green energy — VOICES for REASON

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Keith Lockitch.

• Green central planning—our hydrogen future?
• Climategate: a green conspiracy?
• Green energy: neither free nor forever

Image: flickr/Ahorcado

On this blog, I have repeatedly stressed the inferiority of solar and wind energy due, in large part, to the fact that both are dilute and intermittent, making them expensive and unreliable to harness. For a look at what real energy–that is, concentrated, controllable energy that can provide large amounts of power on demand–looks like, check out this amazing clip of a 25,000 ton nuclear ship plowing through thick Arctic ice. (HT Atomic Insights Blog.)

“The most important and most overlooked energy issue today,” I wrote in “Energy at the Speed of Thought,” “is the growing crisis of global energy supply. Cheap, industrial-scale energy is essential to building, transporting, and operating everything we use, from refrigerators to Internet server farms to hospitals. It is desperately needed in the undeveloped world, where 1.6 billion people lack electricity, which contributes to untold suffering and death. And it is needed in ever-greater, more-affordable quantities in the industrialized world: Energy usage and standard of living are directly correlated.”

In a recent post on Master Resource, Donald Hertzmark elaborates on this point. Hertzmark gives many valuable facts and figures about the degree of “energy squalor” that exists in the world, but to me the most powerful part was this image–a picture of the entire world at night, revealing which parts of the world (such as North America) are alight with plentiful energy, and which parts (such as much of Africa) are dark with energy poverty. Remember that image next time you hear that the whole world needs to drastically cut its usage of practical forms of energy (coal, oil, natural gas).

In today’s economy, which is an unstable mixture of capitalism and socialism, it is all-too common for executives to demand special favors for their companies at the expense of other companies. Nowhere is this more true than in the government-infested energy industry, where solar and wind companies demand (and get) exorbitant subsidies at the expense of taxpayers, and at the expense of truly practical energy technologies such as coal, oil, and natural gas.

Given this sad state of affairs, I was particularly delighted to see a sober, realistic analysis of the many pitfalls of solar power by an executive in the solar industry.

David Bergeron, president of SunDanzer Development, Inc., which manufactures solar-powered refrigeration equipment for customers in remote locations without access to cheap electricity from an electricity grid, recently wrote an analysis of why solar is woefully incapable of providing the reliable, cheap, large-scale electricity generation that solar advocates claim it can.

Here are some highlights:

Solar Photovoltaic (PV) electric panels are far too expensive to provide a sustainable energy alternative to homes and businesses already connected to the electric utility grid. The on-grid solar industry and associated jobs are artificial and only exist because of special government favor.

For PV to be economically feasible, the “installed” cost would need to be equal to or less than $1/watt. This is the holy grail of the industry and consistent with the statements of Dr. Chu, the Secretary of Energy. Very large-scale PV systems are reaching $4/watt today, which is admirable, but still four times too expensive to be a credible solution.

…

Can we get to $1/watt any time soon?  At present, solar panels are about half of the system cost. The remaining cost is mounting hardware for the panels, the inverter to make AC power, wiring, labor, and permitting. So even if it were possible to manufacture panels for free, the balance of system cost is still about $2 per Watt and the industry would continue to be non-sustainable without substantial subsidy.

…

Perhaps the most egregious myth is the claim we are helping our economy and creating jobs. This is false. Money for the solar subsidies comes from taxpayers and ratepayers. As this money is taken from us, spending for other goods and services must fall. This causes economic and job losses in other segments of the economy, such as in restaurants, department stores, and service and manufacturing companies.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Tell me if this refrain sounds familiar: China is leading the world in “green,” “renewable” energy such as solar and wind, and if the US doesn’t shovel (even more) taxpayer money into these technologies, we will suffer an economic deathblow.

Here’s a recent example of this line of argument from the New York Times.

Companies that make solar cells and wind machines argue that a national energy policy is needed to guarantee them a market that will allow their industry to develop. Clean power will be an important industry globally for years, they say, and if the United States does not subsidize renewable energy now, it risks falling far behind other countries.

They point to China, which is rapidly increasing the amount of electricity it generates from renewable sources. In its most recent quarterly assessment of the renewable energy sector, the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young identified China as the most attractive market for investment in renewable energy.

There are many fallacies here–for example, that truly promising industries need government backing, and that another country’s superiority in one line of production is somehow a threat (ever hear of division of labor and comparative advantage?). But it’s important as a factual matter to obliterate one distortion shared by this article and much other commentary on the subject–that “green energy” is in any way, shape, or form responsible for China’s recent economic success.

China’s impressive growth over the last 20 years and its potential for growth in the upcoming years have been and overwhelmingly will be fueled by the greens’ most-hated energy source of all: coal. Coal has provided the vast, vast majority of the nearly 500 percent increase between 1990 and 2008. (See Power Hungry by Robert Bryce, page 60). And don’t just take my word for it; see the statistics provided by the Obama administration’s Energy Information Administration. Of the 77.3 quadrillion Btus China produces annually, coal provides 74%, oil 15%, hydroelectricity 7%, Natural Gas 4%, Nuclear 1%, and so-called Other Renewables (solar, wind, ethanol) 0.2%! Whatever solar and wind farms China is building, to great fanfare, are mere window dressing to win over world opinion.

Those who admire China for its economic progress should take note: it is not coming from the endlessly subsidized, diluted, intermittent, expensive sources such as solar and wind–it is coming from highly concentrated, cheap sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro (all of which the “green energy” movement opposes as “unnatural”). The lesson? If you want more prosperity, don’t go green–go industrial.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

If someone were to propose today that the United States implement a “new,” “exciting” economic idea called “socialism,” in which government central planners effectively owned and controlled the entire economy, we would surely point out that such a system has already been tried and implemented, with disastrous results.

We should do the same with the supposedly “new,” “exciting” economic idea known as the “green energy economy”–in which government central planners mandate that practical energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear) be replaced by solar panels, windmills, dung piles, and corn fields. (Thomas Friedman’s latest column is a typical endorsement of such policies.)

There is nothing new and exciting about the “green energy economy.” There is a place overseas that has already provided stark evidence of what it means to pursue a “green energy economy,” and it’s not pretty. That place is called Europe, and it’s a testament to what happens when you force unproven, inefficient energy down people’s throat. A recent post at the free-market energy blog Master Resource explains:

Renewable energy has proved an expensive and unreliable source of energy everywhere it has been tried on a significant scale…Italy, Spain and Germany are cutting back on their taxpayer/ratepayer-funded generosity toward politically correct energies….In all, Europeans have tested the theory of a “clean energy revolution” to destruction.

For the gory details, read the whole article here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

My colleague Dr. Keith Lockitch recently spoke at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Chicago, IL. The title of his talk was “The Roots of Climate Alarmism.” To view the video, follow this link, then scroll down to find the title slide for Keith’s talk.

Whenever you hear about the miracles of wind power, always keep in mind one thing above all: because the wind blows erratically, and sometimes doesn’t blow at all, wind power is inherently unreliable. As I wrote in a recent piece on “green energy,”

where coal, oil, and natural gas can be burned whenever power is needed, at the exact quantity needed, wind and sunlight can be harnessed only when the weather cooperates–and electricity can’t be stored [in significant quantities] for a rainy day. Thus, they are always used as supplemental, not primary, sources of power on electric grids.

An engineer friend of mine recently witnessed this fact firsthand while driving east of San Francisco. He sent me this still picture that is as good as a movie–because the windmills were not moving. As he wrote: “Good thing Californians have reliable coal and gas-fired power on the grid elsewhere; Gaia did not see fit to bless us with breeze-based power today. Hundreds of them, dead still.”

Following up on an earlier post, here’s another insightful challenge to the mythology of electric cars.

Considering the batteries we have today, and the trajectory of the technological development, I am pessimistic about the viability of a mass market for battery electric cars in the near to mid-term.

Our current battery technology simple does not provide the cost, durability and energy storage attributes that allow for the development of mass-market products. We can get around some of these issues with niche products or schemes like battery leasing, or subsidizing the products but none of these are solutions for the mass market.

Within Toyota, we’re working on a niche electric vehicle. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this year [2009], we showed a concept of what our current thinking is. A small, city car with relatively limited range, that’s reasonably affordable, targeted at non-traditional markets. But it’s not intended to be a mass-market car. We’re looking at sales volumes of thousands not millions. To produce an electric vehicle that’s truly intended for a mass market, a replacement for your current gasoline car, we’re going to need a battery chemistry that isn’t currently available.

Now, some readers might yet suspect that the person quoted is a shill of the oil industry. In fact, the statement is from Bill Reinert, one of the designers of the ultimate “green” icon: the Toyota Prius.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

We are told that Earth Day is about enjoying nature, anticipating exciting green technologies, and promoting human health. It isn’t. It is about guilt for the very thing that makes enjoyment, technology, and health possible–our industrial, capitalist way of life. When environmentalists tell us to be “green” on Earth Day by turning out our lights, hand-washing our clothes, and not using our cars, they are saying that what we do every other day of the year is wrong–that it is destructive and “unsustainable.”

At the Ayn Rand Center, we believe that industrial life is something to be proud of and something billions around the globe desperately need to emulate. We condemn the 40 years of apocalyptic, pseudo-scientific environmentalist predictions–such as environmentalist hero Paul Ehrlich’s prediction that hundreds of millions of people would starve by 1980. We recognize the ability of free minds and free markets to make human life better and better, no matter what nature throws at us.

For a unique perspective on the history, science, economics, and philosophy behind Earth Day, we invite you to explore the following resources.

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