A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the issues associated with the electric rates that Lowell consumers pay and how the promise that renewable energy will lower these costs is more or less a myth for most of us.
Those, however, who can afford to pay $30K to $60K and install solar panels in their home benefit not only for the free electricity that they generate, but also from the subsidies that the rest of us, in the form of net metering charges, pay to subsidize their lower cost of electricity. I also wrote that I would follow up with an article that looks at the hidden costs, both economic and societal, of wind and solar renewable energy.
I delayed submitting this article as a lot has happened in this area over the last couple of weeks that I feel will have an impact on the costs of implementing renewable power.
The top five manufacturers of wind turbines in world are Vestas (Denmark), Siemens Gamesa (Spain/Germany), Goldwind (China), General Electric (U.S), and Windey (China). Recently Siemens Gamesa reported an almost $1 billion loss in 2022, GE Renewables posted a $2.24 billion loss, while Vestas reported a 369% drop in operating profit and a $1.2 billion loss in EBIT (earnings before income taxes). Furthermore these manufacturers have been plugged with failures of the large wind turbines typically used offshore. The combination of these two events will certainly result in increased prices for this equipment and hence to the ratepayers.
Over the past couple of decades, we have seen a tremendous increase in the installation and use of solar panels for the generation of electricity. Global photovoltaic capacity has increase by more than 700 times over the past twenty years according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). All of these have a finite life, typically on the order of 20 – 30 years, at which point we will have to somehow dispose them.
As was said in the Apollo 13 movie; “Houston we have a problem.”
According to an article published by the American Chemical Society (ACS), by the year 2030 close to 8 million tons of these panels will have to be disposed, and by 2050, 80 million tons. This is an enormous problem as these panels contain not only crystalline silicon, but also some very nasty materials such as lead, arsenic, and cadmium.
According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, only 10% of these are recycled and material recovered is mainly the aluminum frames and glass, as some of the other are difficult to extract because they are embedded in the cells.
The U.S. has no regulations mandating recycling, while in Europe they do, mandating that 80% of the solar panel is recycled, typically the aluminum and glass.
As a result these panels end up being buried, presenting a threat to our water table, or incinerated (i.e., burning them with carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels),
So who is going to pay for cleaning up their damage to our environment 20 or 30 years from now?
Finally, the biggest issue that we have with an 100% renewable grid is reliability due to the intermittency of renewable “fuel” (wind and sun).
The chart to the right is from the Texas grid and perfectly illustrates the issue with renewable energy, its intermittency and its impact on power generation.
The first figure shows what the forecast and actual demand is for the June 26, 2023. It shows that total system demand at midnight was 60GW and it peaking at 80 GW on 5 PM. This load by the way, is near the all time record for the Texas system.
Now let’s see now how the renewable electric generating assets performed at the same time.
As shown in the figure below, at 1 AM wind power was providing about 25% of the total demand. But as the day went on it, due to its intermittency, was providing less and less.
So when demand reached its peak at about 8 PM, renewables and wind in particular were providing no more than 15 GW total of the more than 80 GW needed peak. I should also point out that wind installed capacity in Texas is over 33 GW, so the 15 GW produced is less than 50% of capacity due to lack of wind! The rest of the power in Texas at 8 PM was produced by natural gas, coal and nuclear, otherwise there would have been blackouts.
This situation (i.e., the lack of power reliability due to intermittency of wind and sun) happens all over the world. The war in the Ukraine is a great example of the problems that renewable energy has in relying on “backup” power (usually from fossil fuels – coal and gas) to keep the grid on line.
The figure below shows the power generation on June 28, 2023 in Germany, the world’s leader in wind and solar power generation. Germany, with all of its installed capacity of wind and solar, was producing twice as many greenhouse gases per kilowatt hour generated than places like Bulgaria and Romania that rely heavily on fossil fuels.
The environmental lobby will of course claim that the reason for this is because they do not have storage capabilities and that new, advanced, soon to be developed batteries have not yet been installed.
So here is another half-truth that is being pushed by the lobby.
Gathering the materials, manufacturing, installing and connecting to the grid the number of batteries required for grid back up is almost an unobtainable task. An electric car (e.g., Tesla) has approximately 1,000 pounds of lithium-ion batteries to generate about 90 kWh of electricity. Our grid has an installed capacity of 1,200 GW, or the equivalent of about 14 million electric cars. That 1,000-pound battery of each car requires 500,000 pounds of dirt to be processed to get the critical minerals it requires to be made into a battery! The majority of the production of these materials is controlled by the Chinese while some of the mining is being done in places using child labor, as in the photo below. (My next article deals with the issues of batteries and requirement of renewable energy of critical minerals, mining and water)
So, is this what we want? Do we want to maim or scar for life impoverished children for the possibility of maybe reducing greenhouse gases!
We have proven technologies that can capture and safely store the fossil fuel produced greenhouse gases that are also less expansive to implement, use the available T&D infrastructure, provide reliable and resilient electricity and produces less greenhouse gases than renewable energy per our National Energy Technology Laboratory.
It is called carbon capture, utilizattion and storage. It has been under commercial operation for over 70 years and we have areas in the U.S. that can we can safely store underground the captured CO2 for eons. These technologies are also used now to “vacuum” the CO2 out of the atmosphere, granted at a significantly higher cost, without jeopardizing our energy security while making the U.S. a leader in this area while providing a lot of real jobs!
