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.
Storing the energy from windturbines is not a pipe dream. MIT (some smart guys there) have developed a storage system for offshore windturbines.
“Whenever the wind turbines produce more power than is needed, that power would be diverted to drive a pump attached to the underwater structure, pumping seawater from a 30-meter-diameter (100 feet, approximately) hollow sphere. Later, when power is needed, water would be allowed to flow back into the sphere through a turbine attached to a generator, and the resulting electricity sent back to shore.”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/wind-power-even-without-the-wind-0425.html
@ur momisugly yirgach; re your assertion that nuclear power plants are cheaper than coal. And cheaper than solar thermal.
No, they are not. The California Energy Commission published a 2010 study that shows a Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant, single-reactor, is far more costly than the two items you claim. Nuclear costs about 34 cents per kWh, coal-derived power about 18 cents, and solar thermal is about 30 cents.
@ur momisugly John F. Hultquist, see my comment at 11:05 a.m. this date. No waiting required.
Grid-scale energy storage has several technologies. The MIT proposal is probably the most economic. Others are not yet economic.
However, they will certainly become economic if and when nuclear power plants are built in large numbers.
You and I have disagreed over nuclear power many times. I don’t make this stuff up, it is all in the factual disclosures on construction costs and operating costs.
Just a note for Crispin – Bell was in Boston working with local electrical engineer Watson when he invented the telephone, backed by his future father-in-law Hubbard. He was in Ontario prior to moving to Boston, but filed patent in US, just hours before Elisha Gray filed his version.
No implications intended, just wanted the history correct.
Taylor
“Please, “Using good old Yankee ingenuity” enough of the jingoistic drivel. engineers from all over the world have known about the ‘next mile’ extraction of carbon reserves for decades.”
Fracking was first used commercially in American oil drilling (late 1940’s). It became common all over the world in the decades to follow to increase oil production (natural gas was mostly just burnt off as a waste product)
The so-called “Fracking Revolution” was the idea of combining horizontal drilling techniques perfected in the 1990’s with more advanced fracking techniques to liberate oil and gas from “tight formations”. This allowed a single well to have numerous horizontal shafts, each fractured and held open by fracking techniques and fluids. So where a single shaft produced far too little hydrocarbons to be economical, a system of horizontal shafts made it economical as long as prices stay high.
Like all great “inventions”, it was a natural evolution and someone somewhere was going to put the pieces together sometime to make a profit. It happened in America because it had all the pieces and capitalism encourages the entrepreneur. It could have started in any other capitalistic country that had a strong energy industry, but odds favored it would take hold in America (size, wealth, oil industry).
Roger Sowell;
“Whenever the wind turbines produce more power than is needed, that power would be diverted to drive a pump attached to the underwater structure, pumping seawater from a 30-meter-diameter (100 feet, approximately) hollow sphere. Later, when power is needed, water would be allowed to flow back into the sphere through a turbine attached to a generator, and the resulting electricity sent back to shore.”
I truly an tired of your anti-nuclear zealotry which rivals the CAGW crowd on the strength of its religious convictions rather than facts, determined smear campaigns to instill fear, and blatant attempts to present alternatives as being viable when they are not. On this last point, your quote above is a shining example. One completely lame brained uneconomical ridiculous scheme stapled on top of another lame brained uneconomical ridiculous scheme doesn’t result in anything other than a system so stupifyingly idiotic that it could only be presented with a straight face by a lawyer on mission.
The history of renewable energy in the US is predicated on a false notion of natural gas scarcity. Having worked in the oil and gas industry for more than two decades, it is apparent to me how the windturbines and solar power plants were created.
In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter (who has an engineering degree and should have known better) declared that the US was running out of natural gas. Fears of skyrocketing prices for natural gas led to the subsidy of wind and solar power systems. Carter was wrong, of course, as events have shown. We have technologies, as some above have commented on, that have produced ample gas supplies and driven the price downward to around $4 per million Btu (British thermal units). As I write on my blog, the technology geeks are winning.
Peak Oil promoters, and peak natural gas doomsayers continue to this day to spread unfounded alarmism that fossil fuels will run out someday, and we must therefore promote government subsidies to develop efficient and cost-effective renewable energy plants.
At 11:21 AM on 2 March, Roger Sowell had observed:
This brings me to consider yet again a question:
Are hydrocarbon fuels (including methane “natural gas”) really fossil fuels – i.e., necessarily derived from the residua of the biosphere – or are they actually abiotic?
It’s fairly well established that the Earth is an aggregation of protoplanetary materials which include the lighter and heavier elements that are today found in microgravity as planetestimals which reach the Earth’s atmosphere as meteors and the Earth’s surface as meteorites, and thus we have some “biopsies” of their composition.
Much of what we find in these planetesimals gives us to note the presence of carbonaceous chondrites, which are acknowledged to be the primitive source of the carbon compounds from which life had arisen on Earth.
How is it that these extremely primitive chondritic materials which had been in great part the mass aggregated into our planet during its earliest formation are not the direct “building blocks” from which methane (CH4) and other predominantly abiotic hydrocarbon compounds are now being accessed by way of exploiting the deeper geological strata?
The “Peak Oil” contention relies on its premise that the elements of these fuel and hydrocarbon chemical feedstocks had to have been accumulated and modified by life in order to be extracted from our planetary environment, and there’s a limitation on the suitable “work product” that life has been able to turn out over billions of years.
But what if that premise doesn’t reflect what geology in addition to biology had done to cosmological phenomena?
@ur momisugly davidmhoffer,
It appears your blood pressure is elevated. Are simple facts a problem for you? It must truly aggravate you to see a mainstream, prestigious university (MIT) publish a solution to the intermittent energy storage problem.
It will be great fun to watch as these systems are installed and work quite well in the coming years.
The radio…
1 – Maxwell (English) – predicts radio waves in 1864
2 – Hertz (German) – first to transmit / receive radio waves in 1885
3 – Tesla (Serbian-American) – proposes theory of radio wave transmission in 1893
4 – Marconi (Italian) – starts experimenting with radio transmission in 1894-1895
First trans-Atlantic radio transmission by Marconi in 1901
First commercial radio broadcast by PCGG (Dutch) in 1916
First national broadcaster in the world by the BBC in 1926
First transistor (pocket) radio invented by Texas Instruments (American) in 1954
Prior to that it was widely known that pockets were a standard 2′ by 4′
Yet another grid-scale wind-energy storage system, this one patented in the US in March, 2012.
“ABSTRACT
A method and apparatus for compressed gas energy storage using underwater tanks for storing and releasing compressed gas in offshore wind farms has been disclosed.”
Patent Publication number US20120061973 A1
@RACookPE1978 –
Very well said – and let me add this: the cost of removing and cleaning up after the wind turbines and solar arrays should be borne by those who promoted them. And I would include in that cost full reimbursement to all electric ratepayers who paid double and triple and quadruple rates for electricity because of carbon taxes and renewable mandates.
Who would pay?
– All politicians everywhere who supported this criminal waste of resources
– All shareholders of the companies that “invested” in “renewable” energy
– All members of green NGOs that supported and advocated “renewable” energy
Surely there are enough of these people, and they have enough assets, to cover at least a good chunk of these costs.
Justice.
Re Roger Sowell comment about energy storage, offshore solution is way to specialized to brig much impact, but check out SustainX of Seabrook, NH. They are working on a utility-scale solution that has attracted a lot of VC money.
Big issue has always been need for fossil backup for wind/solar. If the storage problem can be solved, it might not fix the economics and other issues, but it would certainly improve them.
Taylor
Roger Sowell;
It appears your blood pressure is elevated. Are simple facts a problem for you? It must truly aggravate you to see a mainstream, prestigious university (MIT) publish a solution to the intermittent energy storage problem.
Simple facts would be great. As soon as you start providing something other than half truths, I’ll be happy to engage. As for MIT, this particular piece of nonsense aggravates me no more than any of the CAGW swill that emerges from the same institution. Suggesting that it is credible because it comes from MIT is no more that argument from authority, a favorite tactic of the CAGW crowd that you have appropriated for your own purposes. Care to post the cost of building and maintaining such a system? Then compare that to the amount of energy that can be practically stored?
This is a great idea that works fine as long as it is funded by taxes. Take it out of the academic world and it will fail without continued subsidies. You can twist and turn all you want, this idea is dead from the get go.
A to you all Horizontal drilling in the bakken with fracking first occurred in the 1980s, the technique was abandoned with the collapse of oil prices in the mid 80. Fracking was first patented in the 1860s in the US it was crude back them, it was just a explosive charge set off in the well. I do not know when hydraulic fracking came in I believe it was some in the mid 20th century. I all can say it was common in the North Dakota oil patch in the1980s. So from what I know the groundwork for this oil boom was laid late in the last oil boom, funny how profit spurs on development.
Relevant to “Renewable Energy in Decline” — article from the Lefty Los Angeles Times today:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ivanpah-technology-20140302,0,6065137,full.story
” Massive desert solar plant opens, already a threatened species
… cheaper photovoltaic cells and natural gas plus shaky funding may make project the last of its kind in the U.S. ”
How many Hundreds of Millions of taxpayer $$ were wasted on this?
CD (@CD153) says:
March 2, 2014 at 8:09 am
Neodymium magnets are used (about one ton per alternator) to reduce the weight of the alternator in the nacelle. They are not especially rare, but they are chemically very similar to neighboring elements and hence difficult to separate chemically.
China decided to dominate REE production, and since they’re much less concerned about their environment, they got the business for now.
Neodymium doesn’t get used up any more than iron does in a magnet. The most difficult things to recycle in a wind turbine are waste oil and rotor blades.
@ur momisugly davidmhoffer, If you will take the trouble to actually read MIT’s press release, link provided in my comment of 11:05, you will find the factual data you seek. Costs, capacities, all those are there.
As for “argument from authority”, that is rich! The self-appointed fact-police on WUWT howl bitterly when assertions are made (that they don’t like) with no supporting link or authority provided.
Now you are howling equally bitterly that the link I provided is not-allowed because it is an “argument from authority”. Which is it, are links allowed or not?
Do you want to try arguing the actual facts, the engineering, the economics? Can you provide sound, good engineering practice and economics as to why and how such a system will fail?
Yes … that was my point – that Iceland is extremely unique, and only has the population of a small city, and as such its energy situation is not remotely applicable to any other area.
Shoulda used the /sarc tag 😉
Roger Sowell says to davidmhoffer:
March 2, 2014 at 11:28 am
One thing I’ve learned from WUWT is that the more prestigious the source, the more critically one should look at their press releases.
For example, in 2008 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html says in part:
Note how the story degrades from storing solar energy to electrolysing water.
In 2010, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/nocera-0514.html says in part:
Now, what’s Sun Catalytix doing? http://www.suncatalytix.com/tech.html says in toto:
I think they’re trying to make a new battery.
Roger Sowell;
Costs, capacities, all those are there.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
So post them for discussion. Cost of a single unit, maintenance over 30 years, and the amount of energy it can store. I’ve read enough drivel of this sort to know it is as waste of my time to slog through the paper. If it is all there, simply put the numbers up for discussion.
Roger Sowell – the MIT system of wind storage does nothing to address the real storage issue.
It would take one thousand 75 foot concrete spheres somehow anchored 1200 feet deep … then connected to and “anchoring” massive wind turbines on the surface … to provide “several hours” of power.
That is not any solution to the real intermittency issue at all. Like all renewables, its a massively expensive boondoggle that looks great in a press release, but would be a costly failure in the real world.
This “storage” – the ability to provide “several hours” of backup power – may address “operating” intermittency – the fluctuations in power during the time the wind generators are operating. But it does essentially nothing useful to address the REAL problem – to provide power for the 75+% capacity factor time the turbines are not generating power.
Wind generation can go days or even weeks without generating ANY power. THAT is the real storage issue, and MIT’s solution does nothing to address that serious deficiency.
Fracking is nothing new. It was the invention of the Mud Motor (by a Yankee) in the 1990’s which allowed horizontal (vs simple directional, which goes deeper continuously) drilling over long distances.
http://wattenburg.us/directionaldrilling.html
@ur momisugly Ric Werme. You misunderstand, I think. The MIT press release describes a way to use solar energy via photovoltaics to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored for later use, perhaps in use in fuel cells.
What to me is much more interesting is the research to cut out the electricity generation step.
As I wrote on my blog in June 2008,
“ there is an incredible new energy technology that is looming. What went virtually un-noticed four years ago was a breakthrough in basic research by scientists at Imperial College London. As reported . . . in the journal Science, these researchers found the precise atomic structure of the protein in plants that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen during photosynthesis. The structure is a cube with an appendage at one corner. This discovery will allow, after a period of more research and development, the production of vast quantities of hydrogen from sunlight and water, at ambient temperature and pressure. The only question, I believe, is how long it will be from laboratory discovery to commercialization.”
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/observations-on-refining-industry.html
John F. Hultquist says:
March 1, 2014 at 10:34 pm
On March 17, 1949, Halliburton performed the first two commercial hydraulic fracturing treatments …
Since Erle P Halliburton was born in Tennessee I wouldn’t say that fracking was ‘Yankee’ ingenuity. 🙂
@ur momisugly davidmhoffer, do your own homework. By wearing my engineer’s hat, I am satisfied with MIT’s numbers. You, by your own admission, have not even read the article. It is up to you to provide a valid, credible refutation. The fact that you have not done so speaks volumes.