10 Things to Understand About an All Renewable Future - part II
Turning a CO2 emissions problem into a materials problem with unprocurable numbers of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries.
See Part I for introduction and issues #1 through #6. Excerpts from Counting On Renewables: A Million Wind Turbines, Tens of Billions Solar Panels, And Trillions and Trillions of Batteries.
Part II
7 – A Bigger Battery.
8 – A December January Secret.
9 – Big numbers: what every ,000 entails.
10 – Paths forward.
11 - Review
— 7 —
The biggest battery in the world isn't from Tesla. It’s two lakes in Bath County, Virginia, almost ¼ mile in elevation apart. Like Sisyphus pushing that boulder uphill every day, it’s the same thing, with water and pumps, instead of a guy and a rock.
Bath County is as powerful as Niagara Falls, 50% more than Hoover Damn. The daily energy is 60% more than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
It is so big it has not one, but six Voith™ pump-generators each 670,000 horsepower. 4 million total HP lifts water a height of ¼-mile, at almost 5,000 cubic-feet per second.
At least 1,000 Bath County Equivalent (BCE) Pumped Storage Hydroelectric (PSH) utilities are needed just for existing electric generation requirements if supplied by renewables. Once all vehicles, home and business heating, and as much industrial heating as possible is electrified, 2,600 BCE-PSHs are needed to support that load with renewables.
How much water flow does that look like compared to rivers? And remember, this is equivalent to flowing over a waterfall ¼-mile high. In Cubic-Feet per Second (CFS):
River CFS (Olympic pools per second)
Niagara 205,000
Columbia 260,000 (3)
Ohio 280,000
Mississippi 590,000
Amazon 7,300,000 (83)
Min 1,000 BCEs 4,700,000 (55)
Max 2,600 BCEs 12,000,000 (140)
Tesla is building huge Megapacks™ with about 200,000 batteries. They’re the size of a shipping container and cost $1 million. The systems under construction have 200 to proposals of over 500 Megapacks. Pacific Gas & Electric is building the biggest electric battery in the world to date, the Elkhorn Battery at Moss Landing, with 256 Megapacks. It will have a capacity of 182.5 MW and be able to store and provide 730 MWh of generation for 4 hours. Sounds impressive, right? It is a weakling compared to Bath County at 3,000 MW and 30,000 MWh. A single Bath County Equivalent will require 10,000 Megapacks.
Why not Tesla batteries again? Because including Tesla’s planned 10-fold megafactory expansion, it will be 9 to 10 months to build 1 BCE with 2 Billion batteries.
Also is the issue of lifespan. Hoover Damn opened in 1936 and Grand Coolie in 1942, about 80 years ago. They will surely last another 80. Batteries will only last 25 at best.
— 8 —
Renewables, especially PV have a little talked about disadvantage, the percentage of time they can produce. Previously the example with a 1,000 MW power plant replaced by a 4,000 MW PV array, was based on an annual average of 25% capacity, or 6 “sunhours” per day.
What happens in December and January?
Even in L.A., Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta, the December 31st sunrise to sunset is 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM, leaving 14 hours of darkness. This drives the capacity down dramatically, in the 13% to 16% range, or 3 to less than 4 “sunhours” per day, after rain, snow, and clouds.
Getting through a winter’s night with generation capacity under 3-½ hours requires 7,000 MW of PV power and 6,000 MW of battery power. The total infrastructure, 13,000 MW of generation plus storage, is 13 times the size of the 1,000 MW it replaces.
(Technically, storage power is negative. 7,000 MV of PV and -6,000 MW of battery storage is a net 1,000 MW capacity. The positive, or absolute value of storage indicates the magnitude of construction cost, which is of course positive. Of greater importance is the duration of energy storage, not the power. Batteries typically only economically store 2 to 4 hours energy. PSH easily stores 10 to 12 hours.)
PV also produces 2-1/2 times as much energy in July as in January, which is diametrically opposed to the energy required for heating. The degree-days for average cooling are 1/3rd of that for heating. A PV array sized to support summer air-conditioning will be woefully undersized to support winter heating with an electric heat-pump. A PV array sized to support winter heating on the other hand, will have an oversupply of summer generation, a huge problem requiring curtailment, less the grid fail from faulty frequency regulation.
No method of energy storage, be it Hydrogen, Pumped Storage Hydroelectric (PSH), and certainly not batteries, can yet economically store energy from one season into the next. The best contender is hydrogen, but it must be kept far colder at greater pressure to keep it liquefied, unlike natural gas. Far easier to implement is Power to (Methane) Gas (PtG) which reverses combustion, turning CO2 and water into methane which can be stored, distributed, and used through existing infrastructure and appliances, without any new emissions, as it came from CO2 in the atmosphere, but at far greater cost to create. Hydrogen has one other problem…
— 9 —
Is a million, a billion and a trillion all the same? They might seem so to the uninitiated, but they are not remotely close.
1 million seconds is 12 days ago.
1 billion seconds is 32 years ago, when the 1st George H.W. Bush was president.
50 trillion (50,000 billion) seconds, 1.6 million years ago, man still hadn't emerged from the swamp despite the dinosaurs being extinct for 62 million years.
It took 25,000 trillion (25 quadrillion, or 25-million billion) seconds for multi-cellular animal life to appear 800 million years ago.
100 quadrillion seconds, 3.2 billion years ago, earth was a lifeless glowing ball of molten rock. In galactic terms, the hot new rock on the block. (It would be another 2.4 billion years before multi-cellular animal life appeared 800 million years ago.)
How about with something anyone, anywhere, can easily visualize, blades of grass:
A small 333 square foot patch of grass no bigger than a patio, less than 20’ X 20’ has 1 million blades of grass.
A house in the middle of a 1-acre property has over 100 million blades of grass.
Just two holes on a golf course, a par-5 and a par-3, or a couple of par-4s, have 1 billion blades of grass.
50 trillion blades of grass is a far, far, bigger area. 600 square-miles, a chunk of land almost 25 miles by 25 miles. All five boroughs of New York City are less than 470 square-miles by comparison.
100 quadrillion blades of grass cover 1.2 million square miles, or over 30% of the U.S.
With money:
A single bundle of one hundred $100 bills is $10,000.
$1 million is one hundred of those $10k bundles. An estimated 11 to 18 million (equivalent to the population of New York City) millionaires live in the U.S.
$1 billion, Mark Cuban wealth, takes 1,000 millionaires - imagine a picture of 1,000 faces - to make one billionaire. There are an estimated 600 billionaires.
$50 trillion. It takes 50,000 billionaires to make this amount. Yankee Stadium is exactly 50,000 seats. Where to get the other 49,400 billionaires from?
$100 quadrillion is absurdly huge. $300 million for each American, from babies to the elderly. Or $12.5 million for each human on earth. It would take 4,000 years of the entire $25 trillion U.S. economy to provide that amount.
Those ten slices of 10% of all U.S. energy presented in Part-I are also, very conveniently, units of energy. For the past two decades, U.S. total energy has been a steady 100 quadrillion BTUs. No math required. 100% equals 100 quadrillion BTUs, also called 100 Quads. Each slice of 10% of energy, is 10 Quads, which is enough energy to power all U.S. homes for 2 years.
— 10 —
Historically CO2 levels steadily oscillated for 800,000 years from 190 to 270 parts per million (ppm). While the trend was broken by 1850, it didn’t cross 300 ppm until 1920. By 1990 it was 350 ppm, and 400 ppm after 2015. That is data, not a forecast or model.
Even strict Creationists cannot ignore that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased in the past 5,000 years. The increase from 300 parts per million to well over 400 ppm in 100 years, measured with modern scientific methods, is irrefutable.
It will exceed 450 by 2040 or sooner if unabated. What effect it will have on climate is not discussed by this paper, which is only about renewables costs as well as benefits. That rapidly rising CO2 level is unquestionably equated to global fossil fuel annual emissions of 7 ppm, 3 ppm after oceanic absorption, which renewables can minimize.
Paths Forward suggest three scenarios, besides the current U.S. fossil fuel trajectory. That continued path inextricably emits 5,400 million metric-tons (Mega tonnes, Mt) CO2 per year, which is 15% (approximately a seventh) of global annual fossil fuel emissions of 36,000 Mt.
All-In for 100% Renewables. Besides the cost, is it achievable? Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson believes so. Others argue the cost immaterial.
Would the expense of a $100,000 new heating system and housing insulation be “immaterial” to the average homeowner? This solution would cost the U.S. 1 million Washington Monument sized wind turbines, almost 30 billion photovoltaic panels, and 5 trillion batteries.
The Nuclear Option, would be of equal emissions reduction, but is that enticing enough to calm nuclear fears? A mere 100 reactors presently supply 20% of U.S. electricity. Fission could be deployed sooner than the unfathomable numbers of renewables, and supplies full winter capacity, no matter how cold, dark, or still.
A vocal nuclear proponent is staunch environmentalist, UN IPCC report expert reviewer, and Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” Michael Shellenberger.
Natural Gas as a Bridge-Fuel. Perhaps the cost, timetable, and risks of the first two scenarios are too high? A low-carbon option, less excessive in terms of time or materials, is to build only the renewable power generation immediately consumable, without energy storage. Natural Gas turbines rapidly fill the shortfall.
Coal, historically the power source of electricity, emits twice the CO2 of methane per unit of energy. And coal boilers are less efficient than gas turbines. Replacing coal with Natural Gas from fracking is primarily why U.S. emissions decreased to 1995 levels, closer to COP21/Paris 2.0 °C target than other countries.
The dollar cost of this strategy is a tenth of an all-renewable one, yet at both extremes it is challenged. Some think the monetary cost remains too high and block funding, others view the environmental cost to dear, blocking pipeline and drilling permits.
Doctor Christopher Clack of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at University of Colorado Boulder is an adherent supporter of the best of each strategy, using nuclear, renewables with direct generation, limited storage, and natural gas peaking plants, in his ZeroByFifty report.
Professor Jesse Jenkins of Princeton University models in detail 5 potential pathways, one being all renewables, another being constrained amounts of renewables with more interstate transmission and gas peaking plants.
A May 28, 2021, New York Times piece, Where Wind and Solar Need to Grow for America to Meet Its Goals, by Veronnica Penney, similarly illustrated the massive amount land required, so much as to be 10% of U.S. land.
— Review —
The U.S. has the capability to cut 50 of its 80 Quads of fossil fuel consumption (all coal, 3/4ths of oil, and 1/3rd of natural gas) leaving 10 Quads of oil and 20 Quads of natural gas consumption (and most that remains is for petrochemical feedstock, not combustion.) The resultant 67% drop in CO2 emissions, from 5,400 Mt to 1,800 Mt, would be well below 1950’s levels.
Yet, to exclaim “full stop, this must be done at any cost because the environmental savings justify the expense,” brazenly ignores the affordability, and requires:
A capital investment over 40 times the existing electric generation infrastructure.
An electric grid 9 times its present wattage, before adding energy storage.
A new energy storage system 7 times the wattage of the present grid.
The combined land area of CA, OR, and WA entirely covered by wind turbines.
Tens of Billions of Solar Photovoltaic PV panels, 100 to 200 per household.
More batteries than stars in the sky, more than galaxies in the universe.
A reliance on PV when available winter sunlight is only 40% of peak summer daylight, yet heating requires 300% the energy of cooling.
Furthermore, coal and gas generators last 50 to 75 years. Conventional hydroelectric dams last well over 100 to 150 years. Yet wind turbines, PV panels, and batteries can only expect a 25-year lifespan. To equal the generation by conventional means, a renewable system would need an entire replacement 2 to 6 times.
Economist Bjørn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, says “we need to get smarter on climate.” It is foolish to annually spend $500 Billion ($1,500 per person) on a policy that per the UN’s own climate model, even if continued through the year 2100 (at a cost of $40 Trillion), would reduce warming by 0.07 °F, while China and India increase their numbers of coal fired electric generators. Rightly so, “they are more focused on development and getting their populations out of poverty.”
Even U.S. climate czar John Kerry admits that reducing US emissions to zero wouldn’t make much difference in the global climate fight. “Not when almost 90 percent of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of US borders. We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved.”
Worldwide problems of poverty, hunger, health, education, gender inequality, clean water and sanitation are the top 6 of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which cannot be ignored at the expense of costly, unproductive climate policies. To “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” is only the 13th of the 17 UN SDGs, and in no way takes precedent over the first 12 goals.
Young environmentalists are fond of saying “your house is burning, and you are worried about the cost of the water?!” The answer is not to sign a contract for the water that requires the bearer to become an indentured servant for the remainder of their life.
The answer, as promised, is a difficult one.
© Hector E Joules, Strategic Sensible Synergies, LLC 2022