“and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
Does Robert Frost know which pathway should America now turn to supply it’s vast energy demand?
Firstly, to quickly review actual issues, not predictions, from “Greta Thunberg Cannot Count”:
1. Half of all existing U.S. energy is waste heat lost in power plant cooling towers and motor vehicle radiators. HALF! The good news is most of that can be eliminated with electrification, cutting U.S. energy use nearly in half. But how does the U.S. electrify everything, and supply the electricity?
2. Wind turbines, despite growing in size – from a past size of the 305’ tall Statue of Liberty spinning a Boeing 747 like a pinwheel, to the current size of the 1,046’ tall Chrysler Building with each blade as long as a football field, to future turbines as big as the 1,776’ tall One World Trade Center with blades over 3½ times as long as the Boeing 747 wingspan – will continue to occupy the same amount of land and sea, for the same amount of power. Merely less units need be deployed. Therefore covering California, Oregon, and Washington combined, or two Californias according to author and speaker Robert Bryce. Or all of Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas.
3. Solar PV panels in the dead of winter, even in the south, only produce ½ the average annual energy, a third of the peak summer production. Yet electrified winter heating demand (degree-days) is triple that of summer air-conditioning. Meaning 7-times as many PV panels are need to keep the heat on.
4. To keep that electricity flowing at night and when the wind isn’t blowing would require more batteries than points of light in the night sky. Batteries have merely proved energy storage is possible, but not at the tremendous scale necessary.
5. Batteries themselves become a precious resource, reserved for applications without an alternative, namely transportation, not the electric supply. Bigger and longer duration grid energy storage is achieved with Pumped Storage Hydroelectric (PSH) which is simply a reversible dam that pumps water back uphill in surplus times. Instead of building upper reservoirs on mountains, underground basins can be cleared using Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) to create lower reservoirs, anywhere, regardless of geography. Furthermore, the world’s largest PSH facility in Bath County, VA is 20-times the size the largest utility-scale battery energy storage project.
6. To supply a mostly electrified transportation system, and electrified residential and commercial heating, will require the net power capacity to nearly double, from 1,100 GW to 2,000 GW. But to supply that with average 20% Capacity Factor (CF, the productivity) output of renewables will need 10,000 GW of renewable generation, plus 8,000 GW of energy storage. That is a total 18,000 GW of renewable+storage infrastructure, 16-times the size of the existing 1,100 GW grid.
7. If by magic the U.S. became fully electrified virtually overnight, or in reality no matter when, its share of global CO2 emissions is just over 10%. Even Climate Czar and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry admits “almost 90% of the planet’s global emissions come from outside U.S. borders.”
America at a Crossroad
The U.S. consumes a supertanker’s worth of oil every 2½ hours, the equivalent of a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) transport every 45 minutes, and a freight train of coal every 15 minutes, and all that is still only 4/5ths of U.S. energy, the remainder ½ nuclear and ½ renewables. Is it now time for America to become all, or at least mostly renewable?
The cost of a renewable system is roughly 1/7th (15%) for wind turbines, 2/7th (30%) for PV, and 4/7th (55%) for battery energy storage. Those that believe costs will drop dramatically, which they must for a fully renewable solution to work, can realistically only pin their hopes on energy storage price reduction.
PV is currently around $300 for a panel similar in construction to, and the size of a huge 85” television. How much further can they continue to drop in price? Increasing the output per unit area is more likely in store for PVs, but even that is limited by physics to roughly 50% additional rated power.
Wind turbines are inexpensive, roughly $1.3 million/MW, which is about the same as PV, yet could be twice as productive as PV (up to 40% CF v 20% CF for PV) which is why they are deployed worldwide. Any further price reduction is also the smallest share of the total renewable cost, therefore of little additional value.
Batteries though are expensive, over half the cost of a renewable system. Current prices of over $6 for a #21700 battery cell (triple the size of an #14500 commonly known as an AA) are under a recent industry target of $400/kWh. At $5 they are almost $300/kWh and at $3 will crack the hallowed $200/kWh. Even then, that makes the cost of an EV’s 65 to 80 kWh battery pack, $12,000 to $15,000 which is why an EV is so costly. How low battery prices can go before a limited supply of rare materials experience dramatic price increases is anybody’s guess.
An exact specifications copy of the Bath County PSH energy storage facility if possibly constructed for $3 Billion would indeed hit the DARPA-E $100/kWh target. Still, this makes for an tremendously expensive energy system.
Is there an alternative pathway to a system where the U.S. would need 1 Million Wind Turbines the size of the Washington Monument, almost 30 Billion PV panels, and 5 Trillion batteries? It is an amount so large that Dr. Michael J Kelly from the University of Cambridge describes as turning an emissions problem into a materials problem, with the associated mining and slave labor problems.
Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads©
Rather than 100% wind, PV, and batteries, the Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) approach favored by Professor Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford, a different approach to electrification would be a return to nuclear fission. For decades, under 100 fission reactors have supplied the U.S. with almost 20% of its electric generation needs. Does the fear of a nuclear accident outweigh the reduction in CO2 emissions by eliminating the biggest U.S. source of CO2 and wasted energy, and 90% of the by-far dirtiest source, coal? Time Magazine ‘Hero of the Environment’ award winner, UN IPCC Assessment Report invited expert reviewer, and bestselling author Michael Shellenberger believes our nuclear fears are overhyped and the benefits of supplying all electricity, emissions-free, far outweighs those fears. Even China which dwarfs U.S. coal use, with its famously dirty air, is building enough reactors to quadruple generation, which is presently half of U.S. nuclear output.
Doctor Eric Larson of Princeton, co-lead author of the report ‘Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts’ does not believe fossil fuels must be completely eliminated, just mostly. The report presents 5 pathways that could achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 through various amounts of renewables, efficiency improvements, nuclear, fossil fuel, hydrogen, biomass, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Fossil fuel with CCS could be as economical as all-renewables and batteries. More importantly, any of the 5 scenarios achieve net-zero emissions, and there is no ‘best’ solution. The pathway “high electrification plus renewables (E+ RE+)” indeed needs 20% more land than reviewed actuality #2 above, adding all of Nebraska.
Dr. Christopher Clack of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that more interstate transmission – especially west to east of which is virtually nonexistent, as well as connecting Texas which is currently almost stand-alone – with backup gas turbines would allow for far more reasonable amounts of wind turbines and PV with little emissions, similar to one of the scenarios in the Princeton NZA report.
Dr. Clack though, refutes Professor Jacobson’s 100% WWS as containing “errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions.” Even the staunch environmental community of elite Ph.D academics, while unanimously agreeing replacing 80% of our fossil fuel system by readily converting to renewables, has bitter disagreement on converting that last 20%. Indeed Professor Michael E. Mann labeled Dr. Steven Koonin a “denier & disinformer” (via Twitter 2/12/2022 at 11:17 AM) and refused to debate him. So now even Ph.Ds resort to name calling to win arguments.
Another potential technology, as batteries hopelessly cannot economically carry energy from one season to the next, is growing research in Power-to-Gas (PTG) to make zero-emission hydrogen, or true net-zero synthetic methane. PTG literally reverses the combustion process, first separating water into hydrogen and oxygen, and harvesting CO2 from air. Then the CO2 and hydrogen is combined into oxygen and methane. When the sun shines and the wind blows, methane is produced from air and water. While methane production is far costlier than hydrogen, the advantage is then it can be conventionally stored and distributed, then used in the massive existing infrastructure of pipelines, gas turbine peaking plants, tens of millions of furnaces and boilers, and combusted as it is now, without any new net-emissions. The disadvantage is any fugitive (leaked) methane is 84-times as destructive a greenhouse gas as CO2.
The ultimate great hope for an emissions-free future is nuclear fusion. It produces negligible to little nuclear waste, turning hydrogen into helium. The comparatively ‘easy’ part is getting fusion to happen, the physics is well known. The extremely difficult part is getting more energy out of the fusion reaction than is used to make it happen, and the almost impossible part is the engineering to keep a reaction happening at 100 million degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun, contained in a vessel that doesn’t immediately melt into scrap. At least it cannot explode. The three giant questions are: what will the cost be in relation to vast renewables plus energy storage; will it be as dispatchable as conventional gas turbines are now, or will it be fixed base-load power like coal and nuclear fission; and, when will it work?
No matter which method of electric generation proceeds to fruition, it should at least be apparent that energy storage in batteries is reserved to the motor vehicles that depend on batteries for electrification in the first place. Adding technology to allow a vehicle to supply the home in the event of a blackout, or even act as a portable generator, is now available on the Ford F-150 Lightning. Others will surely follow, negating the need for most home batteries fixed to the wall.
An emissions-free future is not as simple as “Just Do It”™ or “if you build it, they will come.”© A future of renewables brings obviously great environmental benefits, but if done improperly could inflict depression-level costs, or even war between countries for the imposition of emissions reductions, or the possession of scarce rare-earth metals. Should coal freighters bound for countries refusing emissions reduction goals be sunk at sea? Should rolling blackouts be implemented for mandatory fossil fuel energy reductions? Should mandatory internet-connected thermostats force us to shiver if using gas or oil heat?
Political leaders, activists, and celebrity endorsers must unite behind forward thinking engineers to finance and construct effective yet reasonable systems, on an unimaginable scale, as quickly as economically possible.
Stop predicting future climate doom. Instead, focus on the spiraling CO2 level, of which the increase is directly attributable to the combustion of fossil fuel. And even more so, focus on the actual energy waste, half of U.S. Energy.
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“Just Do It” is a trademark of Nike, inc. “If you build it, they will come” is from the movie Field of Dreams. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads” is from the movie Back to the Future.
Hector E. Joules is the pen-name of a writer with a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A report, “Counting (Not) On Renewables: A Million Wind Turbines, Tens of Billions of Solar Panels, and Trillions upon Trillions of Batteries©” is forthcoming.