The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.
So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?
Let’s consider the latest from Germany. According to Statista here, Germany consumed 511.59 TWh of electricity in 2021 (latest year given, although the numbers have recently changed very little from year to year). Divide by 8760 (number of hours in a year) and you learn that Germany’s average usage of electricity is 58.3 GW. So, can you just build 58.3 GW of wind and solar generators to supply Germany with electricity?
Absolutely not. In fact, Germany already has way more wind and solar electricity generation capacity than the 58.3 GW, but can’t come anywhere near getting all its electricity from those sources. As of June 2023 Germany had 59.3 GW of generation capacity from wind turbines alone, and (as of end 2022) another 67.4 GW of generation capacity from solar panels. The total of the two is 126.7 GW — which would supply more than double Germany’s usage at noon on a sunny and breezy June 21. But, according to Clean Energy Wire here, through the first three quarters of 2023, the percent of its electricity that Germany got from wind and solar was only 52%. Capacity seemingly sufficient to supply double the usage in fact only supplies half. That’s because the supply does not come at the same time as the demand, and the wind/solar generation system provides no mechanism to shift the supply to a time to meet the demand.
And why doesn’t Germany just double the amount of its wind/solar generation, so that those sources would go from supplying 52% of usage to 100%. Because it doesn’t work that way. If they double the wind and solar generation, then on the sunny/breezy June 21 mid-day they will now have over 250 GW of electricity generation — more than 4 times what they need — so they will have to discard or give away the rest. But on a calm night in January, they will still have nothing and need full backup from some other source. Multiplying the wind/solar generation capacity by 10 or even 100 (referred to as “overbuilding”) will increase the costs of the system exponentially, but will never be enough to keep the lights on all the time. Or you can try energy storage to save up the surpluses to cover the deficits, but that also multiplies the costs of the system exponentially. For more than you will ever want to know about energy storage and its costs, read my December 2022 energy storage report, “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”
Renewable energy promoters and governments committed to “net zero” are engaged in a gigantic exercise of self-deception. They have come up with a thoroughly misleading metric to compare the costs of generating electricity from various sources which they call “Levelized Cost of Electricity.” Reports that claim to calculate these LCOEs are published by various organizations, including notably the investment bank Lazard and the International Renewable Energy Agency or IRENA. Here is IRENA’s 2022 Report covering supposed renewable energy costs for 2021, title “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2021.” Key quote from page 17:
In 2021, the global weighted average LCOE of new utility-scale solar PV and hydropower was 11% lower than the cheapest new fossil fuel-fired power generation option, whilst that of onshore wind was 39% lower.
Wow, solar is 11% cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative, and onshore wind 39% cheaper. Why would any dope ever look to fossil fuels again?
And here’s their key chart:
Incredible! Solar is under 5 cents per kWh, and onshore wind is even lower at 3.3 cents per kWh. And how much is in those numbers to account for the cost of either overbuilding or energy storage in order to make a system that works 24/7/365 without fossil fuel backup? The answer is, exactly nothing.
The fact is that building a wind/solar/storage electricity system without fossil fuel backup does not provide cheaper electricity than a predominantly fossil fuel system, but more expensive electricity. And the additional expense is not some small amount like 10 or 20 or 30 percent. It’s more like a multiple of 10 or 20. Nobody knows exactly how much, because there does not exist anywhere in the world a working demonstration project from which costs can be benchmarked and extrapolated. As you start to eliminate the fossil fuel backup from the system, far and away the predominant costs become the energy storage and/or overbuilding. The costs of the wind turbines and solar panels themselves become relatively insignificant. As noted, Germany has gotten to about 50% of its electricity generation from wind and solar, with so far about a 2 times overbuild of capacity, and almost no storage. With the next round of overbuild of capacity, should they do it, they will be lucky to get to 60% of electricity from renewables; and each successive round of overbuild adds less useful electricity and more that must be discarded. Meanwhile, storage is ruinously expensive in quantities that are meaningful to keeping the lights on year round.
In the real world of investment decisions, the costs are becoming increasingly obvious. Greg Ip has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, headline “Why No One Wants to Pay for the Green Transition.” Excerpt:
Investors and consumers balk at costs of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, highlighting painful economics of climate mitigation. . . . In the past few years, Washington and Wall Street started fantasizing that the transition to net-zero carbon emissions could be an economic bonanza. . . . This year the fantasy ended. . . . [T]he economics of getting to net zero remain, fundamentally, dismal: Someone has to pay for it, and shareholders and consumers decided this year it wouldn’t be them.
Of course consumers are never voluntarily going to pay $2 for energy that can be had for $1. Nor are investors ever going to invest to provide consumers the $2 energy when the consumers can go elsewhere for $1. As it becomes obvious that the whole LCOE “wind and solar are cheaper” thing is a transparent lie, all private money will exit the energy transition. The only possible way to get this wind/solar system built is government subsidies. Gigantic, massive government subsidies on a scale far greater than anything ever seen in human history. It’s a very safe bet that it will never happen.
As a refresher for those attending the COP28, wind and solar do different things than crude oil.
Renewables only generate occasional electricity but cannot manufacture anything.
Crude oil is virtually never used to generate electricity but when manufactured into petrochemicals, is the basis for virtually all the products in our materialistic society that did not exist before the 1800’s.
We’ve become a very materialistic society over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of all the products and different fuels for jets, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space program that did not exist before the 1800’s.
Until a crude oil replacement is identified, the world cannot do without crude oil that is the basis of our materialistic “products” society.
It has been pointed out by advocates for building more nuclear power in Washington State that while 14 billion dollars has been spent in our state so far installing a total of roughly 4,000 MW nameplate wind capacity, there are periods in the dead of winter lasting a week or more where these wind farms produce only 7% of their nameplate capacity; i.e., 300 MW.
In contrast, the Columbia Generating Station produces 1,100 MW of nuclear-generated electricity 24/7/365 regardless of what the weather is doing. A second similar size reactor located at the same site could produce another 1,100 MW of nuclear-generated electricity 24/7/365 regardless of what the weather is doing.
During these winter-weather wind droughts, the shortfall in regional wind energy production is made up from other power generation resources attached to the Western Interconnect. These other resources include coal-fired and gas-fired power plants located throughout the western United States, plants now targeted for early closure under the dictates of the Biden Administration’s war on carbon.
How will the power production shortfalls be handled once these fossil-fueled power plants are gone from the Western Interconnect?
The plans developed by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to deal with future shortfalls rely in large part on energy conservation measures. Inside the region’s power planning models, this planning approach is implemented by counting real-time reductions in power demand as being fully equivalent to real-time power generation capacity.
And so we are now being expected by our regional power planning authorities to reduce our consumption of electricity while at the same time converting nearly everything now powered either directly or indirectly by fossil fuels to electricity. (Such a deal!)
“Gigantic, massive government subsidies on a scale far greater than anything ever seen in human history. It’s a very safe bet that it will never happen.”
You underestimate Leftist politicians, Deep State zealots and rich profiteers.
The rich are the big ones pushing this. They own the media control the politicians and hope to make trillions from “climate change”.
Even two-thirds of Republicans under 30 support the “climate change” agenda. 42% of Republicans support developing alternative energy sources according to Pew’s polls.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/
Years ago Tom Steyer got ballot measures on the ballot in Nevada and Arizona. They were to require the utility to get a minimum of electricity from unreliable generation.
In Arizona, the Republican AG required the addition of “regardless of the cost”. That was not on the Nevada ballot explanation.
The measure failed soundly in Arizona, it passed easily in Nevada.
Steyer then used millions of his “unreliable energy” dollars to defeat the AG in his next election.
Ignorance is what it is.
The author reports,
But, according to Clean Energy Wire here, through the first three quarters of 2023, the percent of its electricity that Germany got from wind and solar was only 52%.
That is incorrect. Germany last year was at 26% wind and 9% solar. The 52% includes bio-waste recovering and hydro. No way they jumped from 35% to 52%. How is everyone missing this? I reported it last night, but I don’t see it.
what keeps the lights on in Germany this cold calm snowy winter night?
Their Backup?
Burning lignite.
Next door Nuclear France – while Germany shut down all their NPP.
Next door Poland from more dirty Lignite
Thanks for this very informative article. It confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a while. I was musing on how much land would be required to completely replace, our traditional FF generation network, with totally wind generation. I found that it requires about 1.5sq miles of land for a 20MW (nameplate capacity) farm.
To provide the UK, at 25% capacity, would require somewhere around 15,000 sq miles. Obviously, that’s a massive area, and wind strength/characteristics would vary significantly. Some locations might have a strong wind, whilst others were in the doldrums. So, the result, would still fail to provide total demand. Consequently, adding more turbines, over even more land, would simply increase the variability, and would not provide a pro rata increase. In effect, some form of inverse exponential relationship.
It wouldn’t surprise me, if some of you guys, with the maths capability, could create a statistical formula, to predict the implications.