Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (44 page)

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. To date, 28 states, including the most populous ones, have adopted RPSs and many others are considering doing so. While the objectives vary from state to state, most require between 20 to 30 percent of electricity from approved renewable sources by 2020 or thereabouts. The federal government is considering a national RPS of 20 percent by 2020 as well. This means an 8-to 12-fold increase in renewable energy from the present 2.5 percent of the national electricity supply.
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Given the existing choices, this will invariably be mainly wind and solar energy. Such a program could conceivably increase the cost of electricity in the U.S. by 50 percent, thus making nearly everything Americans do and every item they purchase considerably more expensive. Politicians will no doubt blame the electrical utilities for the consequences of these energy dictates, despite the fact the utilities are being forced into them against their better judgment in many cases.

In mid-2010 the wheels began to come off the heavily subsidized solar industry in Europe. Spain has reduced the subsidy by 30 percent and may retroactively reduce the tariff it guaranteed for 20 years.
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Spanish solar companies are being investigated for selling solar energy at night. It is presumed they were running diesel generators and sending the power through the meters that measure solar output. Such incredible distortions to market prices are bound to lead to this kind of fraudulent activity.
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Germany and France have begun to cut their subsidies for solar energy. This has resulted in a collapse in new installations. The German government has had to face the fact that after committing over US$100 billion for solar energy it is producing well under 1 percent of the country’s electricity.
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Solar electric energy is clearly a bubble that’s beginning to burst.

Wind Energy

Wind energy is more cost-effective than solar panels, but it too is relatively expensive.

Looking again to the German feed-in-tariff that provides real numbers instead of optimistic projections, the price paid for wind energy is between 10 to 15 US cents per kWh. In Ontario, the tariff price is 13.5 Canadian cents, much higher than prices paid for hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear power.

And wind energy also suffers from some inherent weaknesses. Like solar energy, wind is intermittent and unreliable. It has a higher capacity factor than solar, between 15 to 30 percent, depending on the location of the wind farm. But unlike solar, wind does not track the demand for electricity. The peak periods for electricity demand are during the coldest and hottest days of the year. Very often these are calm, clear days in the winter and summer. This means if wind is used for either baseload or peaking power there must be a reliable backup that can be brought online when the wind is not blowing. So when you build a wind farm you must also build a gas plant or another generator of equal capacity to back it up. Then why bother with wind farms?

In some cases there is good reason to build wind farms because when the wind blows we can avoid burning natural gas. This contributes to the conservation of a nonrenewable resource and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, the more wind farms we build, the more gas we must burn to back them up during the periods when the wind is not blowing, or not blowing hard enough to run the windmills at sufficient capacity to meet demand. In the final analysis building wind farms guarantees more and more natural gas will be required. This will likely result in increased CO
₂
emissions, the opposite of what one would expect from wind energy.

The only exception to this is where there is abundant hydroelectric energy. When the wind is not blowing the hydro can be turned on. It is capable of “following the load” as it can be turned on and off quickly and can be ramped up and down with ease. This can allow better management of the hydro capacity because when the wind blows the water behind the dam can be conserved to be used another day.

Wind energy and other energy technologies can be converted into baseload, continuous power by using what is called
pumped storage
. When the wind blows and the power is not needed on the grid, the energy generated can be used to pump water up into a reservoir. Then when the energy is needed the water can be passed through turbines, exactly as with hydroelectric power, to a lower reservoir, 450 feet lower, where the water can be stored until it can be pumped up again. Or there must be a sufficiently large river where water is pumped up to the reservoir and released back to the river after flowing through the turbines. The problem with using wind for pumped storage is that it costs too much to begin with and after pumping water back into a reservoir it costs even more

The clever Swiss buy very inexpensive nuclear energy from France late at night, when there is a large surplus on the grid, and they use it to pump water into dams in the Alps. In the morning they run it through hydroelectric turbines and sell it to the Italians at a profit. But the economics work because the nuclear energy costs less than a penny a kilowatt-hour. With wind you are pumping with energy that costs 10 to 15 US cents per kilowatt-hour. And you have to build all the reservoirs and hydroelectric turbines, so the wind energy ends up costing much more than 15 cents. It is unlikely this approach will be used widely with wind energy in the near future.

Intermittent Versus Continuous Energy Sources

There is a popular perception, encouraged by activists and renewable energy advocates, that technologies such as wind and solar could replace conventional sources such as hydroelectric, nuclear, and fossil fuels. These activists fail to recognize the fundamental difference between technologies that are intermittent and those that produce power continuously. Continuous production is referred to as
baseload
as it is able to satisfy the main load all the time. Power plants are also used intermittently to satisfy
peak loads
when demand is especially high, such as in the afternoon on hot days when air conditioning operates at its peak. Natural gas plants are often used for “peaking” because they can be turned on and off quickly, whereas coal plants and nuclear plants can’t be turned on quickly and turning them off quickly is not convenient for the operators. Even peaking plants work best if you can rely on them at all times. But intermittent technologies, such as wind and solar energy, are not available whenever we want them.

We have discussed how much more expensive wind and solar energy are to produce than conventional systems. But the
cost
to produce the energy is only one aspect. The
value
of the energy produced, how much it is
worth
, is a different matter. Regardless of the cost of producing the power, reliable continuous power is worth more than unreliable intermittent power. It is not worth much to have a lot of wind and solar energy when there is no demand for it. And technologies like wind and solar energy inevitably produce a percentage of their energy when it is not needed. In a very readable essay on this subject Glen Schleede states, “In fact, few people in the general public, media or government know the facts about the high true cost and low true value of electricity from wind.”
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One can only conclude that wind energy and particularly solar energy are investment bubbles that will eventually burst. Only very rich countries that think they have money to burn can afford these technologies. To expect that countries in Africa will adopt them without huge subsidies from rich countries is far-fetched. It appears equally far-fetched that rich countries will provide such subsidies. In many ways these very expensive technologies are destroying wealth as they drain public and private investment away from more affordable and reliable energy-generating systems. It seems this lesson will be learned the hard way.

Hydroelectric Energy

Hydroelectric technology was the first large-scale producer of electricity. Thomas Edison did build a steam-powered generator in New York three weeks before he launched the first hydroelectric system in Appleton, Wisconsin, in September 1882. But for years after hydroelectric energy became the primary source of electricity. Eventually the hydroelectric system around Niagara Falls became the powerhouse that spurred industrial growth in New York and Ontario. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s 30 hydro dams and the Bonneville Power Authority’s 31 hydro dams contribute to a system of hydroelectric facilities that provide 7 percent of U.S. electricity, nearly three times as much as all other renewable electricity technologies put together.

Hydroelectric energy is, in many ways, the best source of electricity. It is renewable, clean, relatively emissions-free, available on demand for baseload power, and in suitable sites is the least expensive of all the major electricity technologies. That is why energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum smelting, tend to locate their factories where large hydro projects can supply the power even when this means shipping the bauxite ore thousands of miles. The airplane manufacturers—Boeing in the U.S., Bombardier in Canada, and Embraer in Brazil—have in common the fact that they are located where there is abundant, inexpensive hydroelectric power to manufacture aluminum. Boeing benefits from the Bonneville Power dams on the Columbia River. Bombardier is in Quebec, where more than 90 percent of the electricity comes from the huge James Bay hydro project. Embraer takes advantage of the fact that Brazil produces 85 percent of its electricity from hydro power. The main weakness of hydropower is that it is limited by geography and rainfall. Some regions have abundant hydro potential while others regions have little or none.

Most environmental groups oppose large hydro dams because they flood valleys. It is true that a hydro dam completely alters the ecosystem, transforming a valley into an artificial lake. But a lake is not an undesirable environment. It’s not as if the valley is being turned into a toxic waste dump. Fish can thrive in hydro reservoirs, boaters and cottage owners can enjoy holidays there and in many cases the dams provide flood control and improved irrigation. It’s not as if there are too many lakes or too few valleys in this world. While a hydro dam means the end of a valley, it also means the birth of a new lake environment.

It is therefore highly irrational for environmental activists to have a zero-tolerance policy toward all large hydroelectric developments. Hydroelectric energy is the most important renewable source of electricity and will probably remain so into the distant future. Yet many Renewable Portfolio Standards in the U.S. do not classify large hydro as renewable energy. Environmentalism is supposed to be about all things renewable. Are solar panels made from aluminum that is produced with hydroelectricity somehow morally superior to the hydro dam that produced the aluminum? Are wind turbines that require backup with large fossil-fuel plants better than renewable hydro plants that provide power around the clock? And perhaps most important, would anti-dam activists rather see countries build more coal-fired plants instead of hydro?

Based on their opposition to hydropower, Greenpeace and other activist groups managed to force the World Bank to withdraw financial support for the Three Gorges Dam in China, the largest hydro project in the world at 22,500 megawatts. Thankfully China had enough economic muscle to go ahead on its own. New cities were built to relocate over one million people who lived near the flood zone. The Three Gorges Dam is equivalent to 40 large coal-fired plants.

In recent years China has become the world’s largest producer of hydroelectric power, surpassing Canada, Brazil, and the U.S. I think this is a good thing as otherwise it would surely have built even more coal-fired plants, of which there are more than enough already. China gets more than 15 percent of its energy from hydro dams and is building more. But over 80 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal, only 2.5 percent is nuclear.
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Clearly hydropower is the most important renewable energy technology in China, without which there would be considerable more use of coal.

Some countries produce a large percentage of their electricity with hydropower. As mentioned, Brazil gets 85 percent of its power from hydro, one of the main reasons it accounts for about 50 percent of industrial production in Latin America. The Itaipu dam on the Parana River, on the border between Brazil and Paraguay, is the world’s second largest dam at 14,000 megawatts. This one dam provides 26 percent of all Brazil’s electricity and 78 percent of Paraguay’s.

Canada produces more than 60 percent of its electricity from hydropower, mainly in Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Ontario. When you add the 15 percent coming from nuclear generation, Canada can boast that 75 percent of its electricity is non-fossil fuel, among the highest such percentage in the world. Sweden produces 45 percent of its electricity from hydropower, 48 percent from nuclear energy, and 6 percent from biomass (wood). Therefore it has one of the least fossil-fuel dependent electrical systems in the world. Switzerland is also nearly fossil fuel free with 54 percent of its electricity coming from hydropower and 41 percent from nuclear energy. And France is also almost fossil fuel free, with 79 percent nuclear, 11 percent hydroelectric, and 10 percent from other renewables and natural gas.
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That is the main reason why Switzerland, Sweden, and France have the lowest CO
₂
emissions per capita in Western Europe—approximately 6 tonnes (6.6 tons) per person per year. This is less than one-third of U.S. emissions of about 19 tonnes (21 tons) on a per person basis.