Reality Check

Somehow or other I ended up subscribing to a fellow named David Roberts, a green-energy enthusiast, on Substack. I do not recall doing this, but maybe in a moment of weakness I clicked a button. He seems like a nice enough chap, but he suffers from the tunnel vision that so many green enthusiasts seem vulnerable to.

David’s latest effort, an interview with somebody named “Texas Doug” Lewin, appeared in my inbox this morning. It was a long piece discussing, among other things, some bills currently wending their way through the Texas Legislature that would place operating requirements on future large green-energy projects: watt-for-watt natural gas backup, setbacks for wind turbine fields and solar arrays, that sort of thing.

A sense of puzzlement permeated the piece: Why would anyone not want as much “cheap” green energy as they could get their hands on, what with AI and its humongous power requirements coming on strong? Why are we powering the 21st century with 20th century technology? Why would anyone want to put obstacles in the way of this long-overdue energy transition. What are these guys thinking? And so on. You have to admire their positive attitude.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-in-tarnation-is-going-on-in

But if you know anything about energy in general and renewables in particular, the operating requirements cited above most likely strike you as being quite reasonable, not pointless obstructions. The natural gas backup requirement offsets the intermittency problem, and setbacks keep people away from the intense heat (and unsightliness) of solar arrays, and spares them from the low-frequency rumble of wind turbines, which has real and debilitating effects. There’s a reason wind-turbine fields are always sited in unpopulated areas.

Renewables certainly have their place, but they also have major drawbacks. These include: extremely low energy density (necessitating large amounts of land,) vulnerability to the elements, a generally short lifespan, diminished efficiency over time, the necessity of having to construct new infrastructure, including thousands of miles of additional power lines, and a badly strained grid due to thousands of individual generators popping on and off at random intervals.

Never mind the ginormous amounts of diesel that must be burned to make/install/maintain/decommission these things. Never mind that nobody has figured out how to recycle solar panels and wind turbines cost-effectively, so they go into landfills once decommissioned. Never mind the gigantic concrete pediments each wind turbine requires, many thousands in total, which will persist unto the end of time because they are too large to remove economically. Never mind the ecological devastation wrought by the mining and processing of millions of pounds of exotic minerals that green energy at scale requires. Never mind the human cost of mining and processing these minerals, which mostly takes place in poor countries with weak or nonexistent environmental and labor laws. Never mind the thousands of tons of toxic waste generated by their mining and processing. Et cetera.

Dave and Doug seemed to think that data center operators are begging for “cheap” renewable energy to meet their large energy needs because at peak generation time, an hour or two either side of noon on a sunny summer day, the price per kilowatt can drop almost to zero. However, this only works in a system that has dynamic (and automatically calculated) energy pricing. The flipside is that when power is in heavy demand, the price per kilowatt soars to infinity, automatically, canceling your cost saving and then some. This is how numerous residential utility customers ended up with six-figure energy bills during the Great Texas Blackout of 2021, following Winter Storm Uri.

In truth, if you have any sense whatsoever, literally the last energy source you want supplying power to your mission-critical facility is renewable anything. Excepting, perhaps, hydropower, but only if local geography and climate permit, which they don’t in all but a few places. There’s no getting around solar and wind’s inherent intermittency, a critical weakness. You’d have to be a bloody fool to base a power grid or a critical facility on an energy source with an average uptime of 20-ish percent.

But but but storage, you say.

Storage, chiefly lithium-ion battery arrays, can make up for generator downtime. But to be truly useful you would need to have backup equivalent to the longest conceivable period of interruption, plus wiggle room. For many locations, this is measured in weeks, not hours. You also need to factor in recharge time after an interruption; you must have generation capacity sufficient to recharge and power the grid at the same time, meaning basically twice the capacity you might normally need.

As of this writing, grid-scale storage costs about $115 per kiloWatt-hour (kWh.) Total US power consumption at any given moment is, on average, about 450 gigaWatts. To be absolutely safe, figure twenty days of storage (480 hours,) which means we would need about 216 billion kWh of storage at a cost of about $25 trillion, slightly above current annual GDP. However, demand for electricity is expected to rise as much as 50 percent by 2040, so add another $12 trillion in current dollars. In addition, heavy demand for storage will push the cost of it up, so prepare for hefty cost overruns. All of this assumes that enough raw materials will exist to meet this ambitious demand, which is not yet the case.

Another issue is that most commercial battery arrays are meant to provide a maximum of 4 hours of backup. The battery array that can provide twenty straight days of usable power does not yet exist. And if ever it does, it’s likely to cost more than conventional storage, maybe much more. So factor that in. Furthermore, lithium ion batteries that are heavily cycled, as these would be, tend to wear out rapidly, and may have to be replaced every few weeks or months. Add that in as well.

Moreover, lithium ion batteries, when overcharged, frequently burst into wickedly hot flames that cannot be squelched by conventional means. Your only choice is to let them burn out. For this reason grid-scale storage facilities are usually placed in remote locations. Which unfortunately makes them vulnerable to sabotage. Forget terrorists; just wait until nihilist hell-raisers discover that you can, with a single well-placed rifle shot, turn one of these things into a holocaust they’ll be able to see from the International Space Station.

Not to burst Dave and Doug’s bubble, but a bit of realism was definitely in order, so I left them the following comment.

There is one dominant reason renewables achieved such market penetration in Texas. Actually it might be the only reason: ERCOT followed an “energy only” policy, meaning that energy suppliers were paid for megawatts they produced, but not required to commit to any schedule of production or contractually agreed amount of production. Literally no other grids do this, and for good reason. You want guaranteed power, all the time. Though bad policy, energy-only was perfect for renewables because of their lack of dispatchability, which prevents them from ever committing to a production schedule. The bottom line is that they work when and only when conditions allow them to.

The origins of the Great Texas Blackout that followed Winter Storm Uri, in 2021, have been greenwashed beyond recognition. Yes the gas pipelines DID freeze in the severe cold, but only after operators lost most of their power. At that particular moment, that part of the grid was 60-something percent dependent on renewable sources, and when nearby windfields went to zero and the solar panels were all covered with snow, there wasn’t enough energy to run the pumps and compressors and other equipment.

Here’s the deal: Pumps and compressors don’t freeze when they are working, and neither do pipelines when their contents are in motion. It’s basic physics. It’s how places like Barrow Alaska, frozen solid 80 percent of the time, can have water and gas-delivery systems.

Now this used to not be a big deal, because those pumps and compressors were all powered by natural gas, which was always available for obvious reasons. Blackout? Schmackout! But the climate zealots went to work and convinced operators to convert to electric operation. Maybe they were hoping something like the Great Blackout would happen. Playing the long game and all of that.

North Texas is one of the better places to put solar panels in theory because at least during the summer months you have pretty reliable sun. Unfortunately, it’s also the place were supercell storms occur with regularity, which generate hail, which pound solar panels to smithereeens. A brand-new, just-open-for-business solar facility got hit by such a storm last spring, instantly obliterating a $350 million investment. Interestingly, this was completely, and I mean COMPLETELY ignored by the mainstream press. Gee, I wonder why.

Solar and wind produce “cheap” energy only if you play accounting tricks, ignore building costs, maintenance costs, land costs, materials costs, productivity costs due to intermittency, synchronization costs, and probably a dozen others. And when you factor in the cost of truly usable storage, it becomes grossly uneconomic. Them’s the facts on the ground.