Time to Get Real About Fossil Fuels And Climate Change
– By Howard Sierer –
Climate change alarmists and their fellow travelers in the leftist media defy reality when they claim we can eliminate fossil fuels by 2050. Increasing numbers of responsible observers, including former climate change alarmists, now recognize that a middle road that embraces a more measured energy generation transition is realistic while meeting environmental goals.
A seminal Manhattan Institute report entitled “The Energy Transition Delusion: A Reality Reset” by Mark Mills explains at length that “regardless of facts or feelings about the climate, there are reasons why wind and solar power are not replacing fossil fuels. Wind and solar are also no substitute for nuclear power. Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how much energy the world already uses, but how much more energy the world will yet demand.”
About 83% of world energy consumption today comes from fossil fuels and it is about the same in the United States. This global figure is down only 2 percentage points in the last 20 years. The percentage of world fossil fuel usage is lower in the electricity sector (62% worldwide and 61% in the US). However widely underappreciated is the fact that only 20% of world energy consumption is in the form of electricity and it’s only barely higher in the US (22%).
The upshot of these facts is that the world cannot get rid of fossil fuels nearly as quickly as climate activists and the media would like to believe.
Mills points out that claims that wind, solar, and electric vehicles have reached cost parity with traditional energy sources or modes of transportation are not based on evidence. Increased use of renewables has not produced lower energy prices for consumers so far despite massive government subsidies.
Instead, the result has been quite the opposite, especially in places like the UK, Germany and California that depend heavily on renewable energy sources. Overall U.S. residential electricity costs rose over the past 20 years even while the price of coal and natural gas collapsed while they were supplying 70% of the nation’s electricity.
Why? Mills explains that even though renewables provide increasing amounts of electricity, “renewable energy sources, due to the intermittency problem, always have to be backstopped by ‘firm’ power that can be switched on when necessary. That means coal, nuclear and most commonly these days, natural gas. Having to keep these firm sources around and always ready to be turned on is a hidden cost of renewables.”
Parts of northwestern and central Europe experienced renewable energy’s “intermittency problem” in July through September 2021 with some of the lowest average wind speeds since at least 1979. Having systematically closed fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, there was little backup power available and energy prices skyrocketed, especially in the UK where the government had boasted that wind power could power every home in Britain by 2030.
Ironically, this intermittency has the opposite effect once the share of solar energy begins to approach 20% or so. Because solar power generation is concentrated to a relatively short part of the day, the average wholesale price of electricity drops significantly during those mid-day hours since it can’t be cost-effectively stored for use later.
This value deflation reduces the value of both existing facilities and of new facilities as they are added. In California, which now gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels, a study otherwise sympathetic to solar power shows that the value of those installations has fallen 37% relative to other sources since 2014. California actually pays nearby states to take its excess solar electricity on some days, a practice that will end as those states add solar capacity of their own.
U.S. electrical distribution is divided into standalone grids that are not interconnected. Moving excess power on a large scale on any given day from sunny locations to cloudy ones will require a substantially increased number of transmission lines built both within and across grids with environmental impacts that would result in decades of environmental litigation, permitting delays and funding uncertainty.
Summing up, Mills says that climate change is a problem but a solvable one whose solution will take decades and major technological innovation. He argues persuasively that today’s idealistic attempts to remake the global economy around renewables in just a few years are doomed to fail.
Until battery technology allows massive, cost-effective storage of renewable electrical power, keeping robust fossil fuel and nuclear power in the mix is mandatory. The climate is changing as it always does, but adapting to climate change is far less costly and far less risky than a massive near-term shift to intermittent renewable energy. And as increasing numbers of former climate alarmists recognize, this middle road will not cause irreversible damage to the environment.
