By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Communities Digital News.
The global energy outlook has changed radically in just six years. President Obama was elected in 2008 by voters who believed we were running out of oil and gas, that climate change needed to be halted, and that renewables were the energy source of the near future. But an unexpected transformation of energy markets and politics may instead make 2014 the year of peak renewables.
In December of 2007, former Vice President Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for work on man-made climate change, leading an international crusade to halt global warming. In June, 2008 after securing a majority of primary delegates, candidate Barack Obama stated, “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…” Climate activists looked to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference as the next major step to control greenhouse gas emissions.
The price of crude oil hit $145 per barrel in June, 2008. The International Energy Agency and other organizations declared that we were at peak oil, forecasting a decline in global production. Many claimed that the world was running out of hydrocarbon energy.
Driven by the twin demons of global warming and peak oil, world governments clamored to support renewables. Twenty years of subsidies, tax-breaks, feed-in tariffs, and mandates resulted in an explosion of renewable energy installations. The Renewable Energy Index (RENIXX) of the world’s 30 top renewable energy companies soared to over 1,800.
Tens of thousands of wind turbine towers were installed, totaling more than 200,000 windmills worldwide by the end of 2012. Germany led the world with more than one million rooftop solar installations. Forty percent of the US corn crop was converted to ethanol vehicle fuel.
But at the same time, an unexpected energy revolution was underway. Using good old Yankee ingenuity, the US oil and gas industry discovered how to produce oil and natural gas from shale. With hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, vast quantities of hydrocarbon resources became available from shale fields in Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania.
From 2008 to 2013, US petroleum production soared 50 percent. US natural gas production rose 34 percent from a 2005 low. Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey, and more than ten nations in Europe began issuing permits for hydraulic fracturing. The dragon of peak oil and gas was slain.
In 2009, the ideology of Climatism, the belief that humans were causing dangerous global warming, came under serious attack. In November, emails were released from top climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, an incident christened Climategate. The communications showed bias, manipulation of data, avoidance of freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process, all to further the cause of man-made climate change.
One month later, the Copenhagen Climate Conference failed to agree on a successor climate treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Failures at United Nations conferences at Cancun (2010), Durban (2011), Doha (2012), and Warsaw (2013) followed. Canada, Japan, Russia, and the United States announced that they would not participate in an extension of the Kyoto Protocol.
Major climate legislation faltered across the world. Cap and trade failed in Congress in 2009, with growing opposition from the Republican Party. The price of carbon permits in the European Emissions Trading System crashed in April 2013 when the European Union voted not to support the permit price. Australia elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the fall of 2013 on a platform of scrapping the nation’s carbon tax.
Europeans discovered that subsidy support for renewables was unsustainable. Subsidy obligations soared in Germany to over $140 billion and in Spain to over $34 billion by 2013. Renewable subsidies produced the world’s highest electricity rates in Denmark and Germany. Electricity and natural gas prices in Europe rose to double those of the United States.
Worried about bloated budgets, declining industrial competitiveness, and citizen backlash, European nations have been retreating from green energy for the last four years. Spain slashed solar subsidies in 2009 and photovoltaic sales fell 80 percent in a single year. Germany cut subsidies in 2011 and 2012 and the number of jobs in the German solar industry dropped by 50 percent. Renewable subsidy cuts in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom added to the cascade. The RENIXX Renewable Energy Index fell below 200 in 2012, down 90 percent from the 2008 peak.
Once a climate change leader, Germany turned to coal after the 2012 decision to close nuclear power plants. Coal now provides more than 50 percent of Germany’s electricity and 23 new coal-fired power plants are planned. Global energy from coal has grown by 4.4 percent per year over the last ten years.
Spending on renewables is in decline. From a record $318 billion in 2011, world renewable energy spending fell to $280 billion in 2012 and then fell again to $254 billion in 2013, according to Bloomberg. The biggest drop occurred in Europe, where investment plummeted 41 percent last year. The 2013 expiration of the US Production Tax Credit for wind energy will continue the downward momentum.
Today, wind and solar provide less than one percent of global energy. While these sources will continue to grow, it’s likely they will deliver only a tiny amount of the world’s energy for decades to come. Renewable energy output may have peaked, at least as a percentage of global energy production.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Oh, dear Mode-rat-or, pardon my French… . (at 2:49pm)
#(;))
Re: “The point is that wind power supply can make the problem worse at least as often as better.”
(Stephen Rasey)
Net Benefit: < or = to ZERO.
Cost per unit: taxpayer subsidies + marginal cost over what cost of conventional power source/Mwatt = NET NEGATIVE ROI —no matter what.
Wind power is for fools.
Correction to: Stephen Rasey at 3:39 pm
To Roger Sowell’s point at 3/12 8:42 am, the load itself might drop 16,000 MW in 5 hrs (Jan 25) or grow 23,000 MW in 18 hrs. So there is plenty of load changes that on-demand sources must meet. The point is that wind power supply can make the problem worse at least as often as better.
This thread may be dead by now, who knows. But just for posterity, it should be noted that Warren Buffett, CEO and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has approved spending around $1 billion for new windturbines. From a December, 2013 announcement:
“MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., the power unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), agreed to buy wind turbines valued at more than $1 billion from Siemens AG (SIE) for five projects in Iowa, in the supplier’s biggest order to date for land-based wind equipment.
Siemens will provide 448 of its 2.3-megawatt turbines with total capacity of almost 1,050 megawatts, enough to power about 320,000 households, Munich-based Siemens said today in a statement.
MidAmerican is expanding in wind as costs fall. Turbine prices have declined about 19 percent from the first half of 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making wind power more competitive with energy produced from fossil fuels.”
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-16/buffett-s-midamerican-gives-siemens-biggest-turbine-order.html
If wind energy is such a bad deal, someone should inform Warren Buffett of that. I’m sure he will place great credence in your informing him. Note that Buffett does not buy or build new nuclear power plants, but does invest in new wind turbines. (MidAmerican Energy, his utility company, does own a small share of a nearby nuclear power plant. That came with the deal to purchase MidAmerican Energy, though.)
Meanwhile, we are still waiting for evidence that the Iowa power grid is failing. Give the engineers some credit, you wind energy denouncers. Still waiting for evidence that fossil fuel use increased in Iowa due to wind turbines. Still waiting for evidence that EPA permits for pollutants like NOx and SOx are being violated in Iowa due to wind turbines.
Finally, someone wanted more frequent information on Texas’ grid and wind energy. Here is a link that provides grid frequency to 3 decimal places, demand, and wind energy produced. It updates every few minutes or one can refresh the screen. Note that Texas does just fine in regulating their grid even with 12,000 + MW of installed turbine capacity. One may want to watch the Texas grid this weekend since a prolonged and strong wind event is forecast. The weekend will have lower demand as always, so the percentage of wind energy in the grid will be higher than usual.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
@roger Sowell
All of your arguments are on topics made irrelevant by liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTYR).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/02/a-review-of-thorium-energy-cheaper-than-coal-by-robert-hargraves/#more-71841
Starting with 3 cents per kWh, compared to about 25 cents for wind (wind turbines are junk after 15 years) and solar (junk when installed at 10% of rated capacity) (plus 6 cents per kWh
for a few hours of storage for both wind and solar, and still needing 100% spinning reserve), then the facts that LFTR is safe, non-proliferating, and consumes rather than produces radioactive waste. No water needed; little space required; safe within urban areas with very short distribution lines needed; no strain on power grids from load following, &etc.
Safer
LFTRs have no high pressure to contain (no water coolant), generate no combustible or explosive materials;
Freeze Plug melts in emergency, fuel drains to passive cooling tanks where fission is impossible;
Reactor materials won’t melt under normal or emergency conditions, radioactive materials stay contained. (Even if a bomb or projectile breaks the reactor vessel, it makes a spill that cools to solid, doesn’t interact with air or water, with most fission products chemically bonded to the salt);
LFTRs can passively cool even without electricity (never uses water);
Salt coolant can’t boil away (boiling point much higher than reactor temperature), so loss of coolant accidents are physically impossible.
Much More Economical
Ambient-pressure operation makes LFTRs easier and cost less to build (no pressure containment dome, no high-pressure pipes);
Operating cost is less since inherent safety means less complex systems;
Fuel cost is lower since thorium is a cheap, plentiful fuel; or eliminate LWR waste as fuel;
No expensive enrichment or fuel rod fabrication is required;
Total to develop LFTR technology and factory less than the $10-12 Billion cost of a Single new LWR; then 100MW LFTR would cost about $200 Million.
The US developed the technology at Oak Ridge over half a century ago, and now China is pursuing it. Roger, all of your “fixes” for the problems of wind and solar intermittence are new and unproven technologies, very “pie in the sky” solutions, untested and undoubtably very expensive. Nuclear energy is in its infancy, yet already has achieved more proven worth than wind and solar are capable of at their hypothetical best.
Unlike wind and solar, which need unproven technologies to store power, LFTR can run continuously at full power and excess power can be diverted to desalinization of water.
Roger, I do appreciate that you use outstanding methods to achieve mediocre returns. It is a shame you have not found better applications for your knowledge and skills than to beat a dead horse on this excellent forum.
@roger Sowell at 9:09 am
If wind energy is such a bad deal, someone should inform Warren Buffett of that.
You know very well that the argument is not:
A) that wind farms are uneconomical to build and operate with tax payer subsidies.
The argument is that
B) wind farms are a poor economic choice from the point of view of the tax payer.
If Warren Buffet is building wind farms without tax payer subsidies, please let us know. That would be news.
@ur momisugly Stephen Rasey, at 3:42 pm March 16
Wind farms are built with taxpayer subsidies, no argument there.
The best arguments for wind are:
1) Wind farms also reduce electricity prices, which benefits consumers who are (presumably) also taxpayers.
2) Wind farms cause nuclear power plants to shut down by making the nukes unprofitable. All of society wins.
Who can say what the net result is? To me, the net result is favorable. Your conclusion may be different.
@ur momisugly Michael B. Combs
“Roger, all of your “fixes” for the problems of wind and solar intermittence are new and unproven technologies, very “pie in the sky” solutions, untested and undoubtably very expensive.”
Actually, grid-scale energy storage solutions are not unproven, not “pie in the sky”, nor untested. They are, though, prohibitively expensive. But only for now.
As evidence, there are commercial-scale batteries in operation today on Santa Catalina Island, which is offshore Los Angeles, California. The Sodium-Sulfur battery stores 1 MW of power.
see http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sc-electric-company-helps-southern-california-edison-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions-124591908.html
High-speed flywheels also work, but not yet at grid scales. Hundreds of these work quite well at smaller scales.
Per the MIT article referenced above, these storage spheres were built and tested on a smaller scale. That shows they are proven.
An article from 5 years ago from my blog discusses ESS, Energy Storage Systems. In that article, I listed these ESS types: ” advanced batteries, ultra-capacitors, superconducting systems, high-speed flywheels, compressed air energy storage, pumped hydroelectric, pressurized hydraulic storage, among others.”
see http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/energy-storage-key-to-renewables.html
As electricity prices increase over time, and renewable energy delivery systems’ prices decrease, ESS will become more and more attractive. It is only a matter of when, not if.
The arguments about LFTR are one-sided, neglecting all the multitude of drawbacks for the system. There are serious reasons why the US dropped development of LFTR.
“The arguments about LFTR are one-sided, neglecting all the multitude of drawbacks for the system. There are serious reasons why the US dropped development of LFTR.”
And serious reasons why China and India are picking up LFTR.
To elaborate briefly on some of the drawbacks of LFTR,
1) The Oak Ridge National Laboratory LFTR was an experimental, small-scale partial system only, not a full power plant. It was only 7 MW of thermal output, meaning serious scale-up would be required to achieve a commercial-size unit. Roughly, 450-to-1 scale-up is required to obtain a 1,000 MWe output reactor. That degree of scale-up is not trivial, nor is it even guaranteed to be successful. Chinese researchers are today attempting the scale-up.
2) Materials used in the reactor developed serious inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the molten salt. This cracking would seriously limit the life of a commercial-scale reactor. It is questionable if such a reactor could last for 30 years.
see e.g. http://moltensalt.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/references/static/downloads/pdf/ORNL-TM-6002.pdf
Public fears over the reactors cracking apart like a dropped egg would be sufficient to cause massive demonstrations to halt such technology. It would be especially difficult to prove to the NRC that a reactor at 20 years of life is sufficiently un-cracked to continue operation. We have enough troubles today with pitting, erosion, and metal loss in nuclear reactor tube walls. Inherent cracks in the LFTR metal surfaces will be a PR nightmare.
3) Costs to construct and operate are speculative at best. So is the safety of such a system, especially given the inherent cracking mentioned above.
The LFTR problems are far less speculative and are capable of solution compared to the pie-in-the-sky (and undoubtedly very expensive) fixes you cite for solar and wind storage. And building those fixes in the harsh ocean environment and depending on them is a monumental stretch in credibility.
Roger Sowell says:
March 16, 2014 at 5:44 pm
“Public fears over the reactors cracking apart like a dropped egg would be sufficient to cause massive demonstrations to halt such technology.”
And people like you would do their very best to make it sound as if a non-pressurized LFTR would be exactly as dangerous as a pressurized Light Water Reactor.
Wind Power kills four times as many people as nuclear.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/03/24/nuclear-is-the-safest-form-of-energy-opposition-is-a-glaring-denial-of-reality/
But granted, it’s less dangerous than solar.
@ur momisugly majormike1 re 6:59 pm
“And serious reasons why China and India are picking up LFTR.”
No, there are serious reasons why China and India are desperately TRYING to pick up LFTR.
India is out of options. India has no oil to speak of, no gas, not nearly enough coal. The country’s wind and solar endowment is insufficient to provide power to the population. They could purchase coal, and oil, and they are doing so. Australia is willing to sell coal to India. But, in the face of all their energy shortages, India is trying to develop nuclear. The population is not thrilled, due to the seismic nature of much of India.
China is also trying to build uranium-based reactors, and to develop the LFTR. It is far too early to celebrate a LFTR operating at 500 MWe output, that will run safely for decades. China also has earthquakes, and some really big ones.
I suggest the LFTR proponents take a serious look at the technology, and view it as an engineer does. It has some promise, but the technical hurdles are immense. If a different alloy is available to eliminate the cracking, great, but how much does that metal add to the cost? Is the alloy even available in sufficient quantities?
@ur momisugly DirkH at 7:15 pm
“And people like you would do their very best to make it sound as if a non-pressurized LFTR would be exactly as dangerous as a pressurized Light Water Reactor.”
Thanks for the admission that PWRs are dangerous. That is progress, for sure.
People “like me” do our best to ensure “people like you” do not endanger the population by failing to mention the inherent dangers of a technology.
The US Navy could have chosen Oak Ridge’s LFTR system for the nuclear navy. The admiral in charge considered reliability as a serious issue. Knowing that the reactors could crack and fail at any time, he chose light water moderated reactors, PWR if you will, for their superior reliability. Also, higher ups in the government wanted to create plutonium for bombs.
Even if LFTR poses no danger from a cracked and broken reactor, the cost to shut down, repair or replace the broken bits would likely preclude any utility from building on in the first place.
Does wind energy really kill people? How many wind farms have had to be permanently evacuated because they poisoned the area for miles and miles? Perhaps the people killed at Chernobyl don’t count to you. Perhaps the people who suffered massive radiation exposure at Fukushima and will soon die from that also don’t count.
@ur momisugly majormike1 re
“The LFTR problems are far less speculative and are capable of solution”
No, they are not. The Chinese are hopeful, but only hopeful. They have no clear path forward on the monumental challenges facing them in developing a commercial-scale, economical, long-lasting, safe, LFTR. You may reject my views on this, but I know from many decades experience how hard it is to scale up a process by a factor of almost 500-to-1. The problem is not quite so hard when one key component is liquid water, as in a PWR or even a BWR, because water is not viscous and has excellent heat transfer properties. But, to accomplish the scale-up with a molten salt, that is much more viscous than hot water, increases the difficulty by orders of magnitude. You can ask any research chemical engineer.
“. . .compared to the pie-in-the-sky (and undoubtedly very expensive) fixes you cite for solar and wind storage.”
No, as I wrote above, the technologies for ESS are not speculative, they are proven to various extents. The only issues are cost and economics.
“ And building those fixes in the harsh ocean environment and depending on them is a monumental stretch in credibility.”
The ocean environment is not nearly as harsh as you make it out to be. Oil and gas exploration has been quite successful for decades offshore. Dropping a hollow concrete sphere onto the ocean floor in a few hundred feet of water is not a challenge. Mounting a wind-turbine on a floating platform, perhaps a tension-leg platform, is also not a challenge.
Give the offshore engineers some credit. They built Troll platform, after all.
Dr. Edward Teller was a proponent of LFTR, and his physics credentials seem quite impressive. The costs and economics of solar and wind are by far the most relevant factors. Wind turbines become junk after 15 years, if not sooner, and must be significantly overbuilt to withstand sporadic super storms. Neither solar nor wind can be sited in close proximity to most major population centers, and increasing their share on power grids soon leads to instability. Further, no storage methodology can obviate the need for spinning backup and load following; wind and solar can not be baseload because even with storage, their output fluctuates, and storage (which for all practical purposes has not been developed, and will be prohibitively expensive when it is) is inadequate for more than a fraction of a day. I lived in view of the Altamont Pass for nine years, and much of the time its wind turbines were idle. A friend owned a significant portion of Altamont, and said without subsidies it was worthless. I lived in Tucson for two years, and as you might expect, the winter low sun angle greatly diminished available solar energy, and long winter nights further complicated the issue. A chart of a daily power curve shows only a brief midday period of stable output, and the rest of the time increasing, decreasing, or no energy production. Solar energy production compared to rated capacity tends towards 10%, less than half of wind’s abysmal 25%. You seems dedicated to putting lipstick on a pig, but that pig will never win a beauty contest.
“The ocean environment is not nearly as harsh as you make it out to be. Oil and gas exploration has been quite successful for decades offshore. Dropping a hollow concrete sphere onto the ocean floor in a few hundred feet of water is not a challenge.”
I’ve lived by the ocean half my life, including the past 16 years on the northern California coast less than half a mile from the Pacific. The ocean environment is very harsh, but not nearly as harsh as the political climate against placing any structures off shore in California, even if beyond the horizon and not visible from shore. Of course, the continental shelf ends before then, so the depths beyond exceed 1,000 feet. Since Obama just placed almost all our northern California coast into a National Monument, such development is now forbidden in perpetuity on what is easily the windiest part of the West Coast.
That leaves off-shore Monterey, San Luis Obispo. Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego with their wimpy wind power as alternative sites for wind farms (here I am dripping sarcasm). Maybe offshore wind enthusiasts should look at Hyannis Port to place more wind turbines for the Kennedy’s to admire, or off the Florida coast to amuse the tourists. When the subsidies run out, they can turn it into a wind turbine theme park dedicated to illustrating the foolishness of humanity.