Where would we be with CO2 without our 3.063 trillion dollar solar and wind infrastructure?
I'm often asked to justify my hostility to the fossil fuel dependent solar and wind industry by people asking the question, albeit with variable syntax and word choices - and almost never with reference to how much money has been "invested" in wind and solar - forms of the the question asked in the title of this OP.
The question is counterfactual, of course, and I will utilize a counterfactual argument to answer it.
This is usually in response to my unshakable conviction that the solar and wind industries are useless in addressing climate change, which should be obviated by the fact that the rate of climate degradation is accelerating, despite decades of cheering for solar and wind, and oodles of money thrown at it.
The figure, 3.062 trillion dollar figure in the title comes from this source: Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020.
The publication information is as follows:
Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre/BNEF. 2020.
Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020, http://www.fs-unep-centre.org (Frankfurt am Main)
Copyright © Frankfurt School of Finance & Management gGmbH 2020
Here is how I came up with the figures.
I referred to figure 42 on page 62 of the report.
It is reproduced here for convenience:
This table is available as a graphics object only, so I manually transcribed it into an Excel spreadsheet to do calculations.
Note that the time period covered is between 2004 and 2019. Far more money has been and is being squandered on solar and wind right up to the present day of course, but for the purpose of the counterfactual calculations here, this number should suffice.
The reader is invited to check my transcription of the numbers into a spreadsheet, but here they are:
For the numbers in the table, the total amount of money squandered on solar energy amounts to 1671.3 billion dollars, 1.6713 trillion dollars. The number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000.
For wind, we have the amount of money squandered on it as being 1391.3 billion dollars, 1.3913 trillion dollars. The number after the decimal point represents $300,000,000, three hundred million dollars. That's the scale of the squandering.
The total amount squandered on these two forms of energy between 2004 and 2019 alone is thus 3062.6 billion dollars. (In the title, I rounded up, what's 400 billion dollars between friends?)
Here, from the 2022 World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA) is the amount of energy produced by all forms of primary energy on this planet, a table I often reproduce in this space:
Source: 2022 IEA World Energy Outlook Table A1a, page 435.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.6713 trillion dollars, solar energy was producing just 5 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
By 2021, at a cost of 1.3913 trillion dollars, wind energy was producing just 7 Exajoules of energy on a planet where 624 Exajoules of energy were being consumed.
After 50 years, half a century, of mindless cheering, the entire combined solar and wind industry at 12 Exajoules built at these trillion dollar rates, was not even able to cover the increase in the use of dangerous natural gas, coal and oil from 2020 to 2021, an 11 Exajoule increase for dangerous oil, a 7 Exajoule increase for dangerous natural gas, and an 8 Exajoule increase in the use of dangerous coal.
Note that this table does not include reference to hydrogen or to batteries, the two schemes often the subject of popular stupidity designed to put a band aid on the disastrous unreliability of the solar and wind industry, making them even more environmentally odious than they already are.
The reason these two forms of energy, batteries and hydrogen, do not appear in these tables are that they are NOT primary energy. The laws of physics, specifically the second law of thermodynamics, requires - and is not subject to any amount of wishful thinking, chanting, advertisements, marketing, and willful assertions of ignorance - that whenever energy is stored, energy is lost. In other words, if one stores energy, one wastes it. Given that the world energy supply is dominated by dirty energy - fossil fuels - every hydrogen powered or battery powered device on this planet requires that more fossil fuels, not less, will be consumed.
The hydrogen morons and the battery morons are thus cheering for the increased use of fossil fuels, not the other way around, popular nonsense to the contrary notwithstanding.
(A caveat is the rare case that energy that would otherwise be lost is partially recovered, for example in a hybrid car, or industrially, in process intensification, a prominent subject in modern engineering beyond the scope here.)
Now for the counterfactual statement, where would we be without our trillion dollar solar and wind infrastructure. Let's leave aside the very real fact that if one shuts a thermal power plant of any kind because the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, energy is lost, without providing power to the grid in restarting it. (One can simply place a pot of tap water on a stove, turn the burner on, and observe that it does not instantaneously boil to see this.) If one keeps a boiler on a thermal plant running because the wind might stop blowing, the amount of energy saved is, if not zero exactly, close to zero. (This actually happens and is known as "spinning reserve." )
Let me be more generous, however and compare what would be saved in terms of carbon dioxide by 12 Exajoules of prevented gas use.
A working figure - it varies - for the carbon intensity of gas powered electricity, that used by the Electricity Map is around 600 g CO2/kWh. I've seen lower numbers, a few higher, combined cycle plants do better, Rankine gas plants (converted coal plants) do worse. A kWh is 3,600,000 Joules, and thus there are roughly 278,000,000,000 (278 billion) kWh in an Exajoule. This means that 167 trillion grams of carbon dioxide would be prevented by each Exajoule. There are a million grams in a metric ton, meaning that each Exajoule of gas energy produces about 167 million tons of carbon dioxide. This would suggest that dangerous natural gas alone produces 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide at 146 exajoules, which seems unreasonable, since coal is a larger and dirtier player.
The 2022 World Energy Outlook (WEO) give a figure of 460 grams of CO2/kwh for electricity overall, including that produced by nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and the dominant dangerous fossil fuels.
To wit:
The global average carbon intensity of electricity generation is currently 460 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilowatt‐hour (g CO2/kWh), heavily influenced by the amount of coal in the mix...
(cf. Page 45, 2022 WEO)
These remarks are followed by soothsaying, which is prominent component of all WEO reports going back to the 1990's; I have copies of most of them.
The 2022 WEO reports that carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 were 36.6 billion tons:
(cf. Page 63, 2022 WEO)
Nominally, 12 Exajoules of solar and wind, assuming that the 460 g CO2/kwh figure is accurate, might have, at maximum, saved 1.6 billion tons of CO2, if and only if, one ignores - wind and solar advocates love ignoring things - that the 460 gram CO2/kwh already includes the contribution from these trivial sources.
And of course, all of the carbon cost of the redundancies for solar and wind are entirely missing from this calculation. Despite much misinformation and outright lying, the sun does not always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Most kindergarten graduates know that, despite popular representations to the contrary.
Now let's dig deeper into the counterfactual argument and focus on the 3.0626 trillion dollars squandered on solar and wind between 2004 and 2019.
We have a set of antinukes who run around saying that nuclear energy is "too expensive" - and to support this argument, they like to carry on endlessly about the two most recent nuclear reactors built in the United States as a result of the efforts of the Obama administration, Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4, which were built at a combined cost of $30 billion dollars.
Note that these people never argue that climate change is too expensive, or that the medical costs associated with 7 million people dying each year from air pollution is "too expensive." They don't give a rat's ass about climate change or air pollution. Nor will they acknowledge the fact that a nuclear plant will be available for future generations, whereas every solar and wind facility on this planet will be a liability before today's toddler's finish their college educations. They don't give a rat's ass about the lives of those who will come after; the nickels and dimes in their own bourgeois pockets are the only thing that matters to them, even as their wind and solar advocacy drives up costs for the poor who can least afford it.
Here are the details of the two reactors that antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes think are "too expensive:"
They each have a thermal capacity (primary energy) of 3400 MW(th) and an electrical power output of 1147 MWe. (net)
Source: World Nuclear, Vogtle 3
Thus the thermal efficiency of the plants is typical for Rankine type devices, about 33%. I do not agree that future nuclear reactors should be devices of this type; my calculations suggest that it should be possible to achieve at least the thermal efficiency of combined cycle gas plants, which typically have efficiencies around 60%, but this said, the worst nuclear plant is better than the best fossil fuel plant.
The Vogtle reactors were both hand made first of a kind engineering (FOAKE) devices, their costs being tied to the fact that nuclear manufacturing capability in this country was deliberately destroyed by fear and ignorance.
They cost $15 billion dollars each. Thus, for 3.0626 trillion dollars, even at this high end costs, it should have been possible to build 3,062.6 billion/15 billion = 204 Vogtle nuclear reactors for this cost.
Nuclear reactors are designed to run at 100% capacity utilization for periods of up to three years before refueling. Most US reactors do just that. Refueling operations run typically about 2 months, suggesting 95% availability, without requiring back up by fossil fuels as wind and solar junk does, over a 38 month period.
It is reasonable, thus to say that @3400 MW(th) each Vogtle type plant will produce about 0.1 Exajoules of energy per year. Thus if rather than spend money on fossil fuel dependent solar and wind junk, we had built 204 Vogtles, we'd be producing about 20 EJ of energy per year. Moreover, unlike solar and wind junk, which needs replacement in its entirely every twenty to twenty-five years, the nuclear plants are designed to last up to 80 years, perhaps with periodic refurbishment, even longer. This fact makes the squandering on solar and wind even more obscene.
Nuclear plants can and do replace coal plants, which have the second highest capacity utilization in the world, typically on the order of 70%, compared to nuclear's better than 90%, although this is changing because of the ill conceived, wasteful, and frankly deadly practice of using coal as peaker plants when the wind isn't blowing and sun isn't shining, as in the Putin funding coal dependent hellhole Germany. Coal plant used as peaker plants are even dirtier than coal plants run as baseload plants.
Thus if we had built 204 Vogtles, even without realizing the cost savings of mass producing these things (as we did in the 1970's and 1980s in this country when we built more than 100 nuclear reactors in less than 25 years while providing the cheapest electricity in the world), we could have reduced coal from 165 Exajoules to 145 Exajoules. In a sensible world, coal would have disappeared entirely decades ago, but fear and ignorance won the day.
I, however, do not think that building more Vogtles is a good idea, although I am certain that they could be mass produced at a much lower price tag than the FOAKE versions. Although for many years I was a "big reactor" kind of guy, my increasing familiarity with additive manufacture, (3D printing) and certain concepts in modern nuclear engineering thinking suggests that we should build many small reactors designed for flexible use far beyond the production of mere electricity, electricity being, despite popular enthusiasm for it based on the delusional belief it's "green," a thermodynamically degraded form of energy. I've been convinced and have changed my mind. I'm now a small reactor kind of guy. Reactor cores should fit on the bed of a flat bed trailer truck, ideally one powered by the wonder fuel DME, produced using heat from nuclear power plants.
What we need to save the world is not electricity, but rather heat, the higher the temperature the better, and this heat can only be supplied sustainably and cleanly by nuclear energy. Heat is the energy currency that can save what is left to save and restore what can or might be restored.
I hope you've enjoyed your weekend.
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