Renewable Energy Won

Quietly our energy problems actually got solved by wind and solar. The energy debate is over.

I was just updating the article below that I wrote five years ago about nuclear power. While doing that I had to research the cost of nuclear power compare to the alternatives such as renewable energy and coal plants.

What I discover is that right now renewable energy with batteries is cheaper than coal power. In other words renewable energy solutions can deliver power 24/7 at lower cost than coal power.

This report from Ember Energy gets into the details and the numbers: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything.

Cheap solar power is rapidly transforming the developing world:

• In Africa, Solar Energy is Booming

• Africa’s solar power revolution driven by China’s investment

The problem now is not so much getting cheap power but having upgraded grids to transport that power and having enough electricians, installers and other professionals to install, upgrade and maintain systems:

• Africa’s Solar Boom Is Happening So Why Are Millions Still in the Dark?

So we still have a job to do. We don’t have a magic wand. We still need to actually build the solar panels and install them. It still requires money, investment, engineers, technicians etc. None of that grows on trees. We still got to do the boring mundane jobs of educating and training people.

But there is no longer a worry about whether we can create the technology for the future. It is already here.

Some practical problems exist. For many regions of the world, there are huge differences in power needs in summer and winter. Batteries are not suitable for storing energy for a whole season.

Yet, this is less of a problem than it may seem at first. Because renewable energy is so cheap now, one can simply overbuild. Build enough wind and solar to also cover power needs in winter.

It is also worth keeping in mind that the primary energy need in winter is for heating. Providing heat is a lot easier than providing electric power. One solution I have been a particular fan of is the use metal powders as energy carriers.

• Metalot - Metal Power Community

Metalot is a Dutch organization that brings together researchers, companies and other stockholders interested in using metal for energy storage. How does this work?

In a large solid piece you cannot easily burn metal, since it conducts heat well and will move the heat from whatever area you try to burn until it cools down too much to ignite. Hence we need fine grains to burn metal. Think of how you can burn steel wool.

Metal stores a lot of energy per volume unit. So the idea here is using electricity to produce meta in summer. Then store it in a pile until winter. Then you burn it. After burning you get metal oxides. If you burn iron you essentially get rust. What is good about this? No carbon-dioxide is produce in this process. The pile of rust produced can be collected and transformed into regular iron again using solar energy.

Basically you store a pile of rust until summer when cheap electricity becomes available. Then you produce metal iron powder. Store that until winter when you burn it again. Rinse repeat.

That is just one possible solution of course. Others might include using heat pumps, pumped hydro, ammonia, hydrogen or other energy carriers. Or one simply overbuilds for winter and use excess power in summer to produce things that requires a lot of energy.

How the American Right Got it All Wrong

I know many are wary of pulling politics into this, but whether we like it or not the future of energy is profoundly affected by politics and the argument made there.

I say “American right” as opposed to the political right in general because I don’t think a strong opposition to renewable energy as existed among the European right the same was as in the US.

For many years I had debates with the American right on renewable energy. It always got mocked. I always got told it would never work. You had people like Jordan Peterson, a darling on the Anglo right, who famously said nobody had thought about power went the sun went down or the wind stopped blowing.

This kind of supposed intellectual genius on the right, made it sound like he had some profound insight that the stupid experts had failed to see. I am sure all the physicists and engineers were floored by how a psychology professor from Canada could understand how to build power generation systems better than them.

But it kind of sums up very well the smug arrogant attitude many of us experience on the political right with regards to renewable energy. Their favorite punching bag was Germany. Of course Germany made an error shutting down nuclear power plants. This made them reliant on importing Russia gas to handle fluctuations in renewable energy production.

Germany got maximum unlucky in that the Ukraine war happened causing a huge spike in gas prices for Germany. But that doesn’t mean their overall strategy was wrong. They made some bad steps but if you look at wholesale prices of electricity to industry in France and Germany it is largely the same.

France is still a little cheaper, but German prices are trending down due to renewables getting ever cheaper. For this reason renewables are rapidly expanding in France as well. Nuclear power is simply not cheap to build and their reactors are aging and starting to need replacements.

When a need for replacements happens, nuclear may no longer be the best choice for them either despite their long proud nuclear traditions.

The critics kept saying renewable energy would always need heavy subsidies, and that we would run out of Lithium. All of that proved wrong. Renewable energy plus batteries won. It beats coal now by a large margin. The debate is essentially over. The irony is that Donald Trump now bans wind projects and promotes fossil fuel extraction. All in a time when it is more clear than ever that renewable energy won.

Few men were as loud and hysterical as former green champion Michael Shellenberger. He kept attacking renewable energy at every junction. In 2019 he wrote this article: Why Renewables Can’t Save the Climate.

Much of his analysis and predictions in 2019 utterly failed looking at them 6 years later. He claimed wind and solar adoption would stall as subsidies expired. That turned out wrong. Costs fell faster than subsidies were removed. Grid scale batteries have changed the economics completely.

Shellenberger thought slowing down in Germany in 2019 represented actual physical and economic limits when it was really permitting rules, court backlogs and distance regulations which got fixed. Germany is now installing wind and solar faster than ever. His prediction was dead wrong.

He claimed renewables cannot scale only nuclear. Again China proved him dead wrong. Nothing stands in the way for their nuclear scaling. Yet their renewable energy production has grown much faster than their nuclear energy. This is despite China building with standardized reactors in record time. Just as fast did in its golden era of nuclear power.

The high electricity prices he blamed on renewables was mostly due to fossil fuel exposure. When gas prices normalized RE-heavy regions saw rapid price declines.

I could go on about all his false predictions but I think you get the point. The naysayers got proven spectacularly wrong. I guess that is why I see so little discussion of renewable energy anymore. Renewable energy won. The discussion is over.