David Roberts Asks, "Is 100% Renewable Energy Realistic?"--Still Antinuclear

Excerpted Roberts Quotes Promoting Wind and Solar Over Nuclear--Read Article for Full Context

Below I parse what I think Dave got wrong in his second of a two-part post about the feasibility of 100% renewable energy. I parsed his first part here. To see what he got right you'll need to read his articles. And if you decide to read them, keep in mind that he has absolutely no background, theoretical or practical, in engineering or science and has been inextricably imprinted with a bias against nuclear energy.

Two potentially large sources of dispatchable carbon-free power are nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

Nuclear and CCS do not have equal potential. What is “potential” about nuclear energy? Next to hydro, it’s the largest low carbon source of electricity on the planet, and has been for over half of a century. Wind and solar are the potentially viable energy sources, nuclear already has a long proven history.

All through his article, Dave repeatedly associates nuclear (a proven source of low carbon energy) with CCS (a completely unproven source) as if they have equal “potential.” He puts nuclear in the same box as CCS, just as antinuclear groups have always put nuclear power stations in the same box with nuclear weapons and coal.

Nuclear power stations ≠ nuclear weapons

Nuclear power stations ≠ coal power stations

Nuclear power stations ≠ carbon capture and sequestration

Clearly, nuclear power, our main source of low carbon energy for a half century, belongs in the box with other proven low carbon technologies, not with fossil fuels.

Suffice it to say, a variety of people oppose one or both of those sources, for a variety of reasons. 

Why no mention of the variety of people also oppose wind, hydro, and biomass?

In this post I’m going to discuss three papers that examine the subject, try to draw a few tentative conclusions, and issue a plea for open minds and flexibility. It’ll be fun!

This will be fun and although he works tirelessly to insinuate otherwise, Dave’s mind remains quite closed to nuclear as you’ll see.

There are two papers circulating right now that cast a skeptical eye on the goal of 100 percent renewables.

One is a literature review on the subject, self-published by the Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), authored by Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom ...

The other is a new paper in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews that boasts “a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems.” It is by B.P. Heard, B.W. Brook, T.M.L. Wigley, and C.J.A. Bradshaw, who, it should be noted, are advocates for nuclear power.

Wind and solar are Fuel Savers

 Figure 1: Jesse Jenkins proposed energy mix

(1) The flow of ideas across the Internet

Jesse Jenkins recently Tweeted his proposal for a low carbon energy mix. I had a few thoughts about his pie chart (see Figure 1).

Note that Jenkins is starting to call wind and solar “fuel savers.” I’ve been pushing this point for some time now. I’m certainly not the first to suggest this concept, but hopefully, with Jenkins intonation, the concept will start to appear more widely across the internet. Google the term “biodiversivist wind and solar are fuel reduction devices” for images and you'll likely see Figure 2 (shown below) at the top of the list. Rather than attempt to replace dispatchable sources with sporadic wind and solar, using wind and solar as “fuel savers” in combination with those dispatchable sources would not require reinvention of entire grid systems to accommodate them.

 Figure 2: Wind and Solar are fuel savers

(2) Are wind and solar, fluctuating, variable, intermittent, irregular, occasional, or sporadic?

I recently read a 2014 German Energy Transition blog article where the author was grappling with the English words “variable and intermittent.” His conclusion; “Variable renewables and intermittent conventional it is!” This is a wonderful example of the human capacity to warp reality as we see fit. Because the word "variable" has multiple meanings to pick from, we shouldn’t be using it to describe wind and solar.

Which Low-Carbon Plan has the Lowest Risk and Cost?

Figure 1: 2017 Technology Neutral Low Carbon Solution from Joint IEA and IRENA Study for Germany

Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom just published a paper that might be described as a meta study of meta studies:

In addition to the 30 papers directly reviewed, this literature review also covers other review articles (Cochran, Mai, and Bazilian 2014; Morrison et al. 2015) that summarize findings from an additional 21 previously published studies, as well as Kriegler et al. (2014) and Krey et al. (2014), which describe results from a detailed inter-model comparison exercise involving 18 energy economic and integrated assessment models.

As it turns out, dispatchable baseload significantly decreases the cost and technical challenge of decarbonizing power systems. Huh, could that be why we use it in virtually all power systems today? There are only three low carbon, dispatchable power sources: nuclear, biomass, and hydro.

All three are resisted by major environmental groups but only two out of the three are resisted for rational reasons:

1. Biomass displaces carbon sinks while usurping land needed for food production and biodiversity and in most cases isn't low carbon at all.
2. Hydro destroys thousands of miles of river ecosystems (think end of the Amazon, extinct river dolphins and salmon runs) and can produce massive amounts of methane as submerged vegetation decomposes. In addition, it can't always be used for baseload depending on precipitation patterns, and to ice the cake, dams eventually silt up.

This paper was, in turn, written about in Utility Dive where Mark Jacobson (mastermind behind a hypothetical global zero-carbon energy master plan based purely on wind, hydro, and solar), was asked to weigh in on the critique of his work found in said paper:

Could Wind Power Become the Fourth Largest Source of Unnatural Avian Mortality by 2050?

Photo by Thomas Kohler Via Flickr Creative Commons

The largest single cause of bird mortality from Mark Jacobson's 100% renewable energy plan comes from the increase in the number of high voltage power lines to connect wind and solar to load centers.

Figure 1: Annual Bird Mortality According to Sovacool Study

Many of you have seen the chart in Figure 1 from the study by Benjamin Sovacool which launched the internet urban legend that nuclear kills more birds than wind. After correcting his errors, it turns out that wind turbines kill far more birds per unit energy than nuclear. But, to Sovacool's credit, that wasn't his main point. His main point was that fatalities from wind and nuclear are very small in comparison to other unnatural sources of fatalities.

And that may have been the case in 2011, with wind supplying a percent or two of our power and nuclear supplying about 20%. Figure 2 shows an estimate of what may happen if we attempt to implement Mark Jacobson's 100%renewable energy plan.

Figure 2: Potential Impact on Mortality from Mark Jacobson's 100% Renewables Scenario (right click + view image to enlarge)

Note that Sovacool's estimate for the annual impact of climate change (23,448,000) from fossil fueled power stations is almost three times lower than Jacobson's impact from wind power (63,193,729), suggesting that the cure is worse than the disease when it comes to bird mortality.

David Roberts thinks there's a revolution happening in electricity, blames utilities for lack of progress

David's headline "There's a revolution happening in electricity" is yet another example of how Americans are being misled. In an earlier article, Roberts blamed television for this but Paul McDivitt and I have our suspicions:

 From How renewable energy advocates are hurting the climate cause:

But even if you look at just electricity, the numbers for the U.S. still don’t come close to 20 percent. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2015 statistics show that 4.7 percent of the country’s electricity was generated from wind, with 0.6 percent coming from solar. That’s a 14-plus percentage point difference between what Americans think and the truth

It’s hard to blame them, with confused and confusing coverage of renewable energy statistics popping up in their social media feeds and on news outlets they’ve come to trust. On top of that, most social media sharers never even read the articles they share. According to a recent study, 59 percent of links shared on Twitter have never been clicked, underscoring the outsize influence of misleading headlines, subheads and header photos. And research has shown that misleading and clickbait headlines have a lasting effect on how those who actually read articles interpret and remember their content.

David thinks the over-hyping of wind and solar "reflects a real communications victory on the part of clean energy industries and climate advocates."

Which may be true for the industries, but not so much for the cause of climate activists (assuming they want to end climate change instead of nuclear energy). We can, in part, thank misleading articles and clickbait headlines for the rise of emissions in Germany and Japan.

You'd never know from reading any of this climate hawk's articles, but nuclear is still the single largest source of low carbon energy in Germany and is expected to be the largest single source (according to six recent independent studies) for the entire world in 2050. See Figure 1. Renewables tribalism, the over-hyping of wind and solar in lieu of an advocacy for a mix of wind, solar, and nuclear has measurably worsened greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 1: Over-hyping wind and solar while denigrating nuclear results in more emissions

I love gizmos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to climate change, their impact will be more incremental than revolutionary. More gizmos won't get us there. We should be replacing existing coal plants with nuclear as well as building reasonable amounts of wind and solar to reduce natural gas fuel bills when the sun shines and the wind blows.

From Jesse Jenkins in the interview: