Embrace of Renewables Has a Hidden Cost . In a somewhat recent issue of the New York Times, a somewhat left-leaning paper, there was a devastating analysis of the naivete and inefficiency of so-called “renewable” energy sources. For reasons laid out in the article they require massive subsidies. The short version of the problem is that solar power is quite available in the middle of a sunny day, other times not so much. Wind power is similarly intermittent. As the linked article states:
Advocating renewables feels good, but has high cost and very questionable benefits.
Other articles have explored wind power’s highly blemished environmental record. In an article entitled Wind Forum Explores Concerns. It seems many Vermonters have had not only their scenery, but right to live in reasonable quiet, utterly wrecked.A neighbor of one such project, quoted in the article stated:
Vehicle Emissions Standards Produce More Fraud than Benefit for Environment
In another article strongly hinting at the limits of environmentalism,** Volkswagen** Scandal Reaches All the Way to the Top, Lawsuits Say The linked article is one of many deailing VW’s extensive fraud designed to fool environmental tests of diesel engines. For a reputable company with a lengthy history to go to these lengths it strikes me that the limits are utopian and not practical.
This article, in yesterday’s New York Times Business Section here, How Producing Clean Power Turned Out to Be a Messy Business highlights how difficult it is for even a solid company to make a profit selling renewable source energy. A brief snippet (article is about two broadsheet pages long):
This is one of many examples of the difficulties that even a well-capitalized, profitable and solid company (NRG Energy) has in bringing renewables to the market.
The problem with renewables isn’t the nature of the generation of the energy. Every energy generation method has its downsides.
The problem is when the government sticks its nose into things and spends taxpayer dollars on forms of energy in defiance of market forces - whatever the type.
I speak from a position of authority, being an Ontarian. In Ontario we pay the highest electricity rates in Canada, so far as I am aware, entirely due to government bungling. The story of how our electricity rates came to be ludicrously high is a long one, and you can all Google it yourselves, but it’s a succession of absolutely textbook examples of politically driven economic ineptitude, one boondoggle after another, leading up to the wind/solar decision.
The province’s decision to invest a pile of money in wind and solar has been a financial catastrophe; there is really no other way to phrase it. It will cost us, and is costing us, billions of dollars to generate power that either goes straight into the ground or is sold off to other jurisdictions at rates a fraction of the cost of generating it. The province would quite literally have been better off withdrawing the money it invested in the form of $100 bills and setting fire to them. A LOW END estimate of the cost to Ontario residents is $35 billion and counting in sheer, unrecoverable investment costs.
There’s nothing wrong with solar or wind power, but they weren’t incorporated into the power system in a way that made any sort of market sense. The government just said "hey, this will be politically popular because it’s GREEN and people like that word) and they went ahead and did it. Only after electricity bills spiked did most people notice it was a disaster (I should hasted to point out that it also eats a lot of our tax money too, but you don’t notice that as much.) Ontario had no shortage of existing power generation capabilities. Nobody was saying “there’s just not enough electricity here.” It was a pure PR move.
The New York Times article in the OP is strangely limited … as though they focus solely on the downsides. The case can be made either way if we wear blinders. Thank you Grey for pointing out the obvious (and yes I found that hilarious too).
The article focuses on Europe, Anglo-America and Australia. That’s only about 10% of the world’s population. What do all these energy sources look like when we connect the other 90% of the people to the grid? We’ll need a wind mill everyplace the wind blows, a solar panel everywhere the sun shines, every river dammed, nuclear power plants feeding every city AND pumping as much fossil fuel out of the ground as we possibly can. Still, this won’t provide everyone with the electric power enjoyed by these ten-percenters.
Conservation in not mentioned. At some point, we have to start using far less energy than what the ten-percent are currently using. If we all used half as much energy, we’d have half as much pollution, half as much CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions. This starts with turning off your A/C, recycling as much garbage as we can and wide-spread mass transit.
No mention of hydro-power in the article. Is this a tacit acknowledgement of hydro’s economy? The actual production of electricity is as carbon-neutral as most any other, except the construction carries a heavy carbon footprint and the environmental damage is considerable.
None of this even begins to address the transportation of food from the farm to the city, where half of us live.
Where the article is truly disingenuous is complaining about tax subsidies to renewable energy sources without even mentioning tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Just how economical would natural gas be if the government held the industry to the same safety standards as nuclear power? Something like 12% of natural gas production simply leaks out into the environment. Can we imagine if 12% of nuclear fuel rods just leaked into the air?
All in all, the article is fighting naïvety with just more naïvety.
You are trying to conflate two separate issues. The VW scandal was about NOx emissions. The push for renewable energy is primarily to reduce CO2 emissions.
Which is why we need to make market forces work for the cause, rather than fighting it. Carbon tax would be the simplest way to do it. This means putting a price tag on the negative externalities of fossil fuels, and charging that cost to the importers and producers of fossil fuels. The free market will adjust itself and come up with the most efficient solutions.
These taxes would be passed on to the consumers … by necessity … it’s the end-user who has to decide to stop using fossil fuels … the pain has to be felt at the retail level.
If we want to go after the producers, importers and wholesalers … we should tighten down the environmental laws and stop grandfathering in old polluting facilities.
It wouldn’t bother me to see more criminal prosecutions as well … if someone’s oil train blows up in some small town killing 100 people … that someone needs to spend the rest of their lives in prison for murder …
FWIW, Ontario has 24 CANDU nuclear reactors; all other Canadian provinces combined have one. CANDU reactors constructed earlier had massive cost overruns: those later came in on budget.
I confess I’m not familiar with the Ontario experience, but I just wanted to set some context. Nuclear power is expensive and Ontario has a lot of nukes.
Generally speaking, I would advocate either a carbon tax or tradeable emission permits to attach a cost to emitting CO2 pollution. Due to conservative opposition and goalpost moving in the US, this hasn’t happened. So responsible policy makers use makeshift workarounds.
That, and they endanger fish that spawn upstream, they change the ecosystem of the river, they eventually fill up with sediment and have to be demolished, and in some places they lose millions (billions?) of gallons of water through evaporation.
Well, the equations on non-renewable sources aren’t going to magically get better, right? What else can we do, but try to figure out the best way to work sustainable sources? Whatever the inefficiencies or secondary problems of current methods may be, surely working the problems, in practice, is better than just running on and on with fossil sources that we know are both dwindling, and harmful in themselves.
There is nothing in those articles that support the OP’s contention.
One is about an old-line energy producer who is having trouble shifting their model from one where resource extraction and utilization is the primary input, to one where technological shifts have a greater bearing on the business model than resource costs.
The other is about the transition from carbon to renewables and some of the challenges we face as the market converts to new realities. But, hell, building the interstate system posed significant challenges to the towns on the old US Route system, and the old US Route system posed significant challenges to the railroad towns of the late 19th century, so I think the Republic will handle this.
On a recent trip to Vermont, I commented on how many solar panels were being used (so far north) but wind generators were sparse, figuring scenic concerns were what was limiting wind energy. The family I was visiting has several acres on a ridge and can’t plant trees or erect a structure on a pasture due to impeding others’ line of sight to some scenic mountains, so I wasn’t surprised that wind hadn’t taken hold. They thought that the area got its power from hydroelectric stations in Canada, so renewable, anyway.
There are massive wind generation installations around here, and the concern is that they were put in with help from subsidies but might not be economical to maintain once the subsidies have expired - leaving behind a huge failed infrastructure of abandoned windmills. I guess time will tell on the attrition, none are old enough to judge so far.
This chart from the Economist magazine shows recent declines in the costs of onshore wind, offshore wind and solar power over the past 6 years. Nuclear power cost estimates have gone up over a similar period. Solar and onshore wind are cheaper than nukes according to the chart.
Solar and wind are intermittent though. Natural gas can be scaled up and scaled down for now, but electricity storage and investments in smartgrids will become cost challenges in the near future.
Those of sturdy temperament, IMHO, will give nuclear power a fair shake, acknowledge that solar is currently cheaper at low levels of production, and recognize that scaling up renewable power will result in higher costs as the storage question becomes more relevant. All at the same time.
Or you could just charge for CO2 emissions and let the market sort it out.
Exactly. It’s not a choice between fossil fuel energy and non-fossil fuel energy. In the long term, it’s going to be a choice between non-fossil fuel energy and no energy. The government is acting wisely in working on developing new energy sources now rather than waiting until it’s a crisis.
My family lives right across the lake from Vermont in upstate New York. New York doesn’t have the organized opposition to wind power that Vermont has. There are hundreds of windmills in New York and the companies that run them seem to be doing just fine. I’ve certainly never seen an abandoned windmill. And I can’t imagine why you would; the main cost of a windmill is building it - after that you’re just selling the energy it generates.
Of course, otherwise it won’t work. And of course the regressive nature of this tax is unfair (i.e. fuel cost is a larger fraction of your income if you are poor). But there are ways to fix that - e.g. lowering income tax on lower brackets to compensate, or even using the carbon tax revenue to start a universal income system.
The problem with market forces is that they are only concerned with doing things the cheapest way possible. Developing technologies to fight future crises, isn’t something that has an immediate payoff. While many decry the high costs of developing green technologies, we are now beginning to see economics of scale bring prices down across the board and the tech is still getting cheaper. Additionally, beyound the environmental concerns, there are no geopolitical downsides to producing homegrown renewable energy. All the trillons of dollars in tax money spent on military actions to make foreign countries stable enough to extract resources from would no longer be required.
