At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system
Here are the real reasons we’re not building clean energy anywhere near fast enough.
by James Temple, MIT Technology review
Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he did a quick calculation to see how we’re doing.
Not well. Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries. In the meantime, temperatures would soar, melting ice caps, sinking cities, and unleashing devastating heat waves around the globe (see “The year climate change began to spin out of control”).
Caldeira stresses that other factors are likely to significantly shorten that time frame (in particular, electrifying heat production, which accounts for a more than half of global energy consumption, will significantly alter demand). But he says it’s clear we’re overhauling the energy system about an order of magnitude too slowly, underscoring a point that few truly appreciate: It’s not that we aren’t building clean energy fast enough to address the challenge of climate change. It’s that—even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem.
The UN’s climate change body asserts that the world needs to cut as much as 70 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions by midcentury to have any chance of avoiding 2 ˚C of warming. But carbon pollution has continued to rise, ticking up 2 percent last year.
So what’s the holdup?
Beyond the vexing combination of economic, political, and technical challenges is the basic problem of overwhelming scale. There is a massive amount that needs to be built, which will suck up an immense quantity of manpower, money, and materials.
For starters, global energy consumption is likely to soar by around 30 percent in the next few decades as developing economies expand. (China alone needs to add the equivalent of the entire US power sector by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.) To cut emissions fast enough and keep up with growth, the world will need to develop 10 to 30 terawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2050. On the high end that would mean constructing the equivalent of around 30,000 nuclear power plants—or producing and installing 120 billion 250-watt solar panels.
| What we should be doing* | What we’re actually doing† | |
|---|---|---|
| Megawatts per day | 1,100 | 151 |
| Megawatts per year | 401,500 | 55,115 |
| Megawatts in fifty years | 20,075,000 | 2,755,750 |
| Years to add 20 Terrawatts | 50 | 363 |
| Sources: Carnegie Institution, Science, BP | *If we had started at this rate in 2000 | †Actual average rate of carbon-free added per day from 2006-2015 |
There’s simply little financial incentive for the energy industry to build at that scale and speed while it has tens of trillions of dollars of sunk costs in the existing system.
“If you pay a billion dollars for a gigawatt of coal, you’re not going to be happy if you have to retire it in 10 years,” says Steven Davis, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.
It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to see how any of that will change until there are strong enough government policies or big enough technology breakthroughs to override the economics.
The study also notes that the United States adds roughly 10 gigawatts of new energy generation capacity per year. That includes all types, natural gas as well as solar and wind. But even at that rate, it would take more than 100 years to rebuild the existing electricity grid, to say nothing of the far larger one required in the decades to come.
“Is it possible to accelerate by a factor of 20?” he asks. “Yeah, but I don’t think people understand what that is, in terms of steel and glass and cement.”
…
Read the entire report, well worth your time: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/
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Living in the Chicago area and then in downstate Illinois, it is impossible in Illinois to drive in any direction for much more than an hour and not encounter a large wind field. Up the rate by 10 and keep it there until 2050? Now there’s a nightmare scenario. And it will be expensive and its product will be expensive- even before the subsidized backup that will still be necessitated. What’s a few thousand nuclear plant sized batteries among friends of the environment?
Here’s a news item from the Seeking Alpha financial site:
In other words:
Assuming the Global Warming Alarmists are right, it’s still going to be more cost effective to find a way to adapt to warming temperatures than it would be to stop man-made warming.
And THAT is assuming catastrophic man-made Global Warming.
Adopting the measures the AGW crowd want absent catastrophic warming reaches the point of being absolutely asinine.
It’s 1618, and you’re tasked to write a paper on how energy production and consumption will evolve over the next four centuries. Will you do any better than this author?
On: “MIT report: it will take 400 years
to transform to ‘clean’ energy”
by Anthony Watts / 1 day ago March 15, 2018
Comment by Arno Arrak
Trouble is that idiots like Ken Caldeira who know nothing of what causes global warming are being listened to with bated breath by true believers in “dangerous global warming.” Some pf his acolytes are filthy rich, and their money is wasted fighting this imbecility. The fact that no greenhouse warming has ever taken place stares you in the face when you look at a global temperature graph likeHadCRUT3 or other similar ones. Let us observe behavior of CO2 and temperature of Hadcrut3 as shown by figure 23 of “What Warming” and elsewhere in the literature. First, atmospheric carbon dioxide curve is smooth and free of kinks. Not so global temperature which zigs and zags and also is overlain by ENSO oscillation, sown by a red line. This red line designates the accrual temperature measurements. They swing above and below the mean gravitational sea level height that is located halfway between an El Nino peak and its adjacent La Nina valley. Second, global temperature simply does not follow this CO2 curve but zigs and zags. This behavior cannot be produced by a featureless carbon dioxide curve if it is true that warming follows CO2 concentration changes. This failure alone is sufficient to invalidate the concept that global warming is due to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Let’s be clear, however, that it does not deny the existence of warming per se, only the claim that its cause is atmospheric carbon dioxide. It follows that all the expensive projects dreamed up and implemented have no influence whatsoever on climate and are a total waste of money. Sime true believers will of course object so let us look at more details. One o of the zig-zags creates a straight warming segment between the years 1910 and 1940. Prior to 1910 temperature was sinking and it had to involved are simply waste of money. After 1940 the temperature rise becomes a temperature drop. In order to change temperature drop you must add carbon dioxide according to the greenhouse theory. But the carbon dioxide curve shows that none was added. Likewise, to stop warming and start chilling in 1940 you must remove part of the carbon dioxide that causes warming. The carbon dioxide curve shows that none was removed. Hence, the warming between 1810 to 1940 was neither started nor stopped by changes of atmospheric carbon dioxide Clearly we are justified in regarding the greenhouse theory of global warming as another failed theory, fit for the company of phlogiston and the geocentric earth. like the phlogiston theory that was retired in the nineteenth century. We might hear that the greenhouse theory ha a good theory behind it. But in science you go by experimental observations, not by unverified theories. And that 400 million year wait? Find out for yourself if you still don’t know.
Erratum!!! The text …“it had to involved are simply waste of money” was supposed to have been replaced by : “CO2 had to be added.” Somehow the previous text that was supposed to have been over-witten by the new text survived erasure and stayed visible. Sorry. AA