Green Energy Substitution Is Not a Realistic Solution to Carbon Emissions in the Short and Medium Terms ─ Our Planning Needs to More Realistic

07 October 2010

U.S. energy inertia prevents sound planning and investment

Planning for our energy future has been almost non-existent. We’re still riding the complacent coattails of coal, oil, and gas.

Presidential administrations seem to believe that occasional and unfocused statements about developing green energy provide sufficient leadership.

As a consequence, Americans generally assume that “the market” will miraculously put developed green energy substitutes on the table when they are needed.

In reality, replacing coal, oil, and gas with less-polluting energy sources involves technical and infrastructural issues of perplexing depth and breadth.

There is, for example, not one green substitute that equals fossil fuels in energy content, portability, and convenience. Green energy production is inherently problematic.

This “it ain’t so easy” characteristic poses two problems:

(1) How can we incentivize development of energy sources that are uneconomic, when lower-priced fossil fuels still dominate the market?

(2) How do we design, finance, and install the sometimes massive infrastructures necessary to produce and deliver consumer-usable renewable energy ─ while knowing that the infrastructure(s) we choose to support may ultimately fail the Real World viability test?

Green energy is geographically and temporally fragmented, and only solar has the capacity to meet all our needs

Solar is only green energy source with the potential capacity to completely replace the energy content of our annual fossil fuels use. Nothing else comes (or can come) close.

That means environmentalists’ often unreasoned hostility to the continued exploration for and use of fossil fuels is unrealistic. Misdirected emotion diverts the conservation movement’s legitimate planet-preserving concerns away from the transitional planning that we need to focus on today.

We must concentrate on producing cleaner fossil-based energy, while we simultaneously incentivize the development of alternative sources and their delivery infrastructures, particularly solar.

Sounds easy.

But nobody in government is doing this in a meaningful way.

And the private sector can’t cope with the uneconomic aspects of green energy development, without government assistance.

Some sobering scientific details about renewable energy and its limitations

Richard A. Kerr’s admirable summation of our energy dilemma points to the following paraphrased facts:

Oil holds 3 times as much energy as plant biomass by weight,

and nearly 5 times by volume.

Coal mines and oil fields yield 5 to 50 times more energy per unit area than solar production,

10 to 100 timed more than wind conversion,

and 100 to 1000 times more than biomass facilities .

Coal, gas, and nuclear-fueled plants operate 75 to 90 percent of the time.

Sunlight is generally available only half the time, not counting cloud cover.

Wind turbines operate only 20 to 35 percent of the time.

Storing solar and wind power efficiently hasn’t yet been done.

Citation

Richard A. Kerr, Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition?, Science 329(5993): 780-781 (13 August 2010)

Kerr goes on to say (and here I quote him):

The “sobering reality” . . . is that there is only one renewable ─ solar energy ─ that could by itself meet future energy demands . . . .

Wind power could conceivably make a significant contribution, but each of the rest ─ hydro, biomass, ocean waves, geothermal, ocean currents, and ocean thermal differences ─ would provide just one-tenth to one-ten-thousandth of today’s energy output from fossil fuels.

Other aspects of developing renewable energy production are also significantly challenging.

For example:

Rapid growth in demand for lignocellulosic bioenergy will require major changes in supply change infrastructure. Even with densification and preprocessing, transport volumes by mid-century are likely to exceed the combined capacity of current agricultural and energy supply chains, including grain, petroleum, and coal.

That is not at all a trivial observation in regard to developing a new transportation infrastructure and the energy required to run it.

Similarly, before we continue to jump the “biofuels are great” gun:

In 2008, the world produced approximately 87 gigaliters of liquid biofuels, which is roughly equal to the volume of liquid fuel consumed by Germany that year.

Essentially, all this biofuel was produced from crops developed for food production, raising concerns about the net energy and greenhouse gas effects and potential competition between use of land for production of fuels, food animal feed, fiber, and ecosystem services.

Sample problems with green energy ─ damaged ecosystems, undeveloped delivery systems, significant space-taking, and wind turbine noise and animal-death dealing

“Green” energy sounds ideal, until one understands that it presents problems similar to those we already experience with conventional energy production.

More monocultures?

Environmentalists complain about species-depleting agricultural monocultures now. Just wait until they see horizons filled with monocultures of water-sucking, non-edible cellulose-based fuel stocks.

In an inequitably food-deprived world, conversion of food land to fuel land makes questionable sense. Even if plant fuel stocks are planted in the planet’s non-agricultural ecosystems, they are still going to displace existing habitats with a corresponding loss in species diversity and planet-maintenance capacity.

Transporting African solar energy to Europe ─ imagine how well and quickly that’s going to work

Daniel Clery took a look at this illustrative challenge, inserting realism into admirable entrepreneurial optimism:

The goal: to build solar and other renewable power projects across North Africa and the Middle East capable of producing 500 gigawatts (GW) of electricity and so meet 15% of Europe’s energy needs by 2050.

Paying for that infrastructure . . . could be difficult.

[D]espite CSP’s [concentrating solar power] promise, its power currently costs considerably more than electricity from traditional sources.

Other worries facing potential funders include a fragmented European energy grid . . . and the lack of any dependable grid at all in parts of North Africa.

Finally, there are political tensions . . . as well as corruption and terrorism, that make large-scale energy cooperation seem a distant prospect.

Wind energy ─ let’s kill a few more animals and keep people awake at night while doing it

Wind turbines take up a lot of space. Some people consider them potentially widespread, unaesthetic accoutrements to our planet’s beauty.

Wind turbines kill birds and bats, and they may be interfering with animal migrations.

Wind power generation is noisy. People complain about not being able to sleep. (Though in some respects this is like taking city noise and transporting it out to rural folk.)

The siting fights threaten to derail efforts to ultimately use wind turbines to generate up to 20% of U.S. electricity. To reach that goal, U.S. wind-generating capacity would have to increase from about 35 gigawatts today to more than 300 GW. That would require the construction of as many as 100,000 new turbines.

“Good idea ─ but not here, buddy”

I do not think we are going to be able to hide those 100,000 animal-killing noise-makers anywhere convenient.

I predict a plague of “backyard-itis” in our futures.

The same can probably be forecast for serious solar development. Who wants their kids to go out to play and come home blind or as a crispy critters?

Conclusion ─ it would be wise to plan an orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewables

For a detailed understanding of these issues, I recommend that readers take a look at Science’s “Scaling Up Alternative Energy” issue (13 August 2010).

Facts matter.

PeteFree.com

Green Energy Substitution Is Not a Realistic Solution to Carbon Emissions in the Short and Medium Terms ─ Our Planning Needs to More Realistic