, and it may be that with currently existing technology and known practice this can continue to be expanded into the sixty percent range.

Of course, that leaves the question of the other forty percent, which would seem to have to come from less intermittent sources. However, we know that hydroelectric works here, supplying many a nation with nearly all its power (advanced, high-income, intensively energy-consuming Norway getting 98 percent from this one source), while it provides the world as a whole with a sixth of its power. Geothermal production, rather less exploited, offers similar stability, and can be vastly expanded on the basis of current, never mind future, technique. Solar thermal energy production, increasingly affordable, offers considerable potentials (a decade ago there was already talk of its providing the world a quarter of its energy), with biofuels potentially playing a role in this area.

In short, with current know-how one can push the contribution of a broader mix of renewables far beyond sixty percent--perhaps not yet all the way to one hundred percent globally, but at least in a good part of it, not least the United States, coming fairly close. Meanwhile, advances in grids, and storage tecnologies for energy production of all kinds (battery prices are falling) hold out the hope of still more than that (all on top of the continued cheapening and increasing productivity of power output from these various sources).

This raises two possibilities, broadly speaking. One is to attempt to capitalize on known technique to the fullest extent, and develop the other possibilities to the end of closing the gaps.

The other is to deem the successes and the perhaps easily realizable potentials irrelevant, and declaring the cause totally and hopelessly lost for all time, write them off and seek something else entirely. Never mind what we're seeing in northern Europe and elsewhere; never mind how consistently wrong they have been in the past on this score. Don't bother going for more wind and solar, we may have too much already. Let's go on cooking with gas!

In the circumstances, it is astonishing that so many, so vehemently, promote the latter course as the sounder of the two options. But that is where the situation stands, with proponents of this view promoting their ideas as if they were rigorous, tough-minded thinking in contrast with the flakiness of those wishing for a 100 percent renewable base for electrical production--and viciously beating down anyone who suggests otherwise. (Mention Fukushima, and they roll their eyes at you ostentatiously, as if to say you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. You're not.)

The wrongheadedness of this view apart, there is also the dishonesty of their view of nuclear as tried and true and somehow a safe, conservative bet. The truth is that any course we take in regard to our energy base, like any large-scale, long-range investment, will involve uncertainty and risk, proportioned to the scale and range of that investment. (And indeed, has there ever been a larger-scale, longer-range investment than the need to change the energy base so as to ward off climate catastrophe?) Someone who thinks that multiplying the number of atomic reactors in the world is a risk-free, costless endeavor is not as out of touch with reality as the climate change deniers who insist that fossil fuels are JUST DANDY, but still needs to think long and hard about that position.

For my part: I have already gone on the record as saying I am not taking the hard, never-nuclear line. I am certainly for the 100 percent renewable energy objective, requisite moonshots and all. But I have also argued for continued development of Generation Four nuclear. (Think thorium-fueled molten salt plants.) The difference is that I see them as a Plan B, to fill in whatever gaps emerge in the broader plan. I trust they will not be many. Perhaps we will not even need the alternative at all. But the object of moving, moving in a big way, moving fast, is far too important for us to totally rule anything out.

The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet
4/23/19
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The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers

I have been writing about energy issues for over a decade. In that time I have noticed, time and again, the reliance of those who denigrate renewable energy on "fighting dirty"--relying on shoddy, mendacious argument, and irrational appeals, to bully those who disagree with them. It seems only appropriate to say something of that.

Double Standards in Technological Comparisons
First and foremost I have been struck by the tendency of detractors of renewable energy to present a balance sheet consisting solely of its credits, not its debits--often while pretending to compare it with the more established sources, often without actually presenting the figures on that balance sheet at all.

For example, they are quick to point out that renewables have received subsidies, and that they carry ecological costs--accounting for greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle. They do not, however, concern themselves with the fact that the same goes for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--as if they had no costs or problems at all, as if they were totally wonderful and perfect. The result is that there is no comparison among these diverse options to see how they stack up in these respects, no consideration of whether renewables may, in fact, be advantageous to some appreciable, worthwhile degree--only much harping on any imperfection they may have, as if this were an automatic deal-breaker.

This may be an oversight on their part--albeit, one which suggests a strong bias in their focusing on the downsides of renewables while ignoring those of established energy sources. However, it may also be a matter of their knowing full well how poorly their favored sources stack up in any such comparison.

Yes, renewables have received subsidies--feed-in tariffs and the like. But so have fossil fuels--which may now be getting the benefit of as much as five trillion dollars a year according not to Greenpace, but to that high church of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund. Nuclear energy, too, has been a beneificary of heavy subsidy, and produced great externalities. (The renewables-basher gets contemptuous if you mention Fukushima, but guess what? The clean-up bill for that disaster was estimated at $200 billion--three years and much bad news ago.)

Yes, renewables have not been competing on a level playing field--because that field has been tilted so long and so sharply in favor of the established energy sources.

Yes, while the spinning of a wind turbine does not in itself produce greenhouse gas emissions, the production, installation, disposal of a wind turbine entails carbon dioxide emissions. How much?

Eleven grams per kilowatt-hour.

It is not zero.

But compare that with the kilogram of carbon dioxide (980 g) produced by a coal plant, the half-kilo (465) by a natural gas plant, which means that a wind turbine generates 98-99 percent less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity. Rather than cause for despair about them this is a powerful argument on their behalf.

Treating Technologies in Isolation
The pattern of giving half of the picture or less in the manner described above extends beyond comparisons between renewables and more established sources to lengthy debunking of the prospect of one source of renewable energy carrying the whole burden--100 percent solar, for example. This is, in part, because the idea of such a "monoculture" is an easy straw man. By and large, proponents of renewable energy, cognizant of the limits of any one form of production, advocate a mix of technologies, to cover a wide variety of circumstances and locations--solar working with wind working with hydropower and whatever else may be available at a particular location that, much as nuclear and coal and gas complement each other in today's grids, would do the same in a renewables-based economy, substantially overcoming weaknesses such as the intermittency of sources. The sun may not shine all day--but when it is not shining, the wind turbines may be spinning.

They also tend to ignore the significant ongoing changes in the way grids as a whole are run--in particular, the shift from grids generating wasteful "baseload" energy ("too much when you don't need it, not enough when you do") to flexible, "smart" grids able to cope swiftly and precisely with shifting supply and demand. As Germany has demonstrated, where grids are sufficiently flexible and connectivity, they can already substanially handle the task of matching intermittent wind and solar to demand at least as reliably as a grid based on more traditional supplies. The incorporation of still other options, like dispatchable hydroelectric power (already well-developed) and solar thermal (pricier as an electricity producer, but relatively low-cost as a way of storing renewable solar energy for dispatch later), provides still more options.

Ruling Out Further Technical Progress
In addition to their tendency to give the advantages of renewables (and disadvantages of other sources) short shrift, and envision renewables-based grids in straw man terms, the detractors of renewable energy, when going beyond the question of whether the technologies can bear a given burden now to whether they can possibly do so in the foreseeable future, dismiss any prospect of improvement in their cost or performance. That the price of solar power-generated electricity fell by seven-eighths in the last decade (to name just one of the more striking of the field's many areas of progress), and thus holds out promise of further improvements, especially if proper support were provided, is, in their view, completely irrelevant.

Of course, one may be willing to grant the point that one cannot build on the basis of unrealized possibilities. Yet, it is another thing to take that as reason not to try and develop those possibilities if the resources are available; and still more, rule out the option for all time. Moreover, while such detractors are extremely exacting with renewables in this area, they are often quite bullish on the prospects of technical progress in the areas they favor, like palliatives for the carbon emissions of continued fossil fuels consumption. Remember how Carbon Capture and Storage was going to save the world?

Once more, a double standard is in evidence.

"Too Good to Be True"
As might be guessed by anyone who has had much experience of specious argument, and those who offer it, the renewables-bashers cross the line into appeals to "truthiness"--the "quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true." How so? Simply put, much of their appeal rests on the idea that the promises made for renewables are just "too good to be true"--an appeal to cynicism and pessmism as such.

Why is that the case? One reason is that the pervasiveness and prestige of the idea that the world must always not be as we would like it to be, that the cosmos is rigged against any chance of human happiness (the "tragic view"), is somehow the beginning and end of wisdom--and that anyone expecting better is a fool--can scarcely be overstated. The idea that we cannot have a green modernity, being unpalatable, consequently seems the "truthier" for being unpalatable. Truthier, too, because of the pompous aloofness with which such words are often spoken, the comfortable being so inclined to lay down the "hard facts of life" to those they see as inferiors; and because of the simple-minded equation of irony with wit, the more for how snobbish irony can be. And truthier because we live in such a postmodernist, end-of-history cultural atmosphere, where people in middle age have no memory of a major problem being solved, only of endless talk, broken promises, betrayals, as things go on getting worse, much worse, especially in regard to the environment. (The environmental movement has won battles, but just about never any big ones, while everything we see in 2019 tells us just how badly they have been losing the war--for decades.)

It seems to me that it might even be the case that, even if people suspect the claims that a renewable energy-based modernity is unworkable are untrue, they are susceptible to going along with it because of that same harsh experience in these decades--that Big Business never loses a fight, that a greener economy can only happen at their sufferance, and that if this means atomic energy, nuclear or nothing, as their shills and their trolls so endlessly insist, then that is preferable to the alternative.

All of this derives additional force from the identification of aspirations to a world which is happier and greener with the countercultural "hippie," still after all these years held up as a straw man for the contempt of the right-wingers who won that particular kulturkampf and never let anyone forget it--hippies contrasted with the "practical men" (I suspect the gendered aspect of this is relevant) laying down the "hard facts of life."

Looking back over it all, one can see how many are intimidated, if not persuaded, by all of that. But to say that it is a logically compelling argument is something else.

There, they lose and lose decisively--and no one should ever forget that.

Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript

Recently, irritated by the endless repetition of the same tired, debunked arguments purportedly showing why renewable energy sources can never be a major factor in resolving the energy-climate crisis by nuclear energy shills and others of their vile ilk (as well as a good many perfectly honest people taken in by their propaganda), I decided to write a post debunking these arguments--specifically the claims that renewables are too expensive, too unreliable, have too low an EROEI, and are too ecologically unsound (too polluting, too intensive in their use of land area and raw materials).

In that piece I concentrated on the production of electricity of wind and solar, to the exclusion of other types of renewables. Of course, no one expects that even the full diversity of these two sources (onshore and offshore wind, photovoltaic and thermal solar in its centralized and decentralized forms) will have to carry the burden by themselves, even in a 100 percent renewable energy-based economy. Hydroelectric and geothermal power each provide other options, with hydroelectric especially notable for its low monetary and energy cost, and easy dispatchability--alleviating one of those areas where wind and solar may be at some disadvantage, and in general simplifying the problem of shifting to a grid completely powered by renewables. I also limited my discussion of the prospects for progress in these areas, and particularly the possibilities of more radical technology rapidly aiding our progress--like the development of high-altitude wind power (one striking estimate regarding which is that it may have a whopping EROEI of 600!).

This was, in part, because as it was the piece quickly grew far longer than I had originally intended (4,500 words, with close to seventy hyperlinks playing the role of endnotes). However, it was also because I wanted to focus on the fuller capabilities of these technologies which seem so likely to be critical in any solution, as their concrete possibilities actually stand at the present time--the better to fulfill that object of answering those detractors whose attacks drove me to write in the first place.

Reflections on "The Moral Equivalent of War"

Several years ago I wrote a brief piece recalling the view of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war," and why the crisis has so signally failed to call forth the implicit, and required, leadership, enthusiasm and effort.

One factor that I think merited more discussion is the utter failure of the environmental movement to offer any vision of a better life for the people of the world. Odd to me then, this now seems to me easily ascribable to its having been so strongly shaped by a constellation of toxic, reactionary ideas--Malthusianism, postmodernism, neoliberalism. After all, not only are such ideas incapable of offering visions of hope to people, but they emerged from a vicious desire to crush such hopes. And of course, neoliberalism, in as well as out of its environmental variation, was devoted to assaulting the idea of the public, the collective--the use of government power to solve problems--for the sake of protecting the prerogatives and profits of the financial sector.

Today, amid talk of a Green New Deal--in the United States, vehemently opposed not only by the avowed right, but the staunchly neoliberal "establishment" of the Democratic Party whose face has now become the sneering visage of Nancy Pelosi, and at the same time, resonating with a public increasingly demanding action--one wonders if the day of neoliberal environmentalism, in spite of the continued faith of elites, in it, is not drawing to a close.

Time Capsule: Thomas Friedman and Enron

It would be a great understatement to say that Thomas Friedman has long since lost whatever credibility he may ever have had as an economic thinker, or observer of the political scene. This is so much the case that it can hardly seem worth bothering with his prior statements. Yet, time and again I find myself thinking of one of his less well-known gaffes: his shameless and shameful fawning over Enron in The Lexus and the Olive Tree as the epitome of that dynamic, globalized turbo-capitalism for which he was such a cheer-leader; as proof positive of how the information economy was the real scene of the action now, quoting Kenneth Lay's remarks at paragraph-length and then himself declaring that "if Enron's exchange works, it could be the equivalent of discovering cyber-oil, for Enron and for the United States," then goes on to glory for several paragraphs more in the thought of how those loser Eurosclerotics across the Pond will soon find the American "hyperpower" even more than before the global sheriff and all-around "Michael Jordan" of the world economy.

Friedman even argued that while it engaged in ecologically threatening practices Enron, and other companies like it (he spoke its name this time in the same breath as "Nike, MTV, McDonald's, Pizza Hut . . . Taco Bell"), were ultimately to be regarded as the keepers of our environment for us, and our one hope for its salvation that "civil society" would get them to do the right thing in the end (even if he conceded that this seemed like "a hope and a prayer" at the time).

Less than three years later, Enron was not just bankrupt, but revealed as a colossal fraud. Alas, few if any bothered to point out Friedman's earlier praises, and I suspect still fewer than that read anything into it. But in hindsight it seems remarkably symbolic--about what the financialization at the heart of neoliberalization has meant; about the delusions regarding a New, information Economy; about the hopes of business, with a little encouragement from civil society, doing right by the environment (as cash continues to pour into fossil fuels). Symbolic of their inanity, and if they were not an ultra-cynical fraud from start to finish, their utter insanity. Indeed, nearly two decades after Friedman published that particular bucket of drivel, that little bit of it still seems representative of the illusions of the '90s, illusions whose discrediting is harder to deny or ignore now than before, but which still dominate the "respectable" discourse, as they can only do for so long as neoliberalism remains king, and even a good many critically minded observers accept the insistence that There Is No Alternative. Thus did it go, for example, in Adam Tooze's in many other respects excellent history of the financial crisis, Crashed.

The broader public seems to have other ideas, however, and I increasingly suspect that the courtiers of the Davos Crowd, still telling us that everything is just dandy, will have a harder and harder time ignoring this.

Bullshit Jobs--and Bullshit Consumption?

I have already written here about the idea of degrowth, and not in a positive fashion. While the idea is unrealistic, and its proponents are generally supporting it for intellectually and morally questionable reasons, it is a far different thing to say that, at least for substantial portions of the citizenries of the higher-income, more developed countries (and to differing degrees, well beyond these strata), people could easily be living better while consuming less. The reason is not because consumption levels make no contribution to human happiness, or consumer comforts are somehow pernicious, but because our lives are organized--indeed, organized for us--so that we are forced to consume a great deal in ways that, on balance, do not make us happier, and make many of us less happy.

I do not deny that the "manufacture of wants" by marketers, shopping-as-entertainment, and the rest, contain much that is unhealthy and hollow--and compel people to make choices they otherwise would not have, whether due to their manipulation by business, or the social pressure to fit in. However, that seems to me secondary. More significant is the fact that, to refer back to John K. Galbraith, public squalor forces people to pursue private affluence; that, partly because of that squalor (the costs of auto ownership, child care, etc.), two-income families are prone to fall into the two-income trap of which Elizabeth Warren wrote; and the design of consumer goods of all kinds for short lives and disposal rather than repair.

Considering those matters it seems to me that, as David Graeber observed, we are working bullshit jobs--to pay for what I will call "bullshit consumption," consumption that brings us no pleasure or benefit (consumption that, like many a bullshit job, amounts to "duct-taping"), and this, largely for the sake of keeping ourselves in bullshit jobs, while our expenditures keep other people in bullshit jobs in an economy that, in the end, has bullshit for an organizing principle.

Why We Really Consume As We Do

Neoliberal environmentalists, befitting their essentially misanthropic, right-wing outlook, and its tendency to reduce major problems to matters of individual failure (as their counterparts in other areas do when discussing poverty, substance abuse, obesity, etc.), make much of the depravity of people's spending and consumption habits. "Oh!" they say, "isn't it horrible! All that money they spend and that gas they burn and all those things they buy and throw away! What horrid self-indulgence! What appalling personal irresponsibility!"

I totally agree that our current consumption patterns are far from ideal. What I have taken issue with in the past, and continue to take issue with now, is their characteristically neoliberal explanation for why it is that people consume as they do. I take the position that there is a good deal of consumption which has nothing to do with the consumer's "choices" in any meaningful sense of that term, and everything to do with choices made by persons far more powerful than they, with a focus on three aspects of this--the private-public balance in our economic lives; the consumption directly required by the fact that it is required of people who work; and finally, the production priorities of manufacturers, who virtually eliminate consumer choice in many key areas.

1. The most basic reason why we consume so much is, to borrow from the ever useful John Kenneth Galbraith, the reality of public poverty, which makes high private consumption necessary to meet any given need. There is no public transport--and so people have no choice but more expensive, more polluting, private cars. There is no national health care system--and so they must buy health care as a commodity sold in the marketplace by a profit-seeking enterprise, which also entails great costs (with the result that the U.S. spends twice per capita what France does per capita, while achieving poorer outcomes, almost half the adult population uninsured and underinsured).

The average annual cost of car ownership is $8,500 per vehicle, and a typical household has two, suggesting a figure of $17,000. At the same time the price of health care for a family of four under a typical employee-sponsored insurance plan will run $28,000. Already this swallows up most of a median household budget (some $56,000 a year), while the pattern continues through every area of life--such as housing (which has contributed to those long commutes in which people burn up so much gas in their cars) or education (private schools, especially at the post-secondary level, demanding vast fees).

2. Much of our consumption is not a matter of indulgence, but a necessity due to our working lives. White collar workers are expected to purchase costly, formal work attire. The manner in which cities have been planned, people housed and work distributed means that each is apt have little choice but to drive a privately owned car long distances each day if they are to work at all. The long hours involved in preparing for work, getting to work, on the job, and then coming back from work, leave little time for meal preparation--and so they have to eat out, or buy pre-prepared frozen meals, simply because they are harried. The long hours, the lack of maternity and paternity leave rights mean that parents of even very young children have little choice but to turn to child care services, using which entails still more driving. (Indeed, the way extra clothes, transport, eating out and child care eat up a two-income household's second income was the basis for Elizabeth Warren's study The Two-Income Trap.) And of course, this taxing, grinding schedule, entails considerable physical and mental stresses, and physical and mental problems that run up their already burdensome medical bills.

3. In addition to the reality that so much consumption is a matter of individuals doing for themselves privately and less efficiently what might be done collectively at lower cost; and the bills, ironically, paid simply for the sake of being able to have a job which will pay the bills; there is the question of the goods that are made available for purchase. Orthodox economic theory imagines the consumer as king, but the reality is entirely different. Especially in an oligopolistic marketplace, consumers buy what business is willing to sell within their price range, and for most the range of choice simply does not include much that is sensible. Many a consumer would love to be offered a choice of goods that includes items which will be durable and long-lasting; and which it will be within the power of a non-specialist to repair more cheaply than replacing them outright. They would love to be able to not pay for the arms race among competing advertisers, love to not pay for features of which they know and understand nothing and which they are unlikely to never use, love to not pay extra for new versions that really offer no advantage over the old versions.

By and large, they do not get such choices. Instead they get goods which will last a short time, which it is extremely inconvenient and expensive to repair so that replacement is the more practical option, which are heavily advertised and loaded with unwanted and unneeded extras and modifications and the rest of what the term "product differentiation" covers. And when they throw out the old goods of this type, because they have been so short-lived and unrepairable, the companies do not exactly make it easy for them to minimize the cost to the environment as they do so. American cities recycle paper and plastic and glass; they do not recycle electronics the same way, dumping the responsibility on the individual consumer who must, yet again, pay a private company out of pocket for something that could be (and should be) a public service--which, inevitably, means less recycling of what can be recycled. When they throw out what cannot be recycled, the companies have not exactly worried about its doing as little damage to nature as possible.

One could imagine the situation being quite different. One could picture a situation where public affluence means that people can live decently with less overall and less private expenditure; where shorter work weeks and decent leave periods translate to less commuting and the rest and therefore less consumption; where people, able to buy even technologically advanced items designed to last, and which they can repair, buy less; and at every stage and in every way, less damage. That so many fail to acknowledge the possibility, indeed reject it vehemently the moment it is mentioned, says less about modern life than it does about their inability or unwillingness to imagine modernity on any other terms--their passionate belief in neoliberal capitalism or nothing, and determination to not proceed from their valid, correct awareness of its ecological sustainability to the social questions inextricably bound up with it.