Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In my recent post yclept Bright Green Impossibilities, I showed that it is not humanly possible to eliminate fossil fuel CO2 emissions by 2050. I live in California, the heart of the green lunacy. Here, there’s a group called Climate-Safe California. Given that there is no sign of the much-hyped “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” I’m not sure what they’re trying to keep us “safe” from … but I digress. Their genius plan is to reduce fossil-fuel emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.
Now, energy use will continue to increase in California, but that will largely be offset by increases in efficiency and changes in manufacturing, with less CO2 per unit of fossil fuel used. In fact, current California emissions are only about 1% higher than they were 30 years ago in 1990. So to reach their goal, if we leave out magical fairy dust and giant imaginary vacuums sucking CO2 out of the air, we’d have to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2030.
The green folks think this can be done with wind and solar … but the sad fact is, you need something close to 100% backup for the times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. We’re already suffering occasional blackouts due to our insane dependence on expensive, intermittent wind and solar. Given the existence of that ugly thing called “reality” that green folks like to ignore, that means we have to replace fossil fuels with nuclear-generated electricity.
So how much fossil fuel does California currently use? Turns out its about 1.7 petawatt-hours (PWh, or 1015 watt-hours) per year. And to replace 80% of this with nuclear, allowing for peak power and downtime, we have to increase our generation capacity by about 307 gigawatts (GW, or 109 watts). By comparison, Diablo Canyon, the only remaining nuclear power plant in California after green activists have had their say, generates 2.3 GW of electricity … 307 GW needed, 2.3 GW per big nuke plant, 8-1/2 years to do it … can you see a problem developing here?
Now, they want to do this by 2030. So we need to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid a 2 GW nuclear plant, a bit smaller than Diablo Canyon, each and every three weeks from now to 2030. And that’s starting tomorrow …
It’s worth noting that in the US, the timespan from feasibility study to grid hookup is longer than ten years … so if we started tomorrow, by 2030 we’d have exactly zero new nuclear plants online. Here’s an overview of the US process:
And people with industry experience say that timeline is optimistic, it can be 15-20 years … not to mention the intense opposition from California greens to anything nuclear.
Still want wind? To do it with wind, we’d have to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid no less than 1,000 two-megawatt (MW, or 106 watts) wind turbines, each and every single week from now to 2030. And that’s starting tomorrow … a thousand per week.
Solar sound better? NREL says the actual delivery 24/7/365 of of grid-scale solar farms averages 8.3 W/m2 of ground area (not panel area). That’s 8.3 MW per square kilometer of ground area. So to do it with solar, we’d have to find sites, do feasibility studies, purchase land, get permits and licenses, manufacture, excavate, install, test and hook up to the grid no less than 83 square kilometers (32 square miles) of solar farms, each and every single week from now to 2030. And again, that’s starting tomorrow …
Just finding suitable land for that scale of development is nearly impossible. Here’s some information from California regarding how hard it is to find suitable land for solar power.
Land
… Another issue is the fact that such solar ‘farms’ require huge tracts of land. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been tasked with finding 24 tracts of public land of three square miles each with good solar exposure, favorable slopes, road and transmission line availability. Additionally, the land set aside for utility-scale solar farms must not disturb native wildlife or endangered species such as the desert tortoise, the desert bighorn sheep, and others. The wildlife issue has proved to be a contentious one. Projects in California have been halted due to the threat caused to endangered species resulting in a backlog of 158 commercial projects with which the BLM is currently contending.
Note that the BLM is having trouble finding a mere 75 square miles of land for solar power generation that doesn’t have too much impact on the environment, and we’re talking about building 31 square miles of new solar power per week … for the next 446 weeks … yeah, that’s totally legit.
Then, of course, there is the stupendous cost of this whole enterprise. In addition to the decommissioning costs of our existing generating facilities, the cost to build a hundred plus new nuclear plants, plus putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and getting rid of hundreds of thousands of automotive gas stations, the entire electrical grid would have to be hugely upgraded to allow it to carry all the power for newly electric homes, businesses, industries, and cars.
And that’s not just replacing the wires, including rewiring every home like mine that uses gas for cooking and for water and space heating. It’s replacing the transformers, switches, substations, control systems, overload protection, breaker boxes, and every other part of the grid as well.
In fact, to do that the California grid would have to handle no less than 3.75 times the power it is currently carrying … that’s what “hugely upgraded means”. Not just upsized by 10%, or even 100%. It will require three and three-quarters times the volume of wiring, switches, substations, and all the rest.
According to the California Public Utilities Commission, California has 25,526 miles of higher voltage transmission lines and 239,557 miles of distribution lines, two-thirds of which are overhead and one-third underground. So we’d need to install another 94,000 miles of high-voltage line and 886,000 miles of distribution lines. At a rate of 440 miles every workday. From now until 2030. Starting tomorrow.
Or we could pull out all ~ quarter-million miles of lines, above and below-ground, and replace them with much, much bigger wires.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars in pursuit of an unattainable chimera, on a quest that will do nothing to change the climate.
I gotta say … the fact that impassioned but totally innumerate folks like the “Climate-Safe California” people get listened to at all gives me nightmares about how many people have fallen for the Great Green Climate Scam … let me be clear:
It. Cannot. Be. Accomplished. This is just another bright green impossible fantasy.
Sigh …
w.
AS ALWAYS: I can defend and explain my words and am happy to do so. I cannot defend or explain your interpretation of my words. So please, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING.
DATA:
- California CO2 Emissions By Year: EIA
- California Primary Energy Consumption: EIA
- California Total System Electrical Generation By Fuel: California Energy Commission
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS: I gotta give huge props to Anthony Watts, who conceived of and created WUWT, and to Charles The Moderator and all of the volunteer moderators around the world. My thanks to you all.
Charles saw the draft of what I was writing and sent me the following, one issued an hour ago and one a few minutes ago today (Wednesday, June 16) by CAISO, the California Independent Systems Operator responsible for the operation of the California electrical grid. Top one is the most recent.
An hour ago … “no anticipation of outages”. One minute ago … “Flexalert”, and “conserve electricity” … the lunacy of unreliable, intermittent, mostly useless renewable energy never ends.
DISCLAIMER: Don’t be misled by my contempt for the modern “environmental” groups. I am and have been since my youth what I would describe as a true environmentalist, as opposed to today’s “watermelon environmentalists”, who are green on the outside and solid Marxist red on the inside … here’s a post on that.
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For some sanity, go and read “Alice In Wonderland” again.
great article
your insights show that the output volumes are impossible to deliver
but remember we need to fail to know we can’t
Just to add a few extra thoughts when you start going back through the inputs to name a few – silicon, rear earth minerals, copper, silver, lithium, cobalt, steel, plastic, concrete, paint, diesel, electricity etc etc etc
You fast realise California would effectively require effectively 50% of the entire world output of most materials to meet this vast insane activity
Then you need to consider the supply chain for moving the panels, wind turbines etc from the manufacturing location to the final location
Then you add UK, EU, Canada, Australia, NZ, India, Russia, Scandinavia etc etc etc and you would see realise that the world energy consumption would required multiple hundreds times of every resource
then finally by after 10 years you need to start to replace the first items
talk about environmental damage with mining ops to get the raw materials
Oil & coal to supply the energy
Humans to build operate and maintain
Not to recognise the where you are going to find these competent trades personnel
This is an implausible impossible dream
John,
To switch the UK’s 31 million cars and vans to EVs would take an estimated 227,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 7200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium and almost 2.4million tonnes of copper. This amount is twice the current world production of cobalt, an entire year’s world production of neodymium and 75% of the worlds production of lithium.
Replacing the estimated 1.4 billion ICE vehicles worldwide would need 40 times these amounts.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00325-9
One or two commenters veered dangerously close to the truth.
Why does anyone think there is a will to replace the mothballed fossil energy plants?
The plan is to reduce the population by denying them the energy they need to survive.
One is not supposed to take these proposed replacements seriously; only a fool like Larry would even pretend that.
Only by turning the lights out will it ever be possible to make good on these political promises. The quicker this happens the quicker sanity will finally find a home in the minds of the modern green.
I’m amazed that nobody has twigged …
It’s all part of the agenda …
Why lefties hate nuclear so vehemently …
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy”
Amory Lovins, The Mother Earth-Ploughboy Interview, Nov, Dec 1977, p.22
Thank you for these Willis Eschenbach posts.
Willis. There is a new paper being pumped by the Guardian about the Earth energy imbalance doubling in last 15y. They claim CERES and ARGO corroborate each other “very,very” closely.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/joint-nasa-noaa-study-finds-earths-energy-imbalance-has-doubled
My instant reaction is that that is probably by design. Somewhere there is a “calibration” process where one of these datasets is used to tweak the unconstrained parameters of the other. Good old “data homegenisation”.
since you are the resident expert of CERES and have a keen eye for spotting this kind of “trick”, what you make of it ?
I’ll take a look. However, the imbalance is tiny (from 1/2 watt to 1 watt/m2) in a system where downwelling surface radiation is about half a kilowatt per square metre … we’re near, at, or past the limit of detectability.
w.
Willis, it is quite obvious to me that California is blundering blindfolded into electricity rationing. It could be interesting to explore who will be most affected and what the social consequences might be. Some thoughts: The most power consuming items in the household are: 1) the electric car and 2) the dishwasher and the washing machine. Both favourites of the climate-crazy eco loons. Rationing will affect them most. Those who wisely held on to their hybrids or even petrol cars will remain mobile, while those who have invested in the diesel powered standby generator will face less hardship. I can see a lively smuggling trade of petrol and diesel by cartels from south of the border and petrol theft Breaking Bad style. But what will it mean for the purists to face rolling blackouts? No driving at will and restricted use of appliances. That means the empleiada can do the dishes and the washing by hand again, but methinks she should refuse and tell the lady of the house to do it herself. Electricity rationing means back to the kitchen for women. I bet they don’t see that coming.
Willis
I believe that the stated goal is not to eliminate CO2 emissions but to move to net zero, which is entirely another matter as it allows for carbon sinks to be included in the calculations. These sinks include:
Also in your calculations for solar area required you have assumed that panels are built for night time use, which I humbly suggest is not the smartest idea and perhaps one subject to challenge. The Australian experience is that roof top solar (homes, offices, factories, shopping malls and parking lots) have sufficient non south facing areas to satisfy local peak load outside of exceptional times. In fact, in this jurisdiction the problem is lack of load rather than lack of generation. See for instance any of the many AEMO forecasting reports.
I acknowledge that evening and night loads require non solar generation as do peak periods. This is where utility scaled wind and gas peaking plants (with pure CO2 feed stock) come in.
I humbly suggest that the problem is not so much physical improbabilities as economic losses. For instance, the Australian experience is that market prices for electricity drop to near zero (and sometimes negative) whenever “renewables” dominate generation. This is to be expected from a basic understanding of micro economics and marginal cost curves.
In short how much are people prepared to pay for a low carbon life?
Point 1) I’ve often been fascinated how those who have never even seen a farm are capable of coming up with ways for farmers to improve their farms.
Point 2) There aren’t enough places in most big cities to plant trees to make a difference. In smaller towns, most people like trees well enough to plant their own. Increase GDP? I suppose you believe that paying people to dig holes and fill them back in would also increase GDP. Finally, once those trees finish growing, they stop sequestering CO2.
Point 3) Is already going on every place where it’s economical.
Point 4) Already going on every place where it’s economical.
Your idea is apparently to install three times as many solar panels, but have a third of them pointing eastward, and a third of them pointing westward, so that you can produce a flatter energy curve over the entire day.
Gee whiz, spend three times as much for only a little increase in power generation. What a deal.
As to understanding microeconomics, you are demonstrating that you don’t.
Yes, during the day the instantaneous price of electricity does drop dramatically when there is a large solar component. That’s because solar panels produce power when the need for it is not at the maximum and as a result the electricity has to be dumped. From an economic standpoint this does two things.
First, it makes it hard for the owners of solar panels to actually make money, as the value of the product that they are selling drops to zero.
Secondly, it makes the power sources that are needed to provide power when the solar panels aren’t producing even more expensive since they can’t be shut down for a few hours and the value of what they are producing also goes to zero.
Finally, look at the actual price of electricity, not the spot market. You will find that the more “renewable” in the mix, the more expensive electricity becomes.
There is already a proven way of doing this — north-south single-axis tracking systems.
Mark
You don’t have to read much, or talk to many farmers to understand that there are smart ways of farming and dumb ways. The traditional methods which effectively mine the soil of their carbon content are really dumb and are non sustainable in the long run without hugely expensive additional inputs. Some examples of best practice are:
In terms of space in cities; maybe not in Manhattan but certainly in the cities in NZ and Australia in which I have lived there are large amounts of waste space – rail corridors, street corners isolated by changes in road layout, motor way verges, street verges etc. in which trees can and should be planted. GDP is enhanced from trees in cities through increased property values, better air, better health, less crime. The same applies in country areas where there are huge amounts of undeveloped public land sitting along road corridors.
In terms of panel orientation with moderately pitched roofs there is surprisingly little reduction in actual power output providing that you are not in the high latitudes. Remember I am writing from a NZ and Australian perspective. In fact having a combination of east and west panels is often better than just north facing as the output profile usually better matches the demand curve.
The point that I am trying to make here is that facts matter, as much if not more on the rationalist side of the debate than on the catastrophist side.
“You don’t have to read much, or talk to many farmers”
You’re basically saying that the people who actually do the work don’t know what they’re doing.
Theory is all well and good, but when it comes to what actually works in reality, you do need to talk to the people who are actually doing it.
And it turns out that there are a lot of considerations beyond just “does it work” – time, cost, personnel, etc. In my experience, many of these “sustainable” practices take a lot more effort for the same yield.
“move to net zero”
NET zero is a cop-out position. Nothing more than modern indulgences.
Strongly agree with TonyG
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/25/net-zero/
And the calculations don’t even include the logistics and cost of providing battery storage for all the wind and solar.
Nobody cares about actually accomplishing anything, it’s all about feeling good because you’re “doing something”.
And for the politicians it’s a bonus if nothing is accomplished because then they can run on “doing more”
I see some Californians are heeding the call and doing their bit to save electricity-
1 in 5 electric vehicle owners in California switched back to gas because charging their cars is a hassle, research shows (msn.com)
Here in the US Northwest, most of the coal-fired power capacity that services the region, including the power imported from Montana and Wyoming, is scheduled to be retired before the end of the decade.
The risks of the transition to wind and solar in our region are discussed in this article: Washington State’s Approaching Energy Crisis – Good Intentions Gone Wrong?
Building new gas-fired generation to replace the coal-fired generation now scheduled to be retired is not in alignment with the Biden administration’s announced target of a 50% reduction in America’s GHG emissions by 2030.
Moreover, it is impossible to build enough wind, solar, and nuclear to replace the coal and gas-fired capacity which must be retired by 2030 in order to reach Biden’s 50% goal. The only way to reach that goal is through aggressive efforts targeted at energy conservation, even to the extent of imposing a government-enforced energy rationing scheme on the American people.
The big questions still remain: How serious is the Biden administration about making substantial reductions in America’s GHG emissions? Are those who make the public policy decisions about our how our future electricity needs are to be supplied willing to force the shutdown of legacy coal and gas-fired power generation resources, even if the retired capacity isn’t being replaced?
The same people who hate fossil fuels also hate nuclear. So switching to nuclear is not going to happen. Let California cut off most of their electric power and live with the consequences of their own folly. That might change their attitude toward fossil fuels. But then again it’s California, the land of nuts and fruits, so maybe not.
Using your own source, I think you’ll find that your calculations are off by a factor of 10. For example, total CA generation in 2018 using your cited source is 285,488 GWh, which is approx. 2.85 E14 (not E15, as you state).
I worked at Diablo Canyon for years, and know that it provides roughly 10% of the state’s power, but when I did a rough calculation using your E15 number, it came out showing that Diablo Canyon’s annual power production is only about 1% of that. I looked up the numbers using your source (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2019-total-system-electric-generation/2018) and found, sure enough, that you are off to the upside by an order of magnitude.
Not that this makes the problem any less dire. Even that reduced number is essentially impossible.
You’re talking electricity generation, and I’m talking total fossil fuel use, which is what needs to be reduced in order to cut emissions by 80%.
Regards,
w.
If that is the case, what is your source for THAT number?
Data sources listed in the end-notes. The EIA data has in-state consumption of fossil fuels. The California Energy Commission data contains information on imported fossil-generated energy coming from out-of-state. Some of the figures are in BTU so you’ll have to convert to watt-hours.
Regards.
w.
“to do that the California grid would have to handle no less than 3.75 times the power it is currently carrying”
Interesting stat. How did you come up with it?
Hey, Joe, good to hear from you. I used Total Whrs needed if 80% of total energy use is electric, divided by current electricity usage.
w.
The high speed railway to nowhere probably provides a model for how far the liberal mind can delude itself that nirvana is just over the horizon and just needs a little more of other peoples money. Then of course you have to hang on to the tattered remnants of the project as if it is an achievement and perhaps talk about how it could have succeeded if only (insert external factor here) All the while ignoring reality and the level of your own incompetence.
See, their “backup” is buying from other states. Of course, they want THOSE states to follow their lead and don’t realize that they’re painting themselves into a corner when there are regional outages. Better to whistle past the graveyard and hope that it all works out.
“Renewables” can’t harness enough energy to produce, distribute, maintain and replace itself, much less power the surrounding society…but that’s the goal, isn’t it.
Nobody does the numbers like Willis does the numbers. Thank you for this great post.
Thanks for the kind words, my friend, always good to hear from you.
w.