The Myth of Viable Industrial-scale Renewable Energy

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill’s dictum could have been coined for the green advocates of the renewable energy revolution; a revolution that demonstrates a thorough-going disconnect between the political rhetoric and a grasp of the physics and economics vital to energy realism.

Remember Germany’s ‘Green Chancellor’ Rhetoric: In 2006 Angela Merkel famously promised to rid her country of coal and nuclear power replacing them with renewable energy sources. Reality: Within just three years Merkel was actively promoting the construction of 26 new coal-fired power stations and demanding special protection for German heavy industry via free cap and trade permits. By 2010 she was praising a deal to grant Germany’s nuclear plants a 12-year extension of life. So what happened? Well a vocal rebellion of German industrial leaders warning against the loss of international competitiveness might have had something to do with it. Rhetoric again: In April this year, however, after Merkel began backing away from the nuclear energy extension deal following the Fukushima disaster, the Green Chancellor’s opportunistic flip-flopping looks set to bring on her own political fall-out.

Rhetoric: Remember on the green jobs front when President Obama warned Americans that “countries like Spain, German and Japan” are “surging ahead of us”? Obama wanted to create 5 million green jobs and set up a green jobs Czar. Reality: A study in Spain in 2009 revealed that in fact 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every ‘green job’ created. The Center for American Progress, whose CEO had headed up Obama’s transition team, calculated it would take government spending of $100 billion to create 2 million green jobs, a bill to the U.S. taxpayer of $50,000 per job created. And in February this year a UK report confirmed that funding the green sector costs more jobs than it creates. Rhetoric: Eurocrat Andris Pielbalgs has been a front-runner in the renewable drivel stakes with assertions such as: “Wind energy can replace a large proportion of the polluting and finite fuels we currently rely on. Reality: “Soon we ‘celebrate’ the 20,000th wind plant, without replacing even one single small plant of conventional energy,” Ferdinand Furst zu Hohenlohe-Bartenstein, Chairman, Federal Association for Landscape Protection, Germany.

Will wind ‘replace’ current conventional power sources? Rhetoric: “Wind energy is one of the most promising renewable energy technologies, and is an area in which there have already been many developments and improvements to make electricity generation more effective”. So says the EU Commission website on renewables. Reality: The British Wind Energy Association has been forced to admit wind power facilities would need 75 percent of its infrastructure back-up by hydrocarbon back-up facilities; UK generating industry players, like E.ON, say wind would need over 90 percent hydrocarbon back-up; while a 2009 House of Lords report suggests wind power would need 100 percent back-up.

Rhetoric: Speaking on “Earth Day” in 2009, President Obama decried the fact that only three percent of U.S. electricity is generated from renewable, mainly wind, sources – and held Denmark up as a leading model; the oft-quoted Danish alterative energy ‘miracle’. Reality: Aase Madsen, the Chair of Energy Policy in the Danish Parliament, calls the Danish wind program “a terribly expensive disaster.” Commissioned to report on Danish electricity exports in 2009, Danish think-tank the Centre for Political Study (CEPOS) found that Danes paid the highest residential electricity rates in Europe (partly due to wind industry subsidies), that 90 percent of new jobs were technology jobs transferred from other industries with only 10 percent of wind industry jobs being newly created, and that GDP took a hit of US $270 million because of wind subsidies.

Just for good measure: “Wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” says Flemming Niseen, Head of Development, West Danish Generating Company, Elsam.

Rhetoric: The British wind industry and Government have each argued that wind power has “no direct subsidies”. Reality: Wind and other renewables are almost entirely subsidised by a complex ‘hidden’ regime of feed-in tariffs, taxpayer cash and preferential tax credits (more in the final part 3 of this series). In a 2003 Energy White Paper, the UK Government has admitted it “will provide support of £1 billion per year by 2010 to the renewable industry”. Sir Martin Holdgate, former chairman of the British Renewable Energy Advisory Group, sums up the contribution of wind farms thus, “The trouble with wind farms, they have a large spatial footprint for a piddling little bit of electricity. You would need 800 turbines to replace the output of a coal-fired power station.” Confirming that fossil fuels, not renewables, will continue to be our main source of energy for decades to come, science writer Dr Matt Ridley, states: “We would have to build 100 times as many wind farms as we have today in order to get even 10 percent of our energy from wind. And we’d soon run out of locations to put them.”

As Congressman Peter Stark commented of US wind farm construction, “These aren’t wind farms, they’re tax farms”.

Dr Howard Hayden, professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut, puts the total dependence of renewables in perspective: “With the right subsidies, wind could become a viable energy source. And, with the right subsidies, gasoline could be made free, and 2-carat diamonds could be given away in cereal boxes. How is it that wind, with a 4,000-year head start, is such a small player in the energy scene? Could it be – just possibly – that the answer has something to do with the physics instead of economics and politics?”

Internationally-recognized energy and climate expert, Dr Richard Courtney, makes the case more graphically. “The New Age dream of a world operated by wind farms will remain a dream because the laws of physics do not allow it in an industrialized world. If wind power were economic then oil tankers would be sailing ships.”

Rhetoric: In the face of all this hard evidence of the failure on renewable energy sources to defeat the physics of energy and laws of economics, the UN IPCC released its latest report on renewable energy development in May 2011. Headlining is this IPCC assertion: “Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” Reality: Welcome to Planet UNIPCC. With the “right enabling public policies”, of course, we could all hitch a ride on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic paying space shuttle, too. Dale Allen Pfeiffer, writing about photovoltaics, does the math to defeat the solar science fiction too: “The U.S. would require 17 percent of the planet’s entire surface area, or 59 percent of the land surface to produce solar energy to replace its current daily oil consumption.”

Perhaps the ultimate irony for political Green Dealers is that the same energy-intensive industries they blame for high CO2 emissions will be the main ones to benefit from massive public largesse in the form of subsidies to ‘clean it up’. A recent report suggests General Electric and Total are currently considering entering the race for solar development contracts. Big Power and Big Oil players, including E.ON, RWE and Shell have lately called for “deep and rapid” cuts in CO2. And let’s not forget the sudden ‘greening’ of the world’s investment bankers – those who met in London in October 2008 specifically to discuss how best to cash-in on the lucrative carbon-trading business.

In 2007 the European Investment Bank calculated it would cost the EU 1.1 trillion euros over the next 14 years to pay for its Renewable Energy Roadmap to be implemented. The entire EU budget at that time was 100 billion euros. Asked who would pay for it, then EU president Angela Merkel, in a moment of unreserved honesty, responded, “With the best will in the world, I can’t tell you that.” Taxpayers beware politicians who haven’t done the math?

Ecologist Dr John Etherington’s pre-emptive epitaph for renewables as “the minting of money for the undeserving, aided and abetted by the uneducated” may be rhetoric, but it’s also reality. As we have quoted elsewhere, “He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense”.

In politics, as in life, it has always been thus.

Energy Tribune