The Soho Forum “climate change” debate yesterday went off without a hitch at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street in Lower Manhattan. The proposition debated was “Climate Science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University took the affirmative; Steven Koonin of NYU took the negative. Mrs. MC and I were among the sponsors of this debate. Daughter (and MC contributor) Jane Menton, who is Chief of Operations for the Soho Forum, was responsible for lining up the speakers and taking care of all the event details.
Congratulations to the Soho Forum for succeeding in having Dessler actually show up and participate in this debate. Generally, the official position of the climate alarm movement is that no adherent should ever debate a skeptic who expresses doubt about any aspect of the orthodoxy. After the debate, I made a point of approaching Dessler, and thanking him personally for his willingness to participate. In our short conversation, he said that several of his colleagues had told him that he should not debate a “denier” like Koonin, but that he had decided that it was important to engage with the public. This willingness to engage publicly is much to Dessler’s credit.
I was very much looking forward to hearing one of the marquee names of the climate movement give his best statement of the basis for the position that “greenhouse gas” emissions must be reduced. At the end, I was left thinking, “Could this really be all they’ve got?”
Both Dessler and Koonin used large numbers of charts and slides, which unfortunately we audience members did not get copies of to take home with us. So forgive me for describing a few of them from memory.
Dessler’s presentation basically broke down into two parts: (1) the consequences of global warming are likely to be bad, and (2) reducing the greenhouse gas emissions is going to be easy and cheap. His emphasis was much more on (2) than (1), and I’ll follow that emphasis. But first, as to part (1), the consequences of warming, Dessler largely relied on a schematic graph that he returned to several times. The graph had an x axis that went (from left to right) from “very bad” to “bad” to “good” to “very good,” and a y axis that showed no units but presumably showed probabilities. The line of likely results was in the form of a bell curve with its tails at “very bad” and “bad,” and a peak about half way in between. No part of the line of likely results, even the slightest tail, got as far as “good.” Dessler represented that this chart was drawn from the peer reviewed literature, and represented the considered judgment of essentially everyone in the field. Make of that what you will. How everyone in the field just knows that the consequences of a few degrees of warming will be at least “bad,” if not “very bad,” was not disclosed.
But far the more important part of Dessler’s presentation dealt with the ease and low cost of transitioning to a low emissions future. This began with the assertion — repeated multiple times during the debate — that wind turbines and solar panels are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. A chart showed comparisons of relative costs of wind and solar generation versus various forms of fossil fuels and nuclear. Wind and solar were clearly the cheapest, cheaper than even the latest natural gas generators. At the bottom of the chart, the basis for the comparison was given. The letters LCOE were legible. That’s “Levelized Cost of Energy.”
Ah, the Levelized Cost of Energy. This is the latest up-to-date metric adopted by promoters of wind and solar generators to mislead the gullible about the costs of making an electricity system that works. If you try to study descriptions of LCOE calculations, you will find that they are chock full of technical terms like “capital” and “operating” costs and “life cycles” and “discount rates,” and other such things that all sound so terribly sophisticated. In fact it is all a smokescreen to hide the fact that an LCOE calculation completely omits the dominant costs of generating reliable electricity using mostly or entirely wind and solar generators. These dominant costs are the costs of energy storage and/or backup, the costs of overbuilding, and the costs of additional transmission. For prior Manhattan Contrarian discussion of LCOE, try going here or here. The second of those posts, from January 22, 2022, with the title “What Solution Do Renewable Energy Advocates Offer For The Problem Of Storage?”, has the following quote:
Since the cost of storage is the dominant cost of the all-renewable system, LCOE is the opposite of a “neat quantification” of comparative electricity generation costs, and rapidly becomes completely misleading as the percentage generated from renewables increases beyond 50%.
In his responsive presentation, Koonin called the prospect for an entirely wind and solar generation system “fantastical.” That caused Dessler to double down in rebuttal by claiming that the details of a functioning wind/solar system had all been worked out, and it’s not all that complicated. He said that just by building more wind and solar generators, you can get to about 76% of electricity generation, and for the small (doesn’t seem so small to me) remaining piece, you just need “something dispatchable,” which could be nuclear (and therefore zero emissions).
It appeared never to occur to Dessler that in the system he was now talking about, the “Levelized Cost” calculations that he had used to claim wind and solar were cheapest were no longer applicable. Wind turbines in good locations can achieve generation at around 35-40% of nameplate capacity over the course of a year; solar panels about 20-25%. A combined wind/solar system might come in at around 30%. That means that if you build a wind/solar system with nameplate capacity equal to peak usage, you will get about 30% of your electricity in the year from these sources, and the rest must come from backup or storage. So how are you going to get to supplying 76% of usage with wind and solar? For starters, you could try building twice as many wind and solar generators, otherwise known as a 2x overbuild. This is the strategy that has been adopted by, for example, Germany. You can get more of your electricity from the wind and sun, but you won’t get double the 30%. That’s because when the wind and sun are at full strength together, you must throw away half or more of the generation; and when they both are at zero (a calm night) you will still get nothing. So with a 2x overbuild, you may get 45-50% of your electricity from the wind and sun. How about a 3x overbuild? With each round of overbuilding, the percentage of generation that is wasted goes up. You will be throwing away more and more at times of peak generation, and also at times of moderate generation and low usage (a windy morning?), and still get nothing on the calm night. Dessler never mentioned it, but the 76% figure he tossed out represents something in the neighborhood of a 4x overbuild of the wind/sun system. And you would still need full backup from something dispatchable.
If you need to build four times the amount of wind and solar generators to provide the same amount of electricity, your so-called “levelized cost” just got multiplied by four. It is no longer remotely competitive with the cost of generation from fossil fuels. And then, in Dessler’s system, you also need to pay for the “dispatchable” backup to generate that last 24%. It may only be called on to generate 24% of the energy over the course of a year, but it must be able to generate 100% of peak usage when needed, and it needs to cover 100% of its capital costs in the price it charges running only a small minority of the time.
In short, the system Dessler was proposing would have to cost a minimum of five times what a standard fossil-fuel generation system costs. Now, is he aware of this and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively? I don’t know the answer to that. But I can’t think of a third alternative.
Koonin did a very professional job of responding to Dessler. Koonin in various ways made the same point I am making above, but in somewhat different words. He emphasized the necessity of near-absolute reliability in an electrical grid, and used the term “cost of reliability” to characterize the costs that Dessler was omitting — such as costs of backup, overbuilding, storage, and additional transmission capacity — in claiming that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. He also repeatedly made the important point that promoters of expensive wind/solar electricity systems are immoral to the degree that they would deprive people in developing countries of the energy-based prosperity that we in the developed countries benefit from. Overall, Koonin was far more in command of facts and figures than Dessler throughout the debate.
The video of the debate seems to be available already at Watts Up With That, although I can’t find it yet at the Soho Forum website. I’ll have to find out from Jane why that is.
Ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether an Andrew Dessler or anyone else claims that wind and solar electricity are cheap based on some flawed metric like LCOE. Big investors put professionals on the job of evaluating projects, and projects don’t get built unless the numbers add up. And thus there is no such thing as a wind or solar project that gets built without massive government subsidies, either in the form of direct cash or tax savings of some sort. The federal government just enacted a law putting up some $370 billion in subsidies, mostly tax benefits, for “renewable” energy. None of that would be needed at all if wind and solar were in fact the cheapest sources. And meanwhile, over in Europe, which is way ahead of us in building wind and solar facilities, the costs of reliability are in the midst of hitting home, and energy costs soaring. Sooner or later this will become obvious to all.
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