Written by Stan Cox and Paul Cox
and first published at Counterpunch
At the
People’s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people,
the atmosphere was electric. But electricity was also the focus of too many of
the signs and banners. Yes, here and there were solid “System Change, Not
Climate Change” – themed signs and banners. But the bulk of slogans on display
asserted or implied that ending the climate emergency and avoiding climatic
catastrophes like those that would occur a few months later—hurricanes Harvey
and Irma and the mega-wildfires in the U.S. West—will be a simple matter of
getting Donald Trump out of office and converting to 100-percent renewable
energy.
The sunshiny
placards and cheery banners promising an energy cornucopia were inspired by
academic studies published in the past few years purporting to show how America
and the world could meet 100 percent of future energy demand with solar, wind,
and other “green” generation. The biggest attention-getters have been a pair of
reports
published in 2015 by a team led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, but
there have been many others.
A growing
body of research has debunked overblown claims of a green-energy bonanza.
Nevertheless, Al Gore, Bill McKibben
(who recently expressed
hope that Harvey’s attack on the petroleum industry in Texas will send a
“wakeup call” for a 100-percent renewable energy surge), and other luminaries
in the mainstream climate movement have been invigorated by reports like
Jacobson’s and have embraced
the 100-percent dream.
And that
vision is merging with a broader, even more spurious claim that has become
especially popular in the Trump era: the private sector, we are told, has now
taken the lead on climate, and market forces will inevitably
achieve the 100-percent renewable dream and solve the climate crisis on their
own. In this dream, anything’s possible; Jacobson even believes that tens of
thousands of wind turbines installed offshore could tame
hurricanes like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma.
The
100-percent dream has become dogma among liberals and mainstream climate
activists. Serious energy scholars who publish analyses that expose the idea’s
serious weaknesses risk being condemned as stooges of the petroleum industry or
even as climate deniers. Jacobson has even suggested that he might take
legal action against NOAA scientist Christopher Clack and twenty coauthors
whose critical evaluation
of his work was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences in June.
Jacobson’s
team and others cling to the idea of 100-percent conversion because they
(rightly) want to eliminate fossil and nuclear energy, and how the world breaks
foresee that any future supply gap left by a shortfall in renewable generation
is going to be filled by those dirty sources. That is indeed stated or implied
by many of the opposing analyses, including the Clack study.
But the two
sides also share other basic assumptions. They both seek to satisfy all future
demand for energy solely through industrial production, technological
improvements, efficiency, and markets, without any strict regulatory limits on
the total quantity of energy consumed in production and consumption. The
100-percenters believe such a scenario is achievable while their critics
conclude that it is not, but they agree on the ultimate goal: a permanent
high-energy economy.
That part of
the dogma, not the “100-percent” part, is the problem. America does need to
convert to fully renewable energy as quickly as possible. The “100-percent
renewable for 100 percent of demand” goal is the problem. Scenarios that make
that promise, along with the studies that dissect them, lead me to conclude
that, at least in affluent countries, it would be better instead to transform
society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring
sufficiency for all. That would bring a 100%-renewable energy system within
closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required
by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.
Waking up from the dream
The pursuit
of the 100-percent dream didn’t start with the 2015 Jacobson et al. papers, and
critiques of it didn’t start with Clack et al. For example, there was a 2015
paper by Peter Loftus and colleagues that critically examined 17
“decarbonization scenarios.” Then earlier this year, a study
by a group of Australian researchers led by B.P. Heard rated the feasibility of
24 published studies that describe 100-percent renewable scenarios.
The Heard
group concluded that among the research papers they evaluated (which included
several with Jacobson as lead author), none “provides convincing evidence that
these basic feasibility criteria can be met.” They found a wide range of
technical flaws in the proposed systems. Most scenarios assumed unprecedented
and deeply unrealistic improvements in energy efficiency (in terms of kilowatt
hours consumed per dollar’s worth of output). Because the chief renewable
technologies, wind and solar, fluctuate continuously in their output and
regularly drop to zero output, they must be backed up with large supplies of
“base load” electricity if all demand is to be met without interruption; no
studies managed this without ecologically destructive levels of biomass burning
or wildly unrealistic estimates of hydroelectric output.
Scenarios did
not account for the overcapacity and redundancy that will be needed if a
high-energy economy is to function in an increasingly unpredictable global
climate. (This year, the people of Texas, Florida, and the West in particular
can attest to the deep impacts of that unpredictability.) Studies did not
account for the expected four- to five-fold expansion of the power transmission
infrastructure that will be required to accommodate renewable energy. And they
did not address the difficulties of maintaining voltage and frequency of
alternating current within extremely tight limits (a necessity in
technologically dependent societies) when a large share of the supply is from
wind and solar. This all adds up, writes the Heard team, to a systemic
“fragility” that will render futile all attempts to deliver the promised output
of electricity when it is needed.
The Loftus
group found several of the same weaknesses in the studies they examined. But
they singled out scenarios in papers by Jacobson and Delucchi, the World
Wildlife Fund, and Worldwatch. Those scenarios had in common two assumptions
that Loftus and colleagues regarded as out of the realm of reality: efficiency improving
at as much as 3 to 4 times the historic rate, and buildup of renewable
generation capacity at many times the rate at which today’s total electric
generation capacity was built up in past decades. They concluded that it would
be “premature and highly risky to ‘bet the planet’” on the achievement of
scenarios like those.
Unrepealable limits
In their PNAS
publication, the one that prompted Jacobson to hint at a lawsuit, Clack et al.
critically examined two papers from 2015, one of which was a widely hailed
“roadmap” for plentiful, 100-percent renewable energy in all 50 United States.
In addition to “modeling errors,” much of the Clack critique is aimed at the
Jacobson group’s assumed ubiquitous deployment of technologies that either
don’t yet exist or are only lightly tested and can’t be scaled up to the huge
scales envisioned. They include underground thermal energy storage for
virtually every building in the country, a full air transportation system run
entirely on hydrogen(!), wind farms covering 6 percent of the entire land
surface of the 48 contiguous states, an outrageous and unrealistic increase in
ecologically harmful hydroelectric power, and a buildout of electricity
generation capacity that hurtles along at 14 times the average rate of capacity
expansion in the past half-century.
But even if
it were physically possible to achieve all of those scaleups, and even if
Congress found a way to repeal and replace Murphy’s Law, the full-blown
100-percent dream could not be realized. In a series of papers published since
2010 (e.g., a 2016
paper in Energy Policy), Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery of Monash
University in Australia have identified several crucial factors that will limit
the total global output of renewable electricity. For example, renewable
technologies exploit the windiest or sunniest locations first, and, as they
expand, they move into less and less productive territory. There, their
construction and operation will require as much energy input as before, but
their output will be lower.
Furthermore,
because of inherently intermittent generation, much of the electric power from wind
and solar will have to be stored using batteries, hydrogen, compressed air,
pumped water, or other means. It will then have to be reconverted to
electricity and transmitted from often remote regions to places where people
and businesses are concentrated. The result is a severe shrinkage of the net
energy available to society, because much energy is expended or lost during
both conversion and transmission. Finally, all production of wind, solar,
geothermal, biomass, and especially hydroelectric energy has an ecological
impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation
and destruction of the Earth’s natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to
declare large areas off-limits to the energy sector.
Moriarty and
Honnery show that given all of these factors, expansion of renewable energy
will hit a brick wall, a point at which as much energy is required to install
and operate electric facilities as they will end up generating in their
operating lifetimes. But even before that point is reached, it will have become
pointless to expand generation capacity that has lower and lower net output.
They conclude that as a result, future renewable output “could be far below
present energy use.”
What are we hoping for?
A generally
overlooked but crucial point about high-energy, 100-percent renewable proposals
is that they seek to meet future demand patterns in a way that would leave in
place today’s great distortions in access to energy and other resources. The
American economy would carry on uninterrupted with its overproduction,
overconsumption, and inequality, while billions of people in poorer regions and
countries would not get the access to energy that’s required for a minimally
good quality of life.
The
100-percent scenarios themselves, as well as the critiques of them, hold one
especially valuable lesson. Unintentionally, they show in stark terms why rich
countries need to start planning to live in the renewable but lower-energy
world envisioned by Moriarty and Honnery rather than the high-energy world that
the mainstream 100-percent scenarios envision. The world that the latter
scenarios would create, one focused on maintaining current profligate
consumption levels, would not be a green and pleasant one. Herculean quantities
of physical and mental labor power will have been expended, boundless physical
resources (including vast tonnages of fossil fuels) will have been consumed,
and countless entire ecosystems across the Earth’s surface will have been
sacrificed to generate more electricity. All of that would make for a pretty
grim world. With society having zeroed in singlemindedly on acquiring enough
energy to keep driving, flying, and overproducing as much as we want, there’s
no reason to expect that other problems, including enormous distortions in
economic and political power and quality of life, along with racial and ethnic
oppression, would have been solved.
Some in the
climate movement believe in the 100-percent dogma and the dream it holds out:
that the (affluent) American way of life can keep running forward in time and
outward in space without breaking stride. There are others who know that to be
an impossibly rosy vision but urge the movement to limit public discussion to
such green dreams anyway, because talking about a regulated, low-energy economy
would crush hope and enthusiasm at the grassroots.
The debate
about hope ignores the relevant question: what are we hoping for? If our hope
is to deploy solar and wind capacity that maintains indefinitely the current
throughput of energy in the world’s affluent societies, then, yes, the
situation is hopeless. But there can be other hopes that, although they’re
looking dim for now, are at least within reach: that greenhouse warming can be
limited sufficiently to allow communities around the world who are currently
impoverished and oppressed to improve their lives; that access to food, water,
shelter, safety, culture, nature, and other necessities becomes sufficient for
all; or that exploitation and oppression of humans and nature be brought to an
end.
There’s
always hope, as long as we don’t confuse dreams with reality.
Stan Cox and
Paul Cox are the authors of “How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path,
From the Caribbean to Siberia,” coming in July from The New Press. Write them
at cox@howtheworldbreaks.com
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