Great article! Thanks fort writing it!! I used to be an ardent--and somewhat naive--supporter of solar and wind energy production. In fact I devoted a major portion of my career to innovating in that space. It was around 2000 when solar industry insiders woke up to the criticality of grid scale energy storage. I was part a team that pioneered grid scale rapid response to short term fluctuations in supply vs demand, and we did so specifically to enable wind and solar. The work was fantastically interesting and my career went well for me personally. But while many have been gainfully employed and sometimes even enriched, and while many politicians and activists have been glorified, the tech companies and the investment community has thus far failed to provide solutions that will allow grid energy storage to keep up with the public and political enthusiasm for renewables. For me personally it has added up to a life lesson on some of the limits of democracy and how far removed policy makers can become when huge practical issues get sharply politicized. In the present pollical environment, climate activists have the upper hand and they are aggressively pushing politicians to enact policy decisions without including enough input from actual experts in energy production and distribution. (Anybody who scoffs at this remark probably needs to get outside their social and political comfort zone and do a little more digging.) Most of the people I talk to about wind and solar literally have no idea that energy storage is a factor and that the present grid infrastructure can only handle a small percentage of wind and solar given the existing storage facilities and technologies. Maybe some team at McKinsey has it all sorted, but it seems to me like the public and the politicians are ill informed as to the net environmental and geopolitical impact that will be inflicted on the world if we rapidly build out a sufficient battery storage infrastructure to catch up with the current rate of growth in so called sustainable sources. Speaking from my own decades long experience in this arena my own personal opinion is that the massive concentration of capital into wind and solar has been a terrible mistake and we should have focused a much bigger share of those resources into nuclear power. People who scoff at nuclear often assert we don't have the right technology yet, but the same criticism entirely applies to grid scale energy storage which may prove to be even more elusive that fusion. There are some very promising entrepreneurial efforts to revolutionize large scale battery storage, and I hope it works out-- but I doubt that we would have opted for the current path if we as a society had done a better job involving industry experts and analyzing the tradeoffs between renewables and nuclear.
You're right on all of the above. Most of the money subsidizing the building of wind and solar should have gone into research on that, batteries and 4th gen nuclear. Fusion is another boondoggle.
These issues of storage and consistent power generation are what have me freaked out about the electrification of everything (e.g. heavily subsidizing people to switch to induction cooktops, split units for heating/cooling/hot water, etc.). That power still has to come from somewhere, and when everything is taxing the electric grid, which is already stretched to the max in states like California... I just don't see a whole lot of good outcomes. Efficient appliances that don't work at peak hours because there's not enough juice are sort of an insult to the people relying on them for heat.
Yes, storage is an issue. And yes, electric cars will use a lot, of power. So the power grid will need to be expanded. But if solar is as cheap as these guys claim (which it isn't yet) all you need to do is overbuild it an you will avoid peak-load blackout. Also using gas for those is quite helpful. And cars will mainly charge at night, when we now sometimes have negative prices from wind -- meaning we have too much power then.
The real problem is letting ideological environmentalists drive tech policy. The tech problems are not the hard part.
And to complete my thought 🤦♂️... That electric power needs to come from somewhere, so if there's lack of storage and consistent generation, we'll be burning coal or natural gas to generate that power. It's that or a lot of new nuclear plants, which seems to appeal to approximately no one in a position of power/decisionmaking.
"We know this for a fact because the only kinds of places that ever seem to install grid-scale storage are rich jurisdictions with generous subsidy regimes. How generous? A report by the Public Utility Commission of California shows that, last year, homeowners with solar panels pocketed $8.5 billion from customers without them."
Yes, that subsidy is happening, and it's a well-know environmentalist regressive policy. But it is in no way related to any cost subsidy for batteries.
I've consulted for energy markets from the CA-ISO to the UK's Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, and I'm a co-editor of an MIT Press book on Climate policy along with the most brilliant Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262036269/global-carbon-pricing/
I've also co-authored a book for the World Bank on adapting the grid to solar and wind.
Persuasion makes a lot of science mistakes because it relies on journalists, and will not make use of it's very smart subscriber base. It's more bureaucratic than a lot of the big regulators and markets I've worked for.
As to batteries, I heard a talk at MIT by probably the best battery researcher in the business, and the real problem is there are tons of subsidies to for environmentalists' feel-good projects and basically zip for basic research. In spite of this, flow batteries are making progress, and may well be able to solve the problem. They use liquid electrolytes, which can store vast amounts of power.
Also the claim that "negative wholesale power prices .... they’re signs of a market dangerously unbalanced," is pure sensationalism. CA was doing that because of wind energy 10 years ago when I worked as a consultant for the CA ISO, and it's a sign the market's working fine. But also a sign that adding more solar will mean that some of the extra power produced will go to waste, hence making it less cost effective. The storage problem is real and will put a limit on solar and wind, or force us to build a lot of excess capacity. But this is not a black or white situation.
Could persuasion please get some fact checking on the science and math articles.
Steve. Would we not be better off following Macron’s lead and adding nuclear capacity to existing plant sites than an over reliance on wind and solar? I’m interested in your expertise on this. I did a rough calculation on the land needed to replace a nearby nuclear plant with windmills and concluded that it would require more than 100% of my county. The plant, which occupies about 3.5 acres as I recall, powers several counties. Please share your thoughts.
Hi Guy, Good question. By a freak coincidence, I had David MacKay's book right next to me, and it took half a minute to find: that with the Brit density of 250 people/km^2, "wind power could generate 8kW/per person" if all land were used. Then he says 10% land use would generate half as much power as British driving. Of course wind turbines, although bothersome, do not occupy much of the land they "take up" as they are spaced far apart.
So it's a tough calculation to make fairly. There's a lot of windy farmland and barren land. And also offshore (which is more expensive.)
My guess is that a mix will probably make sense for a long time to come. But I do think 4th gen nuclear is our best hope of stopping climate change, and it deserves a crash research program because the tech is old and close to being economical and safe.
My rule of thumb is fix the market failures then let the market decide. Power generation companies do the best job of picking low cost options, but they need to feel the cost of carbon emissions and other externalities. The other big market failure is that research is way underfunded, because most of the benefit (profits) do not go to the researcher. So that needs smart gov funding.
Here's a spreadsheet with a quick (unchecked) calculation you can compare with your own.
It uses MacKay's value of 2W/sq-meter for British Wind. A standard nuke (1 GW) would require a 14 by 14 mile square. To supply all US energy on average (electric, gasoline etc) would require a square of about 780 x 780 miles = about 14% of the country. That's equal to 1,190 nukes. But that would come far short of peak usage. Here's the spreadsheet, if you want to copy it.
It’s part of the larger problem. Coal and oil will run out at some point. They are the definition of non-renewable energy sources. If Malthus had been aware of it, his dire predictions would have centered on that rather than on other supply problems like food.
It is part of the extraordinary paradox of the human condition (Like William Saroyan, I’d call it a comedy if it weren’t so dark) that we are willing to spend untold amounts of effort, scientific expertise, and money on weaponry capable of destroying us utterly, which we hope we’ll never have to use, when in fact it needs to be spent on what may one day save us all from going dark and starving to death.
If the military does indeed take control over whatever oil supplies remain at any point, then, practically speaking, the rest of us will run out of it.
Probably a bunch of different things. It’s really hard to predict. Economics is like ecology in that order is an emergent property. You really can’t plan a living economy any more than a living ecosystem.
Probably a bunch of things? And how does that play out across a power grid set up for just one thing? And if it is a question of ‘plenty of warning’, wouldn’t it be wise to start now at a governmental level than waiting for some indefinite moment when ‘a bunch of things’ might be necessary?
I am in complete agreement with Mr. Toro and Mr. Núñez-Mujica. However, it turns out that wind doesn’t have some of the problems that solar has. The wind does blow at night. The need for storage is mitigated by long distance transmission (the wind is probably blowing somewhere). Solar has the worst problems of any source of renewable energy. It is also the most PC. Germany (a northern, cloudy country) poured billions into solar. Did it make any sense? Of course, not. The reality of where energy is going is provided by China. In 2023, China mined ‘only’ 4.66 billion tons of coal.
you are not wrong in the points you make about wind energy (ie that it blows at night and has certain potential to mitigate transient issues with solar production) and those a great points, but as far as I am aware nobody yet knows just how we would configure and manage the grid in order transport and distribute that energy in a manageable way while keeping the whole complex system dynamically balanced and stable. As far as I know massive grid scale energy storage is an essential component for wind as well as solar. I am not familiar with any credible models that suggest otherwise.
You are correct about renewables destabilizing the grid. Europe has considerable experience with this matter. Roughly stated, as long as renewables are relatively small (< 30%, the ‘system’ can adapt without too many problems. When renewables become large (>= 30%) major problems arise. It turns out that the demand for electricity is somewhat seasonal. In hot climates, peak demand is hot afternoons in the summer. In cold climates, peak demand is late at night on Winter nights. Solar is a pretty good match for summer afternoons. Neither wind or solar, matches peak cold demand. To pick on my favorite victim, Germany was a relatively good place for wind and a bad place for solar. So what did Germany emphasize?
This issue even has geopolitical overtones. Germany imported Russian gas as coal substitute. The consequences were dire.
these points are all spot on. we could quibble over numbers (ie 15% vs 30%) but the fact is many of our plans and policies are suffering from orders-of-magnitude errors in key projections... so i have no issue with your comments here. :)
Part of the problem is that our political elites who track center to left of center have to be seen as doing something to placate their environmentalist constituencies. Supporting solar power is something that is highly visible, as compared to supporting fusion research for example, albeit counterproductive. Nuclear power is just so 20th Century!
Another complicating factor for our grids is that our society demands the building of more and more server farms that, of course, use tremendous amounts of electricity especially for chilling cooling water.
The intermittency of wind and solar is no secret. In his excellent little 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates discussed the problem of providing a gigawatt of electricity to a small city « the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, so the effective capacity of plants powered by wind and solar panels might be 30 percent or less. » Currently, The storage technology does not exist and the gigantic networking schemes necessary to make them work requires a massive waste of land and the release of equally massive amounts of carbon when producing steel and concrete.
For now, claiming that these energy sources are cheap is like arguing that a boat trailer uses less fuel than the vehicle that tows it. A traditional power plant is necessary to « tow » the renewables through the darkness of night and the times when there is no wind.
The amounts of money we are squandering on these boondoggles is criminal. Sure, we should invest in researching these technologies. However, impoverishing taxpayers and leaving behind a staggering debt for our kids and grandkids is no type of responsible stewardship. The politically connected are getting rich though.
Also coming back to say, no mention of technologies coming down the pipeline.. Flow batteries, flywheel, thermal, etc.). This article has some reasonable points, but the tone is condescending and not really bringing interested in bringing forth any reasonable solutions. Musk-esque if you will.
Why is the solution to the imperfections of solar, wind, hydro always that was must continue to use fossil fuels? The real temporary solution is to use more nuclear power. It’s cleaner than fossil fuels and the technology is safer than it has ever been.
My solar panels are great. I only have an electric bill a few months of the year when the mini splits are heating and the sun is only fully up 8-9 hours of the day, even then nothing near what we had before. It still generates electricity on cloudy days and the heated panels prevent snow from accumulating.
Great article! Thanks fort writing it!! I used to be an ardent--and somewhat naive--supporter of solar and wind energy production. In fact I devoted a major portion of my career to innovating in that space. It was around 2000 when solar industry insiders woke up to the criticality of grid scale energy storage. I was part a team that pioneered grid scale rapid response to short term fluctuations in supply vs demand, and we did so specifically to enable wind and solar. The work was fantastically interesting and my career went well for me personally. But while many have been gainfully employed and sometimes even enriched, and while many politicians and activists have been glorified, the tech companies and the investment community has thus far failed to provide solutions that will allow grid energy storage to keep up with the public and political enthusiasm for renewables. For me personally it has added up to a life lesson on some of the limits of democracy and how far removed policy makers can become when huge practical issues get sharply politicized. In the present pollical environment, climate activists have the upper hand and they are aggressively pushing politicians to enact policy decisions without including enough input from actual experts in energy production and distribution. (Anybody who scoffs at this remark probably needs to get outside their social and political comfort zone and do a little more digging.) Most of the people I talk to about wind and solar literally have no idea that energy storage is a factor and that the present grid infrastructure can only handle a small percentage of wind and solar given the existing storage facilities and technologies. Maybe some team at McKinsey has it all sorted, but it seems to me like the public and the politicians are ill informed as to the net environmental and geopolitical impact that will be inflicted on the world if we rapidly build out a sufficient battery storage infrastructure to catch up with the current rate of growth in so called sustainable sources. Speaking from my own decades long experience in this arena my own personal opinion is that the massive concentration of capital into wind and solar has been a terrible mistake and we should have focused a much bigger share of those resources into nuclear power. People who scoff at nuclear often assert we don't have the right technology yet, but the same criticism entirely applies to grid scale energy storage which may prove to be even more elusive that fusion. There are some very promising entrepreneurial efforts to revolutionize large scale battery storage, and I hope it works out-- but I doubt that we would have opted for the current path if we as a society had done a better job involving industry experts and analyzing the tradeoffs between renewables and nuclear.
You're right on all of the above. Most of the money subsidizing the building of wind and solar should have gone into research on that, batteries and 4th gen nuclear. Fusion is another boondoggle.
These issues of storage and consistent power generation are what have me freaked out about the electrification of everything (e.g. heavily subsidizing people to switch to induction cooktops, split units for heating/cooling/hot water, etc.). That power still has to come from somewhere, and when everything is taxing the electric grid, which is already stretched to the max in states like California... I just don't see a whole lot of good outcomes. Efficient appliances that don't work at peak hours because there's not enough juice are sort of an insult to the people relying on them for heat.
Yes, storage is an issue. And yes, electric cars will use a lot, of power. So the power grid will need to be expanded. But if solar is as cheap as these guys claim (which it isn't yet) all you need to do is overbuild it an you will avoid peak-load blackout. Also using gas for those is quite helpful. And cars will mainly charge at night, when we now sometimes have negative prices from wind -- meaning we have too much power then.
The real problem is letting ideological environmentalists drive tech policy. The tech problems are not the hard part.
And to complete my thought 🤦♂️... That electric power needs to come from somewhere, so if there's lack of storage and consistent generation, we'll be burning coal or natural gas to generate that power. It's that or a lot of new nuclear plants, which seems to appeal to approximately no one in a position of power/decisionmaking.
Yes, agreed. It's incredible how much push there is to make everything electric now.
The following quote is total BS:
"We know this for a fact because the only kinds of places that ever seem to install grid-scale storage are rich jurisdictions with generous subsidy regimes. How generous? A report by the Public Utility Commission of California shows that, last year, homeowners with solar panels pocketed $8.5 billion from customers without them."
Yes, that subsidy is happening, and it's a well-know environmentalist regressive policy. But it is in no way related to any cost subsidy for batteries.
I've consulted for energy markets from the CA-ISO to the UK's Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, and I'm a co-editor of an MIT Press book on Climate policy along with the most brilliant Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262036269/global-carbon-pricing/
I've also co-authored a book for the World Bank on adapting the grid to solar and wind.
Persuasion makes a lot of science mistakes because it relies on journalists, and will not make use of it's very smart subscriber base. It's more bureaucratic than a lot of the big regulators and markets I've worked for.
As to batteries, I heard a talk at MIT by probably the best battery researcher in the business, and the real problem is there are tons of subsidies to for environmentalists' feel-good projects and basically zip for basic research. In spite of this, flow batteries are making progress, and may well be able to solve the problem. They use liquid electrolytes, which can store vast amounts of power.
Also the claim that "negative wholesale power prices .... they’re signs of a market dangerously unbalanced," is pure sensationalism. CA was doing that because of wind energy 10 years ago when I worked as a consultant for the CA ISO, and it's a sign the market's working fine. But also a sign that adding more solar will mean that some of the extra power produced will go to waste, hence making it less cost effective. The storage problem is real and will put a limit on solar and wind, or force us to build a lot of excess capacity. But this is not a black or white situation.
Could persuasion please get some fact checking on the science and math articles.
Thank you, your response was thoughtful and informative.
Thanks for not taking it amiss. My main complaint is that Persuasion, doesn't seem to do fact checking.
Steve. Would we not be better off following Macron’s lead and adding nuclear capacity to existing plant sites than an over reliance on wind and solar? I’m interested in your expertise on this. I did a rough calculation on the land needed to replace a nearby nuclear plant with windmills and concluded that it would require more than 100% of my county. The plant, which occupies about 3.5 acres as I recall, powers several counties. Please share your thoughts.
Hi Guy, Good question. By a freak coincidence, I had David MacKay's book right next to me, and it took half a minute to find: that with the Brit density of 250 people/km^2, "wind power could generate 8kW/per person" if all land were used. Then he says 10% land use would generate half as much power as British driving. Of course wind turbines, although bothersome, do not occupy much of the land they "take up" as they are spaced far apart.
So it's a tough calculation to make fairly. There's a lot of windy farmland and barren land. And also offshore (which is more expensive.)
My guess is that a mix will probably make sense for a long time to come. But I do think 4th gen nuclear is our best hope of stopping climate change, and it deserves a crash research program because the tech is old and close to being economical and safe.
My rule of thumb is fix the market failures then let the market decide. Power generation companies do the best job of picking low cost options, but they need to feel the cost of carbon emissions and other externalities. The other big market failure is that research is way underfunded, because most of the benefit (profits) do not go to the researcher. So that needs smart gov funding.
Here's a spreadsheet with a quick (unchecked) calculation you can compare with your own.
It uses MacKay's value of 2W/sq-meter for British Wind. A standard nuke (1 GW) would require a 14 by 14 mile square. To supply all US energy on average (electric, gasoline etc) would require a square of about 780 x 780 miles = about 14% of the country. That's equal to 1,190 nukes. But that would come far short of peak usage. Here's the spreadsheet, if you want to copy it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K7mNT9wVaDt3UtWkALY-CjPOnlmnAYIhA-rxamv-yNY
It’s part of the larger problem. Coal and oil will run out at some point. They are the definition of non-renewable energy sources. If Malthus had been aware of it, his dire predictions would have centered on that rather than on other supply problems like food.
It is part of the extraordinary paradox of the human condition (Like William Saroyan, I’d call it a comedy if it weren’t so dark) that we are willing to spend untold amounts of effort, scientific expertise, and money on weaponry capable of destroying us utterly, which we hope we’ll never have to use, when in fact it needs to be spent on what may one day save us all from going dark and starving to death.
We’ll never run out of oil. It will merely become too expensive for anyone but the military to burn.
Malthus didn’t understand technology. Most people don’t.
Military preparedness is like fire insurance.
If the military does indeed take control over whatever oil supplies remain at any point, then, practically speaking, the rest of us will run out of it.
We’ll get plenty of warning, in time to adjust.
Adjust to what? If we don’t have a sufficiently large scale alternative already in place, what will take the place of oil?
Probably a bunch of different things. It’s really hard to predict. Economics is like ecology in that order is an emergent property. You really can’t plan a living economy any more than a living ecosystem.
Probably a bunch of things? And how does that play out across a power grid set up for just one thing? And if it is a question of ‘plenty of warning’, wouldn’t it be wise to start now at a governmental level than waiting for some indefinite moment when ‘a bunch of things’ might be necessary?
I am in complete agreement with Mr. Toro and Mr. Núñez-Mujica. However, it turns out that wind doesn’t have some of the problems that solar has. The wind does blow at night. The need for storage is mitigated by long distance transmission (the wind is probably blowing somewhere). Solar has the worst problems of any source of renewable energy. It is also the most PC. Germany (a northern, cloudy country) poured billions into solar. Did it make any sense? Of course, not. The reality of where energy is going is provided by China. In 2023, China mined ‘only’ 4.66 billion tons of coal.
you are not wrong in the points you make about wind energy (ie that it blows at night and has certain potential to mitigate transient issues with solar production) and those a great points, but as far as I am aware nobody yet knows just how we would configure and manage the grid in order transport and distribute that energy in a manageable way while keeping the whole complex system dynamically balanced and stable. As far as I know massive grid scale energy storage is an essential component for wind as well as solar. I am not familiar with any credible models that suggest otherwise.
You are correct about renewables destabilizing the grid. Europe has considerable experience with this matter. Roughly stated, as long as renewables are relatively small (< 30%, the ‘system’ can adapt without too many problems. When renewables become large (>= 30%) major problems arise. It turns out that the demand for electricity is somewhat seasonal. In hot climates, peak demand is hot afternoons in the summer. In cold climates, peak demand is late at night on Winter nights. Solar is a pretty good match for summer afternoons. Neither wind or solar, matches peak cold demand. To pick on my favorite victim, Germany was a relatively good place for wind and a bad place for solar. So what did Germany emphasize?
This issue even has geopolitical overtones. Germany imported Russian gas as coal substitute. The consequences were dire.
these points are all spot on. we could quibble over numbers (ie 15% vs 30%) but the fact is many of our plans and policies are suffering from orders-of-magnitude errors in key projections... so i have no issue with your comments here. :)
Since you appear interested in these topics. Let me recommend the work of Robert Wilson ('The Energy Collective Group').
thanks!! I will certainly follow up on that!!
Long distance power transmission wastes much of it. A long wire is a resistor.
I found another data source. See "What fraction of energy is typically lost in transmission over power lines?" (Engineering Stack Exchange).
Chinese line losses appear to be relatively low. Say 2-3%. See "High voltage transmission cables: power parameters?" (Thunder Said Energy)
Part of the problem is that our political elites who track center to left of center have to be seen as doing something to placate their environmentalist constituencies. Supporting solar power is something that is highly visible, as compared to supporting fusion research for example, albeit counterproductive. Nuclear power is just so 20th Century!
Another complicating factor for our grids is that our society demands the building of more and more server farms that, of course, use tremendous amounts of electricity especially for chilling cooling water.
The intermittency of wind and solar is no secret. In his excellent little 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates discussed the problem of providing a gigawatt of electricity to a small city « the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, so the effective capacity of plants powered by wind and solar panels might be 30 percent or less. » Currently, The storage technology does not exist and the gigantic networking schemes necessary to make them work requires a massive waste of land and the release of equally massive amounts of carbon when producing steel and concrete.
For now, claiming that these energy sources are cheap is like arguing that a boat trailer uses less fuel than the vehicle that tows it. A traditional power plant is necessary to « tow » the renewables through the darkness of night and the times when there is no wind.
The amounts of money we are squandering on these boondoggles is criminal. Sure, we should invest in researching these technologies. However, impoverishing taxpayers and leaving behind a staggering debt for our kids and grandkids is no type of responsible stewardship. The politically connected are getting rich though.
Also coming back to say, no mention of technologies coming down the pipeline.. Flow batteries, flywheel, thermal, etc.). This article has some reasonable points, but the tone is condescending and not really bringing interested in bringing forth any reasonable solutions. Musk-esque if you will.
Excellent article. Saying what needs to be said!
Why is the solution to the imperfections of solar, wind, hydro always that was must continue to use fossil fuels? The real temporary solution is to use more nuclear power. It’s cleaner than fossil fuels and the technology is safer than it has ever been.
My solar panels are great. I only have an electric bill a few months of the year when the mini splits are heating and the sun is only fully up 8-9 hours of the day, even then nothing near what we had before. It still generates electricity on cloudy days and the heated panels prevent snow from accumulating.