Erroneous recent calculation highlights need to assess renewable energy sustainability claims
Paul Driessen
It’s amazing, though hardly surprising, how quickly some used
Hurricane Harvey’s devastation to claim that fossil fuel emissions are driving
catastrophic climate change and weather. Their proffered solution, of course,
is to replace those fuels with “clean, sustainable, renewable” energy.
I’ve critiqued this supposed solution many times, on
multiple grounds. Unfortunately, a hasty numerical calculation for a recent
column was way off base, and readers properly chastised me for the error. I
just blew it, using megawatts instead of megawatt-hours to derive the number of
wind turbines … and amount of land … it would take to replace the world’s 2016
electricity entirely with wind energy.
My conclusion that it would require 830 million turbines and
twice the land area of North America was thus off by embarrassing amounts.
However, my reviewers offered many “correct” numbers.
Their turbine totals ranged from 2 million to 4, 10 and 12 million;
their acreage figures from 0.5
to 40, 60 and even 247 per turbine. Total acreage for all the turbines ranged
from the size of France or Texas – to half of North America. Energy scholar
Cork Hayden graciously provided analytical aid.
Bottom line: Assumptions are key – about
turbine size; number, location and extent of good wind sites; ability to
actually erect turbines on those sites; wind turbine capacity factor, in
average hours per day of electricity generation; duration and quality of wind
power per year, especially as turbines proliferate into increasingly poor wind
areas; and power generation needed to charge huge battery arrays to ensure
reliable electricity during multiple windless days (2, 7, 14 or more) when
turbines provide no power.
Another variable, of course, is the amount
of electricity that is to be replaced by wind. In 2016, the world used 25
billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electrical energy, generated by fossil fuel,
hydroelectric and nuclear power stations, with minor contributions from wood
(biomass) and trivial amounts of wind and solar. Year-round average power generation was 2.85 million megawatts
(MW) or 2.85 terawatts (TW) – compared to zero
generation in 1881.
Electricity makes our industries, jobs,
travel, communication, living standards, health and safety possible, and demand
will certainly grow as more nations electrify, and more vehicles are
battery-powered.
Here are my fundamental assumptions:
Wind turbines replace 100% of today’s 2.85 TW global electricity generation, by
some future date – as many activists and politicians insist we must (and can)
do. Turbines are all 1.8-MW nameplate power. Average turbine capacity factor
gradually falls from 33% to 16.5% as the best wind sites are utilized, and much
poorer sites must be developed.
(In the USA many of the
best wind
sites are off the Washington-to-California and Maine-to-Georgia coastlines,
and in the Great Lakes, where water depths and powerful local opposition would
make it impossible to install many turbines. Onshore turbine size is limited by
the size of blades that can be hauled by trucks on winding roads. The same
situation would likely apply around most of the globe.)
Further assumptions: One-third of
turbine output powers society; two-thirds charge batteries that provide power
for 48 of every 72 hours that wind is not blowing. And winds always cooperate
with that scheme – always arriving just in the nick of time, as batteries are
depleted, and never disappearing for more than two days, even during sweltering
summers or frigid winters when demand soars but winds disappear.
Of course, most of these assumptions exist only in the realm
of fairies, pixie dust, green energy utopia and easy number crunching. They are
meant to initiate important analyses and debates that climate alarmists,
renewable energy proponents, legislators and policy makers have never conducted.
Using these assumptions, generating 25 billion
megawatt-hours would require 1.6 million 1.8-MW turbines functioning at full
1.8-MW capacity in strong winds, all day, every day, with no worries about
storage. If they operate only eight hours a day (33% engineered capacity), we
just use electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it. But that’s
terribly inconvenient and disruptive.
So we employ the Dr. Hayden system, instead. We erect 4.8
million turbines that operate steadily for eight hours, sending one-third of
their electricity to the grid and two-thirds to batteries. That would yield 8
hours of direct power while the wind is blowing (33% capacity factor) – and let
us draw power from the batteries for the next 16 hours, until the wind regularly
picks up again. “I love magic,” he says.
That clearly won’t work. We really need at least 48 hours of
storage – and thus three times as many turbines, under a similar arrangement,
but providing more flexibility, to recognize unpredictable wind patterns and
the likelihood of two windless days in a row. We’re up to 14.4 million 1.8-MW turbines.
Want a bigger safety net? To assure against seven windless
days? 50 million turbines should do it.
But then we’re really into the mediocre wind sites. Capacity
plummets to 16.5% or so. Perhaps 100 million turbines will do the trick. Pray
that lulls last no more than a week. Or send the army to those intransigent,
unpatriotic coastal communities, and forcibly install turbines in their super
windy areas.
That would also ensure that electricity generation is close
to our big urban centers – hence shorter transmission lines, and less cement,
steel, copper, et cetera to build the power lines. It’s a win-win situation,
except for those who have to look at or live next to turbines and transmission
lines, of course.
How much land are we talking about, to generate 25 billion
megawatt-hours of global annual electricity? Assuming top quality wind sites,
at 5 kilowatts per acre (average output per land area for any turbine at the
windiest locations), onshore turbines operating 24/7/365 would require
some 570 million acres.
That’s 25% of the United States – or 30% of the Lower 48
US states. It’s almost all the land in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho,
Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona combined!
Change the assumptions – change the numbers. To store
electricity for windless days, total power generation (and thus turbine numbers
and land acreage) begins to skyrocket. For 48 hours of backup, triple the power
generation; that’s the entire Lower 48. For a full week of backup, add in
Canada. Bring electricity to energy-deprived developing countries, and you can
at least double all these numbers.
Let’s not forget the transmission lines and batteries. They
also need land (and raw materials).
How many batteries? Storing 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of
electricity – to provide power for 48 windless hours for a US city of 700,000
people – would require 480,000 of Tesla’s new 100-kWh lithium-ion battery packs.
Backing up 2.85 TW of 2016 generation for just two windless days would require 1.4 trillion Tesla
units! And this assumes the batteries are charged and discharged
with 100% efficiency.
Just imagine the land, raw materials, mining, manufacturing
and energy that would be needed to make
all those batteries (and replace them every few years). As energy and
technology analyst
Mark
Mills has noted, all the world’s existing lithium battery factories combined
manufacture only a tiny fraction of that.
I’m sure the
world’s battery makers would be more than happy to take our hard-earned
taxpayer and consumer cash to build more factories and make all those batteries
– to save us from dangerous climate change that is no longer governed by the
sun and other powerful natural forces.
Let’s get real. It’s time to stop playing with pixie dust and
renewable energy utopia schemes. Time to open our schools and legislatures to
actual thinking about energy, sustainability, climate change and what makes our
jobs, health and living standards possible. Time for full-bore studies and legislative
hearings on all these issues – in the USA, UK, EU and everywhere else.
Sustainability and renewable energy claims are too grounded
in ideology, magic and politics. Wind and solar energy forecasts ignore the
need to find and mine vast new metal and mineral deposits – and open US lands
that are now off limits, unless we want to import all our wind turbines, solar
panels and batteries. They assume land use impacts don’t really exist if they
are in other people’s backyards.
Worse, too often anyone trying to raise these inconvenient
truths is shouted down, silenced, ignored. That has to stop. The stakes are too
high for ideology and pixie dust to drive fundamental public policies.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow(www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism:Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.
By Steven Nelson Washington Examiner September 1, 2017
Citing Comey’s bungling of the Clinton email investigation, President Trump unceremoniously fired him by press release on May 9, three-and-a-half years into his 10-year term. Trump was attacked in the media for not caring about Comey’s presumably hurt feelings. He based his decision on a U.S. Department of Justice memo authored by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein that found Comey had, among other things, usurped then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s authority by taking it upon himself to unilaterally clear Clinton.
Rosenstein excoriated Comey, whose side of the story has long been championed by the media. “I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.”...............To Read More....