Google: renewables "simply won't work"

Via The Register we learn that some of Google's top engineers have been tasked with making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We also learn that they have given up.

At the start...we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope ...

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

There's lots of kowtowing to Gaia in the article ("scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger"), but on renewables they seem to have done their homework.

(H/T El Reg)

The underpinning of energy policy collapses

UK energy policy has one key predicate, namely that fossil fuels are going to get inexorably more expensive. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of the whole renewables programme. Renewables, we are told, will save consumers money, and only if we dig much deeper might we discover that in fact we are actually being told that renewables are being forecast to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the future.

For years that forecast has looked ever more implausible, as all around us a revolution in unconventional oil and gas has caused fossil fuel prices to fall. Now, finally, the government has been forced to respond and to reduce its forecast prices.

Burning gas for power is currently far cheaper than electricity from wind farms, which receive billions of pounds in subsidies from consumers.

Yesterday however the Department of Energy and Climate Change released new forecasts slashing its power and gas price forecasts for later this decade by as much as 20 per cent.

But ministers have repeatedly argued that gas prices will keep on rising, eventually making green energy good value for money.

This is a bit of a nightmare for the greens in government, and it is hard to imagine that the government and its advisers are not going to have to reassess the whole renewables programme. No doubt it is not beyond the wit of the bureaucrats in DECC to come up with some plausible explanation of why renewables will get much cheaper in the future, but it will be interesting to see just how much they have to wriggle first.

Renewables don't work

The message that renewables simply don't work seems to be getting around. John Morgan, an Australian industrial scientist working in the area of grid storage technologies, has been looking at the EROI measure that was discussed at BH a few weeks back and has concluded that there is a bit of a problem with the whole concept of grid storage:

Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power.  Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.

Given the amount we have lavished on renewables in this country, Morgan's conclusions could be viewed as just more than slightly unfortunate.

Calling a bluff

The FT is reporting some new research by investment bank Lazard, which claims that in some parts of the US wind and solar are now cost-competitive with gas fired power.

Costs have fallen and efficiency has risen for solar panels and wind turbines, the investment bank found, to the point that in areas of strong wind or sunshine they can provide electricity more cheaply than fossil fuel plants.

I asked Ed Crooks, the author of the article, whether this wasn't just levelised costs rearing their ugly head again. He confirmed that it is, but argues that the impact of intermittency is low.

Click to read more ...

Renewables cannot sustain civilisation

The other day we were considering the concept of EROI, the amount of energy you get out of a given technology for the amount you have to put in. Specifically we were looking at the figures for solar PV in Spain.

With splendid timing, the Energy Collective has published a post considering EROI for the full gamut of energy technologies. At first glance the story looks not too bad, with wind and solar PV (so long as it's in a desert) above the minimum level of 7 that the article says is needed to sustain a modern society (breakeven EROI of 1 is not really worth the bother). The problem arises when you have to start storing all energy from renewables, which as their adherents suggest is the key to having them compete with fossil fuels.

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Kelly on the engineering challenge

Mike Kelly sends details of a talk he gave last week to a symposium on "Energy Challenges and Mechanics".  Mike writes:

There were about 130 energy experts from 40 countries in the room.

I was heard in respectful (stunned?) silence, and there were two mildly critical questions out of a dozen that I was able to handle.

Several came up to be and congratulated me for the courage in speaking out against the consensus.

If you take a look at the slides (PDF below), you will see that there is nothing that would surprise readers at BH, but 130 more people learning that the renewables king has no clothes is good news indeed.

Kelly ECMA

The disastrous revolution

Mike Kelly points me to Spain's Photovoltaic Revolution, a learned tome by Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall that I think you are going to want to look at.

The book covers the development of the Spanish solar PV industry from its boom years after 2006 to the bust in 2008 and is mostly devoted to an analysis of the economics of PV in that country. As the authors point out, the nature of the Spanish grid and the history of its PV industry mean that the data is particularly clean and simple to analyse. In essence, this is where we can truly understand the economic usefulness of PV technology.

The chapter analysing the history of the industry in Spain is laugh-a-minute stuff, a tale of incompetent politicians and civil servants bumbling from one disaster to another and fraudulent investors cheating their way to a slice of public funds. We learn how the Spanish government decreed a feed-in-tariff system that guaranteed six times market rates to PV businesses, before a belated realisation that this was going to lead to astonishing surges of investment. They then put in place a series of only partially successful measures in an attempt to stop the expansion, as the whole farrago quickly became unaffordable and ultimately disastrous. We hear about the diesel generators generating "solar power" at night and that at one point the authorities estimated that half of new solar PV connections to the grid were fraudulent.

Click to read more ...

Vehicle movements and energy infrastructure

I was having an exchange of views with Michael Liebreich on Twitter yesterday. He was getting a bit excited about the number of vehicle movements associated with developing a shale gas pad, saying that the public needed to know that they would be on the receiving end of 60 HGV movements per day. We talked about the duration of these 60 movements per day and I pointed out that the AMEC report on shale had come up with a range of 14-51 movements per day, depending on whether water was tankered in or came straight from the mains.

This seems to have prompted a blog post from David McKay, the former chief scientist at DECC, who set out an analysis of vehicle movements for construction of a shale gas pad, a windfarm and a solar array. He came up with a range of 2900-20,000 movements in total for a 10-well pad, as compared to 7000 for an 8-turbine windfarm. I pointed out to him that his figures had nothing to cover access road construction, and so he redid the figures, coming up with a revised estimate of 7800. One could consider adding more to cover removal of soil for the foundations, but since this might be disposed of onsite, it is arguably valid to leave it out.

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Renewables just aren't worth it - Josh 281

 

Many thanks to Bjorn Lomborg for his help in putting this Infotoon together. There are also a couple of short but excellent videos on Bill Gates blog here - worth retweeting/sharing widely.

Cartoons by Josh

Wind and solar are worst

The venerable (and somewhat woolly liberal) Brookings Institution in Washington DC has published a working paper on the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Commendably, the paper eschews the dishonest levelised-cost (LCOE) approach used by DECC and its colleagues in the green movement. 

The author, Charles Frank, concludes that solar and wind power are the worst possible approach to the problem:

...nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle have far more net benefits than either wind or solar. This is the case because solar and wind facilities suffer from a very high capacity cost per megawatt, very low capacity factors and low reliability, which result in low avoided emissions and low avoided energy cost per dollar invested.

Click to read more ...

Never mind the car crash

UK energy policy may be, in the words of Dieter Helm, a slow-motion car-crash, but Ed Davey and the environmentalists who surround him at DECC are not particularly bothered. Today they have announced minor changes to the market-fixing regime for solar PV, with a proposal to close the Renewables Obligation boondoggle, but only to new solar schemes, and then only very large ones, and then only from next year.

"Oh Lord", those at DECC seem to say, "give me the strength to stop the corruption, the fleecing of the poor, and the lining of the pockets of the rich".

But not completely.

And not yet.

Levelised costs claim another victim

Science writer Martin Robbins has written about the Koch Brothers today, telling us how the new-found "grid parity" of solar energy in some parts of the world is going to give them and other fossil fuel barons a "kick in the balls".

Last year, a small solar revolution happened across Europe, as Spain, Italy and Germany reached "grid parity’" – the point at which the cost of producing electricity from solar energy becomes cheaper than the cost of buying it from the national grid. Just a few years ago, solar installations needed massive government subsidies to be cost effective. Now – in three countries, at least – they can compete on equal terms with their dirtier cousins.

And this spells trouble for big oil:

Click to read more ...

More gloom for renewables rentiers

DECC is apparently about to announce a review of its strategy on solar power:

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is set to announce a review into the level of support offered to large-scale solar through the Renewable Obligation scheme, with a number of industry figures bracing themselves for the news.

While a reduction is not the only outcome of a review, it would tally with the recent Solar Strategy document which appeared to realign its preference for PV developments from ground-mounted to smaller, mid-sized rooftop arrays.

Given that the government has been making noises about keeping everything steady on the renewables front, this could represent something of an about turn. If so, one wonders if it represents jockeying for position ahead of the various elections over the next year or derriere covering ahead of the crises in the electricity grid that are expected in coming winters.

Chinese renewables

An article in the Financial Post in Canada looks at China's much-vaunted renewables industry and shows that it is nearing collapse:

Sinovel – one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – went from earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in 2010 when the renewable energy industry was booming to millions in losses that grow by the day. Revenues are now just a fifth of what they were in 2010. The company has closed its overseas offices and recently laid off thousands of employees.

And it seems that the solar industry is doing just as badly. In China, just as in Europe, renewable energy was only able to survive if it was regularly hosed down with public funds. As soon as the taps were switched off, the industry was in trouble.

Der energieshambles

Spiegel is reviewing Germany's alleged transition to green energy, which is proving just as disastrous as the one in the UK. The story is a familiar one:

If there is too much power coming from the grid, wind turbines have to be shut down. Nevertheless, consumers are still paying for the "phantom electricity" the turbines are theoretically generating. Occasionally, Germany has to pay fees to dump already subsidized green energy, creating what experts refer to as "negative electricity prices."

On the other hand, when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011.

There needs to be a wholesale clearout of both the politicians and the civil servants who did this to us.