This is exactly correct. Nothing is completely without problems. Nothing is without environmental impact.
Solar and wind have big problems that people do not want to look at. Probably the biggest issue is storage. We really do need electricity in the middle of the night. Building enough batteries to get us through the night is going to be horribly polluting and horribly expensive. Where I live getting through the winter would be much worse. Of course, where I live we could get a lot more of our electricity from hydroelectric power (specifically Hydro Quebec) if we would just let them build the power lines to bring in the electricity.
We need to pick the least polluting solution. My suspicion is that this is probably nuclear. However, I do not think that we can do this with reactors that use a lot of U-235. There isn’t enough U-235. We are going to need breeder reactors that either breed U-238 into plutonium, or that breed thorium into U-233. Then we are going to need to allow the waste to be reprocessed so that most of it can be used again.
To me the biggest worry with nuclear power is whether every country in the world will be capable of doing it safely. I do believe that the US and Europe can do it safely. Some parts of Canada has been doing it safely for a long time now.
The solar and wind alternative requires a great deal of land area (clearing forests, wiping out some local plants and animals), plus a huge amount of storage. The storage probably requires batteries, which have big problems in quantity. There is another big issue which is that people are not usually all that good at recycling old stuff. All those solar panels contain hazardous materials, and will need to be recycled. Of course this can be done, but we need to make sure that we do it and do not just pile up the old used panels in a junkyard somewhere (perhaps next to the piles of old cars).
One nephew installs solar panels for a living. He says that 50% of their work is to fix damage done to roofs by squirrels that like to live between the solar panels and the roofs. This at least should have some solution. However, there will be a lot of little details such as this with any solution.
Perhaps the main thing is that we need to let engineers figure this out, and not rely on emotion and politicians to do the right thing.
Oil is a much more globally traded commodity, with decades of infrastructure built out to transport it. LNG transportation is a much more recent development so prices are very different by country and were consistently low in the US after 2010. The US experienced a windfall from gas fracking alone worth at least $200B per year over the last decade (consumption 20-30 trillion cu ft/year, price around $8-$10/thousand cu ft cheaper than historic benchmarks).
The World Association of Nuclear Operators (a former client of mine) exists to ensure the safe operation of nuclear power plants all over the world. It doesn’t have much enforcement authority and suffers from some organizational challenges but bringing in all commercial nuclear operators around the world under its tent (except IIRC North Korea) and liberally sharing good/best practice has probably made nuclear power safer than it would otherwise be.
WANO officially launched after Chernobyl but its history can really be traced to Three Mile Island (the US is a highly active and influential member of WANO).
I will ignore Mr. Shellenberger’s assertions since they are blatantly false. He not just a climate denier, he is an anti-environmentalist. He gives mixed messages on whether there is even such a thing as pollution.
As for power sources, solar is already the cheapest source of power, particularly when it is installed at the home, because then there are low to no distribution costs. On-land wind turbines are slightly more expensive per Kilowatt Hour than natural gas, but are safer and don’t have the carbon output. An odd dynamic is that as more and more people use renewables, it will drive the cost of natural gas down.
Nuclear is a bad solution because of its cost. At $6,000/KWH it is several times the cost of natural gas, wind and especially solar. Generally, the pro-nuclear writers are getting sponsored by the nuclear power industry, which is always looking for government handouts to make itself more economical. Nuclear power can not be turned off, so in times of low energy consumption, nuclear power actually just ends up getting wasted, which results in even larger KWH cost. As others have pointed out, the risk of catastrophic disaster is very real, and the waste is a serious problem. The positive is that it does not generate greenhouse gases.
The storage argument for solar and wind is weak. Why store the power at all? There is more wind and sun coming tomorrow. Somewhere in this silly strawman of an argument is the idea that natural gas can be stored as a fuel, which is true, but unlike solar and wind it is consumed in power generation. While solar and wind can not be stored, they are perpetual and free, unlike natural gas. The one major problem that solar and wind have is that the grid does need a backup power source for them when the wind dies down or it is cloudy. Natural gas is great in that regard. I also wouldn’t be against nuclear being used as a backup though.
There is an irony to Putin’s gas embargo in that he is giving Europe no choice but to make a major renewables push to break its dependence on Russian gas. This will result in Europe permanently reducing its natural gas demand in the future, which will have a huge effect on the total market for natural gas.
As those who have taken economics know, most price curves are not straight lines, but are parabolic. So a 10% reduction in demand could result in a 11% or 12% reduction in price. A 20% reduction in demand could result in a 30% or 40% reduction in price. That is effectively what is going to happen to the natural gas market over the next few years if Europe is able to replace even a portion of its natural gas demand with renewables. The remaining sellers are going to have to slash costs because they don’t want to be the seller left with no buyer.
I’ve wondered about that. Local government here is not pushing home solar panels much because they are pricey (especially since our energy costs are relatively low), and there is more economy of scale as they transition to more renewable sources. But as stated above, there must be a lot of loss in transmission.
At the info meetings I’ve attended, there is recognition there needs to be better battery technology to help even out demand. There are plans to encourage off-peak usage by reducing the rate in certain time periods.
Unqualified statements like “solar is cheapest” are a good example of how sloganeering has produced many of the current problems in world energy markets. Europe is extremely different from the US, not least because in most of the continent there are roughly half the hours of sunshine seen in the US.
Moreover, in Europe (where residential air conditioning is rare), peak power demand is experienced on cold, still winter days when the sun doesn’t shine and (often) the wind doesn’t blow. In the US it is experienced on hot summer afternoons when people get home from work and crank up the AC.
Energy delivery is everywhere and always a problem of matching supply to peak demand. If a solution doesn’t match peak demand then it isn’t going to dictate marginal prices in those circumstances (or put another way, you’d better price battery storage or other fossil fuel generators into your home solar - all our neighbors here in CA have bought gas-powered generators this summer because our electricity supply is now so unreliable). And if you only run your generating plant for peak demand, rather than base load, it will cost far more per unit of power produced.
Moreover if regulators and governments say that new fossil fuel production will be made more difficult and expensive (or even banned in a few years time), that will make most companies think twice about investing in addition production and transportation of these fuels, further limiting supply (but allowing these companies to capitalize on high prices for many years to come).
That means people freezing to death in cold countries, because they can’t afford their heating bills, and starving to death in developing countries, because fertilizer companies can’t afford the energy needed to produce nitrogen-based fertilizers. Stupid environmentalists are likely to cause far more deaths over the next decade than climate change. But most of them are wealthy enough to not worry about imposing those “transition” costs on others.
So like Warren Buffett, I think fossil fuel companies (viz Occidental) will be a good investment for the next decade and its all but certain that energy prices, including natural gas, will be much, much higher during that period than over the last decade.
Storage helps save the excess from peak generation time (e.g. noon on a clear day for solar) to use during peak use time (late afternoon and evening), so that less backup generation is needed. Of course, storage also saves the solar generated electricity for night use.
Does anyone have Musk’s wall battery? How much power can you store? Can you store enough to get through the night and cloudy days? We do have to worry about pollution from batteries and solar panels not to repeat plastic recycling fiasco decades earlier.
Solar panels are guaranteed for 20-25 years and can easily last 30 years plus. The efficiency drops to about 80-85% of initial power output by year 30. I don’t think we are there yet to have massive landfill issues with solar panels because very few residential systems are approaching their end of useful life. BTW, judging by what I’ve seen recently at a local college’s student business school’s project competition, folks are actively thinking about and working on recycling issues.
Speaking of wind turbines, turbine blade recycling can be dicey because they are predominantly made of not easily recyclable fiberglass. We’ve done some work with a local company that figured out how to make composite decking etc. out of spent turbine blades. Here is a good article on the subject of blade recycling (those things are massive!!):
Regarding home batteries, how much you need to go off grid with your solar depends on how much you use, how much your solar generates, and how long bad generation periods (heavy clouds) last.
If you just want a home UPS (whether or not you have solar), then the calculation is just based on how much you use and the length of time of outage you want to cover.
Switzerland just unveiled a giant “water battery” that is pretty amazing. Basically it’s closed-loop hydropower. Excess power from renewable energy pumps water to a high reservoir, and when power is needed the water flows to a lower reservoir with the water flow generating power.
Very cool to see solutions like this for storing excess power - we sometimes forget that storing power doesn’t always mean a chemical battery, and good old gravity+elevation works great for storing potential energy.
I saw that on the news not too long ago - BBC. I’m quite confident the world has brilliant people who will come up with good solutions. We’re not there yet to pull the plug on fossil fuels, but I definitely see dependence on them lessening quite a bit over the next couple of decades.
The book mentions water battery. There was a problem with it in practice and is not a viable option at the moment. I forgot what the problem was. I’ll go back and read it over. What I liked most about the book is its simple thesis. He acknowledges climate changes but thinks the greater evil is population growth and expansion of land use. He advocates industrialization to limit land use expansion, encourage city living, and high density energy source.
I haven’t read Michael Shellenberger’s energy book but have listened to him talk about “San Fransicko” (his book on homelessness in California) on City Arts and Lectures. I think he grew up in Berkeley with somewhat unconventional parents. He’s an interesting man. He ran for governor in June against Newsom but didn’t get over 5% of the vote if I remember correctly. He’s an unknown to the public in general. I’ll try to get ahold of his books, particularly the energy one since it is always good to hear/read varying points of view. I don’t think he has the scientific credentials to really back-up his viewpoints but as a fellow citizen, it’s good to hear what others have to say.
I can see him running for governor. He claims Jerry Brown killed California nuclear energy. After nuclear plants got shut down, air quality in California nose dived and utility bill shot up. It turned out Jerry Brown father has huge oil interest. So does Gavin Newsome’s father. Anti-nuclear groups are heavily funded from fossil fuel industry interestingly. Now that I read it, it makes sense. Nuclear power plants will be eating their lunch.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima killed the popular opinion of nuclear power plants.
So, even though the damage from them was nowhere near that of coal emissions pollution (including fly ash radioactivity), the leaded gasoline emissions crime wave, damage to the land from fossil fuel extraction, etc., fossil fuels have the public opinion advantage of doing their damage a little at a time, rather than having a few big news-attracting disasters.
