Guest essay by Bjørn Lomborg
Globally, renewables have been *declining* for the last two centuries, and have remained stuck at about 13% for the past 40 years.
People expect them to rise dramatically to 30% by 2035 — the honest answer is that they’re likely to rise a meagre 1.5 percentage points to 14.5%
Actually, the UK set its record for wind power in 1804, when its share reached 2.5% – almost three times its level today!
As Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly:
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”
We need to get real on renewables. Only if green energy becomes much cheaper — and that requires lots of green R&D — will a renewables transition be possible.
Data for graph: “A brief history of energy” by Roger Fouquet, International Handbook of the Economics of Energy 2009; Warde, Energy consumption in England and Wales, 1560-2000; http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Energy-Production-Statistics#tspQvChart, and EIA data (DOI: 10.1787/enestats-data-en)
Read my new oped on the topic from Project Syndicate:
Renewables will not be useful until we find a way to store the energy, otherwise we’ll always need a fossil fuel plant to step in when the wind stops or the sun is behind clouds or at night. Without energy storage renewables just increase energy costs double triple or more
Hydro is a renewable resource. Are dams with hydroelectric power included as a renewable source in the graph? I know it’s not considered to be green.
There’s a reason why we abandoned renewables
The reason renewable don’t work is Energy Density.
Are whales renewable?
Actually , renewables go back a bit further than 1800 AD. Probably at least a few million years ago, when our ancestors clambered around in fig trees, with the monkeys, picking the fruit that appeared seasonally.
They couldn’t sustain greater numbers of us back then, and it wasn’t until we discovered stored chemical energy, and how to access it (AKA fire), that our numbers took off.
Renewables never got us to here, and they never will sustain us here.
I do my bit. I heat my household with wood in the winters.
http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/image2.png
Apparently, according to the Weekend Australian, Europeans are changing their chant about green renewable energy. Of course the fallacy about renewable power is that it is free. If ‘free’ why is it loaded with subsidies?
“There’s a reason why we abandoned renewables”
Yes, it’s called material civilization… this graph could be the inverse of population growth and everything we associate with modern prosperity.
Why are we encouraged to only take energy generation back to the technology of 1800s?
I don’t see green energy working at all, no matter how cheap they make it. It has to be cheap, that’s true, but it has to be efficient, also, and it just isn’t.
Nuclear is renewable. Reactors can make their own fuel.
Ed, house heating with wood causes such severe pollution problems that many urban areas have banned the practice.
Hydro is not considered a renewable in the great Pacific Northwet State of Washington for the simple reason that you don’t get any federal money for claiming as newable anything you already built. As a result, on the windy bluffs above the Columbia River, source of renewable energy for generations to come to anyone else on the planet who wishes they had just half the dam energy we produce, our green governmental moronosphere is ushering in wind turbines. Oh – and filling the state coffers with tax dollars collected from as far away as Puerto Rico and Samoa.
I have worked in alternative energy for 14 years. Only low cost feedstocks will ever work for any alternative to crude oil. This means coal, natural gas, and perhaps shale oil. Other energy sources are simply to diverse or they contain too little inherent energy to be used to produce any meaningful volume of fuel. It takes a ton of biomass to make 1-2 bbls of liquid hydrocarbon fuel. And the largest biomass plants will be 2000 tons/day operating 340 days a year. This amount of biomass will require harvesting roughly 100+ sq mi of arable land as a monoculture under contract for 30 years in order for any reasonable investor or organization to be willing to put half a billion dollars into that facility. In terms of cost per bbl/day, a refinery is probably less than $50K/bbl/day capacity. Biomass to hydrocarbon liquids (the only truly useful fuel) are $200,000+/bbl/day capacity.
With biomass having about 7500 Btu/lb and coal over 11,000+, it is hard to compete with fossil fuel. If you factor in the risk of growing a crop (storms, drought, fire, etc.), and the need to have very long term off-take agreements (30 years would probably be necessary), it is no wonder that there are essentially no cellulosic ethanol or other biomass to liquids plants in commercial production. Even the plant that rely on animal fat as feed are shut down as they cannot compete.
Actually, storage of renewable generated energy is a rather unlikely to solve the dilemma of
dependency upon an unreliable (uncontrollable) energy input to the grid. It would hardly allow for the replacement of conventional input sources. There are several problems : exactly how much storage would be required? Wind energy can disappear for weeks or even months. And in most locales solar energy can disappear for days or weeks, and is never available in quantity for more than a few hours per day. And even if an unlimited amount of storage was available, how is it going to be replaced after it is drawn down? Right now extensive storage is only practical
via pumped storage, but that’s not cheap. 25% of the power sent to a pumped storage is lost due to system inefficiency, and the storage facilities built in California each cost several billion dollars and have a max output power of roughly a gigawatt, and can store but 10 hours worth of max power. Utilities are required to buy renewable anytime when it’s available, replacing
conventional power. But that means that the power produced by that conventional plant is less than it otherwise would be, which thereby increases the cost of each unit (kWhr) of power
now produced by the plant, since the plant is being operated at a lower output capacity.
GlynnMhor said: [i]house heating with wood causes such severe pollution problems that many urban areas have banned the practice.[/i]
Not so, there are wood burners that are DEFRA approved in the UK for use in smokeless zones, e.f. the Dunsley Yorkshire stove – http://www.dunsleyheat.co.uk/
Such stoves are typically 70-80% efficient.
GlynnMhor, tell that to the UK. Everyone is changing to wood pellets. They are even changing their coal electrical plants to wood pellets and buying the wood from the US. Yes, wood smoke causes pollution as Greece is finding out. People there cannot hang their wash on the line anymore. It dries black.
On the subject of renewables, does anyone know how much PV would cost is the making of the solar panels using power from solar panels? Most of the cost of PV is the capital cost of the solar panels. Power for smelting all the materials used in making solar panels comes from coal at the moment at say $0.04/kWh. Large scale PV installations produce at a price of perhaps $0.20 per kWh under ideal circumstances. So in effect with solar panels we are making a one off capital investment at one power price in return for an intermittent supply at a higher price over a few decades. So if we had a society that lived off solar panels only, producing them and using them, what would be the power price in that society?
China’s current plan is to have a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) working prototype completed by 2020. When this happens, I think largescale wind and solar will effectively be dead.
There will still be niche market for home solar panels as an expensive energy backup system, which may actually be fairly large given the rolling blackouts caused by impoverished countries (ie UK in the 70’s), but LFTRs will mark the end of largescale wind/solar farms.
An interesting bit of nuclear alchemy actually makes the thorium burned in reactors “free” as many nuclear isotopes created during the Thorium nuclear decay chain are worth more than the thorium being burned in the LFTR… In addition, some thorium 231 also decays into uranium 233, which is then chemically removed and diverted back to neutron core to fission more thorium…
Basically, you switch a LFTR on and it’s self sustaining for 40 years. You just dig thorium out of the ground, purify it and burn it. It requires no special processing. One average rare earth mine produces enough “waste” thorium to provide the world of all its energy needs for a year….
Neat stuff..
Wind and solar are basically the horse and buggy industry of the 21st century.
Wind is renewable. Solar activity is renewable. But wind turbines and solar panels sure aren’t.
You know the old saying; Wish in one hand, crap in the other, see which one fills first.
meanwhile, over at fukushima…
14 Aug: Reuters: Insight: After disaster, the deadliest part of Japan’s nuclear clean-up
The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale…
“The No. 4 unit was not operating at the time of the accident, so its fuel had been moved to the pool from the reactor, and if you calculate the amount of cesium 137 in the pool, the amount is equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs,” said Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUKBRE97D00M20130814
I would guess total amount of energy from renewables consumed per year has remained approximately constant since 1800, that is when compared to the total combined energy consumed per year.
It’s amusing to see EIA tables now showing positive projections of wind and solar. Not long ago wind and solar were in the tank and projected to stay there. I guess the energy bureaucrats knew they have to show something else to keep their funding, that is a rosy picture of renewables gaining ground. Not a chance. The older tables were right.