On Saturday March 2nd Northern California was hit by a major blizzard in its Sierra Nevada Mountain Range with 12 feet of snow and winds of 190 miles per hour. But during the following week America was hit with a blizzard of a different kind: a flurry of pro-renewable energy news reports which totally distorted the facts. The distortion of the truth has been going on for at least 15 years. In 2009 Scientific American published an article (citing a Stanford study) which predicted that renewables could become 100% of the world’s energy needs by 2030.
In March of 2021 Carbon Tracker posted a report errantly asserting that renewable energy was capable of meeting energy demand 100 times over. Two years later the World Economic Forum jumped on the bandwagon with a study that mistakenly claimed that we have “reached peak fossil fuels” and that we are now entering a “new era for power”. Yet the WEF’s own charts show that worldwide electricity production (WEF apparently forgot about the energy needs of the global transportation sector) in 2022 was less than 13%. The WEF also aberrantly suggested that global CO2 emissions might start to decline in the near future.
Making matters even worse, U.S. President Joe Biden touted renewable energy in his March 7th 2024 State of the Union speech, and two days later the Washington Post printed a story about the efforts by Dartmouth University to try and find some way to bring solar power to northern Greenland where the sun does not shine for six months every year: solar power for six months and fossil fuel power when darkness shrouds the landscape.
Because of this never ending deluge of renewables propaganda, most American progressives dutifully believe that humanity can obtain all of its energy needs from renewables almost for free. But energy has never been unchained from cost. And although the cost of renewables have been declining, existing fossil fuel (including coal and nuclear) sources remain the cheapest sources of energy. That is true both for electrical generation and transportation – not least because the Sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, making these intermittent sources of energy unreliable, as Germany discovered last winter.
Political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. has stated: “It is quite intuitive for people to understand that there is a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.” But the Sun does not shine at night and the wind blows strongest at night in the winter when the electricity that it produces is not needed. Simply put, renewables are intermittent and they are far less concentrated than fossil fuels are.
In America, different states are following varied energy paths, providing us with an invaluable 50-part experiment. California is the most committed jurisdiction to the adoption of renewable energy and its citizens are being hit hard in their wallets. Take the U.S. West Coast as a comparison. Consumers in Washington state on average pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for the electricity they use. In Oregon, the average household pays 13 cents per kilowatt-hour used. Now look at California where people must endure an average cost of electricity of 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and they suffer from rolling blackouts and brownouts. The cost of their electricity has risen three times faster than the rest of the nation. Even California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has admitted that “we failed to predict and plan”. California’s recent spate of wildfires has been attributed by some to the state’s overloaded power grid.
The ‘lifting cost‘ of a land-based barrel of oil in the U.S. is under $40 for existing wells and about $60 for new wells. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review asserted that wind energy is now competitive with the cheapest fossil fuels even without Government subsidies – but this analysis did not consider the cost for each electric utility to keep a ‘spinning reserve‘ that burns natural gas as back-up in order to maintain grid integrity.
An article in One Finite Planet put its finger on the nub of the problem. “Solar and wind have proven to be successful partial cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are stored energy, and solar and wind are not.”
Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.
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