Ryan Radecki, from The Green Room at Ohio University, writes:

I agree with some of your proposed ideas on the problems with environmentally friendly forms of energy, and I used your comments about having no free lunch for energy in my essay. I also feel that renewable energy forms by themselves are not helping, but the combination of many types of renewable sources is our future. Would you mind reading my blog at http://ryansfuturefuels.blogspot.com I would like to have your perspective.

Ryan:

I agree with the basic idea, i.e., the pros and cons / no free lunch concept. But I think your perspective here is too harsh and a little unfair.  For example, to say that the various forms of renewable energy are not helping is not true.

To take a more specific  example, let’s look at what you write about wind. First of all, some of your facts are wrong, like the amount of land required. By my calcs, you’re off on the pessimistic side by a factor of about 5.  But more importantly, let’s be fair and note:

• Only about 1-2% of this area is actually occupied by turbines, access roads and other equipment. The rest remains free for other compatible uses such as farming or ranching.

• Turbines will eventually be put offshore.

• The problem we’re trying to solve has externalities that are immeasurably huge by comparison. As the gentleman I interviewed for my chapter on wind in my first book (Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies), Dr. Amir Mikhail, CTO of Clipper Windpower told me, “There are people who would rather chop the top off of a mountain (and burn the coal, contributing to lung disease and long-term environmental damage) than put a wind turbine on top of it. Good luck trying to explain that to me.”

Thanks for writing, and keep up the good work.

We speak often about ending the subsidies for Big Oil, in an effort to create a level playing field for renewable energy, and simply to stop transferring wealth from the U.S. tax-payer to the captains of the most profitable industry on Earth. And the discussion is heating up even further, now that America is $15 trillion in debt.

Here’s an article that points out that the federal government has spent more than $95 billion (in 2011 dollars) on nuclear energy research and development (R&D). That is more than four times the amount spent on solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biofuels, and hydropower combined.

Its authors note:

Many in Congress talk of getting big government off the back of private industry. Here’s an industry we’d like to get off the backs of the taxpayers. …..One thing we strongly agree on is the need to end wasteful subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry. After 60 years, this industry should not require continued and massive corporate welfare. It is time for the nuclear power industry to stand on its own two feet.

EVWorld has a wonderfully encouraging article on renewables that begins:

Pop quiz time. The fastest growing energy sector in terms of percentage of growth in the United States between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2011 was: A) natural gas, B) nuclear power, C) renewable energy?

The answer is C, renewable energy (RE) by a huge margin. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), RE grew by 27.12%. That includes biofuels, biomass, geothermal, solar, water, and wind. By comparison, natural gas production increased 13.66%, while crude oil grew 14.27%. Nuclear power, in contrast, shrunk 1.99% and coal dropped 7.16%.

All true, but one can find different facts that would support a different conclusion.  E.g., under 5% of the U.S. grid mix is renewable energy (if you don’t count hydroelectric dams), so talking about percent growth of this small number may not be the most relevant stat.  

I wrote a piece a few months ago on nay-sayers to wind, in which I pointed out that the UK’s Duke of Edinburgh just may be the king.  In it, I noted:

Here in the U.S., we have climate change deniers, and all manner of other opponents to renewable energy. In essence, they’re the oil and coal companies, the members of Congress they influence, and those who believe the torrents of propaganda they generate on “clean coal,” “safe nuclear,” and the other oxymorons that are creeping into our vocabularies.

In the U.K. however, they come in the form of certain members of the nobility. According to The Guardian, the Duke of Edinburgh has made a fierce attack on wind farms, claiming that “they don’t work,” and describing them as “a disgrace” and “absolutely useless.” Pictured here, however, I would say that he looks rather jolly. Who would know that such scathing (and silly) statements lie behind such a winsome smile and what I’m sure is truly excellent breeding?

In response, Nick Cook, a wonderful chap from Cheltenham (Western England), with whom I Skype writes:

(Your piece notes that) “The law of statistics means that the wind is likely to be blowing somewhere.” Unfortunately the law of statistics also means that the wind is not guaranteed to be always blowing somewhere, as happened in December 2010 in the UK when it hardly blew anywhere for a fortnight. This is when you need some serious storage capacity, several TWh worth if you are to get most of your electricity from solar and wind. (For reference the average UK electricity usage is about 1 TW.)

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-wind, but we do need to be pragmatic — not a nay-sayer but also not over optimistic. To balance out these we will need very substantial energy storage and the only technology that can sensibly and economically store these quantities of energy are chemical fuels, ideally synthetic hydrocarbons.

Nick:

Yes, we DO need storage, but only when we have huge penetration of wind and solar. We’re a long way from that now — at least in the U.S., where it’s about 2%; we could quadruple that and not have any issue with storage at all.

And yes, synthetic fuels is a very good approach.  As you know, I’m a big believer in Doty Windfuels; I think they’ve cracked the code here.

Re: your comment on chemical storage, I would point out that we’re fairly close to batteries at $100/KWh. That starts to make grid-scale energy storage affordable.

And try to keep the Duke under control there, mate.  

Don Harmon of LiFeBatt, a long-time 2GreenEnergy reader, writes in about my recent video on clean energy:

Good interview. We are currently working on a project in the Caribbean Islands for solar and wind generation. The islands are a very ripe opportunity now for implementing green energy because they are mostly dependent on buying diesel fuel from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the cost is atrocious. So, may we see these islands go green way before the U.S. does? Since there is virtually no infrastructure, we have a blank slate to work with, and of course battery storage backup will be a key ingredient.

Thanks, Don. Yes, I think we’ll absolutely see this, for the reasons you name and more.

1) The price of diesel is bad and getting worse.

2) Having all one’s eggs in one basket, in this case, diesel, has hugely negative implications to national security.

3) Having a blank slate means not abandoning existing as-yet-to-be-depreciated assets in terms of investments/infrastructure.

4) Island nations can be corrupt, but at least it’s not corruption built out into a super-bloated bureaucracy like ours.

5) The warmer the surface waters, the more potential ocean thermal has – and OTEC is baseload (24X7).

6) Ocean current is also a possibility for island nations near large, steady currents, e.g., the Gulf  Stream and the Mozambique Current.

7) The intermittencies of solar and wind aren’t as important, since some of these nations are densely populated, and don’t have the land mass for solar anyway. Bermuda is a great example. They’d need almost a square mile of PV to replace their diesel generators, but the land mass simply isn’t there.  I’m good at using prefixes like mega, giga, and tera, but I can’t imagine what a square mile of Bermuda is worth; it’s gigadollars, to be sure.

8) There is some serious money laying around some of these islands. Bermuda’s another good example. Their population of 68,000 or so is one of the wealthiest in the world per capita, and they’re really tired of watching the smoke rise up out of those chimneys, and dumping particulate exhaust all over the island.

Thanks again for writing.

Here’s a short video I made explaining the basics of wind energy for young people, or newcomers to the subject.  I explain why the wind blows, offer a brief history of man’s attempts to harness wind energy, and discuss our current efforts to use wind to generate large amounts of electricity with relatively little environmental impact.  

Whenever I speak on renewable energy, I’m careful to leave my audience with a sense of the “tough realities.”  We all want simple answers to our questions, but in the case of clean energy, none exist.

There are dozens of different flavors of solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal, each improving in terms of cost and efficiency, but at different rates.  There are economic issues, as none of these flavors can compete with the dirtiest form of coal, if we don’t take into account the “externalities” like lung disease and environmental damage.  And Lord knows there are political issues, where we have serious candidates for president of the U.S. who, if elected, boldly pledge to dismantle our Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy.  If this occurs, it would effectively end the efforts of the largest economy on Earth to migrate away from fossil fuels and nuclear. 

Here’s another in a series of infographics that attempts to put all this into perspective. Hope you enjoy.

When we think of wind energy, we generally think of those multi-megawatt farms in western Texas, the plains states, and California.  Conversely, when we think of solar PV, we normally conjure images of “distributed generation” — “DG” for short — rooftop mounts on thousands of geographically dispersed homes and commercial buildings.

Increasingly, however, wind is sporting a DG face, with smaller turbines appropriate for “campus” settings: schools, cities, counties, farms, factories, communities, and other large power users who want to stabilize their energy costs.

My colleague Jim Boyden acts as an advisor to a company called Continental Wind Power, which offers a range of campus wind solutions.  Considering that an incremental 8 gigawatts of new capacity will be installed in the U.S. alone this year, this may not be a bad place to be.

The answer, generally, is that only a very small minority of people have gotten the  message that what they’re doing matters.  Almost no one thinks before turning on a light:  “I can flip this switch if it’s really too dark to see, and it’s OK to spend that energy if I need to.  But if I don’t need to, I shouldn’t, because the world will be a slightly better place if I don’t.”   Or: “I could open this (petroleum-derived) plastic container of creamer for my coffee, but isn’t there an open jug of milk within easy reach?”  Or: “Walk or ride?” “Bike or car?” — or the dozens of other choices we make on a  minute-to-minute basis.  Very few people have gotten the message that their personal decisions to use energy actually matter — that they come at a cost to all of us — and worse, that this cost is far higher than we had previously imagined.

Perhaps we can liken this behavioral issue to littering.  The reason most of us don’t throw trash from our car windows is not that we’ll personally see that rubbish later on, but that doing so would tarnish and degrade the space in which we all must live.   We’ve processed the idea that littering is simply an unacceptable form of slob-like behavior, and we conceive ourselves to be better people than that.

The societal issues around wasting energy take the exact same form. We shouldn’t waste the HVAC (even in a hotel, where we’re not paying for it), or buy unnecessarily large and heavy cars, because doing so actively damages the quality of our living space.

People say there is a limit to what we can do with efficiency, which, of course, is true.  But I wonder if we haven’t misestimated that limit.  What happens when people 90+% of our population gains the same level of understanding and concern for energy consumption as they have for the concept of littering?  In other words, what happens when it becomes cool to be green? It’s hard for anyone to predict with any real accuracy, but the potential consequences are huge.

A quick story, if I may.  My wife and her friends are into wine, and so I see stuff for the modern wine connoisseur that suggests that we’re quite a long way from this type of consciousness.  I see disposable plastic bubblewrap for transporting opened and recorked bottles.  What’s the matter with a towel?  I see mini-refrigerators to hold literally one bottle of wine, and to maintain it at the precise correct temperature — a device one plugs in, with its own little refrigerant compressor, chugging along, drawing current (and making noise) for those who want their Chardonnay at 37 degrees F, not the 34 that they’d be forced to suffer if they put the bottle in the main kitchen refrigerator.

I understand that “living large” in energy consumption has been the chic thing to do over the past decades, but perhaps this is merely a matter of a lack of public education.  What happens when people think through the consequences of what they’re doing, and realize that a great deal of their behavior is really the equivalent of littering?

To make this happen, of course, we’ll have to contend with the wizards of mass marketing and the billions of dollars they spend every day convincing consumers that they need that new electric dog-polisher or whatever.  But I predict we’ll eventually see through this foolishness.  There’s a new living large; it’s called living small, and it’s a Christmas present truly worth giving.

Frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:

What would really be nice is an infographic comparing the cost of mitigating CO2 with various alternatives… just to put the different alternatives into proper perspective.

For instance, how much more does it cost to abate CO2 emissions by setting up a rooftop solar panel in NJ as compared to installing additional insulation in an office building in Texas or setting up a wind farm in the Dakotas?

This would be extremely instructional to your readers in terms of what policies would make more sense… and it would be fun to look at how you graph the negative CO2 abatement value of EV’s.

I respond:

Ha! I was reading along here, wondering when you were going to make your point about EVs, and lo! (a good word for the season), there it was.

Seriously, please send me a high-level treatment of your reasoning.

At a minimum, there are two things I don’t get.

1) What’s the matter with this reasoning: There are many different reasons that we need to knock off our addiction to oil, of which climate change is only one. What about the financial and human cost of war? What about national security and empowering terrorists?

2) And where’s the flaw here: While the short-term impact of a few EVs may be debatable (most don’t see it that way, but whatever), the evolution to EVs is paralleling the medium-term evolution to renewables, smart-grid, and storage, which will have an enormous impact. Are we to suppose we’ll be burning coal and driving Hummers in the year 2050? Of course not. Then why not phase in electric transportation, let it scale, let the costs come down and the value to the consumer increase, as we use technology to integrate more renewables in parallel?  Solar’s going to be $1/Watt soon, and the levelized cost of a number of other forms of clean energy is also falling. The opposite is the case with oil, where the costs, both financial and ecological, of extracting and refining shale oil are huge and growing.

As always, thanks for your thoughts.