Governments frequently set lofty goals for the replacement of fossil-fuel-based energy systems. Yet, building an energy supersystem is a gargantuan task that requires generations of commitment and decades of work.
In his 2012 article A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy, Vaclav Smil questions the feasibility of rapid transitions to renewable energy. He claims that renewable energy sources (except hydroelectric and geothermal ones) can’t compete with conventional generators without government subsidies.
One limitation of renewable energy sources is their relatively low capacity factors compared to conventional sources.
Capacity factor, also called load factor, is the amount of electricity a plant actually produces divided by what it would produce if it could run full time.
- A typical nuclear power plant has a capacity factor of more than 90%
- A coal-fired generating plant is about 65~70%
- A photovoltaic installation can get close to 20% — in sunny Spain
- A land-based wind turbine, about 25~30%. An offshore wind turbine may reach 40 percent.
However, to convert to either of the latter two technologies, you must also factor in:
- The need to build entirely new transmission lines to places where sun and wind abound
- The need to manage a more variable system load, due to the intermittent nature of the power source.
These complications are well known and are too lightly dismissed by renewable energy backers and the media. Most egregious of all is the failure to recognize the time it takes to convert to any new source of energy.
The role of subsidies in driving energy source development
There is a long history of governments using subsidies to encourage new energy sources. The oil and gas industries have benefited from decades of tax relief designed to stimulate exploration. The nuclear industry has grown on the back of direct and enormous R&D support.
- In the United States, nuclear received 54% of all federal research funds between 1948 and 2007
- In France, nuclear had all-out support from the state electricity-generating company. Without that subsidy, the industry would never have managed to get its share of 75 percent of the French electricity market
With renewables, we must ask whether the subsidies for alternative energy can deliver what their promoters promise.
The most ardent supporters of solar, wind, and biomass argue that these sources can replace fossil fuels and create highly reliable, nonpolluting, carbon-free systems priced no higher than today’s cheapest coal-fired electricity generation — in just a few decades — soon enough to prevent the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide to more than 450 parts per million — at which point, climatologists estimate, the average global temperature will rise by 2 °C.
However, by 2024, atmospheric carbon dioxide had already reached a level of 412 ppm.
The matter of affordable costs is the hardest promise to assess,
given the large assortment of subsidies that have for years propped up renewable generation technologies.
Solar enthusiasts love to take the history of impressively declining prices for photovoltaic cells and project them forward to imply that we’ll soon see installed costs that are amazingly low.
But other analyses take into account the fact that photovoltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000.
In 2012, solar photovoltaic was 29 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 64 cents per kilowatt-hour in cloudy ones. This is still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet.
The time and scale required for a transition to renewable energy are often underestimated.
Electricity generation in the United States
- Natural gas turbines, launched in the early 1920s, took 30 years to achieve 10% of all U.S. power generation. It took 45 years to reach 20%.
- U.S. nuclear generation, launched in 1957, delivered 10 percent of all electricity generation after 23 years of operation, and it took 38 years to reach 20%, which occurred in 1995. It has stayed around that mark ever since.
- Wind power took 30 years — since the launch of small, modern wind turbines in 1980 — to reach the modest percentage of 3%. In 2022, with a total installed capacity of 141 gigawatts in the United States, supplied only 10% of electricity in the US.
- And even the most optimistic projects for solar generation don’t promise half that much.
Projections of wind-power generation into the future have been misleadingly optimistic, when they are based on initial increases from an initial minuscule base. Yes, total global wind turbine capacity multiplied sixfold between 2001 and 2011, but such high growth rates are typical of systems in early stages of development, particularly when the growth has been driven primarily by subsidies.
New factors, such as natural gas and fracking, have also changed the prospects for wind and solar. Natural gas turbine modules with up to 60 megawatts of capacity can be up and running within a month of delivery, and unlike wind and solar, they can be conveniently sited so as to feed their output into existing transmission lines.
The intermittent nature of the wind makes it hard to estimate how much electricity can be generated in a period of time and wind turbines cannot be used unless you’re prepared to hook them to the grid by building lots of additional high-voltage transmission infrastructure, an expensive and typically legally challenging undertaking.
Assuming that any major wind farms in the United States would be built on the Great Plains, where there is sufficient wind and land, developers would need to construct many thousands of kilometers of transmission lines to connect those farms to the main markets for electricity on the coasts.
In the United States, the problem goes beyond building new lines; it is also necessary to add them to an existing grid that is already stressed, relatively old and repeatedly challenged by spikes of high summer demand.
Adding to an existing energy grid is not merely a technical challenge — it often faces entrenched political opposition — the not-in-my-backyard syndrome.
The connection challenge is easier for small countries, which is one reason why Denmark became a leader in wind power.
Government intervention is needed because the odds are poor that any private program will be massive enough to speed the conversion to new sources of energy. But even governments in rich countries are having trouble bolstering essential infrastructure, mainly because of mounting debts caused by uncontained health-care costs, trade deficits, uncompetitive manufacturing, and tax-revenue shortfalls.
The ultimate justification for alternative energy is its mitigation of global warming: Using wind, solar, and biomass sources of energy adds less greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.
But because greenhouse gases have global effects, the efficacy of our conversion to renewable sources must be judged on a global scale.
Writing in 2012, Smil states: we have to face the fact that the Western world’s wind and solar contributions to the reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions are being utterly swamped by the increased burning of coal in China and India.
Between 2004 and 2009,
- The United States added 28 GW of wind turbines — equaling about 10 GW of coal-fired capacity, given the different capacity factors.
- Yet, China installed more than 30 times as much new coal-fired capacity in large central plants, facilities that have an expected life of at least 30 years.
In 2010,
- China’s carbon-dioxide emissions increased by 800 million metric tons, an equivalent of 15% of total U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions that year.
- The United States generated 95 terawatt-hours of electricity from wind, thus theoretically preventing the emission of only some 65 million tons of carbon dioxide.
Between 2010 and 2015,
- China is adding 200 GW of coal-fired plants
- The United States will add only about 30 GW of new wind capacity, equivalent to less than 15 GW of coal-fired generation.
The rapid increase in the burning of Asian coal will eventually moderate, but even so, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cannot possibly stay below 450 ppm.
The most misunderstood aspect of energy transitions is their speed.
Smil concludes: Substituting one form of energy for another takes a long time. The quest for noncarbon sources of electricity is highly desirable, and eventually such sources will predominate. But this can happen only if planners have realistic expectations. The comparison to a giant oil tanker fits perfectly: Turning it around takes lots of time.
Turning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is a truly gargantuan task. Its infrastructure — coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil engines — constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place.
It is impossible to replace this supersystem in a decade or two — or five, for that matter. Replacing it with an equally extensive and reliable supersystem based on renewable energy flows is a task that will require decades of expensive commitment. It is the work of generations.
This article contains only the essence of its source — For a more complete, data-driven, albeit grueling read — read the full article at A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy.
