The Green Energy Transition Fantasy
– By Howard Sierer –
The Biden administration has been doing all it can – with your money, of course – to put an end to fossil fuel use and transition to renewable energy sources, primarily solar and wind power. It hasn’t worked and never will.
In what might seem like good news at first blush to the environmental left, solar and wind energy use has soared to record levels over the past decade. Almost $2 trillion was spent worldwide in 2023 alone to try to force an energy transition. But to green energy proponents’ dismay, fossil-fuel use has not been reduced. Instead it has increased even faster over the same period. The last decade’s experience worldwide has shown that adding renewable energy just adds to overall energy consumption that already was increasing rapidly.
Researchers Richard York and Shannon Elizabeth Bell report that it would be “entirely unprecedented for [green energy] additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.” A recent study by Kashif Nesar Rather and Mantu Kumar Mahlik showed that for every six units of new green energy, less than one unit of fossil fuel-energy is displaced. Even the Biden administration projects that while renewable energy worldwide will increase dramatically through 2050, fossil fuel energy – oil, natural gas and even coal – will continue increasing as well.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Biden is throwing in the towel. A review of energy sources and transitions starting with the Industrial Revolution shows a consistent pattern. In the 19th century, as coal became the primary energy source, the use of wood continued to increase. The story was the same when oil replaced coal in the 20th century: by 1970, as oil had become the primary source, coal and wood were each delivering more of the world’s energy than ever before in history.
What prompted shifts from wood to coal to oil? A study by Roger Fouquet, a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, investigated 14 shifts that happened over the past five centuries, for example when farmers went from plowing fields with animals to using tractors powered by fossil fuels. In every case, the new energy source was better or cheaper.
Solar and wind fall short on both counts. They aren’t better, because unlike fossil fuels, they can produce electricity only when the weather allows. They are cheaper only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing at just the right speed. The rest of time they are expensive and mostly useless.
Wind and solar energy solutions are uncompetitive with fossil fuels when the cost of storing electricity for as little as four hours for a single user is considered. Achieving a sustainable transition to solar and wind on a national scale using today’s battery technology would more than exhaust the world’s supply of essential minerals like lithium and bankrupt the country.
Further, solar and wind supply electricity and electricity makes up only one-fifth of all global energy use. We are wrestling with auto and light truck EVs – only 17% of greenhouse gas emissions – while EV applicability to large trucks and railroads is still in doubt. Further, using electricity for cargo ships is even more problematical and not applicable at all to aircraft. And we haven’t even begun to address the energy needs of heating, manufacturing or agriculture. Beyond them, we are all but ignoring the hardest and most demanding sectors like making steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizers.
These lessons are clear: so-called “energy transitions” are instead “energy expansions.” In the past 50 years, oil and coal energy use has doubled, hydro power has tripled and natural gas has quadrupled. The use of nuclear, solar and wind power has surged. Why? Human beings have an unquenchable thirst for affordable energy.
The only way to achieve an eventual green energy transition is to dramatically improve its cost effectiveness. Embracing zero greenhouse gas nuclear energy would provide reliable base load power. The most effective government spending would be supporting research on low cost, large scale battery storage and funding innovative, “outside the box” ideas that might not qualify for private sector funding.
Spending trillions of dollars each year under the guise of a “green energy transition” is pursuing a sheer fantasy. The facts speak for themselves. It’s time that the emperor’s new clothes are exposed (pardon the pun) for what they are: an excuse for government officials to direct the economy to their liking and for favored businesses to reap taxpayers’ dollars.
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