Renewable Energy Hits the Wall

If the official definitions of renewable energy were logical, renewable energy would be defined as energy that does not emit CO2 and that is not using a resource in danger of running out anytime soon.  But the definitions written into the laws of many states are not logical.  Hydroelectric energy is mostly banned because the environmental movement hates dams.  Nuclear is banned because a hysterical fear of nuclear energy was created by environmental groups.  Both nuclear and hydro don’t emit CO2.  Hydro doesn’t need fuel.  Nuclear fuel is cheap and plentiful.  A large number of prominent global warming activists, such as James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand have declared that nuclear is the only solution for the crisis that they imagine is approaching.

For those of us who don’t take global warming seriously, there is nothing wrong with using coal and natural gas to generate electricity.  The CO2 emitted helps plants to grow better with less water, a great help to agriculture.

In approximately thirty states that mandate renewable energy, the only scalable forms of renewable energy allowed are wind and solar.  California mandates that 60% of its electricity come from renewable energy by 2030.  Nevada mandates 50% by 2030.  There are other types of official renewable energy, but they can’t be easily scaled up.  Examples are geothermal energy, wave energy, and garbage dump methane. Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $10.00 (as of 08:25 UTC - Details)

Wind and solar are erratic sources of energy.  The output depends on the weather.  Solar doesn’t work at night.  Because they are erratic, there have to be backup plants, generally natural gas plants, that balance the erratic flow of electricity from wind or solar.  The backup plants increase output when renewable energy output declines and vice versa.  Because both wind and solar are subjected to periods of near zero output, the backup system has to be able to carry the entire load of the electric grid without the wind or solar.  Neither wind nor solar can replace conventional plants.  If you hear that a utility is replacing fossil fuel plants with wind or solar, that can’t happen.  The most that can happen is that the fossil fuel plants will use less fuel when the wind or solar is generating electricity.  For a natural gas plant, the gas to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity costs about $20.  That $20 is the economic value of each megawatt-hour generated by wind or solar.  Unsubsidized, wind or solar electricity, either one, costs about $80 a megawatt-hour to generate.  The difference between $80 and $20 is the subsidy that has to be paid in order to use wind or solar.

As long as the percentage of electricity that comes from wind or solar is small, the grid can handle the erratic nature of that electricity.  But if the penetration becomes large, severe problems start to emerge.  Solar power is strongest in the middle of the day and weakens toward the end of the day.  But the late afternoon and early evening, when solar is dying, are when power usage peaks in many locations.  The graph below shows how the sun’s strength varied in Las Vegas for July 2018.

The output of wind farms varies rapidly.  The graph below is for the Texas wind system, with thousands of wind turbines.  In one hour, the output can change by more than 3,000 megawatts.

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