By Paul Homewood
AEP is off on one of his usual rants about how wonderful renewable energy is:
We have a choice. Either we fight runaway climate change with liberal market policies and capitalist creativity, or we cede the field to Malthusians and the Green Taliban.
Retreating into denialism – or more corrosive these days, into shoulder-shrugging nihilism – will not cut it. Last week the France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) warned that global warming could reach seven degrees by the end of the century under current policies.
This week the UN warned – after the Saudis lobbied furiously to tone down the language – that the biochemistry of the oceans is changing with alarming speed. Water acidity has increased by 26pc. The pace of melting ice has quickened fivefold (147 Gt yr) in a decade. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are at vanishing at an “accelerating rate”.
There are tipping points and feedback loops all over the place. The impact is hitting earlier than we supposed and at lower CO2 and temperature thresholds. We risk an unstoppable chain-reaction. Greta Thunberg is right about that. ………..
Technical solutions and eternal economic growth are our only salvation. They are also achievable at zero or even negative net cost with the right market signals. The technology leaps are in fact happening – late in the day – with breath-taking speed. ……
Solutions are at hand. They just need an extra push. We have cracked the challenge of renewable electricity. Solar is cheaper than coal in most southern latitudes. The distortions of China’s Silk Road – Beijing’s way of shunting excess industrial capacity abroad – is the chief reason why new coal power plants are still being built in South East Asia. As of late 2019, at ‘2 cent’ solar costs, they are no longer uncompetitive.
The latest auctions for UK offshore wind came in as low as £39.50. Few had thought this possible even by mid-century. Germany has got the message. It is now ramping up its offshore wind target to 20 gigawatts by 2030.
Energy storage for weeks at a time is in sight at costs that match and may soon undercut gas peaker plants to balance intermittent renewables. Highview Power’s 4GW liquid air project in Texas will compete toe-to-toe with cheap US shale gas, providing wind back-up at levelized costs below $100 per megawatt/hour. It is aiming for $50 within a decade.
“We have a clear path to zero-carbon power from wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal covering 75pc to 85pc of the world’s needs. The last 15pc is harder,” said Mr Liebreich.
“All road transportation up to 200-300 miles is going electric. By 2025 mayors in European and US cities will have banned diesel vans for deliveries,” he said.
“We have a clear path to zero-carbon power from wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal covering 75pc to 85pc of the world’s needs. The last 15pc is harder,” said Mr Liebreich.
“All road transportation up to 200-300 miles is going electric. By 2025 mayors in European and US cities will have banned diesel vans for deliveries,” he said…
The next frontier is green hydrogen made from solar or wind by electrolysis. This is harder to crack but the top US universities are all over it. So are London hedge funds. BNEF thinks the levelized cost will drop to $24 MWh by 2030, and to $15 by 2050.
This opens the way to limitless production of hydrogen for shipping, long-haul road freight, and railways, or for replacing coke in steel making. Once the cost is low enough huge offshore islands could produce limitless amounts of energy from wind and solar for synthetic fuels.
Heating, farming, and land use will be last but nothing is beyond our innovation. The National Farmers Union has plans for net zero emissions in British agriculture by 2040.
There is no necessary macro-economic ‘cost’ to this great transformation. Economic systems are not like family budgets….
What we must not do is carry on with business as usual. As Greta says, our remaining safe carbon budget will be gone in under nine years. That way lies the temptation of green political tyranny.
It is the usual rehash of previous articles, with this Greta being the target.
I’ll ignore the apocalyptic nonsense, which has been debunked many times. (By the way, how can sea be 26% more acidic, when they are alkali?).
AEP remains convinced that we can run a modern economy on wind and solar power, whittering on about how cheap they both are. Intermittency and fluctuations in demand? Don’t worry, we can soon sort that out with a few batteries.
Clearly AEP has not got a clue about how power grids work, or how little energy battery and other systems can actually store.
But don’t just take my word for it. Even the Committee on Climate Change, in their Net Zero report, admitted that we would still need large volumes of natural gas, both for power generation and also converting to hydrogen for heating.
Below is the key chart:
148 TWh of gas generation is actually greater than last year, when gas power amounted to 131 TWh. The requirement for 225 TWh of hydrogen is also considerable, when compared with current domestic consumption of natural gas, which was 309 TWh last year. For these to be compatible with zero emissions, the CCC assume that carbon capture and storage will be available. If this comes about, of course, AEP’s windmills are pretty much redundant.
This need for hydrogen is because power grids simply cannot cope with the enormous spikes in winter demand for gas.
By all means, build as many wind farms as you want, but you will still need proper dispatchable capacity on standby. In other words, you simply double up the cost for no good reason.
He reckons that our remaining safe carbon budget will be gone in under nine years. But does he really believe China and India are going to shut down all of their coal plants, steelworks and pretty much their whole economies, so that they can live on solar power? Fortunately for their citizens, their governments have not fallen for AEP’s illusions.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 30, 2019 at 11:30AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
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