Green, Clean Energy!
Suddenly, it is an emergency, and there is little time to actually think and plan...
There is a push to promote “Zero Carbon Footprint”. There seems to be a plan to allow (and even promote) a grossly higher cost of gas and oil in order to hasten the transition to “Renewable Forms of Energy”. But is this EVEN a plan? Cutting off available energy sources when there is virtually no realistic alternative on the horizon is not a plan. About 3% of our current energy is low-carbon. That will have to be multiplied by a factor of THIRTY. And how long will it take to ramp up those new emergency sources.?
These pages may be updated frequently: Last updated 10/22/2022.
So lets take a realistic look at the road ahead…
Licensed Dilbert copy
In order to get from “A” to “B” you need to know three things:
(1) Where is “A”? (2) Where is “B”? (3) What lies in between?: You need a roadmap.
“A” is a society that was built early-on almost entirely on oil and coal. But the oil industry is very heavily woven into the very fabric and foundations of our society. “Oil” is not just an energy source. You can’t just “unplug” from Oil and “plug into” the “Green Outlet”. Oil byproducts from the refinery find there way into a very wide range of industry. Most of our plastics depend on oil and get their raw materials from oil. Disposable plastics may pose a very serious problem, but little attention if given to the durable plastics. Many of thee last a decade or more as a part of a durable product, and many can be recycled. The same goes for the chemical industry. Oil provides the lubricants for your electric vehicle. Petrochemicals ( see https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/#topicHeader__wrapper ) needed for a very large number of industries will soon be in short supply. The petrochemical industry converts raw materials from oil refining and gas processing into a wide range of products. These include plastics, synthetic fibers, fertilizers, adhesives, dyes, detergents, and synthetic paints and coatings. In 2019, petrochemicals accounted for more than 13 percent of the oil demand. In that same year, the market value of petrochemicals reached 441 billion U.S. dollars. Even the heaviest components of the raw oil become the asphalt for our roads, so not much is wasted. Since supplies of the raw components are abundant, they have been put to practical use maximally. All of these will suddenly become scarce. Most products will rise in cost as we try to find suitable substitute materials on a short fuse. Substitutes for petrochemical stocks will have to be synthesized or otherwise substituted. It is going to take a long time to invent/develop durable and reliable substitutes. The reliability an durability of many current products will suffer during the transition and many will remain degraded.
(See https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/)
“B” is an idealistic society that will have transitioned almost entirely to “Green, Clean Energy”. Is that realistic? Is that practical? Is that even possible??
The path from “A” to “B” will be enormously disruptive. It will require enormous levels of investments. But without the continuity of the current cheap and efficient energy sources, that progress will slow painfully and drastically.
Lets start with considering “A”. Here is our current menu of energy sources according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This combination has evolved and optimized over many decades by free market forces. This is “what actually works”. THIS IS WHERE WE ARE NOW.
Note that only 11 percent of our energy consumed comes from “Renewable Energy Sources”. That sounds like a fair start, until you look closer. The “Traditional Renewable Energy Sources” (the “zero carbon footprint” sources) are Solar, Wind and Geothermal energy. This data is from 2019, but there was little progress on ANYTHING during the peak of the pandemic. But Solar was only supplying 0.9% of our energy (8% of 11%), and Wind Power was only generating another 2.4%. If you throw in 0.2% Geothermal Power, it only brings you up to 3.5% of our current energy needs. (There are of course extremely limited locations where geothermal power is even possible, so we are pretty much limited to wind and solar.) So the current “Green Energy” would have to be ramped up by a factor of 30x in order to “go green”. Think about that! Every time you see a wind or solar power project, think of multiplying that by 30 times. Another problem is that building all of that equipment requires a tremendous amount of energy, and the only source for that energy in the foreseeable future is fossil fuels.
Solar and Wind are true “Green Energy”. The next three are technically “renewable” — but they are HIGH CARBON. I have seen a lot of promotion for Biofuels as “Renewable Energy”. But why do I call them “High Carbon”? Oil and Natural Gas are “hydrocarbons”. That is to say that they consist almost totally of Hydrogen and Carbon atoms, so they are in principle nearly “100% combustible”. Biofuels typically have substantially less energy per gallon, meaning that it requires more gallons to travel 100 miles. (Traveling 100 miles requires a fixed amount of energy, regardless of what is in your tank!) Thus you end up burning more, and emitting substantially more carbon per mile. Driving on pure ethanol would get 30% less miles-per-gallon, and would thus actually burn roughly 30% more fuel per mile, resulting in even higher carbon emissions. Since the current “motivation” is for allegedly for reduced carbon footprint, some “renewable” energy sources are disqualified.
“Ethanol [gasoline] contains less energy per gallon than gasoline, to varying degrees, depending on the volume percentage of ethanol in the blend. Denatured ethanol (98% ethanol) contains about 30% less energy than gasoline per gallon, so it dilutes your gasoline. Ethanol’s impact on fuel economy is dependent on the ethanol content in the fuel and whether an engine is optimized to run on gasoline or ethanol”. ( https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html )
Corn for ethanol requires cultivation, irrigation, and transportation to the distillery. Fermenting and distilling drains a substantial amount of energy from the budget. The soil will become depleted if it is not fertilized. There are no “Ethanol pipelines”, so the product must be trucked overland to the refinery.
But there is a far higher cost that is seldom mentioned. Fifty years ago we were sending vast shipments of surplus corn to feed starving millions in the famine areas of the world. We elected to let them starve so that we could “save the World” by putting it in our gas tanks instead. That has troubled me deeply every time I thought about it. With vast amounts of corn going into your car, that also drives up the cost of food in general.
E10 Gasoline in morally unforgivable. State legislatures should at least pass laws to make fuel choice available. Meanwhile, Biden is moving to increase the Ethanol content. Doing so incrementally will obsolete your car as your engine performance deteriorates, eventually forcing you to buy a new “green” car. Meanwhile, major farmlands will have to be diverted to ethanol production. This will inevitably drive all food prices up drastically. In other words, this would greatly accelerate the already painful inflation.
So the realistic “traditional renewables” only account for about 3.5% of our current energy supply. How do we plan to scale them up to 100%? And how many decades will that require? Building all of the new infrastructure would require tremendous amounts of energy, but we now find ourselves starving for the energy we need. It would also require a robust and vibrant economy that could support the enormous cost. This would cost far more than the Apollo Moon Landing. We can’t do this during a protracted depression.
But there is another stark reality. While the US and the European Union are retiring coal-fired plants, China and India are building new coal plants at a rate far greater than the “Green Countries” can retire them. Many of these plants will still be in operation 20-40 years from now. In addition, we are actually making coal cheaper for them. China is currently constructing over 700 new coal-fired power plants around the world. According to Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin, some of these new coal plants will be built in countries that burn little or no coal today.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/china-and-india-count-on-coal/
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal/despite-paris-agreement-china-india-continue-build-coal-plants/
WE NEED A REAL PLAN.
Most people probably think of Solar Power as the “most popular” and thus the top candidate for the Green Era. That popularity probably comes largely from its wide application on home rooftops, but solar actually only ranks around 1% on the chart. Consider the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility. The plant is in a formerly pristine portion of the Mojave Desert that was home to colonies of endangered desert tortoises and a refuge for birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway.
In order to “go green” we would have to build THIRTY more of these — and THIRTY more of EVERY solar and wind “Green Energy” source.
“The 2,200 million dollars per 120 million watts represents an $18 dollars per watt ($/W) investment. By way of comparison, another nonpolluting source of electricity, nuclear power plant, the Millstone reactor No. 2 in Connecticut, operating at 880 MW since 1975, cost 0.5 $/W, making Ivanpah 36 times more expensive. (But the real ratio is a good bit smaller since inflation was excluded).”
This 392 MW (“name-plate”) giant was built on 13 km^2 of land in Mojave Desert at a cost of 2.2 billion dollars. It generated a disappointing 0.4 billion kWh thus producing at an average rate of 46 MW the first year. The plant was producing 12 % of its name-plate power. The 2200 million dollars per 46 million watts represents a more realistic $48 dollars per watt ($/W) investment.
But Ivanpah is already near shut-down: Is this really the “energy of the future?? Who is going to want to invest in this kind of energy? Profits are low, risks are high, and the electricity is expensive and unreliable. ( https://www.masterresource.org/ivanpah-solar-plant/ivanpah-solar-fail/ )
Solar power currently accounts for only about 1% of energy needs. A massive scaling of solar power would be disastrously expensive and the long term cost of energy would permanently cripple our economy.
http://www.technocrazed.com/ivanpah-solar-power-plant-can-provide-electricity-to-140000-homes-and-roast-birds":
But, as they say, “The Devil is in the details!” And when you start looking at those details, what you find is a comedy of errors. Or worse, a LOT of false advertising.
But this type of solar power is hardly the wave of the future:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/americas-concentrated-solar-power-companies-have-all-but-disappeared
https://www.masterresource.org/ivanpah-solar-plant/ivanpah-solar-fail/
They spent and exorbitant 2.2 Billion tax dollars based on very ambiguous (at best) projections of 50-year global warming. But they failed to get accurate 1 year forecasting of transient and/or average cloud coverage. Out of the $2,200,000,000, they should have sent an engineer right at the start in a car to park by the road twice a week for a year to measure the daily insolation. Both transient AND average cloud coverage turned out to be critical and problematic.
This map of predicted insolation (think of Solar Irradiation) applies only to completely cloudless days. Also, it peaks at high noon but drops to zero at sunrise and sunset. With solar concentrators like Ivanpah, they may only be able to produce practical amounts of power for 8 hours/day without a boost from Natural Gas.
Here are four consecutive days of cloudy weather. A “bad cloud day” is much worse than a “bad hair day”. Four (or more) days in a row is serious trouble. It is easy to see the need for for the natural gas: If major cloud cover passes over, it would take a long time to get the steam pressure back up. Some days will require substantial gas. PV systems dip instantly under clouds. In the big picture, there will be days when one third of the country would need to be supplying the missing power to the other two thirds, so they would have to be generating THREE TIMES their normal power. And they would need enough BATTERIES to supply all of that power at night.
Every morning they have to warm up the water to boiling. Then they have to super-heat the water to build up full steam pressure. Since the incoming sunlight is weak in the morning, it would require a painfully long time just to get up to full power.
The solution was simple: Fire up the boilers on natural gas in the morning. Then, as the Sun “warms up”, they can gradually throttle back the natural gas, and hopefully shut it off completely by late morning.
But guess what? It isn’t that easy — by a long shot. They had estimated that it would take an hour to power up the system. But experience quickly showed that they needed four hours of Natural Gas every day. I read that they are up to about 7 hours of at least partial Natural Gas to keep the plant reasonably practical. How ironic!
But then there was a second unanticipated problem. The efficiency of the steam power plant drops quite significantly when not running “full steam”. That means that when the sunlight drops, the power output drops even more. This presents problems to the power companies purchasing the Solar Power. They must compensate for customer-side fluctuations in load power. But that problem is compounded if they must simultaneously compensate for fluctuations in supply-side power. A massive scaling up of solar power would result in a unreliable and unstable power grid. When Solar is just a small fraction of the power on the national grid, the oil and gas powered generators can “take up the slack”. But as the percentage of Solar and Wind becomes significant, the grid becomes increasingly unstable.
At the risk of “beating a dead horse”, here is a full year of insolation pictures of the entire U.S. Solar Power Grid at night:
OK! That should be painfully obvious! But most people seldom think of it because they can always get “regular power” from the fossil-fueled plants.
But even fewer people realize that in the early hours after sunrise and the late afternoon before sunset, the amount of solar power available is greatly reduced — even on a clear day. So they pre-heat the boilers with Natural Gas. As the Sun gets higher in the sky, they can transition smoothly to full solar power as quickly as possible. But on a hazy day, that transition may be delayed considerably, and on a cloudy day, they may never get close to full solar power.
In a Solar Power source, if the day is a bit hazy, then the power output is reduced. But if a “puff of clouds” blows over, that creates a dip in the power. That dip is instantaneous in a Photo-voltaic system, while there is somewhat slower dip in a Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant, but it is still real. It also takes longer to recover full power. If a larger bank of clouds is approaching, then the operators need to start firing up the Natural Gas to keep their output reasonably constant. I am guessing that for the public statistics, power purchased from the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility is thought of as “Solar Green Energy” to avoid the embarrassment of having to account for the “Brown Energy” from Natural Gas.
In the final analysis, we are left with a “Fully Functional Natural Gas Power Plant with Supplemental Solar Power (When Available)”: A “Comedy of Errors.” But I should expect that a 2.2 Billion Dollar Comedy should absolutely brighten the day of a million people for at least a week. Instead, I am left feeling rather ambivalent. I am not sure whether I should laugh or cry. So I make the conscious choice to just laugh. Life is short.
One of the selling points for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility was that you need to “go big” to achieve an “economy of scale”. But the problems go far beyond just economy of scale. Most of the problems are fundamental and would apply as well even to a much larger scale plant. Most problems would simply get worse.
Before we abandon the theme of the “Comedy of Errors”, it is only fair to grant them some credit on the comedy angle. The engineers reprogrammed the mirror array to track the moon and focus the “lunar flux” on a remote camera. (I suspect that it might have been on a nearby mountain.) Perhaps you are unimpressed by the fact that the camera (and the photographer) were not incinerated by the full intensity of the concentrated moonlight. But c’mon guys! Give us an animated cartoon!
This “scientific experiment” certainly provides a conclusive proof of why the U.S Government does not provide any funding for “Lunar Power”. But the point is painfully clear: A Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant only produces full power for a few hours before and after noon.
But the power companies also need to supply power to customers at night. If a Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant wants to supply 100MW of power around the clock it will have to be rated to produce enough power during the peak period around noon to make up the deficiencies during the mornings and evenings, plus storing enough power for the whole night. In our present national power grid, the Solar Power is supplying a fluctuating power that perhaps mostly “averages out” the local clouds and weather. But as the percentage of Solar Power ramps up, the grid will become increasingly unstable until it reaches a critical instability point. The only way to supply nighttime power then gets deeply into the problems of power storage. Battery storage is both highly polluting and energy intensive both in the manufacturing and in the disposal or recycling of the batteries. Huge battery installations are subject to spectacular and catastrophic failure. California currently has only about 30 minutes of total battery storage, but someone pointed out tongue-in-cheek that this figure is true only if you include every car and truck battery! That is actually a valid observation, since those batteries are indeed storing energy for use later (rather than “electric vehicles with long extension cords”…) All types of energy storage are subject to two-way inefficiency losses, and require more than doubling the plant capacity in order to store and supply night time power.
The goal (the price at which battery storage would be considered practical) is $150 per kWh (that is $150 million per GWh). For a fully backed up power system, you would need at least 15 hour of battery backup to cover the early morning and late afternoon hours, so that would be $2.250 billion per GWatt plant capacity. That would add $880 Million to the cost of Ivanpah. That price level is still considered “future hopes”, and the pollution concerns of manufacturing (plus the danger of catastrophic failure) could place battery storage quite a way into the future…
In order to make a useful clarification, I will keep the discussion here overly simplified. Just remember that every process is “less than 100% efficient” — often much less than 100% efficient. For a major example, storing energy for use later is likely to suffer from substantial inefficiencies. Huge battery banks are historically susceptible to catastrophic failures, and they require a major financial investment. They are also highly polluting to manufacture and more so to dispose. The AC power on line must be rectified to charge the batteries, and the battery power must be converted back to Alternating Current for sale on the grid.
The figure is not necessarily drawn to accurate scale. The “24-hour average” would have the same area (energy) as the output energy curve (blue). But the charge/discharge efficiency would lower that average even further. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility generated an average 12% of the “advertised nameplate power”.
A 2.2 Billion dollar attempt to advance the technology of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) systems like Ivanpah fell grossly flat. As a result, investors are going to shy away from projects which are frighteningly expensive with high risk of failure. They gave it their best shot, but the failure only highlighted some fundamental problems.
Not too far from the Ivanpah power site are several Photovoltaic installations of similar magnitude. Note that most of the arguments about weather (clouds) and energy storage apply pretty equally to Photovoltaic installations as well.
But there are some obvious differences. You can’t just “pipe in” Natural Gas to supplement a Photovoltaic array. If a cloud blows over, your power output can immediately drop “some, a lot, or dramatically”, and you have no recourse except to either drain your batteries (if you have any) or try to borrow energy from other PV systems (which may be requesting energy from you!) In any grid that has too many PV systems, rolling blackouts are inevitable.
The only other energy source that comes readily to mind is wind energy. But wind energy also has problems. While solar power has a mathematically predictable solar cycle (minus the “un-mathematical” cloud cover, of course), wind power is rather chaotic. Major mountain gaps funnel the wind and are somewhat more reliable, but wind power is more a function of weather. The “prime real estate” would be quickly filled, forcing the use of lower-yield areas.
Offshore wind farms offer unobstructed wind fields, but are very expensive to install, and they are subject to a harsh and corrosive salt water environment with very difficult maintenance. In all cases, the wind turbines must be spread out because down-wind turbulence substantially degrades the efficiency of wind turbines placed there.
And then there is the “bird problem”. Offshore turbines are going to decimate the seabird populations, and like the CSP solar power, wind farms kill a lot of land birds. For the many endangered species, expanded wind and solar power may tip many populations to extinction.
So we know fairly well where we currently are. “Green, Clean Power” is still in its infancy. It is a minor player in the big picture. It would require major up-scaling. But efforts to up-scale have thrown harsh light on a number of very fundamental problems, and many of these are indeed fundamental and seem to have no clear answers. And there are a host of companion problems which are also without reasonable answers. Note also that many “Renewable Energy” fuels actually produce far more carbon dioxide than oil or gas, so they cannot be called “Green”.
But this raises some serious questions that are even more fundamental in their nature: Is a massive conversion to “Green Energy” even necessary, let alone desirable or practical?
There are hundreds of web sites providing excellent insights into the “CO2 problem” and so-called “Global Warming”. But here are my thoughts on the subject: