These are all very interesting statistics, but I think a key point is missed.
It is important to note that from a climate perspective, increased solar and wind is not supposed to be a goal in and of itself. It is supposed to be replacing fossil fuels, especially coal which produces the most carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy (other than wood).
There is very little evidence that this is actually happening. Increased solar and wind is in addition to coal, not instead of coal.
Yes, I guess on a second reading, I did see you mention:
“The incredible growth of renewables has allowed emissions in the power sector globally to level off… but to see it actively bringing emissions down, it needs to start edging out coal in China and India, where electricity demand growth is robust.”
I guess that my point is that there is no reason to believe that increased solar and wind can ever lead to dramatic reductions in coal or other fossil fuels, particularly in China and India. My guess is that the trend of the last 3 decades of solar and wind failing to reduce fossil fuels substantially will continue for the next 3 decades.
I think the problem are the assumptions of the Green energy transition.
Fortunately, I think that there is a better alternative:
Do we have any reason to believe that increased wind and solar can ever lead to dramatic reductions in fossil fuels? In theory, yes. It just requires that wind + solar growth > electricity demand growth. In practice, also yes. You can look at the electricity mix of the UK, US, Germany or most other developed countries here and see it in practice - https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
With China, it hasn't materialised yet, but the compounding growth of wind and solar suggests that we're on the cusp of seeing it. From IEA data it looks like China's electricity demand has grown on average 400TWh per year. If you take a capacity factor of 15%, each GW of solar capacity installation equates to 1.3 TWh of generation. So about 300GW of annual installed solar capacity would see it eclipse demand growth on recent trends. The IEA (which has never been sufficiently aggressive in its forecasts), suggests that China will average 300GW over the next 5 years, plus about 400GW total in wind. Also, whatever part of electricity demand growth is driven by electrification of transport or heat also reduces fossil fuel demand.
For the record, I am in favour of much much more nuclear. But why is it that you would expect the next few decades to look like the last few regarding wind and solar when we're just hitting the elbow of the exponential curve? The next 10 years will look nothing like the last 10 years in terms of capacity deployed.
You cannot look at aggregate data for a long time period to show replacement. There are many other possible explanations. See my link.
And solar/wind increasing faster than overall demand is also not evidence of replacement. Fossil fuels can still keep rising (and probably will).
It is not just the next 10 years. I expect the next 30 years to look much like the last 30 years because wind/solar rarely (if ever) replace coal. Increased capacity is not going to change that unless we get electricity storage far beyond what we currently have planned.
Nuclear power can replace coal, and so can natural gas and hydro, but that is not the topic of this article.
If you still doubt me, then please take this challenge:
Thanks, Michael. I think your challenges to the simplicity of the case presented by ideologically-driven solar and wind advocates (you call them "greens", but I think there are various stripes within people who are strongly committed to environmental sustainability) are valid and important. However, I don't know if your challenge is technically feasible (or at least, I wouldn't know how to go about tracking the 24/7 electrons that are replacing a coal plant, but, then again, I'm not an analyst). But, moreover, I'm not sure if it is important to understand the decarbonisation story. What has certainly happened is that coal plants have been shut down and replaced with a mixture of variable renewables and flexible gas. That has a meaningful impact on carbon intensity of electricity, even if it doesn't take fossil out of the picture altogether. Also, starting from a low level, but we're on the early part of an exponential curve for battery storage to be paired with solar: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-the-us-grid-battery-fleet-is-about-to-double-again
This is a really important question that I'd like to get as close to the truth on as possible with the data we have. If you'd be up for having a conversation on it, I'd be interested to connect and exchange views more fully than is possible in a comments thread.
Decarbonization started long before anyone even knew about carbon emissions. To keep it going we do not need any government interventions, solar power, or wind power, or grid batteries. And it is much cheaper if we don’t have any of them, except in specific geographical areas.
I am happy to discuss with people of differing opinions, but I would rather keep it to Substack, where everyone can view it and learn from it. Feel free to add comments to my articles.
I think my views are pretty clear from my articles:
I was interested to see your note regarding bioenergy – "we have seen increasing interests from VCs in investing in technologies that scale bioenergy as the challenges of efuel inefficiencies become more apparent". My understanding had been that biofuels from dedicated biomass (crops planted specifically for use as biomass) is basically a horrible idea under all circumstances, due to large use of land, water, and fertilizer, not to mention all of the downstream processing that then needs to be done. (I wrote about this a while back at https://climateer.substack.com/p/biomass-overview.) Is the interest you're seeing around other forms of bioenergy, such as fuels from waste biomass? Or are sensible use cases for dedicated biomass emerging?
Conversely, I'd been holding out hope for efuels, especially as the price of solar power as an input continues to fall, but I haven't been following progress there.
Hi Steve, the interest in biomass that we've been seeing has been really focussed on maximising the use of waste streams (agricultural, forestry), both from a mass and conversion efficiency perspective, rather than from energy crops. There is a finite amount of sustainable biomass, but it's much more than what we're using so far. Because there is only a limited amount, it really should be preserved for the highest value uses, which are feedstock for materials and aviation, which basically needs to have liquid hydrocarbons. Ethanol for road transport is lower carbon than petrol, but it would be better to electrify and use the land or the fuel for something else. I see in your own piece you've covered quite a lot of ground, but it is also worth checking out this report - https://www.energy-transitions.org/publications/bioresources-within-a-net-zero-economy/
Efuels - I can maybe see a niche role in the short to medium term where solar panels are very cheap (as they are already), projects can't get connected to the grid, and airlines only have to pay the premium on a tiny percentage of their fuels. For them to have anything more than a niche role, we need to achieve a level of low-carbon electricity abundance that I don't see happening for quite some time to come. As with anything, view on this can evolve over time.
These are all very interesting statistics, but I think a key point is missed.
It is important to note that from a climate perspective, increased solar and wind is not supposed to be a goal in and of itself. It is supposed to be replacing fossil fuels, especially coal which produces the most carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy (other than wood).
There is very little evidence that this is actually happening. Increased solar and wind is in addition to coal, not instead of coal.
If you doubt me, follow up on my challenge:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/prove-that-solarwind-replaces-fossil
Totally agree and I said as much in my first couple of points!
Yes, I guess on a second reading, I did see you mention:
“The incredible growth of renewables has allowed emissions in the power sector globally to level off… but to see it actively bringing emissions down, it needs to start edging out coal in China and India, where electricity demand growth is robust.”
I guess that my point is that there is no reason to believe that increased solar and wind can ever lead to dramatic reductions in coal or other fossil fuels, particularly in China and India. My guess is that the trend of the last 3 decades of solar and wind failing to reduce fossil fuels substantially will continue for the next 3 decades.
I think the problem are the assumptions of the Green energy transition.
Fortunately, I think that there is a better alternative:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/there-is-a-better-alternative-to
Do we have any reason to believe that increased wind and solar can ever lead to dramatic reductions in fossil fuels? In theory, yes. It just requires that wind + solar growth > electricity demand growth. In practice, also yes. You can look at the electricity mix of the UK, US, Germany or most other developed countries here and see it in practice - https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
With China, it hasn't materialised yet, but the compounding growth of wind and solar suggests that we're on the cusp of seeing it. From IEA data it looks like China's electricity demand has grown on average 400TWh per year. If you take a capacity factor of 15%, each GW of solar capacity installation equates to 1.3 TWh of generation. So about 300GW of annual installed solar capacity would see it eclipse demand growth on recent trends. The IEA (which has never been sufficiently aggressive in its forecasts), suggests that China will average 300GW over the next 5 years, plus about 400GW total in wind. Also, whatever part of electricity demand growth is driven by electrification of transport or heat also reduces fossil fuel demand.
For the record, I am in favour of much much more nuclear. But why is it that you would expect the next few decades to look like the last few regarding wind and solar when we're just hitting the elbow of the exponential curve? The next 10 years will look nothing like the last 10 years in terms of capacity deployed.
You cannot look at aggregate data for a long time period to show replacement. There are many other possible explanations. See my link.
And solar/wind increasing faster than overall demand is also not evidence of replacement. Fossil fuels can still keep rising (and probably will).
It is not just the next 10 years. I expect the next 30 years to look much like the last 30 years because wind/solar rarely (if ever) replace coal. Increased capacity is not going to change that unless we get electricity storage far beyond what we currently have planned.
Nuclear power can replace coal, and so can natural gas and hydro, but that is not the topic of this article.
If you still doubt me, then please take this challenge:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/prove-that-solarwind-replaces-fossil.
Thanks, Michael. I think your challenges to the simplicity of the case presented by ideologically-driven solar and wind advocates (you call them "greens", but I think there are various stripes within people who are strongly committed to environmental sustainability) are valid and important. However, I don't know if your challenge is technically feasible (or at least, I wouldn't know how to go about tracking the 24/7 electrons that are replacing a coal plant, but, then again, I'm not an analyst). But, moreover, I'm not sure if it is important to understand the decarbonisation story. What has certainly happened is that coal plants have been shut down and replaced with a mixture of variable renewables and flexible gas. That has a meaningful impact on carbon intensity of electricity, even if it doesn't take fossil out of the picture altogether. Also, starting from a low level, but we're on the early part of an exponential curve for battery storage to be paired with solar: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-the-us-grid-battery-fleet-is-about-to-double-again
This is a really important question that I'd like to get as close to the truth on as possible with the data we have. If you'd be up for having a conversation on it, I'd be interested to connect and exchange views more fully than is possible in a comments thread.
Decarbonization started long before anyone even knew about carbon emissions. To keep it going we do not need any government interventions, solar power, or wind power, or grid batteries. And it is much cheaper if we don’t have any of them, except in specific geographical areas.
My guess is that the battery storage capacity that is mentioned in the linked article stores only a tiny amount time of the total US electricity use.
Nor does the article mention financial cost, which is undoubtedly very high and must be added to the cost of supposedly cheap solar and wind.
This is very unfortunately typical of cheerleading articles that dominate Green energy.
Big costs with little results.
I am happy to discuss with people of differing opinions, but I would rather keep it to Substack, where everyone can view it and learn from it. Feel free to add comments to my articles.
I think my views are pretty clear from my articles:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/t/energy
Particularly this one:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/there-is-a-better-alternative-to
Great review of the state of play!
I was interested to see your note regarding bioenergy – "we have seen increasing interests from VCs in investing in technologies that scale bioenergy as the challenges of efuel inefficiencies become more apparent". My understanding had been that biofuels from dedicated biomass (crops planted specifically for use as biomass) is basically a horrible idea under all circumstances, due to large use of land, water, and fertilizer, not to mention all of the downstream processing that then needs to be done. (I wrote about this a while back at https://climateer.substack.com/p/biomass-overview.) Is the interest you're seeing around other forms of bioenergy, such as fuels from waste biomass? Or are sensible use cases for dedicated biomass emerging?
Conversely, I'd been holding out hope for efuels, especially as the price of solar power as an input continues to fall, but I haven't been following progress there.
Hi Steve, the interest in biomass that we've been seeing has been really focussed on maximising the use of waste streams (agricultural, forestry), both from a mass and conversion efficiency perspective, rather than from energy crops. There is a finite amount of sustainable biomass, but it's much more than what we're using so far. Because there is only a limited amount, it really should be preserved for the highest value uses, which are feedstock for materials and aviation, which basically needs to have liquid hydrocarbons. Ethanol for road transport is lower carbon than petrol, but it would be better to electrify and use the land or the fuel for something else. I see in your own piece you've covered quite a lot of ground, but it is also worth checking out this report - https://www.energy-transitions.org/publications/bioresources-within-a-net-zero-economy/
Efuels - I can maybe see a niche role in the short to medium term where solar panels are very cheap (as they are already), projects can't get connected to the grid, and airlines only have to pay the premium on a tiny percentage of their fuels. For them to have anything more than a niche role, we need to achieve a level of low-carbon electricity abundance that I don't see happening for quite some time to come. As with anything, view on this can evolve over time.
Thanks! This all makes sense. I'm glad to hear that the focus is on waste streams, and on finding the highest-value uses for those streams.