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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