Posted on 01/05/2022 10:22:32 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Between 2017 and 2021, Environmental Progress and I researched and published dozens of articles, testified before Congress, and authored a book, Apocalypse Never, arguing that weather-dependent renewables were making electricity increasingly unreliable and expensive, and making the United States, Europe, and Asia, dangerously dependent on natural gas.
In response, there was an organized and somewhat successful effort by progressive climate-renewables activists to cut off our funding, censor us on Facebook, and prevent me from testifying before Congress.
But now, one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewables, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we have made over the years. “Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,” screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was “years in the making” because Europe is “shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.”
Bloomberg still pulls its punches and misdescribes the situation in some ways. The article, like many other Bloomberg articles, mislabels the deployment of renewables as an “energy transition” similar to past transitions from wood to coal and coal to natural gas, failing to acknowledge that the poor physics of energy-dilute renewables make that impossible. And it suggests that Europe’s energy crisis is the result of ignorance. “The energy crisis hit the bloc,” notes a renewable energy PR person, “when security of supply was not on the menu of EU policymakers,” ignoring the reality that I and others warned EU policymakers of this very crisis.
But, to its credit, the article acknowledges that the energy crisis is a direct result of Europe over-investing in unreliable renewables and under-investing in reliable energy sources. “Wind and solar are cleaner but sometimes fickle,” the authors admit, in the understatement of the year, “as illustrated by the sudden drop in turbine-generated power the continent recorded last year.” (I was the first U.S. journalist to report Germany saw its emissions rise 25% in the first half of 2021 due to lack of wind.)
Now, a new analysis from Environmental Progress finds Germany increased its emissions last year and will likely increase them again this year. This year, German electricity generation coming from fossil fuels will be 44% compared to 39% in 2021 and 37 percent in 2020, assuming weather conditions and electricity demand are similar to 2021. Emissions from Germany’s power sector will rise from 244 million tons in 2021 to 264 million tons in 2022.
And Bloomberg notes that Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis.
“The retired salt caverns, aquifers, and fuel depots that hold Europe’s stockpiles of natural gas have never been so empty at this point in winter,” it notes, and “the continent is grappling with a supply crunch that’s caused benchmark gas prices to more than quadruple from last year’s levels, squeezing businesses and households. The crisis has left the European Union at the mercy of the weather and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wiles, both notoriously difficult to predict.”
It’s true that American natural gas from fracking, a practice I have defended since 2013, is being shipped to Europe, and will ease Europe’s pain. And it hasn’t helped that France’s leaders have grossly mismanaged their nuclear power plants, resulting in an embarrassing 30% decline in their output during the crisis.
But, notes Bloomberg, the relief provided by American liquified natural gas (LNG) is “temporary at best…. Storage sites [for natural gas] are only 56% full, more than 15 percentage points below the 10-year average… Barring an increase in Russian exports, something that doesn’t appear to be in the cards, levels will be at less than 15% by the end of March, the lowest on record… With the two coldest months of winter still ahead, the fear is that Europe may run out of gas.”
And the lack of nuclear energy underscores the need for more nuclear plants since they are reliable and operate independently of the weather when they are managed well. No matter how well a solar farm is managed, it can’t change the weather.
And now, Russia is massing troops on its border with Ukraine, and may invade. This is a problem since one-third of Russian gas going into Europe goes through Ukraine. If war breaks out, Europe could suffer serious gas shortages. Overdependence on natural gas and renewables, and underinvestment in nuclear, has thus undermined the energy security, and thus national security, of Europe, since heads of state dependent on Russian gas will be less likely to speak out against an invasion.
Even longtime natural gas and renewable energy boosters agree there’s a crisis. “The ability of Europe and the U.S. to respond to a Russian invasion is constrained both by a desire not to exacerbate Europe’s energy crisis by sanctioning Russian energy exports and, more broadly, by the threat that Russia could retaliate to any confrontation by restricting gas flows into Europe, as Russia did in 2006 and 2009,” Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration official, told Bloomberg.
Covid accelerated many trends and one of them is the recognition that unreliable and weather-dependent renewables cannot power modern economies. Senator Joe Manchin specifically mentioned the role that renewables are playing in making America’s electricity less reliable when he killed Build Back Better legislation in December. The Netherlands mentioned the need for reliable electricity when it announced plans to expand nuclear energy.
Now, with New England at grave risk of energy shortages for the exact same reasons as Europe, it’s time for the American people and their representatives to fully wake up to the reality that modern societies cannot rely on unreliable renewables. It would also help if the renewable energy industry, and its dogmatic supporters, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Rep. Sean Casten, and Rep. Jared Huffman, would stop trying to censor and otherwise shut down the people who raised the alarm about the coming crisis in the first place.
* * *
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment,"Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is author of just launched book San Fransicko (Harper Collins) and the best-selling book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020). Subscribe To Michael's substack here
Interesting post, thanks.
As I say here quite frequently, you can’t power modern civilization on wind and solar. It cannot be done.
You need to challenge anyone who claims you can, as if this is allowed to be policy, it will create much pain.
I think there are some countries deep in the African deserts which could run on solar. And Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion could be applied on at least half of the countries that touch the open seas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
But fossil fuels are still the cheapest and most efficient way to generate energy for now. In the future we’ll have LENR.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/lenr/index?tab=articles
The Venn diagram of “countries deep in the African deserts” and “modern civilization” is two separate circles, a null set.
OTEC is another renewable chimera like wind and solar. Not enough energy to power modern civilization.
My wife (who tracks numbers intensely) added up power usage in the past year in the house. Between the LED lights, low-power freezer/washer...we now use about 50-percent of the power we consumed in 2000. We also now pay around one-and-a-half times more for the 50-percent than the 100-percent of 2000.
Indeed.
The Venn diagram of “countries deep in the African deserts” and “modern civilization” is two separate circles, a null set.
***There is a mega-proposal to install thousands of square miles of solar panels across the Sahara desert and pump that electricity up into Europe. It appears to be doable. Desertec: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/business/global/25sahara.html#:~:text=Desertec%2C%20as%20the%20%24573%20billion,Middle%20East%20and%20North%20Africa.
OTEC is another renewable chimera like wind and solar. Not enough energy to power modern civilization.
***I did NOT say it was enough energy to DO that. So why argue against such a thing? That is straw argumentation. I even said explicitly that fossil fuels are currently more efficient.
Look at the graph of world energy usage on this page:
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
It makes sense to stick with fossil fuels as well as what you call “chimera” like wind and solar.
Wind and solar on the scale you are mentioning is a poor use of resources. At that scale, you should be building nuclear plants.
The future of nuclear is LENR
https://freerepublic.com/tag/lenr/index?tab=articles
That may be so, but the present is a nextgen fission plant likely using thorium.
My wife (who tracks numbers intensely) added up power usage in the past year in the house. Between the LED lights, low-power freezer/washer...we now use about 50-percent of the power we consumed in 2000. We also now pay around one-and-a-half times more for the 50-percent than the 100-percent of 2000.
Renewables? What’s that? Must be referring to the IUs.... Intermittent/Unreliables....
That may be so, but
***but you got your tenses all wrong. We are talking about the future, not the present. There are plenty of good reasons why nuclear fission is on the wane. Such things as “as bad as coal is, there aren’t 3 coal-fired plants in the world that can’t be entered without rad suits for 10,000 years” or “ we can at least dump coal waste by covering over the ground but there’s no place in America to store the nuke waste”
the present is a nextgen
***See here? You’re talking about the future. You’re trying to make it sound like it’s in the present. But it aint.
fission plant
***Fission is a dog. Far too many problems with it, like the waste storage noted above and the possibility of horrible nuke accidents like the 3 that have taken place.
likely using thorium.
***Likely... meaning it is supposed to happen in the future. Just because you use a different element doesn’t mean you’ve changed the spots on that leopard. It’s still fission.
https://energy.wisc.edu/news/solar-now-cheapest-electricity-history-confirms-iea
https://mobile.twitter.com/martinvars/status/590220317848645633
It’s not a matter of total energy the amounts of solar striking the planet’s surface is millions of times what humans use in a year TOTAL energy consumption not just electricity. It’s always been a getting the energy from the sunny places to where it’s used and 24/7 so a transport and demand shift problem. HVDC power lines solve the long distance transport issue it’s demand shift for 24/7/365 use that’s expensive only pumped hydro ,compressed air and now molten salt storage techs have the multi gigawatt hour capacity to demand shift at the grid level.
MIT is working on a sun in the box silicon approach with silicon being the most abundant material on earth only oxygen is higher and silicon is paired with oxygen in nature it’s 27% of the mass of the crust we will never run out of silicon.
https://www.solarpaces.org/mit-proposes-pv-to-discharge-energy-from-2400c-silicon-thermal-storage/
You could run the same tech at 1200C directly from solar thermal power towers storing the sun’s heat from the day to use at night there’s so much solar energy in the world’s deserts you could build out 4x the capacity and store months of energy as molten silicon in vacuum insulated tanks the mass is so substantial the heat would last for timescales of years at the gigawatt level.
Fascinating. This article had me scratching my head until here:
But how could any photovoltaic cells turn heat back to electricity? All PV requires sunlight to make electricity – so how would it work shut away from the sun, enclosed inside a box of thermal energy storage?
Photovoltaics use light: Heat makes light
The answer is extremely hot metal, Amy explained in a Skype call. Molten silicon heated to 2,400°C emits very bright light.
“At these higher temperatures, you get enough radiation that is strong enough to use a photovoltaic heat engine,” he said.[While an “engine” sounds mechanical, a photovoltaic heat engine has no moving parts like a mechanical turbine. It simply converts light to electricity.]
***Let’s see. Molten silicon. Desert: check. Surrounded by silicon [sand]: check. Electricity generation 24/7: check.
I’m gettin’ to like this idear.
We also now pay around one-and-a-half times more for the 50-percent than the 100-percent of 2000.
***Once you reach the breakeven point, installing solar panels helps to brace against those increases in fees. You might consider asking your wife to do the calculation of “what would we be paying now if we had installed solar panels in 2000?”
Thorium is a pipe dream, Thorium is not fissile it’s fertile you have to supply high-energy neutrons to turn Th 232 into I 233 which is fissile and also the world’s most perfect bomb making material better than pu239 by far. So you must start this magical thorium reactor with some other fissile fuel usually u235 which is going to run out in under 80 years of humans keep with the present water reactors that only is less than 1% of the energy in natural uranium ore. Then foolishly throw the other 99% away because Jimmy Carter says the risk of reprocessing is too great because he was afraid of nuclear weapons proliferation. Well news flash jimmah every rogue nuclear state didn’t use reprocessing tech and commercial reactors why because the Pu out of a commercial reactor wont work in a bomb it has too much Pu240&241 in it to go boom. Every rogue state used research reactors or heavy water reactors to breed nearly pure Pu 239 in short order.
The future has two paths neither of them thorium fueled one is reprocessing and use either fast reactors as the make up fissile materials source for high conversion ratio gen3+, gen4 reactors all using reprocessing to turn spent fuel into more fuel. Included in this path is the fusion/fission hybrid where sub one Q fusion reactors drive a fission blanket that’s at a Kef of .9 or less which breeds enormous of Pu239 which is fissile and used in the gen3+ reactors one hybrid can breed enough fuel for 14 daughters of equal power UT Austin has a design for this type of hybrid at the JJ Pickle nuclear research campus in Austin Texas. Reprocessing solves the waste crisis as only 4% of spent fuel is actually wastes the other 96% is still good fuel so only 4% must be put into geologic storage and that 4% is only radioactive for a few hundred thousand years deep bore hole into granitic basement rocks solves that issue it’s political not scientific at that point.
The other path is to use seawater uranium and the effectively limitless amounts of it and either reprocess to cut the waste volumes and use seawater uranium as the make up fissile materials source or keep the once through and bury all that good fuel into bore holes which should be a crime against humanity.
On a must remember that the cost of uranium ore is less than one percent of the total cost of electricity from a reactor it amounts to less than a quarter of a penny in the levelized cost of electricity or LCOE. Using seawater uranium at even the current five times higher cost vs mining would only raise the cost of power by a about a cent per kilowatt hour sold. The Koreans proved that their reprocessing tech to quadruple the energy from a ton of mined uranium is only fractions of a cent more expensive than once through and geological storage.
0.63 cents vs 0.65 cents total fuel cycle cost on a LCOE basis with PWR gen reactors the economics improve with gen3+ cores that can use 100% MOX cores to a higher 45,000+ gigawatt day per ton burn up rates. The end result is with seawater uranium make up fissile materials source and reprocessing to drastically reduce the waste volumes nuclear power is not only 00% renewable it’s also the greenest energy on the planet BAR NONE.
Yup deserts loaded with silica sands used to make either PV panels or heliostat mirrors either of which drive a silicon based gigawatt scale storage right next door. Well insulated tanks can keep heat for months up to years if needed the area of the tank walls decrease at the cube root function as the volume goes up larger the tanks in volume the smaller the area ratio of liquid to wall. Using thermal photovoltaics is genius PVs are not first law heat engines they are second law of thermodynamics electronics no losses for Carnot like every heat engine on earth be it internal combustion or gas turbines th st all must pay Mr Carnot. Thermal PV have a 50% efficiency with today’s tech with a theoretical of nearly 100% thank you 2nd law. If your source heat cheap enough such as sunlight in the F in Sahara then one doesn’t care than you lose 50% in the round trip all that matters is what is the LCOE of a kwh delivered to the grid. Economics is the key not are engineering efficiency. Perfect is the enemy of good enough to do the job. If you’ve able to get a kwh of sun into your tanks for 1 cent per kwh who cares if you lose half when you selling it to the grid for 15+ cents per kwh or higher to the European grid Germany pays 21+ euro cents per kwh for natural gas and coal as it is. HVDC power lines can cross continental scale distances with a few percentage loss again who cares if your source is effectively free for the taking in the case of solar falling on barren deserts. The cost is how much is the solar power towers LCOE and heliostat field the IEA already proved that is the cheapest form of or primary energy humans have EVER come up with.
And in the future, if we ever come up with a strong enough light source that doesn’t need 2400C heat, it’ll be even cheaper.
Geothermal is basically free heat. You put your water close enough to the lava to get 600deg or so, run some turbines to generate electricity. Is there a source of free or cheap light that isn’t 93million miles away? Molten silicon seems like the best candidate so far.
The reason for going to such high heat is thermal radiant flux is higher at higher temps not only is the frequency of the light higher the flux in watt per square cm increases as temperature rises. The Sun at 10,000 degrees put out primarily visible light at very high flux density. A blue giant star at 20000K put out primarily shortwave UV at incredible flux density we only see it as blue because our eyes don’t see UV at all.
The silicon has two advantages it’s pump able by magnetic pumps and it’s also conductive enough for joule heating to its working temps. This means you don’t have to use direct solar heating any source of AC current at sufficient voltages can heat the silicon to white hot temps. You could store off peak nuclear power, wind power too not just solar. Geothermal works best when run 24/7 flat out like a nuke plant dumping all the off peak.energy into molten silicon allows for demand shifting of gigawatts it fundamentally changes the way a grid would work for the better. If you are willing to take the Carnot losses 1600 degree steam mates perfectly with existing supercritical steam turbines at 2400 degrees you are pushing the limits of the best military grade gas turbines blade tech which is classified civilian turbines run in the 1600s like steam turbines blade tech the benefit is you have a gigawatt scale boiler on tap that can use existing turbines at already built power plants to load shift and demand shift. MITs tech can and probably will be a paradigm shift in the energy landscape. Luddites gonna ludd but it’s inevitable that humans go largely solar the amounts of energy is simply too much once cost is at parity or less the tidal wave is unstoppable. Fortunately luddites are not in charge of humanity’s energy transition the scientists are. As general rule people are too stupid to decide large scale issues its best left to scientists with decades of education and decades more of experience. Anyone without PhD at the minimum in what ever field they are speaking in should be ignored when it comes to policy making. Someone with a BA in political science should have zero say in energy policy. If you don’t hold at least an MD you get zero say in medical policy. If you don’t hold a PhD in geology then you zero say in nuclear waste storage. Thank goodness H Reid is dead F him for his Yucca mtn obstruction.
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