Getting Real About "Green" Energy

Getting Real About Green Energy. Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com, Oct. 4, 2019.

An honest analysis of what it can't promise...



I want to be optimistic about the future. I really do.

But there’s virtually no chance of the world transitioning gently to an alternative energy-powered future.

These Are The ‘Good Old Days’

I’m often asked where I stand on wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.

My answer is: I love them. But they’re incapable of enabling our society to smoothly slip over to powering itself by other means.

They’re not going to “save us”.

Some people are convinced otherwise. If we can just fight off the evil oil companies, get our act together, and install a national alternative energy system infrastructure, we’ll be just fine. Meaning that we”ll be able to continue to live as we do today, but powered fully by clean renewable energy.

That’s just not going to happen. At least, not without a lot of painful disruption and sacrifice.

The top three reasons why are:

• Math
• Human behavior
• Time, scale, & cost

I walk through the detail below. I’m doing so to debunk the magical thinking behind the current “Green Revolution” because I fear it offers a false promise.

Look, I’m a huge fan of renewable energy. And I’m 1,000% in favor of weaning the world off of its toxic addiction to fossil fuels.

But we have to be eyes wide open about our future prospects. Deluding ourselves with “feel good” but unrealistic expectations about green energy will result in the same sort of poor decisions, malinvestment, and crushed dreams as fossil-based system has.

As we constantly repeat here at Peak Prosperity: Energy is everything.

Without as much available, the future is going to be exceptionally difficult compared to the present. Which is why I call the time we’re living in now The Good Old Days.

Now is the time to prepare for what’s coming. To acquire the skills, the land, and make the financial, physical and emotional adjustments in your lifestyle that will boost your resilience for a future of less and more expensive energy.

Math

Let’s start with the math.

Suppose we agree on the goal to entirely replace fossil fuel energy by 2050. (We’re going to have to do it by some point, because oil, coal and natural gas are all depleting finite resources.)

With 2050 as a starting point we can run some simple math.

We start by converting the three main fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – into a common unit: the “millions of tons of oil equivalent” or Mtoe.

A million tons of oil = 1 Mtoe, obviously. And there’s an amount of coal, if burned that has the same energy as 1 Mtoe. Ditto for natural gas. If we add up all of the fossil fuels burned in a given year, then we can express that as a single number in the many thousands of Mtoe.

Roger Pilke has run the math for us in his recent article in Forbes:

In 2018 the world consumed 11,743 Mtoe in the form of coal, natural gas and petroleum. The combustion of these fossil fuels resulted in 33.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. In order for those emissions to reach net-zero, we will have to replace about 12,000 Mtoe of energy consumption expected for 2019.
(Source)

So that’s our starting point. Whatever future alternative energy systems get installed will have to replace around 12,000 Mtoe.

Now, it bears noting that 12,000 Mtoe is a truly massive amount of energy.

To visualize this, let’s use gigantic oil-bearing cargo ships. Here’s a picture of the Ultra Large Crude Carrier, the Oceania, which can hold a bit more than 3,000,000 barrels of oil at a time. That’s a staggeringly massive ship. Ginormous.



We’d need 2.4 of these massive ships to hold 1 Mtoe. Which means we’d need a fleet of approximately 30,000 of these tankers to hold 12,000 Mtoe. (By the way, there are currently only 4 ships in the world of this size).

Because these truly gigantic ships are 1,246 feet in length, our fleet of 30,000 would stretch over 7,000 miles if parked stern to nose in a line.

Are you getting a sense yet for how mind-bogglingly large the world’s annual fossil energy consumption is?

So, what would it take to replace those 12,000 Mtoe with alternative fuels by 2050?

Pilke answers that for us:

Another useful number to know is that there are 11,051 days left until January 1, 2050. 

To achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions globally by 2050 thus requires the deployment of >1 Mtoe of carbon-free energy consumption (~12,000 Mtoe/11,051 days) every day, starting tomorrow and continuing for the next 30+ years. 

Achieving net-zero also requires the corresponding equivalent decommissioning of more than 1 Mtoe of energy consumption from fossil fuels every single day.

Yikes! More than 1 Mtoe of alt-energy systems would have to be installed every single day? Between now and Jan 1 2050? No resting on Sundays even?

But that’s only half of the story.

We’d also have to decommission and retire an equivalent 1 Mtoe amount of still-functioning fossil fuel property, plant and equipment. Do you have any idea how much money and embedded capital is contained in all the world’s current energy infrastructure — including our cars and homes — that’s built around fossil fuel use?

Somehow, the world would have to replace the equivalent of the energy contained within 2.4 Ultra Massive crude ships. Every. Single. Day. For 11,000 days straight, without missing a single day. A 7,000 mile long cargo train of ultra massive ships retired at the rate of 2.4 per day for the next 30 years.

What would that take? Again from Pilke:

So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 [brand new] nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. 

I’ve found that some people don’t like the use of a nuclear power plant as a measuring stick. So we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.

So to dismantle that 7,000 mile long conga-line of ultra massive crude carriers, we’d have to build and commission 3 new nuclear plants every 2 days. Or 1,500 very large wind towers installed across 300 square miles every day.

It’s just not going to happen.

Even if the world got totally, completely serious about doing this, it remains an exceedingly improbable task. That’s being kind, too. When something strays this far over the line of improbability, it’s really an impossibility.

Oh, and I started writing this article on Tuesday. Since it’s now Friday, that means we’re already behind by 9 nuclear plants. We’ll need to hurry to catch those up.

But maybe you’re still holding out hope. If all the countries of the world suddenly made this their #1 priority, could we have a shot?

This brings us to complicating factor #2: human behavior.

Human Behavior

One huge reason that an easy, seamless transition to alternative energy won’t happen is because our biological wiring is terrible at responding to such big, complex, long-range predicaments.

A snarling saber-toothed tiger crouching right in front of us? That we know how to respond to. Filling our bellies from a ripe fruit tree to sate our hunger? We’re absolutely wired for solving problems like that.

But organizing ourselves against a faceless distant threat? Not in our wiring. Trying to convince people to make sacrifices today for no immediate or visible reward? Really not at all in our biological wheelhouse.

When united towards a common goal, humans can do amazing things. Simply brilliant and astonishing works exist that inform us of what’s possible when we set our collective minds to a shared mission. The great pyramids. Towering middle-age cathedrals. The Great Wall of China. The Apollo missions.

But far less is possible when we’re fractured and divided. As we are now. We’re currently having trouble trying to agree on which gender(s) should use a particular bathroom. Or being civil when standing in line for a discounted TV.

Given this, it’s impossible to imagine the increasingly-divided populations in the UK, France, America or Germany agreeing on much of anything, let alone a gigantic and massively expensive energy transition.

Each country is currently struggling with its own brew domestic social and political problems (of their own making, I should add). They have neither the appetite or ability to take on the much more challenging task of a 30-year global energy infrastructure re-build.

Making this energy transition will require an enormous diversion of effort – away from this and towards that.

It will be hard. It will take a lot of political capital and expert leadership. Huge pain and suffering will result as entire industries are shut down and new ones are started up.

Just drive through any former mill or mining region and you can still see the bitter remnants of its abandoned industries. Some have not yet recovered, even hundreds of years after the initial loss.

When the coal mines died out, so did the cities:


Centralia PA

When the mills left, so did the vitality.


Lowell MA
(Source)

With an energy transition away from fossil fuels, there will be similar examples of ruined economic ideas littering the land. Places where refineries now stand with their thousands of jobs will become rusting derelicts. Ditto for hundreds of other dependent businesses, ranging from Jiffy Lube to Boeing to gas stations to airports.

Which brings us to complicating factor #3: time, scale and cost

Time, Scale and Cost

Suppose for a moment that we did decide This is it!, and began building 3 nuclear plants per day in earnest.

First: how much would that cost? Who would pay for it?

Second: are there enough skilled workers and manufacturing facilities to make and install all of the components?

Third: even after these nuclear plants were all up and running, is there even enough Uranium in the world to fuel the eventual 16,500 new, additional plants?

The answer to each of these questions is some form of “no, that isn’t really possible.”

In the third case, the entire amount of all known Uranium reserves are only currently sufficient to supply the existing ~400 reactors in the world of 90 years.

If we expanded the number of reactors by a factor of 41 (16,500/400), that 90 years of supply shrinks to just a bit over 2 years. Nobody is going to build a nuclear plant with just 2 years of Uranium around to supply it. (that said, I am a fan of researching the use and installation of Thorium reactors, which I’ve explored before)

Similar supply constraints arise if we calculate out the amount of resources required to build the amount of wind towers or solar panels that could replace these nuclear plants. The costs are staggering, the global resources too limited. There aren’t enough new hydro dam sites to even make a dent.

Also complicating things, each of these so-called alternative energy systems requires a huge amount of fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, install and maintain. The world has yet to see a single windmill or solar panel that was mined, manufactured and installed without using fossil energy.

The Vision We Need

The answer to the post-fossil fuel era is not an alt-energy system capable of providing us with the same way of life. Because that’s just not feasible.

The answer lies in doing more with less.

We already know how to build structures that will last for hundreds of years and which require almost no energy to operate for heating and cooling. But those are very rarely built today, because they cost more.

We already know how to build small, light vehicles and operate mass transit very energy effectively. But society prefers its huge cars and trucks, because they’re affordable (while debt is cheap) and convenient.

We already know how to grow more food, closer to home, that is far healthier for humans and the ecosystem. But it’s still only done on a boutique basis because it costs a little bit more.

This is why people need to be told the truth and inspired with a vision that we can all share. With a grand cause, anything is possible. Without one, nothing will be done.

The vision we need will align what needs to be done with proper incentives to get those things done. We’ll be told the truth, what is expected, and our role in the project. It will imbue many lives with a sense of meaning and purpose that are currently missing in the lives of most people.

However, given the enormity of the challenge, and the fractured, divisive social and political landscape, you really need to plan for nothing happening. That no vision is coming along, no savior will appear, and that we’re going to merrily continue along until we run out of time and resources to do anything more than regret our mistakes.

Odds are we’re going to keep heading straight along our current trajectory. Until — clunk! — we go right over the edge.

Conclusion

Given the math, human tendencies, and the issues pertaining to time, scale and cost, the current green energy movement currently is little more than hot air. It’s just not going to happen in time.

We’re nowhere close to being able to build out the massive energy projects required. The equivalent of 3 nuclear plants every two days for the next 30 years? That’s a total pipe dream.

We lack the political will, the cultural readiness, the proper narrative. Even the appropriate resources.

Beyond those concerns, nearly everything about how we heat, move, cool and manufacture the components of our modern lives will have to be refashioned (and possibly jettisoned) as part of that project.

Such an ambitious undertaking has no historical analog. It’s a ridiculously complex set of problems (which have solutions) and predicaments (which don’t). It’s exactly the sort of situation that politicians will avoid as long as possible, after which it will be too late to do very much about it.

Which means you need to adjust your expectations and investment of your money and energy, accordingly. The entire world — which is utterly dependent on infinite growth — is only years away from grasping the impossibility of that approach. When it does, everything will change. Quickly.

This is why Peak Prosperity spends so much time and effort alerting people to these realities, and then helping them take informed individual actions that align with the future we all see (or feel) coming.



In Part 2: Reality Shock we examine the most compelling evidence I know of for why taking matters into our own hands is so important now. It explains everything from slowing global economic growth, to the widening wealth gap, to the rising rejection of globalization and the increasingly desperate mad dash (at any cost) for what remains of natural resources.

Humanity is in the early innings of a great transition. Losing access to abundant energy will change things more than you or I can appreciate at this time.

This future is barreling towards us at a furious — and accelerating — pace. Get prepared.

Book Review: Designing Climate Solutions

Designing Climate Solutions — Book Review. Carolyn Fortuna, CleanTechnica. Nov 14. 2018.

Some people take a college course in climate change policy. I read a new book that outlines which energy policies can put us on the path to a low-carbon future. Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy combines the latest research and analysis on low-carbon energy solutions from electric vehicles to renewable energy. It is a primer that identifies which specific policies, applied to the top 20 most-emitting countries, can have the largest potential impact to reduce emissions. The book, with clear and jargon-free explanations of policy changes and fiscal implications, outlines long-term goals, price-finding mechanisms, and small sets of actions that can achieve market goals. It is a must-read.





Designing Climate Solutions (November, 2018) offers policy design principles to ensure that future climate and energy policy maximizes greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions and economic efficiency. The book (and accompanying website) is intended as a resource by policymakers, advocates, philanthropists, and others in the climate and energy community as a guide to where to focus efforts and how to ensure that policy is designed to maximize success. Part I of the book provides readers with a roadmap for understanding which countries, sectors, and sources produce the greatest amount of GHG emissions. Part II of the book explores each of the emission-reducing policies, including detailed information on the policy and its goals, when to apply each policy, the key policy design principles that make that policy effective, and case studies of good and bad applications of that policy.

The Necessity of Reaching the 2 Degree Celsius Limit

The scope, scale, and irreversibility of climate change — and the irreducible mathematics of carbon accumulation — together mean that swift action to abate greenhouse gas emission is imperative. There are 3 consequences of global temperature shifts:

• Increase in the frequency of extreme temperature and weather events, which makes previously rare extreme temperatures more frequent 
• Irreversibility of warming on reasonable timescales, which, once a quantity of greenhouse gas is emitted, will begin cycling out of the system as various natural cycles pull it out of the atmosphere 
• Danger of triggering natural feedback loops that cause additional warming, as, although anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions may be the initial catalyst in warming the globe, Earth’s natural systems can exacerbate this impact, understood as a vicious cycle 

The authors of Designing Climate Solutions, Hal Harvey with Robbie Orvis and Jeffrey Rissman, argue that we must act as soon as possible to reduce emissions. First, most energy-consuming assets — buildings, power plants industrial facilities — have a turnover rate of decades or more, so that we lock in a higher level of warming with each piece of new equipment we adopt or install. Second, because warming is a function of the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, delayed action on emission reductions makes it far harder to achieve the same concentration of CO2 in the future.

Reasons for Hope in Designing Climate Solutions

But the authors do not perseverate on notes of doom and gloom. Instead, they say that there is ample technology to put the world on a low-carbon trajectory. Costs for wind and solar power have plunged, propelling their growth around the world. Innovation in energy efficiency continues, with well-constructed buildings using a fraction of the energy of older buildings thanks to advances in lights, windows, insulation, and heating and cooling systems. Decades of energy policy examples have highlighted which policies are most effective in reducing carbon emissions and energy use. From city ordinances to international treaties, politicians are “lining up” to put strong policies into action — at the international level, 189 countries have submitted emissions targets, and such commitments over nearly 99% of the world’s emissions. Consumers, too, are shifting their behavior to reduce their carbon footprint, with households installing solar panels or opting into green power programs, buying energy efficient appliances, and driving EVs.

The authors acknowledge that, while development in low-emission technologies is providing an array of options for emission abatement, policymakers need to help push these technologies into the marketplace with smart policies that quantify each major source of GHG emissions.

• Step #1 — Identifying the Sources of GHG Emissions around the World: Nearly 75% of global GHG emissions are generated by just 20 countries. Emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes (including agriculture and waste) are the primary sources of GHG emissions, comprising more than 93%.

• Step #2 — A Straightforward Roadmap for Reducing Energy-Related Emissions: We need to implement policies that reduce emissions in the electricity, industry, transportation, and building sectors in the top 20 emitting countries. To do so, a suite of policies which fall into 4 broad types is the lowest-cost way to drive down GHG emissions.

4 Policy Types to Support Designing Climate Solutions

• Performance Standards improve new equipment and help capture savings that economic signals cannot, because of market barriers. These quantitative targets at the device, fuel, or sector level specify levels of performance businesses or equipment must achieve — for example, fuel economy standards for vehicles or particulate emissions standards for coal-powered plants. They increase the availability of price-competitive efficient and low-carbon technologies and spur the innovation essential to long-term decarbonization. Performance standards also serve as market guidelines that encourage competition to produce least-cost solutions and are particularly necessary when price is not an effective inducement.

• Economic Signals can be highly efficient and encourage the uptake of more efficient equipment driven by performance standards. Two of the most common economic signals governments use to promote decarbonization are economic incentives for clean energy, and taxes on carbon. Generally, economic incentives should decrease over time while carbon taxes should increase over time. When possible, the endpoint or goal of an economic incentive should be selected and explicitly specified. If a long-term goal is publicly specified, this helps businesses understand policymakers’ intentions and make plans with the benefit of having this endpoint in mind. Economic incentives for clean energy should be based on the amount of clean energy that is generated and used, not on the amount of capacity built, or money invested to purchase or install clean energy infrastructure. This ensures that the incentive is only paid when these resources are used — and actually playing an active role in decarbonization. Economic signals are best put into place as far upstream as possible, where sophisticated upstream actors will adjust to the signals, resulting in accelerated decarbonization. This improves the ease of regulation (it is much easier to regulate 500 companies than 1 million consumers) while making sure the incentive is carried through to the whole value chain.

• Support for Research and Development (R&D) brings to light new technologies that can accelerate and complete global decarbonization. Continued and broadened support for R&D is an essential component of remaining below the two-degree warming target and can lower the cost of future emission abatement by decreasing the costs of low-carbon technologies. To help guide funding priorities, the government should involve the private sector, which can bring crucial expertise regarding the technologies, markets, scalability, and technical challenges associated with early-stage technologies. Bringing this experience to bear on funding decisions can help ensure that government R&D dollars are spent wisely. An efficient way for the government to fund and support R&D is to concentrate funding on a specific topic in more focused, granular institutions, possibly co-located with one another. This allows researchers working on similar technologies to share information and work together while avoiding the inefficiencies that can arise from spreading funding for similar research across many different institutions. Ideally, companies and government-owned research facilities will have a large pool of researchers to draw on with strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To attract this talent, policymakers can establish top-quality education programs and ensure immigration laws allow companies to hire STEM talent from other countries.

• Enabling Policies tend to lower transaction costs, improve information, and streamline decision making. Supportive of and secondary to the 3 previous types of policies, these lower the costs of performance standards and economic signals by pushing new technologies to market and lowering the costs of existing technologies by removing deployment market barriers.

A Suite of Policies is Essential for Designing Climate Change Solutions

Policymakers have many types of policies at their disposal to limit global warming to the 2-degree Celsius target. Policies with large potential abatement and long lead times that deliver economic savings should be prioritized first. Initial policy action must be followed with sector-specific performance standards, carbon pricing, and R&D-supporting policies to help lower abatement costs and provide additional compliance options. Other considerations like political feasibility must also be considered.

Part I of Designing Climate Solutions offers the suite of policies available and helps with strategies for identifying the most effective options and principles for designing successful policy programs.

• Chapter One: Putting Us on Track to a Low-Carbon Future — This chapter discusses how much effort is needed, the types of reductions and emissions pathways that are need in order to avoid the worst parts of climate change, and ideas about where to focus. 
• Chapter Two: Energy Policy Design — 4 types of essential energy policy and how they reinforce and interact with one another comprise the essence of this chapter. 
• Chapter Three: How to Prioritize Policies for Emission Reduction — Which policies can effectively work together in a portfolio to drive down GHG emissions? This chapter lays out a framework for identifying these policies and provides insight into how to prioritize policies for reducing emissions. 

Part II explores these policies in depth. Each chapter includes information on how each policy works, when to use the policy, the policy design principles most applicable and how they can be implemented, and case studies of good and bad implementation of the policy.

• Chapter Four: Renewable Portfolio Standards and Feed-In Tariffs — These topics are considered because their roles in promoting renewable energy are similar: each policy creates a compensation mechanism for renewable energy generation and drives renewable energy growth. However, a feed-in tariff is price-based, while a renewable portfolio standard is target-based. 
• Chapter Five: Complementary Power Sector Policies — This chapter outlines that, even under the best possible policy design for renewable portfolio standards or feed-in tariffs, a more holistic approach is needed to ensure the transition is affordable, increases prosperity, maintains reliability, and expands service to unserved customers. 
• Chapter Six: Vehicle Performance Standards — Designed well, stronger vehicle performance standards can achieve about 3% of cumulative global emissions needed to meet the 2-degree Celsius target. 
• Chapter Seven: Vehicle and Fuel Fees and Feebates — Along with performance standards, fees of fuel and inefficient new vehicles are among the best policies for reducing emissions from on-road vehicles, which make up 71% of emissions from the global transportation sector. 
• Chapter Eight: Electric Vehicle Policies — Vehicle electrification policies can contribute at least 1% of cumulative emission reductions to meet a 2-degree target through 2050. 
• Chapter Nine: Urban Mobility Policies — Smart policies to enable alternative forms of urban mobility and reduce the number of vehicles on the roads can improve the quality of life with dramatically cutting transportation sector emissions. 
• Chapter Ten: Building Codes and Appliance Standards — Residential and commercial buildings are major energy consumers, accounting for roughly 20% of delivered energy use and more than 50% of electricity worldwide. 
• Chapter Eleven: Industrial Energy Efficiency — Industry plays a central role in the world’s economy and is responsible for more than 40% of world energy consumption, more than any other sector. Industrial energy efficiency policies can achieve at least 16% of the GHG reductions needed to hit the 2-degree target. 
• Chapter Twelve: Industrial Process Emission Policies — Industrial process emissions reflect all the non-energy ways in which industrial production results in the release of GHG into the atmosphere. Part of the challenge in reducing process emissions is the diversity of ways in which the emissions are generation. Measures to reduce process emissions often must be specific to each type of process. 
• Chapter Thirteen: Carbon Pricing — Carbon pricing is a critical tool for reducing emissions and should cover all sectors of the economy. The impact of carbon pricing depends on its design and on the price. The authors’ modeling of a carbon price set at the social cost of carbon suggest it can deliver at least 26% of the emission reductions necessary to meet the 2-degree Celsius target. 
• Chapter Fourteen: Research and Development Policies — This chapter describes a handful of best practices that can help energy technologies advance all the way from the laboratory to the marketplace. This work is built on experience in the field, collaboration with government, reviews of a dozen studies, and many interviews with experts from the private sector, academia, and national labs. 
• Chapter Fifteen: Policies for a Post 2050 World — This chapter considers technologies that may be necessary in the long term (after 2050) to achieve the emission reductions required by a future with less than 2 degrees of warming and policies and adapt to climate change. Policies to accelerate technologies that may not currently be ready for widespread deployment must begin now, the authors say, so that they will be sufficiently mature by the time they are needed. 

Final Thoughts

Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy is an accessible guide that should be on every person’s resource shelf. It offers concise information and pathways for the necessary transition to a low-carbon society. Because the book moves fluidly within argumentation, data, and practical applications, it allows multiple audiences to consider policies that can introduce climate change action in all our communities. The authors’ focus on quantitative analysis, at first glance, seems reductive to a strict economic lens. But the various case studies through the book bring the policy recommendations back to the human — which becomes a descriptive method that continues to examine and also make relevant analogies to familiar cityscapes and scenarios.

Topic: Clean Energy

first published April 2017; updated 2020

Morneau budget is down payment on clean energy “dream home”. Clare Demerse, Clean Energy Canada. March 22, 2016.

Is Vaclav Smil a Pessimist or Voice of Uncomfortable Truths? Tracy Durning, Huffington Post. Jun 1, 2015.

EPA: Building solar panels makes global warming worse:
Solar panels increased emissions of a gas 17,200 times more potent than CO2. Andrew Follett, The Daily Caller. Mar, 1, 2017.


The dark side of renewable energy. Liu Hongqiao, earth journalism network. Aug. 25, 2016.

Rare earth metals, hard-to-find materials, with unfamiliar names such as lanthanum, neodymium and europium, are used in wind and solar energy projects, but dwindling supplies could hinder a roll-out of low carbon technologies and slow China's shift away from coal power. 

These compounds, which are highly toxic when mined and processed, also take a heavy environmental toll on soil and water, posing a conundrum for policymakers in China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of rare earths. 

Confidence in 100% RE plans is poorly justified and may be dangerous. J. M. Korhonen. Jun. 21, 2017.

The recent publication of an unprecedented critique against the so-called “WWS” 100% renewable energy (RE) scenario has re-ignited the debate about the feasibility of renewable only energy scenarios in the United States and abroad. This is a long-overdue debate the world sorely needs, and everyone who has the slightest interest in climate change mitigation should pay careful attention. At stake is nothing less than whether or not our climate policy measures are based on sound science or pie-in-the-sky optimism. 

As many of the critics of 100% RE plans – myself included – have repeatedly pointed out, the problem here is not that 100% RE plans are being developed. We definitively need research that tries to solve the issues related to large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources, and it is a very good thing that such plans are made. Even if the plans themselves never come to fruition, their existence serves to increase the ambition level of other plans and policy proposals; and if it turns out that we can power the planet with nothing else but renewable energy yet limit the environmental and social damages to an acceptable level, I believe we should do so. 

But the burden of proof lies with those who assert that we definitely do not need certain solutions, usually nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage. At this moment, no country on Earth has managed to decarbonize its economy even close to the extent required by climate science. Despite encouraging progress of renewable energy sources, the “new” renewables that would have to shoulder most of the burden in renewable-only decarbonization plans are still a minor fraction of the world’s total energy supply.

A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why. Alf Hornborg, The Conversation. Sept. 6, 2019.


Huge Global Study Just Smashed One of The Last Major Arguments Against Renewables. David Nield, Science Alert. March 31, 2019.

Pumped-hydro is one of the best technologies we have for storing intermittent renewable energy, such as solar power, which means these sites could act as giant batteries, helping to support cheap, fully renewable power grids.

The Limits of Clean Energy. Jason Hickel. Foreign Policy. Sept. 6, 2019.

If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels.