By Robert Bryce
Saturday, June 24, 2017
The idea that the U.S. economy can be run solely with
renewable energy — a claim that leftist politicians, environmentalists, and
climate activists have endlessly promoted — has always been a fool’s errand.
And on Monday, the National Academy of Sciences published a blockbuster paper
by an all-star group of American scientists that says exactly that.
The paper,
by Chris Clack, formerly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder, and 20 other top
scientists, appeared in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. It decimates the work of Mark
Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor whose wildly exaggerated claims
about the economic and technical viability of a 100 percent renewable-energy
system has made him a celebrity (he appeared on David Letterman’s show in 2013)
and the hero of Sierra Clubbers, Bernie Sanders, and Hollywood movie stars,
including Leonardo DiCaprio.
Jacobson became the darling of the green Left even though
his work was based on Enron accounting, alternative facts, and technology
hopium. Nevertheless, his claims were politically popular, and his academic
papers routinely sailed through peer review. In 2015, Jacobson published a
paper, co-written with Mark Delucchi, a research engineer at the University of
California, Berkeley, in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, which claimed to offer “a
low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem” with 100 percent renewables,
went on to win the Cozzarelli Prize, an annual award handed out by the National
Academy. A Stanford website said that Jacobson’s paper was one of six chosen by
“the editorial board of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences from the more than 3,000 research
articles published in the journal in 2015.” The fact that the National Academy
would bestow such a prestigious award on such weak scholarship greatly
embarrass the Academy, which gets 85 percent of its funding from the federal
government.
In their scathing takedown of Jacobson, Clack and his
co-authors — who include Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Dan Kammen
of the University of California, Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board
chairman Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory — concluded that Jacobson’s 2015 paper contained “numerous
shortcomings and errors.” The paper used “invalid modeling tools, contained
modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”
Those errors “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical
reliability, or feasibility of a 100 percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power
system.”
Among the biggest errors — and one that should force the
Academy to withdraw Jacobson’s 2015 paper — is that Jacobson and Delucchi
overstated by roughly a factor of ten
the ability of the United States to increase its hydropower output.
Furthermore, the paper ignores two key issues: electricity storage and land
use. Jacobson claimed that the U.S. can store energy underground or store it in
the form of hydrogen. Clack and his co-authors wrote that “there are no
electric storage systems available today that can affordably and dependably
store the vast amounts of energy needed over weeks to reliably satisfy demand
using expanded wind and solar power generation alone.”
But the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves
his years-long refusal to admit the massive amount of land his proposal would
require; his myriad acolytes have repeated his nonsensical claims. For
instance, last year, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and one of America’s
highest-profile climate activists, wrote an August 2016 cover story for The New Republic in which he lauded
Jacobson’s work and repeated Jacobson’s erroneous claim that his all-renewable
program would need only “about four-tenths of America’s landmass.”
Clack et al. correct the record by pointing out that
Jacobson’s scheme would require “nearly 500,000 square kilometers, which is
roughly 6 percent of the continental United States, and more than 1,500 square
meters of land for wind turbines for each American.” In other words, Clack
found that Jacobson understated the amount of land needed for his all-renewable
dystopia by a factor of 15. But even
that understates the amount of territory needed. Jacobson’s plan requires
nearly 2.5 terawatts (2.5 trillion watts) of wind-energy capacity, with the
majority of that amount onshore. The Department of Energy has repeatedly stated
that the footprint of wind energy, known as its capacity density, is 3 watts
per square meter. And so 2.5 trillion watts divided by 3 watts per square meter
equals 833 billion square meters (or 833,000 square kilometers): That’s a
territory nearly twice the size of California.
The idea of using two California-size pieces of territory
— and covering them with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines — is absurd on
its face. And yet, Jacobson’s 100 percent renewable scenario has become energy
gospel among left-leaning politicians. For instance, in January, New York
governor Andrew Cuomo touted his renewable-energy goals and declared that his
state was not going to stop “until we reach 100 percent renewable because
that’s what a sustainable New York is really all about.”
In February, 54 Massachusetts lawmakers — representing
more than a quarter of the members of the state legislature — signed on to a
bill that would require the Bay State to get 100 percent of its energy from
renewable sources by 2050. The bill (S. 1849) says that the goal is to
“ultimately eliminate our use of fossil fuels and other polluting and dangerous
forms of energy.”
In April, U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), Bernie
Sanders (I., Vt.), Edward J. Markey (D., Mass.), and Cory Booker (D., N.J.)
introduced the 100 by ’50 Act, which calls on the United States to be
completely free of fossil fuels by 2050. The bill, available here,
is a laundry list of terrible ideas, including a “carbon duty” on any
foreign-made goods that are made by energy-intensive industries. And as is
standard with all-renewable promoters, the bill doesn’t contain a single
mention of the word “nuclear” even though some of the world’s highest-profile
climate scientists, including James Hansen, have said nuclear must be included
in any effort to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions. The 100 by ’50
legislation was — of course — endorsed by a who’s who of all-renewable
cultists, including actor Mark Ruffalo; Michael Brune, the executive director
of the Sierra Club; and May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org.
Jacobson’s response to the Clack paper (and to the
ensuing Twitter storm attacking his work) would have made Captain Queeg proud.
He has claimed, among other things, that his paper contains no errors; that
Clack and the other authors are simply shilling for the nuclear and hydrocarbon
sectors; and that the Department of Energy’s capacity data on wind energy (3
watts per square meter) is wrong and that, instead, the figure should be 9
watts per square meter.
The late David J. C. MacKay, a physics professor at the
University of Cambridge, would have been horrified. In 2008, MacKay published Sustainable Energy — without the Hot Air,
one of the first academic books to look at the land-use impacts of renewables.
MacKay, who recognized that nuclear must be part of any effort to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions, also calculated that wind energy needs about 700 times more
land to produce the same amount of energy as a fracking site. Three years ago,
shortly before his death at age 46 from cancer, MacKay talked with British
author and writer Mark Lynas about his work. During that interview, MacKay
called the idea of relying solely on renewables an “appalling
delusion.”
The punch line here is clear: The Clack paper proves that
it’s well past time for the green Left and their political allies to quit
claiming that we don’t need hydrocarbons or nuclear energy. Alas, it appears
they prefer appalling delusions about renewables to real science and simple
math.
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