10 Things to Understand about an All-Renewable Future - part I
One question: How many wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries are needed to complete the job?
The U.S. uses an incomprehensible amount of energy, 100 followed by 18 zeros. Energy can't be seen. Combining an absurdly large number with an invisible force, how can people comprehend the issue?
Renewables have incredible costs and benefits. The scale of these numbers is so expansive, it dwarfs the comparison of the Titanic to a bathtub toy boat.
What will a renewable future of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries achieve, and at what expense? It is a difficult answer, with staggering impossibilities, and unimaginable improvements. It’s not philosophical. It’s incontrovertible math.
- Hector E. Joules
Excerpts from Counting On Renewables: A Million Wind Turbines, Tens of Billions of Solar Panels, and Trillions Upon Trillions of Batteries
Part I
1 – Slicing the energy pie: Supply, Demand, and Waste.
2 – Sizing the scale of the whole pie and slices.
3 – Two key words.
4 – When the generator only works part-time.
5 – A better window sticker on new cars.
6 – The area used by wind turbines, the numbers of PV panels, & how many batteries?
7 – A Better Battery
8 – A December January Secret.
9 – Big numbers: what every ,000 entails.
10 – Paths forward.
11 - Review
— 1 —
Understanding present U.S. energy distribution.
The big picture is as simple as 4, 3, 2, 1. Instead, remember. 40, 30, 20, 10, which adds up to 100, or 100%. (For those who think this is grossly simplified, the actuall 2019 pre-Covid percentages are included with the pie chart.)
Where does energy go?
40% Electricity Generation.
30% Transportation: Cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships.
20% Industrial production.
10% Residential & Commercial heating homes, offices, shops.
Where does it come from?
40% Oil.
30% Natural Gas.
10% Coal. (Almost the same 40-30-20-10 rule)
10% Nuclear.
10% Renewables.
80% fossil fuels, 10% nuclear, and 10% clean renewables.
What goes where?
Oil, as popularly believed, does not supply any measurable energy to make electricity. 3/4ths of the oil goes to Transportation, 1/4th to Industry.
Only 1/3rd of the gas is used for Industry, 1/3rd for Residential & Commercial heating, and 1/3rd to generate electricity.
The remaining supply - the coal, nuclear, and renewables - all goes to make electricity.
What is far more incomprehensible is the total amount of U.S. energy consumption that is wasted:
Of the 40% of U.S. energy consumed by electric generation, all that comes out is 15% electricity (5% for residential, 5% commercial, and <5% industrial.) This is called Secondary energy consumption. 25% of U.S. energy goes up the smokestack and out the cooling tower.
Of 30% of U.S. energy for transportation - Cars make power, but they also make twice as much waste heat - 20% of all U.S. energy is lost in radiators.
Of 10% used by Residential & Commercial, 5% goes up the chimney.
50%, HALF of all U.S. energy is lost, for absolutely nothing.
This should make it readily apparent where the U.S. should have its priorities.
A full quarter, 25% of all energy, is lost in the generation of electricity by thermal means. Heat is either boiling steam or directly powering a turbine. This would be eliminated with renewable generation, IF the storage capacity problem can be solved.
Another fifth, 20% of all energy, is lost in gasoline and diesel Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) for automobiles and road freight. The average car has a 15-year lifespan in the U.S., therefore even once the sale of ICE powered non-EVs are banned, it will still be 15 years before the overwhelming majority of the U.S. fleet of over 250 million vehicles is fully electrified.
All U.S. homes, roughly 125 million or half as many as cars, waste another 5% of U.S. energy through combustion, the heating of air and water. Homes last much longer than cars, typically 60-75 years between complete “gutted down to the studs” major renovations that are also 4-5 times the cost of a car. Simply put, electrifying housing will only recover 1/4th the waste energy compared to transportation, and it will take 4 times as long to implement and possibly cost 4 times as much as the electrification of cars to eliminate this waste. This doesn’t mean new construction can continue the status-quo. Indeed, the best affordable energy efficiency should me mandated. But to expect rapid electrification is also myopic. Swapping a furnace for a heat-pump in a drafty, poorly or even lightly insulated home simply doesn’t work.
Renewable generation with energy storage and the electrification of the road transportation fleet will have the most impact in the shortest time-frame for decarbonization. Full electrification of housing and commercial spaces will take longer and at higher cost, with less benefits towards decarbonization, and therefore should not be a priority with limited resources and budgets.
— 2 —
How big are those slices of U.S. energy?
Oil is a supertanker full, every 2 hours and 45 minutes. Over 200 barrels per second.
Gas would annually cover New York City, all 5 boroughs, to the height of One World Trade Center’s observation deck, three times over. That gas can be liquified, enough for a LNG carrier ship every 45 minutes.
Coal is a train full every 15 minutes. Here is a video of a freight train pulling 130 cars, where the wait is almost 3 minutes for it to pass.
80% of U.S. energy is from fossil fuels, roughly a ship-full every 30 min.
20% of U.S. energy is non-CO2 emitting - ½ is nuclear, ½ is renewables.
A year of U.S. energy is equivalent to 1 terrible WWII Hiroshima atomic bomb, every 19 seconds, 1.7 million in a year, enough to boil an Olympic pool of water every ¼ second.
— 3 —
Energy and power are not interchangeable words for electricity.
Energy is an actual ‘thing’, like distance (miles), volume (gallons), or weight (pounds).
Power is how fast energy is used, a rate, like:
Speed, MPH.
Water through a garden or fire hose, in gallons per minute.
Horsepower, HP. More power is more expensive and uses more energy, faster.
Rates - speed, flow, & power - CANNOT be stored. There’s no storing MPH or horsepower, and neither are kilowatts stored.
Energy CAN be stored. Gallons of water can be stored, feet in a ball of string, pounds of gold in the safe, or kilowatt-hours in batteries.
Energy can be bought and sold, in gallons gasoline or heating oil, cubic feet natural gas, pounds propane, tons coal, cords wood, and the units on the electric bill, kilowatt-hours.
We don’t consume power. It’s energy that’s consumed. We build power generation to supply the energy demand, at the rate energy is being consumed.
Power is a simple formula: Power = Energy / Time
Power in Imperial units is BTU per hour (BTU/hr) and metric SI units of kilowatts (kW).
Energy is British Thermal Units (BTU) and kilowatt-hours (kWh).
— 4 —
How much energy storage is required when solar Photovoltaic (PV) panels generate cheep electric energy by day, but produce nothing at night?
A coal or nuclear power plant, has the capacity of 1,000 MW. It can run 24-7. Steadily 1,000 Megawatts every hour, day and night. In a single day it produces:
Power X Time = Energy
1,000 Megawatts X 24 hours = 24,000 Megawatt-hours
However, after clouds, storms, and the sun being low in the sky at sunrise & sunset, PV only produces an average 25% of the day. PV must be 4 times the power it’s replacing:
4,000 Megawatts X 6 hours = 24,000 Megawatt-hours (MWh)
Supply (production) during the 6 hours of PV generation is:
1,000 Megawatts X 6 hours = 6,000 MWh TO GRID Directly.
3,000 Megawatts X 6 hours = 18,000 MWh TO BATTERY
=============== . . . . . . . . . ============
4,000 Megawatts X 6 hours = 24,000 MWh Total
Demand (consumption) throughout day and night, is steadily:
1,000 Megawatts X 6 hours = 6,000 MWh FROM PV Directly
1,000 Megawatts X 18 hours = 18,000 MWh FROM BATTERY
. . . . . . . . . . . . ========= . ============
1,000 Megawatts X 24 hours = 24,000 MWh Total
(This is obviously simplified for clarity, at 100% round-trip efficiency.)
— 5 —
Cars and Energy Consumption
The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is 20-30% efficient. Electric motors with batteries are roughly 80%. Electric Vehicles (EVs) would eliminate most of that 20% of U.S. energy lost out car radiators.
A decade ago, it was mistakenly thought EVs would be small and cheap. Instead, EVs are the most capable luxury vehicles.
So that consumers can compare changing fuel prices, the example below, table-3, shows 2 rows of the full table (below, table-4.)
The row corresponding to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle for sale, and
A second row of a comparable vehicle, but with the opposite power.
A 20 MPG truck with $4.00 per gallon gasoline (May, 2022) costs $200 per month. (Top) As of June, 2022, at $5/gallon this truck costs $250/month. If gas continue to climb or $6/gallon premium gas is required, the monthly cost rises to $300.
The 80 MPGe EV in the city at 24¢/kWh electricity only costs $100 per month. (Bottom) In the middle of the U.S. with 15¢/kWh electric, this EV is $60 monthly.
Note that as of June 2022, regular grade gasoline at $5.00 per gallon is the EXACT same energy cost of $0.15 per kilowatt-hour electricity in most of the country (excluding New York, the New England states, Alaska, and California where it is $0.20 to $0.24 per kilowatt-hour, and Hawaii where it is $0.36 per kilowatt-hour.)
— 6 —
Wind turbines used to be the size of the 305' Statue of Liberty, spinning 40-yard blades 125% the length of a single wing from a Boeing 747 jumbo-jet, or 1/3rd a football field. They’ve grown to the size of the 555' Washington Monument, and recently the 809' Met-Life (ex. Pan-Am) building. Now they are the size of the 1,046' Chrysler Building, with blades 1 football field long, 3-½ times the length of a 747’s wing. Turbines as big as the 1,454' Empire State Building are in development and coming within the decade. The limit on future turbines is theoretically as big as the 1,776' One World Trade Center, with blades the length of 2 football fields, 7-¼ times as long as a Boeing 747 wing.
No matter how big they get, they still require the same amount of land to generate the same power. Bigger turbines only are spaced further apart.
Wind turbines are growing tremendously. An individual 375’ blade of a 15 MW unit in 2025 will be 3 times the 125’ blade of a 1.5 MW unit from 1995. Note that a single wing of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet is only 100’ long. Perhaps by 2050, a single blade will double again to 750’ in length, more than three times the wingspan of a 747. Yet the power density (impact area per MW) remains the same. Simply fewer units are necessary. Their size limits them to offshore usage. The monocoque blades are simply too large to be transported overland.
While land beneath turbines is usable for crops, living anywhere near the noise and flickering light from the shadow of the spinning blades is problematic. The mortality of endangered birds of prey and bats is a grave environmental issue.
A nuclear power plant’s two reactors occupy 1-½ square miles. The same energy from a wind farm requires 1,000 turbines on 600 square miles.
Powering half of existing electric generation with wind would take up the land area of the entire west-coast states of California, Oregon, & Washington, 9% of U.S. land. This is the same amount as “two Californias”, which syndicated energy author Robert Bryce says in the report “Not In Our Backyard” for the Center for the American Experiment. Princeton Professors Eric Larson and Jesse Jenkins in their report “Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts” also say the same amount of land, the combined mid-west states of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas would be necessary for a “high electrification 100% renewables (E+ RE+) approach.” It would be grossly simplistic to expect 8% of Americans will gladly accept their homelands being covered with wind turbines and long-distance transmission lines as far as the eye can see. More and more communities are rejecting them, over 300 since 2015.
Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Panels - Elon Musk once said the U.S. could be powered by a patch of land 100 miles by 100 miles. He's not far off, but that patch, only a scant 1/3rd of 1% of U.S. land area, would have 10 BILLION - with a 'B' - PV panels. It is an equivalent as if every one of America’s 130 million U.S. households each had 80 PV panels, each the size of a huge 85" television.
That is only for existing electricity. Additional electrification:
to keep the lights on in January darkness, with -10°F temperatures (at 17% PV Capacity Factor), requires 40% more power (than annual average 24% CF).
to charge EVs, electrically power domestic and commercial heat, and electrify industrial heating requires another 85%.
That would be 208 commercial-sized PV panels for every U.S. household.
The U.S. consumes 1/6th of global energy but could deploy 1/3rd of global production of 330 million PV panels. Nevertheless, even a 10-FOLD increase in production of PV panels will still take 25 YEARS to deploy 27 Billion PV panels in the U.S. alone.
Furthermore, with 1% annual degradation, 270 million more panels are required yearly which amounts to another 8% increase in production.
And unlike coal and gas fired power plants, nuclear reactors, and hydroelectric dams, which have service lives of 50, 75, and 100+ years respectively, PV panels only have a service life of 25 years. As soon as the last necessary panels are installed across the country, the original systems must be removed and replaced.
Seeing Stars - A Tesla Giga factory, spits out batteries faster than a machine gun, a few thousand batteries per minute, 2 billion yearly.
2 trillion batteries (2,000 billion) are needed just to support the existing electric supply, requiring a decade of production by 100 Giga factories. And that’s with 100% battery production for U.S. electric generation needs, nothing for cars needing another trillion. Is 2 trillion batteries just for present U.S. electricity, (the world needs another 10 trillion) really possible? That 2 trillion for the U.S. alone is 5 to 20 times more batteries than the number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, as many as the estimated number of galaxies in the universe.
To fully electrify the U.S. within 10 years requires 350 Giga factories. As a planet, 600 to over 2,000 Giga factories are needed.
Where is the raw material going to come from? This changes an emissions problem to a material problem, with procurement, mining waste, and its associated third-world slave labor issues, as Professor Michael E. Kelly of the University of Cambridge points out.
Battery technology only demonstrates a utility can store energy, not how much energy.
Wouldn’t that many batteries be better used in moving vehicles in the first place?
© Hector E Joules, Strategic Sensible Synergies, LLC 2022