Month: October 2017

Whistling in the dark with the lights on

The Roadmap has a slick graph that depicts a completely unrealistic buildout schedule. It calls for more than half of the buildout in the first ten years (2015–2025), and another 25% of the buildout in the following five years.¹

That’s 15 years to build more than three-quarters of a $15.2 Trillion, nationwide, fuel-free renewables grid:

The 35-year Roadmap would entail manufacturing (or importing) and installing:

• 496,000 5-MW wind machines
• 18 billion square meters of PV panels
• 50,000-plus wind and solar farms
• 75 million residential rooftop systems
• 2.7 million commercial rooftop systems

On 131,200 square miles, not counting the rooftops.²

Nuts and bolts

To execute the Roadmap, the entire country would have to shift to a war footing and stay hard on it for over three decades. And like we said, if other countries follow suit and overseas fabricators can’t fill our orders, we’ll have to make our own gear.

Which is a lot of stuff. Yes, we stepped up for World War II, and yes we can do it again. But can we keep it up for 35 years?

And do some of it two or even three times over? Because remember, the buildout will last longer than the wind turbines, and nearly as long as the solar panels.

So even when the buildout is complete, it’ll never end.

Like our military-industrial complex, born in the cradle of WW II and still going strong, we’ll have to keep fabricating, installing, and recycling 1.23 million square meters of PV panels every single day – forever – just to keep the Roadmap working.³

Fabricating and installing that many panels each day would be difficult enough. Recycling the old panels that the new ones replace would become a polluting, resource-intensive industry unto itself, involving a series of mechanical, thermal, and chemical processes, each with its own energy requirement and waste stream.⁴

And don’t forget, we’ll also have to refurbish all of the 340,000 onshore turbines every 15–20 years (gearboxes, generators and blades), and do the same with the 156,000 offshore turbines every 10 years because of their harsh marine environment.

The U.S. doesn’t have anywhere near the industrial capacity to get this done.

For example, just to stay on-track with the Roadmap’s second 5-year portion (the period 2020–2025), we’ll have to exceed our best year ever in PV panel production by almost 29X, and our best year ever in wind turbine production by nearly 17X, based on U.S. production totals for 2016.⁵

Dozens of factories will have to be built overnight, and we’ll have to run them three shifts a day. That may seem like a good thing, since it would be a national jobs program that can’t be beat.

But it could also amount to biting off more than we can chew. Because if we can’t ramp up that much and that fast, we’ll find ourselves hemorrhaging money with nothing much to show for it.

Public morale will falter, and the mobilization will seem more like the home front during the Vietnam War than World War II, with all the political turmoil, protests and culture wars that came with it.

And keep in mind, the longer it takes to get mobilized, the more those Xes go up.

So despite the optimistic curves in the Roadmap’s graph, the buildout will actually be a constant scramble to catch up for three exhausting decades.

As of this writing (autumn 2017), we’re already two years behind schedule.

Low energy? You might have a mineral deficiency

Copper and silver are just two of the critical minerals used to fabricate wind turbines, PV panels, and the parabolic (curved) mirrors for CSP solar.

We currently import a third of our copper and most of our silver. Imports would necessarily skyrocket if we make our own Roadmap gear. And even if we had the equipment made overseas, those countries would still have to mine or import the material themselves.

So how much copper and silver would we need for our nation’s Roadmap?

The copper industry says that PV solar needs about 5 tonnes per MW, and wind turbines need about 3 tonnes.⁶ Panel makers say they’ll soon be reducing their silver consumption to 13 mgs (milligrams) per dc watt.⁷ By pure coincidence, CSP’s parabolic mirrors also need 13 mgs per ac watt.⁸

Doing the math, the U.S. Roadmap will need 24.4 million tonnes of copper⁹ and 51,300 tonnes of silver.¹⁰ And that’s not counting all the copper for the tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Or mirrors for CSP backup systems.

We’ll assume that all the copper and silver in our worn-out panels and turbines will be recycled for the new panels and turbines needed to maintain the Roadmap.

Regardless, our sudden increase in demand, along with the decline in ore grade that typically occurs with each new dig, would result in rising prices and bottlenecks around the world.

The material, however, does exist, even if it doesn’t exist here. So the U.S. Roadmap, in theory, could actually be built. However, there’s a catch:

If the Roadmap goes global, the worldwide buildout will consume about one-third of the world’s proven copper reserves¹¹, along with 90% of proven silver reserves¹² – meaning the copper and silver that we know for sure is still in the ground.

New silverware and silver jewelry would have to be banned. And mirror technology would have to be revamped – silver, the best reflector of visible light, has been used for centuries. The list goes on: Electrical contacts, batteries, printed circuits, etc.

At our current rate of silver consumption for all industrial products that aren’t solar panels, we would blow through the final 10% of the world’s silver reserves in 4 years. Entire product lines would have to be re-thought. Things will change bigly.

Monopolizing one-third of the world’s copper would be just as bad, putting a serious kink in global supply chains and jacking up prices around the world. And we haven’t even factored in the transmission wires to connect the hundreds of thousands of new wind and solar farms to their respective national grids.

 A global Roadmap would quickly become a victim of its own excess. Strip-mining the planet, and carpeting it with wind and solar farms, is not going to save it. Or us.

The 1,591-GW grid*^†

(*Batteries not included. ^†Backup is optional at extra cost.)

The Roadmap contends that an all-electric grid could power the nation­ ­– electricity, transportation, heating, industrial processes, the works – with an average (not nameplate / peak) capacity of 1,591 GWs.

We’ll take the estimate as a given.

If everything goes according to plan, smart grid technology will manage all of this extra juice (about 3.4X of what’s now on the national grid) by sending power to wherever it’s needed on a second-by-second basis, adroitly balancing our national supply and demand.

The Roadmap also recommends using LoadMatch, a grid integration computer model, for predicting the amount and availability of power every 30 seconds across the entire grid.

Sounds amazing, but we have our doubts, because no matter how precisely the grid is managed, it’ll essentially be a fuel-free system with virtually no backup or storage, and entirely dependent on our ever-changing weather.

Even more amazing, the 1,591-GW average was derived by simulations that Dr. Jacobson and his colleagues had LoadMatch perform for the years 2050 through 2055.¹³

Think that through:

A $15.2 Trillion national WWS buildout, embraced by millions of renewables advocates, was determined with the aid of a computer model that purports to predict the nation’s weather, region by region (not the climate, mind you, but the weather), every 30 seconds . . .

For a 6-year period 35 years in the future. 

 Future trippin’

Peering into the future through a 35-year fog bank, and claiming to read the details of a distant shore, takes a certain amount of chutzpah.

Nevertheless, the authors of the Roadmap are confident that a fuel-free national grid is not only achievable, but predictable to the gigawatt.

While computer modeling is improving by leaps and bounds, the accuracy of any model’s output depends upon the accuracy – and applicability – of the input.

The only way to make accurate long-term weather predictions is by extrapolating historical data, and that data is proving to be less and less applicable as climate change disrupts our weather patterns.

Which means that any long-term bets on the weather are long shots at best.

Looking into the past to see the future only works if baseline conditions remain largely intact. But global weather conditions are becoming ever more unpredictable, and doing so at an ever-increasing rate.

Smart grid technology and LoadMatch will supposedly enable us to build up to the grid capacity we need, then add on a mere 4.38% overbuild (69.7 extra GWs) and call it a day.

So much better than the 150% overbuild¹⁴ the U.S. resorted to in the dark days of the 20th Century, before computers made everything run like a Swiss watch . . .

We disagree.

If backup is like training wheels, then overbuild is like spare tires. And anyway, a Swiss watch runs like a Swiss watch without any help from a computer.

Overbuild, as distinct from oversize (yes, there is a difference)

Oversize has to do with power plants. Overbuild has to do with the entire grid.

We walked you through oversizing, which is a new thing in the energy business. Before renewables came along, a power plant was expected to produce exactly what its nameplate said when the thing was tuned up and running at full capacity: A 1-GW plant has always been relied upon to crank out one gig, on demand.

Even so, we still built a lot more power plants than we strictly need, just for just in case. Using thousands of “always-on” baseload plants (coal, gas, hydro and nuclear) we built a 1,167-GW national electric grid – not primary energy, mind you, just electricity.

That’s an overbuild of 2.5X our annual average electrical demand of 467 GWs.¹⁵ Another way of saying it: Our current safety margin is 150% above demand.

That’s how we’ve kept the lights on 99.9% of the time for more than a century.

Call it overkill if you like, but the idea is sound. So is the idea of converting to an all-electric society. Better living through electricity! Go, USA! However . . .

If you’re driving into unexplored territory, you’re probably going to pop some tires. Reliability rules, and overbuild is a low-tech, nearly foolproof way of getting down the road. Buy the best tires you can afford, but always carry a spare. Or two. (Even armored limos with run-flat tires carry a spare.)

But the Roadmap chucks all of that Nervous Nelly stuff out the window, because LoadMatch. Which is why the Roadmap’s total grid overbuild (as distinct from oversizing each farm) amounts to 69.7 GWs, or just 4.38% above and beyond the basic 2050 grid:

That’s not an overbuild of 4.38 times, mind you, but 4.38 percent.

For an interdependent – and weather-dependent – fuel-free national grid, into which we’ll plug every blessed thing in the country. And all of it load-balanced to a T with a computer program, and a dinky little 69.7-GW spare tire for good luck.

Green elephants with training wheels

Back in the day, before elephants were on the endangered list, they were sometimes used in metaphors for comic effect: When a person was drunk they saw pink elephants.

A white elephant was something you wouldn’t dare get rid of, even though it was utterly useless and destroyed your finances. The term comes from a time when Thai royalty would gift the rare creatures to especially annoying patrons. The patrons couldn’t refuse a royal gift, even though they knew it would ruin their lives.

In our view, wind and solar farms are green elephants, with an endless supply of free “fuel” gifted to us by Mother Nature.

She’s mighty annoyed by what we’ve done to the planet, so we’re atoning for our sins by humbly accepting her bounty – no matter how impractical, risky and harmful to the environment it would be.

That may seem over the top, but we wanted to get your attention, to emphasize an important distinction between a fueled grid and a fuel-free grid:

• If we launch a buildout of fuel-powered baseload plants (coal, gas or nuclear) and abandon it halfway through, we would still have a collection of fully functioning, independent power plants.
• If we launch the Roadmap and abandon it halfway through, we would have a herd of green elephants that will always need training wheels.

All or nothing                                          

The Green Elephant Scenario is one of the biggest drawbacks of a 100% national WWS grid: It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

That’s what interdependency is all about – it only works if all (or nearly all) of the pieces are in place and functioning.

If we start the buildout, we’ll need to complete the entire project to ensure that each renewables plant has the best possible chance of having enough fuel-free backup.

For that to happen, tens of thousands of wind and solar farms will have to be placed in the widest possible variety of advantageous weather zones. And they’ll all have to be completed, or alternative sites will have to be found.

And then, even if we do build the whole thing, the Roadmap may still not prove to be fully self-supporting. It’s entirely possible that training wheels in the form of traditional fueled power plants will still be needed.

We won’t really know if the Roadmap will work as advertised until we actually build it. And once we do, we’ll have to make it work. The reason is simple:

We can’t afford to waste that much money, time, land, and resources, then change our minds and move on to something else.

Aside from using fast-start gas turbines or traditional baseload plants that can operate 24 / 7, and aside from oversizing every wind and solar plant we build, the only reliable way to back up the inherently unreliable performance of renewables is with mass energy storage.

We walked you through P2G. In the next few pages, we’ll be addressing energy storage in the form of grid-scale batteries and pumped hydro. We’ll also cover hydrogen, which is being considered as a carbon-free fuel for heavy transportation and process heat.

The bare-bones Roadmap treats adequate storage as an externality. Which is one way to keep the sticker price down: 24 hours of energy storage could easily add an additional $7.6 Trillion. The price chart deserves another look:

Of all the WWS plants called for in the Roadmap’s 1,591-GW plan, only 7.3% of them (116 GWs) will have their own on-site storage, and it’ll be just enough to get them through the night. If it was a sunny day.

 CSP: Sunshine in a straw

Concentrated solar power (CSP) is a clever solar technology with a bit of built-in storage – just for over night and pretty much just for itself, but it’s a step in the right direction. (More of a gesture than an actual step, but still . . .)

Instead of photovoltaic solar panels, which convert sunlight to electricity, CSP uses simple curved mirrors to heat a pipe of molten (melted) salt, which is used to boil water to run a turbine to generate power.

Since molten salt retains a tremendous amount of heat, some of the salt can be stored in insulated tanks to produce power when the sun goes down – if it was a sunny day.¹⁶

 If not, then the CSP plant has to be backed up by another plant, or plants. And even if it was a sunny day, the stored energy will only last till morning.

Not to change the subject, but a Molten Salt Reactor’s fuel salt is totally different: It stays molten because the atomic fuel in the salt is actively producing heat.

But since there’s nothing in CSP’s molten salt to generate its own heat, storing its solar energy in salt tanks is like storing water in a leaky bucket – it’ll probably be gone by morning. But no biggie, you can just heat up the salt again the next day.

If it’s sunny.

END NOTES

1. http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html Critique.

2. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf

Roadmap.

See table 2, row 9: 2,326,000 MWp-ac ÷ 160 Wp-ac / m² = 14.5e9 m² of solar panels. To calculate PV land area, divide by packing factor PF = 0.40 (40%). Obtain 36.3e9 m² = 36,300 km² land area, or 14,000 sq mi for utility PV solar farms.

Use the Roadmap’s assumed wind farm density of 0.089 km² / MWp-ac. Table 2, row 1: Wind capacity 1,701,000 MWp X 0.089 km² / MW = 151,400 km² land area, or 58,500 sq mi.

Combined PV & onshore wind = 14,000 + 58,500 = 72,500 sq mi for wind & PV solar.

Using the CSP land density of 0.039 km² / MWp that describes the Andasol CSP farm in Spain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andasol_Solar_Power_Station

Andasol’s land area is 5.85 km². Its nominal power rating is 150 MWp. 5.85 ÷ 150 = 0.039 km² / MWp.)

In the Roadmap’s Table 2, rows 10 and 11, CSP capacity: 227,300 + 136,400 = 363,700 MWp. Multiply by 0.039 km² / MW to obtain 14,200 km²; or 5,500 sq mi for utility CSP farms.

Total onshore wind and solar: 72,500 + 5,500 = 78,000 sq mi.

3. 18 billion m² of panels ÷ 14,600 days in 40 years = 1.23 million m² / day

4.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem

http://www.environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

5. Ibid. Chapter 5 End Note #1 Critique. Search for “intends to ramp up our solar”.

6. Ibid. Chapter Five End Note #2. Roadmap. See the Abstract.

7. Ibid. Chapter 5 End Note #1 Critique. See internal footnotes 9 and 11.

8. Ibid. Critique. See internal footnotes 9 and 10.

9.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/a-tower-of-molten-salt-will-deliver-solar-power-after-sunset

An exercise in utility

A utility-scale power plant can be relied upon to deliver power as needed, day in and day out. The standard of the industry is 99.9% uptime. That’s what the word utility means, and the same concept holds true for water, sanitation, fire, police, etc.

There is no renewable energy system that comes anywhere close to this standard, without adequate backup or storage.

Renewable advocates like to tell you that the wind is always blowing somewhere, which is true as far as it goes.

But it doesn’t go very far, because until we have enough wind farms in Somewhere, Kansas and Somewhere, Wyoming and Somewhere Else offshore, we won’t have a self-supporting renewables grid.

Ideally, utility-scale power plants should be independent sources of rock-solid, reliable power, free from the vagaries of weather, climate, season, or time of day, and under the operator’s control at all times. In a word, they should be decoupled from the environment as much as possible.¹

Since renewables are weather dependent, they can’t be separated from the environment. Like the weather they rely upon, renewables are interdependent, variable, and intermittent, unless they’re having a real good day.

As climate change evolves, the weather will be ever more difficult to predict. Which is a problem, because wind and solar farms are more like actual green leafy plants than any traditional power plant we have.

Just like crops, wind and solar systems depend upon the whims of Mother Nature. And just like modern agriculture, the variables can be reduced but rarely eliminated.

Irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizer and pest control enable the mass production and consumption of crops. In the same way, backup and storage enable the mass production and consumption of renewable energy.

But at this point in time, and for the foreseeable future, practical energy storage technology for a nationwide 100% renewables grid simply does not exist. And the technology that does exist can’t be scaled up without bankrupting the nation.

Adequate backup technology exists, but most of it is in the exact form of energy production that renewables advocates seek to eliminate: Fast-start or always-on fossil-fueled power plants.

The Roadmap envisions a nationwide network of inter-dependent plants (as distinct from in-dependent), each one oversized to compensate for its low capacity factor (see below), so the plants that are having a good day might back up their less fortunate fellows.

However, without adequate storage or backup, WWS farms can’t be thought of as actual utility power plants, unless they’re members of a widespread, interconnected, self-supporting nationwide renewables fleet.

Which is a dubious proposition, because that same interconnected, interdependent nationwide fleet has to actually be able to back itself up. Which has never been tested at scale.

Nevertheless, that’s the strategy behind the Roadmap: Build enough farms in a variety of weather zones, and they should, in theory, be able to back each other up.

This helps explain why the Roadmap calls for WWS in all 50 states. The other big reason may be politics:

Taking a cue from the defense industry, a WWS facility in every state would guarantee access and influence with local legislators. Or at least a seat at the table.

Training wheels

 As we said, the industry standard for utility plants is 99.9% uptime. Renewables are fundamentally incapable of meeting this standard, due to the intermittent nature of wind, water, and sunlight. So they can’t be considered true utilities without massive (and massively expensive) amounts of backup and storage.

In lieu of adequate storage, the Roadmap’s wind and solar will need external backup from coal, gas, nuclear, or pumped hydro during most of the 35-year buildout, to serve as training wheels until there are enough renewables in enough regions to back each other up.

These are the key distinctions between baseload (always-on) plants and WWS:

• Baseload plants are IN-dependent.
• Renewables plants are INTER-dependent.

Coal, gas, hydro and nuclear plants can operate on their own, independent of any other power plant. But WWS plants need training wheels, until there are enough of them to get their collective act together and (hopefully) roll with the big boys.

For these reasons and more, comparing always-on baseload plants with intermittent renewables can be an apples-and-oranges situation.

We can’t actually replace a reactor with a wind or solar farm unless that farm has sufficient backup or storage. Augmentation options for a WWS plant include:

• Pumped hydro, or grid-scale batteries (which don’t exist), or other mass energy storage systems
• Traditional baseload plants (coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, etc.)
• Fast-start “peaker” plants (gas, diesel, propane, etc.)
• Other wind or solar farms that are having a better day

Oversize it!

We use the term oversize to refer to building a wind or solar farm with a much larger nameplate rating than the average power it’s expected to produce.

Nameplate rating refers to the peak, or highest, output of a power generator, traditionally stamped on its nameplate and often called its peak capacity. Which, when it comes to wind and solar, might only happen for a few minutes a day.

(Sorry to throw all these terms at you at once, but hang in there . . .)

Because the weather varies and because the sun tends to set every day, a renewables farm will, on average, generate just 1/5th to 1/3rd of its peak capacity, meaning the most power the farm can produce under ideal (sunny or windy) conditions.

Over the course of a year, a U.S. solar or wind farm’s capacity factor (average output) is only 20­–35% of its peak.² 

To give you a good visual between the installed capacity and the actual performance of most renewable systems, here’s the installed capacity of German wind in 2014 (light blue), and the power that was actually delivered by those wind machines in that same year (dark blue):

For a 1-GW solar farm with a 20% capacity factor to actually deliver a yearly average of one gigawatt, you have to oversize the farm by 5 times.

That is, you have to build it as a 5-GW power plant, so it can deliver a yearly average of one gig with a 20% CF (capacity factor).

If that’s not enough to make it perform as advertised – and it typically isn’t, due to seasonal variations (more on this later) – you have to back it up with external power or energy storage. Or both.

Or we shouldn’t even be calling it a 1-GW power plant (more on this later, also too.)

Since non-fuel forms of energy storage (batteries, reservoirs, etc.) are expensive, the Roadmap’s approach is to build lots of wind and solar farms in a variety of weather zones.

[NERD NOTE: Capacity factor (CF) is the total amount of energy that is actually produced by a power plant over the course of a year, divided by the greatest amount of energy that it could possibly produce under ideal conditions in that same year.

For a wind or solar farm, ideal conditions means that the equipment is clean and in perfect condition, and the wind is always blowing at the perfect speed or the sun is always overhead in a cloudless sky.

Which of course is impossible. So the CF of any WWS power plant will always be a fraction much less than 1, and is usually expressed as a percent. For example, a CF of 0.20 is a CF of 20%.]

Due to wind and solar’s naturally low capacity factors, a typical solar farm should be oversized by about 5X, and a typical wind farm by 3X (2.5X for offshore wind.)

That way, the underproduction of one farm can be compensated by the overproduction of another farm – if the weather cooperates over yonder.

And in the absence of storage, the farm over yonder that’s having a good day has to be able to send its excess energy somewhere else.

The only alternative is to unplug their solar panels, or feather their turbine blades so they don’t catch the wind. Either of which is a sin, given the money, subsidies, and resources spent on building and maintaining the typical renewables farm.

Sorry to beat this to death, but most people don’t think it through. They just blithely assume that the one-gigawatt farm sold to their community will routinely deliver an average of one gigawatt.

The problem is, they were sold a 1,000-horsepower monster truck that averages 200 horses over the course of a year.

Truthiness in advertising

Industry professionals and savvy WWS advocates are well aware of the fact that a 1,000-MW solar farm in a 20% average capacity region (which is just about everywhere on earth) is actually a 200-MW farm in need of some serious backup.

But they don’t make this perfectly clear to the general public or legislators, or even to most dedicated environmentalists, who think their community has a shiny new 1,000-MW farm.

That may seem like a forgivable bit of sales puffery (“your mileage may vary”), but when an industry is promoting a radical new energy paradigm for the entire nation – indeed, for the entire planet – the failure to clear up such a common misconception amounts to a massive form of deceptive advertising.

One admirable thing about the Roadmap is that the wind and solar it’s calling for is based on average, not peak, capacity. So when the Roadmap proposes a 1,591-GW national grid, realize that it isn’t calling for a wind and solar capacity of 1,591 GWs.

It’s actually proposing that we build 3–5 times that amount to deliver an average of 1,591 GWs, on the presumption that the farms will be able to back each other up in real-world conditions, year after year, with no storage to speak of.

Due to the yawning gap between average and peak capacities, the Roadmap won’t result in a self-supporting, nationwide network of fuel-free power plants until the 35-year buildout is nearly complete.

A substantial amount of wind and solar will have to be built, in a variety of weather zones, before true interdependence starts to emerge. Until then, the wind and solar farms that are up and running will need training wheels.

Since coal is verboten, and nuclear is the work of the devil, and since we can’t build more rivers or call rain down from the sky, the only acceptable backup for the first half of the buildout, if not longer, is:

Natural Gas ­– the polite term for methane

“We need about 3,000 feet of altitude, we need flat land, we need 300 days of sunlight, and we need to be near a gas pipe. Because for all of these big utility-scale solar plants – whether it’s wind or solar – everybody is looking at gas as the supplementary fuel. The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are gas plants.” ³  

 – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Environmental activist

Member of the board of Bright Source

Developers of the Ivanpah Solar-Thermal Station

On the California / Nevada border

As luck would have it, Mr. Kennedy’s Ivanpah plant has had to burn 62% more methane than originally forecast by the builders, due to the unpredictability of relying on Mother Nature for energy.

In fact, Ivanpah has been burning so much methane that they’re facing the ironic prospect of paying a carbon tax.⁴

Let that sink in for a moment: A solar plant that’s so dirty, it has to pay a penalty for polluting the environment.

Burning natural gas for energy produces half the CO₂ of coal, which is a good thing. But if it leaks before you burn it, it has 84X the GWP (global warming potential) of CO₂ for its first 20 years in the atmosphere.⁵

If it makes you feel any better, methane’s GWP mellows out over a 100-year span to “only” 28X, as the molecule breaks down and combines with oxygen to form CO₂ and water vapor.

But since the next 20 years are the most critical in the fight against global warming, 84X is the number to focus on.

Like any gas, methane is an escape artist ­­– remember the Porter Ranch leak? Using it as a bridge fuel to a clean, green future is a double-edged sword.

In fact, a 4% leak makes any gas plant, or the average gas-backed wind or solar farm, as bad for the climate as a coal plant. We call it the “Worth-It Threshold.”

That low number may sound like a wild claim, but in our 2016 paper “Wind and Solar’s Achilles’ Heel ­– the Meltdown at Porter Ranch” we have clearly shown it to be true, with some surprisingly simple high-school chemistry and math.⁶ (If anyone can disprove our formulas, please let us know.) Here’s a graph from that paper:  

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

To put Porter Ranch in perspective, its contribution to global warming was the equivalent of burning about 300 million gallons of gasoline,⁷ essentially wiping out the climate benefits from an entire year of California’s wind and solar.⁸

To further put it in perspective, the ongoing, business-as-usual national leak rate of the U.S. natural gas industry, according to the industry’s own estimate, is equal to more than 75 unplugged, continuous, year-round Porter Ranch leaks.⁹

Even so, the gas industry claims a mere 1.6% national leak rate,¹⁰ despite the fact that the EPA, using the latest in detection equipment, has found leaks up to 9%.¹¹

But the industry’s low number is alarming enough – see the above graph.

Since methane has such a powerful GWP, a 1.6% leak rate wipes out 40% of the climate benefits we hope to derive from gas-backed wind and solar: 1.6 is 40% of 4, and 4% is the Worth-It Threshold for gas-backed renewables.

As RFK Jr correctly points out, virtually all of our large wind and solar farms are backed by gas. What he doesn’t mention is that with a 4% leak in the methane infrastructure, gas-backed renewables simply aren’t worth the trouble.

In fact, you might as well be burning coal for all the good it’ll do (global-warming-wise, not total-pollution-wise: Methane is a lot cleaner than coal.)

As more renewables come online, their intermittent energy is having a greater impact on grid stability. Whenever clouds pass overhead or the wind dies down, backup or storage has to kick in to take up the slack, and do so within seconds.

Although it’s true that natural gas turbines can respond faster and easier than most reactors, there wouldn’t be much need for their heroic interventions if the intermittent energy of WWS wasn’t mandated to become a major part of our energy mix, and if it wasn’t prioritized to be used first.

Right this way, your table’s waiting

State governments should require that wind and solar come to the party with their own backup and storage. But WWS advocates and lobbyists have successfully pushed “priority dispatch” policies that give renewable energy precedence over any other form of production.

This leaves the twin problems of backup and storage for others to solve.  In California, for example, any renewable power that’s generated, no matter how fleeting, is given priority to be consumed first.

This poses a major and growing problem for utility companies, since the grid was designed to import, synchronize, and dispatch the steady flows of high-quality energy generated by fueled plants and hydro.

A “renewables first” policy is like designating the fast lane of a freeway for bicycles.

Our existing Gen III reactors were designed to run flat-out for months at a time, day in and day out – the baseload behemoths of the grid. But with the increasing penetration of low-quality energy from renewables, more and more of our run-steady power plants are being called upon to act like fast-response backup systems.

Which poses a problem for these legacy plants: Ramping them up and down several times a day, on short notice, subjects them to stresses they were never designed to handle.

What gets lost (or dismissed) in the debate over carbon-free energy is that new reactors like the AP and the MSR are all-load plants, not just baseload plants.

Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors will be able to ramp up, or down, at power increments as fast as 5% per minute. That flexibility, plus some fast-response backups like hydroelectric dams, pumped hydro reservoirs, and gas turbines could power the grid.

But our existing reactors aren’t that flexible. So the “solution” (actually, the anti-nuclear excuse) is self-evident: Replace all reactors with natural gas plants.

This unfortunate decision obscures the larger point:

If California had never embarked on a wind and solar buildout, a carbon-free fleet of new and existing reactors could anchor their entire grid, and power their pumped hydro for unexpected peak loads. Reactors could even power synfuel (synthetic fuel) factories to make carbon-neutral fuel for whatever backup gas plants they still need.

The truth is, California doesn’t have to shut down their existing reactors to go green. What they really need to do is expand and modernize their nuclear fleet.

The state has created their own problem, and now they’re “solving” it by getting rid of something that works like a champ – the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which reliably generates 8.6% of California’s electricity.

Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) has shown that nearly half the natural gas burned in CA for energy is now being used to back up wind and solar:¹²

CGNP has also shown that when SONGS was shuttered in 2011 (the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station), California’s natural gas use sharply increased, while their zero- greenhouse-gas electric production plummeted:

On January 23 2017, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) published their projection of a sharp increase in natural gas use, if the so-called bellwether state of California shuts down the Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) in 2025, and replaces it with a fleet of gas-fired plants, to back up their wind and solar:

Now that San Onofre is shuttered, Diablo Canyon is California’s last zero-emissions fueled power plant. But anti-nuke groups have persuaded Sacramento that renewables are the way to go.

Even though the direct result of implementing their “green” ideology over science-based reality will be a net increase in greenhouse gases, from methane combustion and leakage.¹³

 Compounding this irony, a sizeable chunk of the climate benefits that California thinks it’s getting from the renewables industry, is actually being wiped out by leaks from an entirely different industry – the same frackers and extractors of the methane they’re relying on to back up their fossil-free renewables.

(To be fair, California’s gas leak rate is lower than the national average. So their natural gas industry is “only” wiping out one-third of the state’s WWS climate benefits, not the 40% average experienced nationally.)

And how exactly is this comedy of errors supposed to mitigate global warming?

We don’t know, either.

¿Quién es mas verde? ¹⁴

Renewables advocates like to cop a greener-than-thou attitude, but we’re not overly impressed. When you drive an EV, your tailpipe’s down at the power plant.

With anemic capacity factors of 20–35%, the WWS farms they envision powering the nation would effectively be gas plants supplemented with renewables.

That is, until that happy day when we finally have enough WWS plants and transmission lines scattered hither and yon, that can back each other up without relying on gas training wheels.

Without that backup, the farms will be one-fifth to one-third as productive as their advocates claim. And either way, the plants will have to be refurbished every 10–40 years.¹⁵ Plus, there’s the whole storage thing.

Not being up front on these fundamental issues can make a sensible conversation on energy choices far more difficult than it needs to be.

In theory, a tipping point should eventually occur when enough farms in enough regions start backing each other up. But the longer it takes to reach that point, the more methane we’ll have to frack, leak and burn.

Another problem with blowing through our natural gas reserves is that we don’t use methane just for electric power. We also use it to make fertilizer, plastic, pesticides, synthetic fabrics and pharmaceuticals.

Substitutes for methane can be found, but consuming mass quantities of a non-renewable resource to build a renewable energy system is a Faustian bargain that should give us pause.

P2G – a (possible) breath of fresh air

Power to Gas (P2G) is a new technology that may be worth watching. With P2G, the overproduction of a wind or solar farm that would otherwise be wasted in the absence of batteries or pumped hydro can now be used to produce methane, to store the energy for later use. Like we’ve been saying, fuel is storage.

In an industrial P2G system, water is electrically split into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is released to the atmosphere and the hydrogen, combined with CO₂ that was scrubbed from a smoke stack or harvested from the atmosphere, is fed to microorganisms that excrete methane.

While it’s not carbon-free, P2G methane is carbon-neutral, since the carbon released by burning it was either harvested from the atmosphere, or would have wound up in the atmosphere anyway as power plant smog.

[NERD NOTE: Burning a mixture of methane (CH₄) and oxygen (O₂) produces heat, water vapor (H₂O), and carbon dioxide (CO₂).]

Power-2-Gas methane is less harmful than methane extracted from the ground, since the additional CO₂ from burning newly extracted natural gas would further disrupt the planet’s Carbon Cycle.

P2G methane doesn’t disrupt the Cycle all that much, since it re-uses the CO₂ that came from the prior burning of extracted fuel. But since any energy conversion results in a loss, the ultimate effect would be more carbon in the atmosphere.

The technology is still being tested, so don’t hold your breath. In fact, a cursory glance suggests that the process may only return about 25% of the energy fed into it. Which, by the way, is the same return on energy we get from electrically isolating hydrogen for vehicle fuel (more on that later.)

In the absence of any other mass energy storage technology, P2G (and hydrogen) are better than nothing. Not by much, but still . . .

Even so, there are three points about P2G methane to keep in mind:

• It’s (mostly) carbon-neutral, not carbon-free.
• Like any combustion, burning methane for electric power wastes most of the chemical energy released in the process.
• Like natural methane, a 4% leak of P2G would make the renewables it backs up as bad for the climate as a coal plant.

Global Weirding

Messing with the Carbon Cycle is the disruption in the term Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD.)

When you dig up a gazillion tons of carbon fuel in 150 years (a geologic blink of an eye) and burn it, weird things start happening to the climate. That’s because some of the carbon dioxide released in the combustion process will remain in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, trapping heat.

But this extra CO₂ doesn’t just warm the atmosphere, which is one of the flimsiest substances on earth. Nearly all of the excess atmospheric heat (94%) is absorbed by the oceans, which cover 70% of the globe.¹⁶

That’s why it’s called global warming, not atmospheric warming.

And even if you don’t “believe” in all of this global warming stuff (or even if you do, but think that a warmer climate and more atmospheric CO₂ would be beneficial for crops and other flora), you should know that the oceans aren’t just absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

They’re also absorbing a lot of this excess CO₂. Which isn’t surprising, since the oceans already absorb atmospheric CO₂ as a normal part of the planet’s Carbon Cycle.

The problem is, with all the extra CO₂ we’ve been adding to the atmosphere, the oceans are absorbing far more than they can process, becoming more acidic (less alkaline) as a result.

Ocean acidification is global warming’s evil twin.

Even now, the increasing acidity of seawater is destroying the phytoplankton at the base of the oceanic food chain, by dissolving their calcium carbonate shells. Drop a piece of chalk (fossilized phytoplankton) into a mildly acidic liquid like vinegar or carbonated water, and watch what happens.¹⁷

Acidification is a huge problem, because no little critters for the fish to eat = no fish for us to eat, and no more whales to watch. Since the oceans provide about 15% of humanity’s dietary protein, the choice is clear: Reverse our carbon emissions, or acquire a taste for jellyfish.

Even more worrisome: Oceanic phytoplankton excretes about half of the world’s supply of atmospheric oxygen.¹⁸ So completely aside from the issues of smog, acid rain, global warming and climate change, if you’re partial to breathing air and if you enjoy seafood . . .

END NOTES

1. http://www.ecomodernism.org/

Download the Manifesto pdf.

2. http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html Critique.

See internal footnote No. 12

3. http://tinyurl.com/hhwmpzz

4.

http://www.pe.com/2017/01/23/ivanpah-solar-plant-built-to-limit-greenhouse-gases-is-burning-more-natural-gas/

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

6.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/03/18/1503359/-Wind-and-Solar-s-Fukushima-The-Methane-Meltdown-at-Porter-Ranch

7. https://www.kcet.org/redefine/socalgas-aliso-canyon-leak-a-disaster-for-climate

37,000 tonnes methane leaked is equivalent to annual emissions of 195,000 passenger cars.

Total amount of methane leaked from Porter Ranch was 94,000 tonnes, according to CARB. By proportion, 94,000 tonnes / 37,000 t = 2.54.  Multiply 195,000 cars X 2.54 = 495,000 cars. Assume 12,000 miles / yr @ 20 miles / gal; 495,000 cars X 12,000 mi / yr ÷ 20 mi / gallon = 297 million gallons of gasoline.

8. Carbon-free electric generation avoids about 405 kg CO₂ emission per megawatt-hour of production, assuming that it replaces natural gas-fueled Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) electric plants.

California wind and solar produced 20 million MW-hrs in 2013 (stated as 20 billion kW-hrs in the fourth paragraph).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/10/02/are-california-carbon-goals-kaput/

Therefore California’s wind and solar avoided 405 kg CO₂ / MW-hr X 20 million MW-hr = 8.1e9 kg CO₂ = 8.1 million tonnes CO₂ avoided in 2013.

Per California Air Resources Board (CARB) the Porter Ranch total emission was 94,000 tonnes of methane. At a GWP of 84X, that’s 7.9 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (CO₂-e).

7.9 million tonnes ÷ 8.1 million tonnes avoided = 98%. Therefore nearly one year’s worth of emissions benefit was wasted by Porter Ranch.

9.

http://www.theenergycollective.com/energy-post/2375967/wind-and-solars-achilles-heel-what-the-methane-meltdown-at-porter-ranch-means-for-the-energy-transition

See: “From Sea to Shining Sea.”

10. http://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2013/01/04/measuring-fugitive-methane-emissions/

See 4th paragraph.

11. Ibid. See 1st paragraph.

12. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-diablocanyon-naturalgas-2016jul03-story.html

13.

http://norewardisworththis.tumblr.com/post/64845798933/snl-quien-es-mas-macho-sketch-from-21719

14. http://windpower.sandia.gov/other/080983.pdf

See Page 16.

https://us.sunpower.com/sites/sunpower/files/media-library/data-sheets/ds-e20-series-327-residential-solar-panels.pdf

See Page 2, note 4.

15. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051106/abstract

16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuttOKcTPQs

17. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0607_040607_phytoplankton.html

18. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0607_040607_phytoplankton.html

A fuel-free lifestyle and the quest for the holy grail

Aside from a handful of CSP plants comprising 7.3% of the basic 2050 grid, and another handful comprising the grid’s entire 4.38% overbuild, none of the Roadmap’s farms will have any built-in training wheels. External backup or energy storage would be the only two reliable ways to make the Roadmap’s fuel-free grid work.

Cheap storage is the holy grail of renewable energy, the long sought game-changer that will finally put renewables on par with traditional baseload systems.

With enough cheap storage, the bits and bursts of energy gathered from wind and solar can be collected and later released in a smooth, steady stream that mimics the dependable power we rely upon for modern life.

But the Roadmap has a better idea: Eliminate the need for storage. With enough oversized farms in enough locations backing each other up, who needs storage?

This is an adventurous proposition, because the light and motion that make renewables work isn’t under human control and never will be, unless and until the energy we make with it can be transferred to a storable medium.

Our existing grid has a 2.5X overbuild, consisting of fossil, nuclear, and hydro plants. All these systems have storage in the form of actual fuel, or in the potential energy of elevated water. And though drought is eroding our hydro capacity, we still have plenty of fossil and nuclear fuel on hand.

Traditional power plants extract energy from their fuel supply (a load of coal, a fuel tank, a fuel rod, or a reservoir of water) and generate power with that energy day and night.

Fuel (or elevated water) enables these plants to adjust their output, sometimes within minutes, to respond to predictable peak loads.

Renewables, not so much.

Gridmasters of the 21st-and-a-half century

Overbuilding the grid is all about how much extra generating capacity (fuel or hydro) can be reliably brought into service with adequate lead time.

The operative concept is “reliability,” but the Roadmap dispenses with this old-school notion. Its 4.38% overbuild of extra CSP farms will rely strictly on sunshine – if and when it’s available.

As you can imagine, this may not suffice to ensure grid stability. For example, California needs to find 60 additional MWs per minute every afternoon, as the sun’s energy fades past its midpoint and solar production declines.

So let’s play gridmaster, and examine the quantity of extra power potentially available in 2050, to see just how wobbly the grid might be without training wheels.

First off, the Roadmap calls for adding 19.2 GWs to our dammed hydro production, from our current 28.7 GWs, for a new peak capacity of 47.9 GWs (3% of the 2050 grid). This will be done by upgrading the turbines and extending operating hours.

However, the turbines in our large dams weren’t designed to be ramped up and down as fast-response backups, even if they were upgraded. So we’re guessing that the Roadmap’s expansion of our hydro dams would probably include the installation of additional, fast-start hydro turbines.

It’s just our speculation, but our large existing dam turbines would most likely function as they always have, providing both baseload and what Europe calls intermediate load – power that can be slowly ramped up and down to meet predictable daily and seasonal demand. The newly installed turbines would be fast-start models to respond to unexpected peak loads.

We’ll also have our existing 22 GWs (peak capacity) of pumped hydro storage, which can run for about 12 hours – if the reservoirs are full. Which means the Roadmap, through no fault of its own, will actually inherit a tiny amount of storage. And, we’ll have the Roadmap’s 69.7 GWs of overbuild CSP.

Our intrepid gridmasters of 2050 will therefore have the following options:

• 19.2 GWs of backup power from expanded hydro capacity
• 22 GWs of pumped hydro for 12 hrs (if we can fill the reservoirs)
• 69.7 GWs (4.38% of grid) from overbuild CSP (if it was a sunny day)

That’s a theoretical blue-sky maximum of 110.9 GWs (about 7% of the grid.) Which is great, until we have an extended period of unfavorable weather.

And that’s the Roadmap’s entire backup for the 2050 grid. We recommend more.

Cargo Cult

Staking out a patch of wilderness and waiting for energy to come along is what we call a Cargo Cult approach to power.

In World War II, remote Pacific Islanders marveled at the bounty that washed ashore from torpedoed cargo ships. As far as they knew, they must have finally thrown the right virgin in the right volcano, because all of a sudden the gods were sending them tons of free goodies.

Mother Nature sends us an inexhaustible bounty of wind, waves, tide and sunlight. WWS “islands” catch this light and motion and make electric power at her whim.

But if we can’t use the power as soon as it’s made, we have to store it or dump it. At least cargo-cult Spam had a shelf life.

Lithium-ion batteries are mentioned in the Roadmap’s footnotes, but they aren’t formally factored in, probably because they’re prohibitively expensive and haven’t been tested at scale.

In any case, those that are on the market are only warrantied for 10 years. So even if prices drop like a rock, their lifespans will have to grow by 6X to match a reactor’s.

But the battery guys aren’t about to give up.

Big-ass batteries

In July of 2017, Elon Musk promised to build a 100-MW lithium-ion battery in 100 days, to store the excess production of a South Australian wind farm.¹

If he makes his self-imposed 100-day deadline, the price is $50 Million. If he misses the deadline, it’s free. (No worries – he can afford it.)

Existing Li-ion battery technology enables a storage capacity of one kWhr with about 77 grams of lithium metal.² So Musk’s battery will contain about 10 tons of lithium.³

That is one big-ass battery. But it’s still not big enough – like everything else in the field of renewables, it’s a nice idea that doesn’t scale.

Just one hour of energy storage for the Roadmap’s 1,591-GW grid would require over 122,000 tonnes of lithium (77 tonnes per GW-hr × 1,591.)

That’s more than 3 times the total global production of lithium in 2016, which was 36,000 tonnes.⁴ Flip the numbers around:

All the lithium mined on planet Earth in 2016 would provide a whopping 18 minutes of all-grid storage for the 2050 Roadmap (36,000 tonnes ÷ 122,000 tonnes = 0.3. And 0.3 hrs = 18 minutes.)

But wait! There’s less!

Liquid-flow batteries have been generating considerable interest in renewables circles as a possible solution to mass energy storage. Don’t get too excited.

The battery consists of two tanks of different electrolyte solutions (dissolved minerals.) The liquids are pumped into a divided chamber (the two solutions never touch) to produce a flow of dc (direct current) electricity.

The liquids are returned to their tanks, and the system is recharged, using surplus electricity from a wind or solar farm (when it’s available) for another round.

Vanadium oxide is the electrolyte mineral of choice. Unlike a solid lithium battery, which eventually wears down and must be dismantled to recycle the material, a vanadium electrolyte solution can be used over and over again.

Problem is, a grand total of just 79,400 metric tonnes of vanadium were mined last year, over half of it in China. And they used 90% of it for making steel, not batteries.

Aside from resource availability, the problem with flow batteries is energy density: Vanadium electrolyte solution can only store 0.36 MW-hrs per tonne of vanadium, compared to lithium’s storage capacity of 13 MW-hrs per tonne. That’s a 36:1 ratio.

And, the round-trip efficiency of a flow battery is about 75%, compared to a lithium battery’s 90%. But here’s the real deal breaker:

If all 79,400 tonnes of vanadium that was mined worldwide in 2015 were used to make electrolyte solution for one big-ass flow battery, it would store about one minute of all-grid storage.⁵ 

Back to the drawing board.

UTES (no, not the tribe . . .)

Underground Thermal Energy Storage (UTES) is mostly done in the form of borehole energy storage (BHES).

Basically, borehole is just a residential heat pump writ large and enhanced with thermal solar panels, those black plastic rooftop panels that heat circulating water.

The hot water is sent through a network of underground pipes and the surrounding soil retains the heat, which can later be retrieved for space heating.

Since different soils retain heat with varying degrees of efficiency, borehole is a site-dependent technology. But it works well enough that the authors of the Roadmap chose it for the bulk of our heating needs.

Sounds boring, but space heating is a sizable slice of our energy pie, currently consuming about 10% of primary energy.⁶

(Remember, primary energy is all the energy we use: For air, land, and sea transportation; for construction, industrial process heat, space heating, etc., as well as electricity.)

The Roadmap removes space heating from the 2050 primary energy pie because it’ll be produced independently of the grid, using borehole rather than grid electricity.

Fair enough – for our all-nuclear grid we’ve done the same.

With improved efficiency and building insulation, the Roadmap estimates that our national space heating requirements will drop to just 7.2% of our total primary energy, down from the approximately 10% that space heating now consumes (mostly natural gas and heating oil.) That 7.2% amounts to 114.7 GWs, derived from heat, not electricity.

Good old H­₂­O

 Like a hydroelectric dam, pumped hydro (PHES, or Pumped Hydro Energy Storage) generates energy from the force of falling water.

A superior storage system, pumped hydro comprises nearly 99% of all mass energy storage in the world. The U.S. currently has a peak capacity of 22 GWs, which is about 2% of our grid’s total peak power.⁷

Essentially, pumped hydro acts like a dam: Pump water uphill when you have the power to spare, and let it run back down through the same reversible turbines when you need the power to satisfy electric demand.

The round-trip efficiency is about 80%: If you use 100 megawatt-hours to pump up the hydro, you’ll get 80-ish MW-hrs back.

Unlike our existing hydroelectric dams, our pumped hydro reservoirs aren’t factored into the 2050 grid. Probably because, strictly speaking, pumped hydro doesn’t generate its own electricity. Rather, it stores and re-generates (most of) the energy that was used to fill its reservoir in the first place.

Prices may vary

When it comes to mass energy storage, pumped hydro is the gold standard that has to be matched or beaten by other non-fuel storage technologies. And it’s as low-tech and reliable as gravity.

Like borehole, the cost and efficiency of pumped hydro is site-dependent. If there’s a dammable, high-elevation valley nearby, or an abandoned watertight mine, you’re in luck. Otherwise, you’ll have to build two reservoirs, not one.

This is one reason why pumped hydro prices vary from a few pennies per installed watt-hour, to well over a dollar. To be more than fair, we’ll calculate pumped hydro for the 2050 grid based on the lowest quintile: $0.20 per watt-hour of stored energy. It’ll be interesting to see if P2G can match or beat that $0.20.

So why did we call out a price per “installed watt” for a fueled power plant, if we called out a price per “installed watt-hour” for storage?

Because any fueled generator can continuously produce power at its nameplate rating as long as it has fuel. But storage can only deliver a finite amount of energy before it has to be recharged, refueled, or refilled.

Unlike the heat stored in CSP’s molten salt, pumped hydro energy doesn’t fade away, unless the water evaporates or the reservoir leaks. Which is why fresh water is a must: A saltwater leak would be catastrophic to the local flora. That’s why ancient armies would sow their enemy’s fields with salt.

The drawbacks of large-scale pumped hydro are the gargantuan amounts of water required, and the evaporative loss that’s bound to occur. Not to mention the permanent inundation of habitable land.

In these days of severe drought, fresh water is a major concern – especially in the southwest U.S., where most of our solar farms would be.

To put the volume of water in perspective, it would take almost 135 days of America’s total fresh water consumption (irrigation, industry, tap water, the works) to store one day of power at 1,591 GWs, or one “grid day”.

So that’s off the table.

We’ll explain how we arrived at 135 days in the section “One ESB” below. But first:

Another shameless plug for our favorite technology

The general consensus of MSR engineers is that Molten Salt Reactors can be built for an average cost of $2.00 an installed watt, which would make them substantially cheaper than a coal plant.⁸

The reactors of an all-nuclear grid could generate about 550 grid days of power (18 months) before refueling. And that’s if we use traditional solid-fuel reactors.

Liquid-fuel Molten Salt Reactors would be even better, since an MSR can be refueled while it’s running by simply pouring in more fuel salt.

Like most other Gen IV reactors, a pair of small MSRs would enable switching from one reactor to the other, so the first one can be taken back to the factory for service and refueling.⁹

ThorCon’s twin 500-MW reactors will feature continuous production. A fresh reactor will come online as a spent reactor is shut down and shipped back to the factory.

This eliminates the downtime that is ordinarily backed up by the rest of the fleet, meaning the entire collection of power plants that generate power for the grid.

Since an MSR can run non-stop for 4–10 years before it needs to be serviced, the ability to refuel on the fly, and / or the ability to switch to a fresh on-site reactor, are two major advantages that give Gen IV reactors a capacity factor that will probably exceed 99%.

Of all the Gen IVs, we feel the MSR is the solution for our energy needs, featuring:

• 99% uptime
• Cheaper than a coal plant
• An endless supply of cheap fuel
• The physical impossibility of a meltdown
• No spread of contamination in case of a malfunction
• The ability to operate exactly where the power is needed
• The ability to use “waste” (including weapons) as a secondary fuel

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

One ESB

We coined the term “ESB” to refer to the volume of one Empire State Building – the amount of falling water required to generate 250 MW-hrs of electric energy.

A 100-meter drop provides a good pressure head, like the standpipe in a skyscraper. Which is what inspired the term.

Imagine if the Empire State Building was made entirely of water, like the water snake in The Abyss.¹⁰ Now picture that water draining by gravity through a bank of hydro-turbines in the basement.

That’s one ESB.

Under perfect conditions (with 100%-efficient machinery) 917,400 cubic meters of water, falling 100 meters, would be all the water you need: That much water has a kinetic energy capable of producing 250 MW-hrs of electric energy.¹¹

 But in real-world conditions, hydro turbine-generator efficiency is about 90%. So the actual water volume required to generate 250 MW-hrs is 1,020,000 m³ (917,400 ÷ 0.90 = 1,020,000.)

The ideal water volume of 917,400 m³ is roughly equal to the visible part of the Empire State Building, which is 900,000 cubic meters. The entire structure, including the basement, comes to 1,100,000 m³. So the ESB acronym works in either case.

Of course, a reservoir would never be shaped like that. We’re just trying to give you a good visual on the volume of water required.

Drop one ESB in one hour and you generate 250 MWs. Drop it in 5 hours and you get 50 MWs for five hours. Drop it in 10 hours and you get 25 MWs for 10 hours. Et cetera. The rule of thumb is: “One ESB = 250 MW-hrs.”

[NERD NOTE: One tonne (1,000 kilograms) of pure water has the volume of one cubic meter, and weighs slightly more than 2,200 lbs in the English system of measurement.

(And no, tonne is not pronounced “tonay” or “tunny.” A tonne is a tonne.)

In the U.S., a tonne is often called a “metric ton” to distinguish it from a 2,000-lb U.S. ton, which is sometimes called a “short ton”. At 2,200 lbs, a metric ton is also called a “long ton”.

Weight is gravity’s pull on mass. So we’re actually talking about a mass of water with a volume of one cubic meter, which just so happens to weigh about 2,200 lbs on this planet. The same mass of water would weigh more, or less, on another world.

All these labels and numbers might seem confusing, but that’s because we in the U.S. adopted the antiquated measurements of inches, feet, yards and pounds from England, while the rest of the world adopted the metric system.

Science uses the metric system because all metric measurements – volume, energy, mass, distance, force, work, power, etc. – fit together like Legos into a simple, elegant, and logical framework. And it all comes back to the weight and volume of water.¹²

 They don’t call this a water planet for nothing.]

Pump up the hydro¹³

At the rate of 1,020,000 m³ for 250 MW-hrs, we would need about 156 billion cubic meters of water (that’s 156 cubic kilometers) to generate one grid-day of power.

In 2010, the U.S. consumed about 421 cubic kilometers of fresh water. Which means that one grid-day of pumped-hydro energy production requires the fresh water consumption of the entire nation for nearly 135 days.¹⁴

Even at the bargain-basement price of $0.20 per installed watt-hour, twenty-four hours of pumped hydro for the entire 1,591-GW grid would cost $7.6 Trillion.¹⁵ Plus you’ll need enough fresh water, and the land to build the reservoirs.

Keep in mind, prices will vary depending on site conditions. But even with the most favorable conditions, one grid day of storage (a prudent insurance policy) would balloon the cost of the Roadmap to nearly $23 Trillion.

That’s a lot of money, and a lot of water – 152,700 ESBs to be exact. If the entire island of Manhattan was a solid mass of Empire State Buildings, built window-to-window, you would need 19 Manhattan Islands to accommodate that many ESBs.

All of which is ridiculous. So let’s explore a (slightly) more reasonable scenario:

WWS advocates say that with a smartly managed grid, wind and solar farms will only need a few hours’ storage. Since the number 4 has been bandied about, let’s do the math:

Four hours is 1/6th of a day, which comes to about 23 days of total U.S. fresh water use. Which is still ridiculous.

Granted, the electric grid would never have to be backed up in its entirety, even for 4 hours. But with a major interruption like the Northeast Blackout of August 2003, a substantial portion might need backup for a day or more. These things add up.

In our view, a mere four hours of all-grid backup is pretty darn optimistic for a fuel-free grid. Our existing grid has a safety margin of 150%, and virtually all the power plants we have, including our backup systems, are powered by fuel or hydro, with plenty of extra fuel on hand.

Even then, we still have the occasional wide-area blackout.

Nevertheless, the authors of the Roadmap are confident that we can enjoy a clean and green fuel-free future, utilizing geographic sweet spots in all 50 states.

Distributing, diversifying, and interconnecting our 50,000-plus WWS farms would (hopefully) ensure that the bulk of them would never be idle at the same time, and would always be able to back each other up.

Which looks great on paper, until you look out the window.

END NOTES

1.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/all-the-details-on-teslas-giant-australian- batteryt/

2. Our estimate of 77 grams of Li per kW-hr of battery storage is averaged from two sources:

http://www.batteryeducation.com/2010/05/what-is-the-total-equivalent-lithium-content-of-my-battery.html

A 10.8 volt (V), 8.8 amp-hour (Ah) Li-ion battery contains 7.9 grams (g) lithium.10.8 V X 8.8 coulombs / sec X 3,600 sec / h = 342e3 joules (J) energy content of battery. Conversion factor: 1 kWh = 3.6e6 J. 342e3 J X 1 kWh / 3.6e6 J = 0.095 kWh energy content of the battery. Therefore: 7.9 g Li / 0.095 kWh = 83 g lithium / kWh.

Now click on:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_content_of_pure_lithium_eg_kg_kWh_in_Li-ion_batteries_used_in_electric_vehicles

Refer to derivation by Saeed Kazemiabnavi: lithium content = 0.0714 kg /kWh or 71 g lithium /kWh.

Average the values 71 g and 83 g to obtain 77 g Li /kWh.

3. Ibid. Footnote #1. See 2nd paragraph:

100 MW / 129 MW-hrs refers to 129 megawatt-hours of energy storage (energy content, or energy “capacity”), with a maximum power output (discharge rate) of 100 megawatts. As usual, the word “capacity” is misused here to refer to peak power output.

129e6 W-hrs energy content X 77 g Li /1e3 W-hrs = 9.9e6 g Li, or 9.9 tonnes lithium.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_production

5. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/css_2016_energy.pdf

6.

http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage

7. http://thorconpower.com/costing

http://thorconpower.com/costing/bottom-line

http://thorconpower.com/docs/exec_summary.pdf

See: Frame 62, page 61.

8. http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf

See: page 6ff

9. One cubic meter of water has mass (m) = 1000 kilograms (kg). Acceleration due to earth’s gravity (g) = 9.81 meters / second per second (9.81 m / s²). Force (F) [also called weight] = mass X acceleration = m X g. F = 1000 kg X 9.81 m / s² = 9.81e3 newtons (N). Kinetic energy (NRG) from falling 100 meters onto hydroturbine = F X distance = 9.81e3 N X 100 m = 981e3 joules (J) per cubic meter. Conversion factor: 1 watt-hour (Wh) = 3.6e3 J.

Therefore:

981e3 J per m3 of water / 3.6e3 J /Wh = 273 Wh of kinetic NRG per m3 of water.

Ideally, 1 ESB = 917,400 m³ (with 100% efficient machinery).

273 W-hrs / m³ X 917,400 m³ = 250e6 W-hrs. Or 250 megawatt-hours per 1 ESB.

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MJkAoA1Nek

11. The metric system is an amazing, ingenious, brilliant, and stupid-simple method of measurement based on two everyday properties of a common substance that are exactly the same all over the world: the weight and volume of water.

One cubic meter (m³) of pure H₂O = one metric ton (~ 2,200 lbs) = 1,000 kilograms = 1,000 liters. And one liter  = 1 kilogram (~ 2.2 lbs) = 1,000 grams = 1,000 cm³ (cubic centimeters.) And one cm³ of water = one gram, hence the word “kilogram,” which means 1,000 grams. And a tonne is a million grams.

You may have already deduced that metric linear measurements are related to the same volume of water: A meter is the length of one side of a one-tonne cube of water, and a centimeter is the length of one side of a one-gram cube of water.

Metric energy measurements are based on another thing that’s exactly the same all over the world: the force of falling water. One cubic centimeter (one gram) of water, falling for a distance of 100 meters (about 378 feet) has the energy equivalent of right around one “joule” (James Prescott Joule was a British physicist and brewer in the 1800s who figured a lot of this stuff out.)

One joule per second = one watt. (Energy used or stored over time = power. A joule is energy, a watt is power.) A million grams (one tonne) falling 100 meters per second = a million joules per second = a million watts, or one megawatt (MW). One MW for 3,600 seconds (one hour) = one MWh (megawatt-hour.)

They don’t call this a water planet for nothing.

12. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

13. To calculate the water needed for one “grid-day” of energy: 1,591e9 W X 24 hr = 38.2e12 W-hrs. 38.2e12 W-hrs per grid-day X 1,020,000 m³ / 250e6 Wh = 156e9 m³ of fresh water = one grid-day.

https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/wuto.html

U.S. annual water use = 397 million acre-feet per year, of which 86% was fresh water, so 341 million acre-feet. Multiply by conversion factor 1.233e-6 km³ / acre-foot. Obtain 421 km³ / year, or 421e9 m³ / year

1,56e9 m³ per grid-day / 421e9 m³ water usage / year X 365 days per year = 135 days of fresh water usage for one grid-day.

14. 1,591 GWs X 24 hrs = 38.2 Terawatt hrs (trillion watt-hrs.) 38.2 trillion watts X $0.20 per W-hr = $7.64 Trillion.

To be perfectly clear

We do think that small-scale renewables can be a clean and effective solution for off-grid and undeveloped regions. But in developed areas, the grid is expected to perform as reliably as our water, sewer, fire and police “utilities”: they serve us 99.9+% of the year, night and day, rain or shine.

When you try to scale WWS technologies to run a factory, hospital or town, much less a city, state or country, the notion becomes more hopelessly impractical the more you think it through.

For starters, here’s a big reason why:

Energy Density

Energy must be collected and directed to do work.

Mother Nature has already gathered and stored her energy in substances we call fuel – stable, portable stuff from which we can extract the energy we need, when and where we need it.

WWS advocates don’t seem to fully appreciate these two essential points:

• Fuel is energy storage
• Renewables are fuel-free systems

That’s worth repeating:

• Fuel is storage
• Renewables are fuel-free systems

Burn those points into your brain, and renewables will be a lot easier to understand.

Thus far, civilization has advanced by exploiting ever more energy-dense fuels: Wood, coal, petroleum, gas and nuclear.

Fossil fuel takes about 100 million years to form, as carbon-rich organic material is drawn into the earth’s crust by the motion of tectonic plates, where it’s heated under pressure to form coal, petroleum and natural gas.

While fossil fuels are some of the most energy-dense substances we use, nuclear fuel is a million times denser.

Its heavy atoms were formed in the supernova shockwaves of dying stars, where small atoms were fused into larger ones, becoming trace elements in the stardust that coalesced into planets.

These oversized atoms can be thought of as tiny fusion batteries, retaining some of the ancient energy that formed them billions of years ago. Nuclear fission is the process of splitting these unstable atoms to exploit their stored energy.

In fact, over half the heat in the earth’s core comes from the radioactive decay of thorium, uranium, and potassium-40, along with some naturally occurring fission. That heat, plus friction, and the residual heat from earth’s formation, keeps the outer core’s rotating mass molten, or melted.¹

The constant circulation of this liquid metal creates our magnetic shield. This shield is what prevents the solar wind from destroying our atmosphere. That’s what happened to Mars eons ago, when its core cooled and solidified.

So whatever misgivings you may have about nuclear material, realize that life on planet Earth wouldn’t exist without it.

Energy, power and storage

Before we get too deep in the weeds, we should clarify some terms:

• Energy is the ability to do work that can change the physical world.
• Work is utilizing energy to exert force, resulting in motion.
• Power is the rate at which energy can be used to cause physical change.

Pour some gasoline on the sidewalk and light the fumes. [Disclaimer: Don’t try this at home, or anywhere else for that matter.]

The ball of flame that sets your hair on fire also releases the gasoline’s stored (potential) chemical energy.

The combustive energy dissipates as an undirected force, jostling the air around the flame. We experience this jostling (kinetic energy) as heat, or first-degree burns.

Burn that same gasoline (plus oxygen, of course) in a car’s engine, and what was potential heat energy now produces explosive force that pushes down on the pistons. Their motion is successfully applied force doing work.

Doing it over and over again for an extended period of time is how the engine generates the steady power to move the car. The potential energy stored in the gasoline has now become the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle.

Some of the potential energy in the fuel is wasted as exhaust heat and mechanical friction. This applies to any power source.

The period of time that the engine can propel the car depends upon two things: How much energy (gasoline) is stored in the tank, divided by how much of that energy is used per unit of time. Energy ÷ time = power.

Energy, power, and storage are the three interlocking parameters that any power plant must contend with, whether they use actual fuel or not.

Reinventing the waterwheel

The recent interest in renewables appears to be a reversal of the historical trend toward more energy density, in the sense that wind, water, and sunlight are regarded as less-dense forms of fuel.

Except they’re not really fuels at all.

Renewables are fuel-free systems that exploit ambient natural phenomena by gathering and concentrating diffuse and variable bits of energy from the environment.

But the light and motion they exploit are not stable, storable, or transportable. That light and motion must either be utilized on the spot to make energy, or converted into something that can be stored for later use, typically as the electricity in a battery or the water in a reservoir.

That conversion will always entail a loss of energy. And while this stored energy can be loosely thought of as fuel, its wind, water and sunlight precursors cannot.

An example is the potential energy of an elevated reservoir. The water isn’t actually fuel; the reservoir is simply storing the energy that was used to pump the water uphill.

Most of that energy is re-generated when the water flows back downhill through the same reversible turbines, with about 20% of the energy lost in the round trip.²

The scope of the problem

Implementing the Roadmap would easily dwarf our industrial mobilization for World War Two, and last nearly nine times as long: 35 years instead of 4 years.

Even so, we’ll probably still need to import a massive amount of wind and solar equipment – if it’s available. And that’s a big IF.

Because if the rest of the world embarks on their own Roadmap, which the Solutions Project recommends, no major exporter (read: China) will be able to keep up with global demand, and may stop exporting altogether to build their own national WWS grid.

Long story short: Everybody will be on their own.

Nevertheless, Dr. Jacobson and his colleagues have just released a Global Roadmap for the 139 countries that generate 99% of the world’s carbon energy.³ As you read through our examination of his 50-state U.S. Roadmap, it will be easy to see that their global roadmap is doomed to be just as impractical.

To stop and reverse anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming and ocean acidification, the entire world must replace the fossil fuel it uses with a reliable and “renewable” (read: inexhaustible) source of carbon-free power.

We strongly suggest nuclear energy, the next step in fuel’s historical evolution of big punch / tiny package. Renewables are all about tiny punch / big package.

The notion of running the country on fuel-free renewables may sound like an elegant solution to pollution and climate change, but WWS advocates should keep three fundamentals firmly in mind:

• The gargantuan amount of on-demand energy our nation needs
• The scale of the project they’re proposing to produce that energy
• The environmental impacts and resource consumption that would result

The U.S. has just 4.4% of the world’s population, but we currently consume 18% of the world’s energy ­­– about 4X average global consumption.⁴

An all-renewables U.S. electric grid would be the largest construction project in history, by far. And the most expensive – like we said, nearly equal to an entire second military budget for 35 years, and that’s without adequate backup or storage.

Another way of looking at it: The bare-bones Roadmap would cost three times what the U.S. spent, in constant dollars, on World War Two and the Iraq War combined.

Wind and solar systems capture diffuse and ambient energy to generate power. Which means that vast tracts of land and boatloads of equipment will be needed to gather and concentrate the energy into a useable form.

And if it’s not used on the spot, or if there’s not enough to satisfy demand, backup and storage will be needed to ensure an adequate supply, and that will require even more land, equipment and resources.

And even then, the entire Rube Goldberg scheme will only generate a reliable flow of power if the weather cooperates.

Not as easy as it sounds

Wind, water and solar are not, and never can be, independent, consistent, and dependable sources of power.

While their “fuel” is free and renewable, gathering and exploiting the energy that results is expensive. And, their intermittent nature greatly complicates the effort and cost.

Wind, water and sunlight ebb and flow, come and go. Harnessing them as a source of power requires converting enough of their motion and light to energize the grid.

Hoover Dam is mighty impressive, and its massive turbo-generators are a sight to behold. But what’s often overlooked are the tens of thousands of square miles needed to gather the rain that eventually flows into Lake Mead, its artificial reservoir.

Also overlooked are the downstream effects: Northwest Mexico was once a lush delta of verdant farmland, before the U.S. dammed the Colorado. Now it’s a desert wasteland.

The same principle applies to solar and wind. Vast tracts of land and a stupendous inventory of equipment placed on that land would be needed to collect and concentrate the fitful energy of wind and sunlight.

That energy can either be exploited in real time, or stored for later use – if we can afford an adequate means of storage (more on this later.)

Like any form of renewable energy, hydro power is also at Mother Nature’s mercy, though the effects play out in slow motion. As the drought increases, Lake Mead drops inch by inch, gradually decreasing the output and reliability of Hoover Dam.

Currently, the power production of U.S. dams is down about 20% since the mid-1990s. They now generate just 6% of domestic electricity.⁵

Our increased awareness of the environmental and ecological impact of dams and reservoirs, including the methane released from their algae blooms and drowned flora, is making dams increasingly unpopular.

In some cases, the greenhouse effect of methane from a dam’s reservoir, or a pumped hydro system’s reservoir, can actually be worse than if the same electricity was produced by fossil fuel.

Water scarcity is another issue. Indeed, as our drought unfolds, hydro may eventually become as unreliable – and impractical – as wind and solar.

END NOTES

1. https://www.livescience.com/15084-radioactive-decay-increases-earths-heat.html

2. http://energystoragesense.com/pumped-hydroelectric-storage-phs/

3. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1

4. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

See 5th line in list: “hydro power”

The big idea

Burning stuff is a grossly inefficient way to generate power.

So the Roadmap proposes that we do much more than just clean up our electric power production, which now requires 39% of the primary energy we consume, mostly derived from burning fossil fuel.¹

Primary energy refers to all the energy we use, not just electricity, and regardless of how it’s produced. And even though electricity is only 15% of our consumer energy pie,² it takes 39% of our primary energy pie (mostly derived from fossil fuel) to generate that 15%. The rest is lost as waste heat.

The Roadmap aims to reduce this inefficiency by producing all of our primary energy in the form of WWS-generated electricity. Which, in principle, is a great idea (the electricity part, not the WWS part.)

So the Roadmap is about a lot more than just keeping the lights on. It also covers transportation, cooking, heating and cooling. Anything that involves energy, including process heat (the high temperatures used to make steel, concrete, etc.)

With enough clean electricity, we can free ourselves from fossil fuel without immediately junking every vehicle we have and switching to EVs (electric vehicles):

Electricity, water and CO₂ (captured from the atmosphere or smokestacks) can be used to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels (synfuel), to get the full life cycle out of our existing fossil-fueled vehicles and their supporting infrastructure.

Today’s carbon fuel infrastructure is more than just the drillers, refiners, and end-consumers. It also includes everything in between: Virtually all transport and shipping by air and sea, and the millions of fossil vehicles on the road, as well as the fuel storage, distribution, repair, parts and maintenance needed to service these assets during their lifespans. The trick is to exploit these assets as cleanly as we can.

We could even make synfuel for our fast-response gas turbines, the hot-rod power plants that respond to unforeseen peak loads on the grid. We may have to, if we’re still using them to balance the grid when we finally run out of methane (natural gas.)

At our current rate of consumption, we’ll run out of methane in less than a century. If we replace all of our coal power with methane power, it could happen in 50 years. Even quicker if we start exporting the stuff. And just as soon as we build a fleet of LNG tankers (liquefied natural gas), we will.

 All hands on deck!

“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.” ³

– Marshall McLuhan

The task of our generation is to make an informed decision on the best way to get to a sustainable, zero-carbon world, and to act on that decision “with vigor!” as President John F. Kennedy used to say.

Unfortunately, making that decision entails wading through some rather science-y stuff. It also means shedding a lot of pre-conceptions, prejudice, and tribalism.

The “renewables vs. nuclear” divide has often been split along political lines, with lefties / greens all in for renewables while demonizing nuclear power.

That’s gradually changing. In fact, many of the nuclear advocates and scientists we personally know are either centrists or left of center, and some are even social democrats. Very few of them could be considered right-wingers or free marketeers.

But regardless of your politics or ideology, there are two things to keep in mind:

• Science is (or should be) above politics
• Belief is a barrier to understanding

We’ve tried to make our analysis as fair and painless as possible, because something this big and this important shouldn’t be left to the Powers That Be. It’s up to all of us to make an informed decision.

For that to happen, the basic knowledge of what it takes to cleanly and adequately power the nation, and the world, should be conveyed in the most non-partisan and user-friendly way possible.

A clean-energy solution comes down to either renewables or nuclear

Sorry, but an “all of the above” energy strategy is politically-correct greenwash.

It may seem like the most realistic strategy, given the politics involved and given the fact that today’s orthodoxy dictates that green = renewable energy, as distinct from green = clean energy (because “clean energy” includes nuclear power.)

But the all-of-the-above catchphrase implies that the load will be more-or-less equally shared among energy sources. It won’t.

The truth is, there will ultimately be just one hero in this movie, supported by an ensemble cast of low- and no-carbon characters. And the starring role will go to either renewables or nuclear.

The Roadmap arrives at the audition with some token gigawatts of geothermal, tidal and wave power, but over 95% of its primary energy would come from:

• Onshore wind
• Offshore wind
• Utility-scale PV (photovoltaic) solar
• Residential rooftop PV solar
• Commercial / government rooftop PV solar
• Concentrated solar power (CSP) with overnight thermal storage

In a separate critique,⁴ we detailed every aspect of the Roadmap ­­­– what it would take to fabricate, install, and maintain each type of WWS system for a 60-year period, which is today’s conservative estimate for the lifespan of a nuclear reactor.

When reactors were first being licensed, 40 years was considered reasonable. But now, 40 years later, inspections have shown that reactor components can easily last 60 years, and with some standard refurbishment, 80 years and perhaps 100. But to be more than fair, we’ll use 60 years as our benchmark.⁵

Some quick notes

As we mentioned, most energy experts agree that a national renewables grid would need a tremendous amount of energy storage, fueled backup, or both.

The exact amount of each is in dispute, but adequate storage alone would likely require much more than the token 4 hrs mentioned above, and cost several trillion.

The Roadmap is unusual among WWS schemes in that it largely ignores mass storage, and completely ignores backup.

The $15.2 Trillion price for the bare-bones Roadmap also leaves out the new transmission corridors required to connect its 50,000-plus wind and solar farms to the national grid.

This alone would kick up the price by an additional $0.5 Trillion or more, based on a rough average of 10 miles of new connector lines per farm to link the facility to the main trunk line (the actual grid), at the lowball price of $1 Million a mile.⁶

Another thing left out of the Roadmap is a nationwide HVDC (high voltage / direct current) transmission network. It’s something that most renewables advocates agree would be a key element in a national WWS grid.

The intermittent spurts of energy produced by wind and solar can cause serious frequency disturbances on the existing ac (alternating current) grid. And the greater wind and solar’s penetration becomes, the greater those disturbances will be. The counter-measures will likely be expensive, and they may not even work – we won’t really know until we try them.

A direct-current grid would have none of these issues, and would greatly reduce line loss as well – typically 5% of ac energy is lost over long-distance transmission.

An HVDC grid, in parallel with our ac grid, is actually quite feasible by running underground cables along existing state and federal rights-of-way, such as highways and railroads.⁷

A national HVDC grid could probably be built for $100 – $200 Billion, which is nothing to sneeze at. But in the $15 Trillion grand scheme of things, it’s chump change.

In contrast, deploying the right reactors would require virtually no new transmission corridors, since many of the reactors would simply replace our existing fossil plants.

And since most Generation IV reactors won’t need water cooling, they could be sited virtually anywhere. That would eliminate many of our existing corridors, returning the land to the communities they run through.

Last point: Our prices are based on the latest industry and government figures, without tax breaks, rebates, or any other thumbs on the scale. Our focus is on what the Roadmap would cost the nation, not the subsidized homeowner.

With all that out of the way, here are the bottom lines up front:

Generating all U.S. primary energy by 2050 with renewables

• Land for photovoltaic solar equal to Maryland and Rhode Island
• Land for concentrated solar power equal to Connecticut
• Land for onshore wind larger than New York state, Pennsylvania, Vermont and New Hampshire
• An offshore wind region larger than West Virginia
• Our existing hydroelectric dams (upgraded to 3% of grid)
• Over 140 GWs of hydrogen production for heavy vehicles (problematic)
• 4.38% overbuild of all WWS systems (inadequate)
• Our existing pumped hydro storage (inadequate)

Bare-bones cost: $15.2 Trillion

With 4 hrs of additional pumped hydro: $16.5 Trillion   

 (Onshore wind in blue, offshore wind in purple, solar in yellow.)

Generating all U.S. primary energy by 2050 with nuclear power

• Land equal to half of Long Island (including full security perimeters)
• $6.7 Trillion with AP reactors (based on South Korea’s price for U.A.E.)
• $3 Trillion with Generation IV Molten Salt Reactors
• Existing hydroelectric dams (upgraded to 3% of grid)
• Existing pumped hydro (to match the Roadmap, but superfluous)
• 18 months (minimum) of all-grid storage, in the form of reactor fuel

Total cost (depending on the reactors used): $3 Trillion – $6.7 Trillion

                (Land for all-nuclear grid in green.)

Whichever reactors we use, a nuclear grid would be roughly 20–45% of the cost of the Roadmap, on less than 1% of the land, with 18 months of built-in storage – the fuel in each reactor.

If we go with small, factory-built reactors, a national nuclear buildout could be accomplished in 10 years.⁸ At the low end of the reactor price spread, the MSR, or Molten Salt Reactor, is our preferred technology.

It’s also the safest.

The reactor for people who don’t like reactors

The liquid-fuel, meltdown-proof, air-cooled MSR was co-invented by Alvin Weinberg, who previously developed the solid fuel, water-cooled, high-pressure Light Water Reactor (LWR).

Weinberg’s LWR began operating in the 1950s, and when it powered the submarine USS Nautilus, both the sub and the reactor became global sensations. From then on, nearly every reactor on earth has been a variation of the basic LWR concept.

But Weinberg had an even better idea.

By the 1960s, he was telling Washington that the new MSR would be a much more efficient, and far safer, reactor. Except by that time, an entire global industry had been built around the LWR and nobody wanted to hear it.

It was the Cold War, and we wanted a reactor that could easily produce plutonium for bombs and electricity for power. The LWR can do both, but not the MSR. While it’s the best reactor for making power, it’s not a reactor for making bomb material.

So despite 17,000 hours of flawless testing at Oak Ridge National Lab, the MSR was shelved in the 1970s and Weinberg was forced to retire.

He spent the rest of his life advocating for safe civilian power produced by the small, unpressurized, fuel-efficient MSR. Not only did it feature minimal waste, but it could also be configured to run on the “spent” fuel from his LWR design.

Nuclear waste is wasted fuel. But it’s only waste if you don’t use it.

After gathering dust for 45 years, MSR technology is finally being revived in the U.S., China, Canada, the EU, and elsewhere. Expect the first MSRs to be in commercial operation by the mid-2020s.

Specially designed Gen IV reactors can actually breed (produce) more nuclear fuel than they use. Others will be able to run on spent fuel, and still others will use natural (unenriched) uranium as fuel. An abundance of cheap, clean and reliable carbon-free energy will be readily available.

Thorium, which you may have heard of, is a popular candidate for fueling MSR breeder reactors. A common and slightly radioactive mineral found all over the world, thorium transmutes to (turns into) uranium fuel inside a reactor’s core.⁹

 A promising first-generation MSR design by ThorCon proposes a fuel load of half uranium and half thorium.¹⁰ A second-generation dual-fluid MSR design called a LFTR (“lifter” – Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) will use an initial kick-start load of uranium, but from then on all refuels would be 100% thorium.¹¹

 Thorium requires no enrichment, and is easily isolated with simple, low-tech chemistry. There’s plenty of the stuff, generously distributed all over the world – there is no Middle East of thorium. It’s even in Miami’s beach sand at 12 ppm (parts per million): A pickup truck of sand has enough thorium to power the city for a day.

Ironically, thorium is also found in the waste stream of the wind turbine industry. In the process of mining one tonne of neodymium for the generator of a single 5-MW wind turbine, the mine throws out one-half to three-quarters of a tonne of thorium.

That’s enough fuel to power a U.S. city of 500,000 for one year. A 5-MW wind turbine might power a village of perhaps 1,000. If it’s a windy day.

The options mentioned above combine to make nuclear a true renewable energy, with enough carbon-free fuel to power the entire planet, at our current rate of energy consumption, for literally thousands of years. Or until we figure out fusion; whichever comes first.

 Rube Goldberg and the Fukushima Syndrome

If you’re convinced that nuclear power is off the table in any discussion of clean energy, here’s a thought experiment that may give you another perspective:

• Pretend that nuclear power has one of the lowest death rates per terawatt-hour of any form of mass energy production in history, including hydroelectric, solar and wind.¹²
• Further pretend that nuclear energy doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, that the volume of waste is small and easily managed, and can be recycled for more rounds of fuel.
• Also pretend that no one died from the meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and that no one is likely to in the years ahead.
• Now pretend that there’s enough fuel to power the planet for centuries.
• Finally, pretend that no one will ever build a reactor like Chernobyl again.

Holding those ideas in mind, how attractive does wind and solar seem to you now? Particularly since everything in the foregoing list is true.

In our view, the interest in large-scale renewable energy is the direct result of a misinformed aversion to nuclear power. In the absence of that hyper-inflated fear, renewables would never be seriously considered as a viable solution for powering the grid.

Instead of refining and improving the simple, clean, safe and compact technology of splitting atoms to release their stored energy, the Roadmap offers a complex, inefficient, sprawling and expensive Rube Goldberg scheme to power the nation instead.

In case you don’t know, Rube Goldberg was a wildly popular humorist of the early 20th Century, whose syndicated newspaper cartoons depicted intricate, silly, and laughably inefficient contraptions to perform the tasks of modern life:

From our perspective, WWS schemes to power the nation amount to a ginormous self-operating napkin.

We’re happy to explain why, but the Roadmap is so complex and interwoven that we’ll have to unpack it and show you all the pieces to get our point across.

The roadmap ahead

The following chapters provide what we hope to be an easy and entertaining overview, not only of the Roadmap’s major elements components, but equally important, the broader context in which the Roadmap should be considered.

As our analysis unfolds, you’ll see that we give the Roadmap the best possible advantage at every turn.

To cite one example: its solar estimates are based on the 134-watt PV panel available at the time (2013–2015), but we used the newest (2017) high-performance 160-watt panel, which is now favored by Dr. Jacobson.¹³

The only thing in the Roadmap we didn’t use was their land estimate for solar farms. We think it’s an error, and we’ll explain how we came to that conclusion.

Since energy is the lifeblood of our modern world, the consequences of pursuing an unworkable strategy could be downright catastrophic. So this is important stuff.

As Michael Klare once said, “You don’t know what bad times are until you don’t have enough energy to run the machinery of civilization.”¹⁴

On that cheery note, let’s proceed.

And if it all becomes annoyingly intricate at times, don’t blame us. The Roadmap calls for 1,515 GWs of new-build renewables¹⁵ on a whopping 131,200 square miles¹⁶ and millions of rooftops. But our “roadmap” for powering the nation is simple:

• Install 1,515 gigawatts of small, factory-built Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) precisely where the power is needed

• Beef up our transmission corridors as required
• Dismantle the unnecessary corridors
• Break out the beers

Since small, cheap, air-cooled and meltdown-proof MSRs could be installed anywhere, even in the harshest desert, our roadmap is entirely feasible. And most of our long-distance transmission corridors would become a thing of the past.

[NERD NOTE: Liquid-fuel MSRs are physically incapable of melting down, as in “the laws of physics.” The reason is simple:

How do you melt a liquid?

If the liquid fuel leaks, it cools and solidifies like candle wax, with the radioactive particles held in chemical lockdown.

So even though the material is highly radioactive, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Visualize a spill from a concrete truck.

The mess would be measured in square meters, not square kilometers. We’d have a contaminated reactor building, not a contaminated countryside.

A Molten Salt Reactor solves the biggest drawback of nuclear power – contamination. It also solves the second biggest drawback – waste.

MSRs can utilize the residual energy in the “spent” fuel of other reactors. That unexploited energy is what makes nuclear “waste” such a long-lived problem.

Exploiting this energy reduces the storage timespan of the residual waste to about 300 years.]

One standardized MSR per day could roll off the assembly line like a Learjet, be transported by ship, truck or rail, and installed wherever it’s needed.¹⁷

We figure ten years tops for the entire buildout, with no need to import any raw material or equipment, and for much less money than we spent invading the Middle East to make the world safe for oil.

But first, let’s explore the Roadmap, because the advantages of an all-nuclear grid can best be appreciated by a thorough examination of the alternative.

We tried to make our analysis as pleasant as possible, but at the end of the day there’s no real shortcut for getting a handle on their far-ranging proposal.

We read the whole thing so you don’t have to, but unless you absorb the salient points it’ll always be Dr. Jacobson’s word against ours.

We don’t want that, he certainly doesn’t, and neither should you.

END NOTES

1. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/css_2016_energy.pdf

2. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow /electricity.pdf

Energy consumed to generate electricity = 38.52 Quads

Gross generation of electricity = 14.69 Q

Generation efficiency = 14.69 Q ÷ 38.52 Q = 0.38

0.38 X [39% of PRI NRG] = 15% of PRI NRG

3.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32944-there-are-no-passengers-on-spaceship-earth-we-are-all

4. http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html Critique.

5. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103490041.pdf

Generic Aging Lessons Learned (GALL) report, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, frame 602, page X E1-2

6. https://www.wecc.biz/Reliability/2014_TEPPC_Transmission_CapCost_Report_B+V.pdf page 2-3, Table 2-1

7. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full

8. http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf See page 17, 4^th paragraph:

“A big shipyard . . . could easily manufacture 100 one-GW-e ThorCons per year.”

So two big shipyards = 200 GWavg annually. Therefore 1,517 GW ÷ 200 GW / year = 7.6 years.

9.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/ – 3aabd483159a

10.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2010/4/liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactors See p. 307, Figure 3

11. http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf

12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

13. http://boingboing.net/2017/07/31/nuclear-energy-is-the-safest-m.html

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

14. https://us.sunpower.com/sites/sunpower/files/media-library/data-sheets/ds-e20-series-327-residential-solar-panels.pdf

See also Ibid. Chapter Two End Note #4. Critique. Search for “Land Use Utility PV Solar”, then see 15^th paragraph. Also see internal FN 22.5.

15. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175621/tomgram%3A_michael_klare,_a_thermonuclear_energy_bomb_in_christmas_wrappings/

16. From Chapter One End Note #5, we take the value of 1,591 GWs, minus the following:

a) Existing wind production of 21.8 GWavg in 2015 (Critique FN 67.3), with

b) Existing solar production of 4.4 GWavg in 2015 (Critique FN 67.7), with

c) Expected hydro production of 47.9 GWavg in 2050 (Roadmap, Table 2,

row 5, 3.01%).

Therefore 1,591 GWs – [21.8 GW + 4.4 GW + 47.9 GW] = 1,517 GWs

17.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf

Roadmap. From Table 2, row 9:

2,326,000 MWp-ac ÷ 160 Wp-ac / m² = 14.5e9 m² of solar panels.

To calculate PV land area divide by packing factor PF = 0.40 (40%). Obtain 36.3e9 m² = 36,300 km² land area; or 14,000 sq mi for utility PV solar farms.

Use the Roadmap’s assumed wind farm density of 0.089 km2 /MWp-ac:

Table 2, row 1; Wind capacity 1,701,000 MWp X 0.089 km² / MW = 151,400 km² land area; or 58,500 sq mi.

Combined PV & onshore wind = 14,000 + 58,500 = 72,500 sq mi for wind & PV solar.

Use the CSP land density of 0.039 km² / MWp that describes the Andasol CSP farm in Spain (see footnote No. 86). In the Roadmap’s Table 2, rows 10 and 11, CSP capacity = 227,300 + 136,400 = 363,700 MWp. Multiply by 0.039 km² / MW to obtain 14,200 km², or 5,500 sq mi for utility CSP farms.

Total onshore wind and solar: 72,500 + 5,500 = 78,000 sq mi.

18. Ibid. Chapter Two End Note #11. See page 15 ff

You can’t get there from here

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

In our view, the claim that the United States, much less the entire world, can be adequately powered by 100% renewable energy is extraordinary, indeed.

The claim that we can have an all-renewables grid with no backup from fueled power plants, and practically no energy storage, is even more extraordinary.

To confirm or dispel our doubts, we ran the numbers on the industry’s most highly regarded proposal, the Solutions Project’s 50-State Roadmap.¹

Short answer: It’s not a solution. Long answer follows.

The Solutions Project is an environmental group with a bold vision to power the world with 100% renewable energy, through an aggressive buildout of WWS systems (wind, water, and sunlight) and a simultaneous phase-out of fossil and nuclear power.

The public face of the project is Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, PhD, a civil engineer helming Stanford’s Atmosphere and Energy Program.

The project’s website² presents 50 detailed “roadmaps” to complete the U.S. portion of their global vision by 2050, with a custom blend of renewable systems for each state’s geography and weather.

The 50-State Roadmap has become the go-to bible for WWS advocates in any discussion of U.S. energy policy. Their goal is laudable – a clean, green global civilization by mid-century – but getting there is the problem.

And replacing carbon-free nuclear power, with carbon-free renewables, is not the solution. This book shows you why.

The Roadmap

The 132-page plan details the equipment required (solar panels, wind turbines, etc.) for each state’s participation in the national strategy. The feasibility, resource availability, and practicality of the nationwide scheme are simply assumed.

Mass energy storage plays a big role in most large-scale WWS strategies. The scenarios range from powering the entire grid from 4 hours up to an entire day.

In contrast, the tiny amount of storage in the Roadmap would only provide the equivalent of around 1.5 hours of nationwide power consumption.

The basic strategy of a wind or solar farm is the same as any actual farm: Make hay while the sun shines, use what you need, then store the rest for later or sell it.

The Roadmap takes a different approach:

• If we build enough wind and solar farms in enough places, they should all be able to back each other up – when it’s cloudy in one place, it’ll be windy in another.
• With a nationwide network of interconnected wind and solar farms, we won’t have to rely on mass quantities of energy storage, or backup from fueled power plants.
• Just in case, we can place a small amount of energy in storage, to be used for smoothing out the occasional unexpected peak loads.
• Our fueled power plants (coal, gas, and nuclear) will become obsolete, so we’ll shut them down as the buildout proceeds.

At least, that’s the plan.

While enthusiasm for the Roadmap is strong, we wonder if advocates have actually read the fine print, because the more you pencil it out the sketchier it seems.

After reviewing the entire proposal, it’s our conclusion that the Roadmap is fatally flawed. We’ll show you exactly how and why.

This is more than an academic argument. The long-term energy plans of towns, cities and states are being actively shaped around this popular proposal, and underwritten (for now) with substantial state and federal incentives.

So we all need to know if the proposal is sound. Particularly since the Roadmap has become a national meme, as if it were a well-proven, highly workable, ultimately affordable, and entirely do-able national project. Even though it’s not.

Before the renewables fans who are reading this become too annoyed, we should clarify something right here and now:

We all want the same thing.

We all want enough carbon-free energy to power the planet, reduce pollution, reverse ocean acidification and mitigate Global Warming. We’re on the same team.

Because we are, we feel obligated to explain to our fellow environmentalists in particular, and our fellow human beings in general, why it is highly unlikely that the Roadmap will take us where we need to go, especially in the time we have to act.

As appealing as it may seem at first blush, the Roadmap is, unfortunately, an expensive, complex, inefficient, and ultimately unworkable idea. If not in principle, then certainly in practice.

Don’t take our word for it. Twenty-one top climate experts, led by Dr. Christopher Clack of the University of Colorado, have reached the same conclusion, in a devastating analysis we call the Clack Evaluation.³

Their paper has inspired a flurry of bad press for the Roadmap, which will hopefully prompt a productive dialogue. We’ll explore their key finding in Chapter Ten. And if you think we’re being harsh, wait’ll you read their paper.

It is their view – and ours – that the Roadmap will get us nowhere fast.

Buckle up

 There are some major potholes in the Roadmap, and we’ll be driving right over the biggest ones we found. First off, the sheer scale of the project verges on fantasy:

• A half million giant 5-MW wind turbines on acreage equal to New York state, Pennsylvania, Vermont and New Hampshire, and in open sea region equal to West Virginia
• Billions of solar panels on land equivalent to Maryland and Rhode Island
• Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) on land equivalent to Connecticut
• Rooftop solar on 75 million homes and nearly 3 million businesses

And all of it covering 131,200 square miles (that’s miles, mind you, not acres), plus the offshore region. The number would be even larger if we accepted the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s land estimates for wind and solar at face value.

In 2009, NREL made hundreds of real-world inspections of actual, operating wind farms across the nation. And in 2016, they conducted real-world inspections of U.S. solar farms. According to their numbers, U.S. onshore wind will need 4X the land the Roadmap calls for,⁴ and 2X the land that the Roadmap estimates for solar.⁵

However, we should note that the Roadmap plans on siting 70% of its onshore wind on the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains (we’re just using east coast states for easy visual comparison.) So to be more than fair, we based our calculations⁶ on placing that 70% on the most ideal acreage possible.

We’ll explain our other gimmes as we move along. However, we did take issue with the Roadmap’s solar land estimate. We’ll explain why when we get there.

But even with all the gimmes, the numbers still don’t add up.

The Roadmap presumes that with enough wind and solar, in a wide enough variety of weather zones, a self-supporting, fuel-free, 100% WWS grid could actually power the nation on a dependable basis. And that it can all be built in 35 years.

 We disagree on both counts, and more. So do the aforementioned experts and many others in the energy field, whose criticisms have been categorically dismissed by Dr. Jacobson because many of the experts happen to be pro-nuclear.

What Dr. Jacobson doesn’t seem to accept is that they – and we – aren’t pro-nuclear, we’re pro-math.

Just to be clear

• Backup is extra generating capacity on standby that can come to the rescue on short notice.
• Storage holds a supply of energy that’s already been generated, or a supply of fuel from which energy can be generated on demand.

The key feature of backup and storage is that either or both can be quickly brought online, and their power dispatched to wherever it’s needed, to support the inevitable lapses and shortfalls of renewable energy production.

Wind and solar equipment can last from 10­–40 years: About 10 years for offshore wind turbines, 25 years for onshore turbines, and up to 40 years for solar panels.

This means that nearly 500,000 giant wind turbines, both onshore and off-, will have to be completely refurbished before the Roadmap’s 35-year buildout is complete.

It also means that 5 years after completion, we’ll have to start recycling and replacing the solar panels – all 18 billion square meters’ worth.­_­­⁷

A 40-year solar refurbishment schedule would mean the recycling and replacement of 1.23 million square meters of worn-out panels, every single day, rain or shine – forever.⁸

And note clearly: All that would do is maintain the 2050 national grid, not expand it.

So quite aside from any technical shortcomings (several of which we’ll explore), sobering questions arise:

• Can we actually pull it off?
• Do we have the money, land, labor, factories and resources?
• Equally important: Do we have the political will?

Even if the answer is yes to all three, and even if the Roadmap could actually work, and even if we could actually build it in 35 years:

• Is it really the best choice we have?

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” ­ – Yogi Berra

At this critical juncture in history, our energy choices may well determine the survival of civilization as we know it. And even if we do get our act together in time, we’re still in for a rough ride.

While going carbon-free is something our energy sector absolutely must accomplish, the Roadmap is such a big project that the entire nation will have to get on board or it won’t get done. So consensus is king.

Which raises an interesting point:

Advocates of the Roadmap tend to be politically left of center, which is fine. But they couldn’t even get Bernie nominated, much less Hillary elected.

So do these same advocates really think they can convince the American public – 47% of whom voted for a person who claims that global warming is a Chinese hoax – to sign off on a long-term monetary commitment that’s nearly the size of a second military budget?

For thirty-five years?

Or just as daunting: Do they really think they can convince Capitol Hill to re-purpose the bulk of our military budget to fight a war on climate change?

We don’t think so, either.

An inconvenient yardstick

 In principle, enough renewables in enough places should provide the energy we need. But in practice, would the Roadmap actually work? Or would it be a lateral move from pipelines to pipe dreams?

The main issues that concern us are:

• The intermittent nature of WWS systems
• The risk of relying on a fuel-free grid with no substantial backup
• The lack of adequate mass energy storage
• The World War Two-scale mobilization lasting 35 years
• The wildly optimistic buildout schedule
• The mind-boggling amount of land
• The eye-popping price tag

Cleaning up our energy act is not an option – there is no Planet B. But can we do it as the Roadmap suggests, without tanking the economy in the process? And if that’s a real concern (and it is) the follow-up question is:

Will we actually cut the check?

It’s a key question, because the bare-bones Roadmap, without sufficient backup or storage, will cost at least $15.2 Trillion. That’s Trillion with a T.⁹ (By the way, Professor Jacobson agrees with this price.¹⁰)

A modest 4 hours of pumped hydro all-grid energy storage – the cheapest mass energy storage that currently exists – would raise the price to $16.5 Trillion.

[NERD NOTE: Storage would never be used to energize the entire grid at any one moment. The hypothetical scenario is simply used as a basis of comparison between various energy storage options.]

Discretionary spending is the money that Congress decides how to spend, by passing various appropriations bills. It currently totals about $1.1 Trillion a year.

The cost of the bare-bones Roadmap is equal to 14 years of all U.S. discretionary spending. Spread out over 35 years, it would constitute about 40% of every discretionary dollar.

In contrast, a 35-year buildout for an all-nuclear grid would cost what we currently spend on SNAP, the federal program for food stamps.

And if you think the Roadmap is pricey, wait till you see the land requirements (which we left out of our cost calculations), not to mention all the fresh water we’ll need for the pumped hydro. With just 4 hours of pumped-hydro energy storage, the Roadmap’s price breaks down to over $471 Billion a year for 35 years.¹¹

That’s over 80% of our current $583 Billion military budget, and over 60% of our current $742 Billion social safety net. Year in and year out, for more than 3 decades.

That’s what the Roadmap is proposing. On over 130,000 square miles of land, and more than 75 million rooftops.

And make no mistake, we have to decide and we have to act – not now, not right now, but right freaking now, because the clock is ticking. In fact, according to the Roadmap, we’re already 2 years behind schedule.

So if we’re really serious about becoming a 100% WWS nation, it comes down to four options:

• Gut the military budget
• Gut the social safety net
• Print the money
• Some combination of the above

For 35 years. And anyone who tells you different is either blowing smoke or seriously misinformed.

The fifth option: Go nuclear!

We’ll be comparing an all-nuclear grid with an all-renewables grid, each grid totaling 1,515 GWs of new-build power plants (we’ll explain why as we go along.)

An all-nuclear grid would cost somewhere between $3 Trillion and $6.7 Trillion, depending on the reactors used.¹²

A $3 Trillion, 1,515-GW grid breaks down to about $2 an installed watt.¹³ That’s the estimated price per watt of our favorite reactor, the Generation IV MSR (Molten Salt Reactor).

The $6.7 Trillion price tag would be for a national fleet of Generation III+ AP (Advanced Passive) reactors. South Korea’s KEPCO is building four AP-1400s (1,400 megawatts) in the United Arab Emirates for about $4.40 an average watt. The first one was finished on time and on budget.¹⁴

In their home country, KEPCO claims an installed cost of $2.50 a watt, which is significantly less than a new coal plant’s $3–$3.50 a watt.¹⁵

The Roadmap’s “Supplemental Information” section¹⁶ implies that the price of an all-nuclear grid would be about $9 Trillion, using Generation III+ AP reactors.¹⁷

But KEPCO has shown that they can be built for much less.¹⁸ This is reflected in our $6.7 Trillion price tag for an all-AP reactor grid.

Make nuclear cheap again

Every commercial power reactor built in the United States has been a custom design, using the latest innovations. Some changes were even introduced in mid-project, causing expensive challenges and delays.

The upside of this approach is that our nuclear industry’s product and performance has improved. The downside is that our reactor fleet has become an expensive collection of hand-built hypercars.

What we need to power the country is a fleet of cheap, safe, and reliable mass-produced sedans. Reactor technology has matured to where this is entirely feasible.

The AP’s design consists of standardized factory-built modules. Prices will drop and schedules will accelerate as more units are built and the learning curve kicks in.¹⁹

But the first of anything you build, even if it’s based on a standardized design, is still a brand-new custom product. So things happen: Supply chain problems put the first American AP project into an over-schedule / over-budget tailspin.²⁰ But despite our problems at the Vogtle, Georgia project, the South Koreans in the U.A.E. have shown that the design is solid.

While the Gen III+ advanced passive reactor is the best of its class, Generation IV reactors are the future of nuclear power. We’re especially impressed with the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), one of eight Gen IV designs now being developed.

A peer-reviewed energy innovation study shows that five of the eight designs will be as cheap or cheaper than an AP, two of them substantially so.²¹

To get the information they needed for an accurate analysis, the authors of the study kept corporate identities anonymous. It lists the eight companies and their reactors, but it doesn’t reveal which set of results goes with which company or which reactor.

But we figured out that at least one of the two lowest-cost Gen IV reactors is an MSR. We’re guessing that both of them are, but here’s what we actually know:

The two cheapest reactors in the study have a construction cost of right around $1.20 per watt. And according to ThorCon, an American MSR company, the manufacturing (construction) cost for their molten salt reactors will be $1.20 a watt.²²

So there you go.

The overall capital cost for both reactors at the low end of the price spread is projected to be $2 an installed watt ($1.20 of which is construction cost.)

We’ll be using $2 a watt as our benchmark price for Molten Salt Reactors – the safest reactor, with the lowest capital and operating costs.

“Come now, let us reason together . . . ” – Isaiah 1:18

A fair comparison of renewables and nuclear energy clearly shows that nuclear is a far superior technology for powering the nation.

And since fuel (nuclear or otherwise) is, in essence, a cheap, stable, and compact form of energy storage, the pivotal issue of mass storage – the holy grail of renewable energy – is rendered moot.

As we see it, renewables are only being seriously considered because the public has developed an overblown fear of radiation, largely generated by disinformation, sensational media, and the occasional outright lie.²³

Fukushima is a perfect example: No one died from the meltdowns, and no one is expected to in the years ahead. Nevertheless, nuclear fear is what drove the news cycle, not the 20,000 lives that were actually lost in the earthquake and tsunami.

This deep-seated radiophobia is directly responsible for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s overabundance of caution these last several decades. In the wake of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, 9/11 and Fukushima, the NRC’s excessive defense-in-depth approach to reactor construction has earned it the nickname of the Nuclear Refusal Commission.

No other energy source is regulated anywhere near the standards they have set for nuclear power’s safety and reliability. Indeed, living near a nuclear power plant subjects you to less radioactivity than eating one banana per week.²⁴

Fear-based protocols, in response to the political pressures of a misinformed populace, have guaranteed spiraling prices and failed projects, which only encourage anti-nuclear arguments.

On a level playing field, with appropriate safeguards and standardized designs, and with science and engineering as the final arbiters, reactors can come in on time and on budget, while being built to the highest international standards.

Nuclear is indeed competitive with fossil fuel, if it’s allowed to compete under the same rules. In fact, the new Generation IV reactors are designed to be both cost-competitive and even safer than today’s already-safe designs.

The true nature of things

Advocates of renewable energy may be uncomfortable reading this book, but sometimes facts are uncomfortable things. We know we’re challenging some deeply held beliefs, and rest assured we have a few of our own.

To put things in perspective, here’s something we said elsewhere that should be kept in mind by anyone proposing a national energy solution, including ourselves:

 ” . . . please understand that when it gets right down to it, Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s favorite technology.

“She doesn’t care if some people think that nuclear power is awesome, or if others think it’s the work of the devil. And she doesn’t care if some people think that global warming is settled science, or if others think that it’s an anti-capitalist con game concocted by liberal academics angling for grant money.

 “She frankly doesn’t care what anyone thinks, hopes, or believes. All she cares about is objective reality, quantified by math and explored by science, both disciplines guided by a diligent respect for the true nature of things. . . .”

 ­– From our 2016 paper: “Wind and Solar’s Achilles’ Heel –

The Meltdown at Porter Ranch”²⁵

END NOTES

1. http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf

“Roadmap.” Originally published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679003/ “Clack Evaluation.”

3. http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html “Critique”

(NOTE: This paper by Tim Maloney is the basis of Roadmap to Nowhere.)

See internal footnote # 33. It refers to:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/45834.pdf

Land-Use Requirements of Modern Wind Power Plants in the United States. See Page 10, Table 1, Average Area Requirements row, Total Area column: 100 hectare units (ha) = 1 km². 34.5 ha / MWp = 0.345 km² / MWp capacity-weighted average per NREL study in 2009.

Ibid. Chapter One End Note #1. Roadmap. See:

Table 2, row 1, column 4: 1,701,000 MWp nameplate capacity of existing plus new plants. 1,701,000 MWp X 0.345 km² / MWp = 586,800 km² total area for onshore wind, per NREL data (without taking into account capacity weighting of future new construction on clear flat land.)

Table 2, row 1, column 5: 3.59% existing, so 96.41% new construction. 0.9641 X 1,701,000 MW = 1,640,000 MW new construction, using 5-MW wind turbines.

When NREL made its survey in 2009, such giant 5-MW wind turbines did not exist. Using larger / taller turbines can result in an improved land density value/ This is prtt of the Roadmap’s strategy.

Note clearly that when NREL made its survey in 2009, these giant 5-MW turbines didn’t even exist. So using larger machines result in more energy production per acre, which is the Roadmap’s strategy. Hence the improved land density numbers.

Row 1, column 8: 1.5912% X 9.162e6 km2 (US total land area) = 145,800 km² for new onshore wind construction. Anticipated new land-use density with 5-MW giant wind turbines: 145,800 km² ÷ 1,640,000 MW = 0.089 km² / MWp (0.0889).

So on the face of it, there is a discrepancy factor of 3.9X between NREL’s and the Roadmap’s land usage. [0.345 km² ÷ 0.089 km² = 3.9]

Alternatively: Total onshore wind area: 145,800 km² ÷ 0.9641 = 151,200 km² per Roadmap. Or 1,701,000 MW X 0.0889 km² / MW = 151,200 km².

NREL total wind area ÷ Roadmap total wind area: 586,800 km² ÷ 151,200 km²  = 3.9X factor of difference.

4.  Ibid. Chapter One End Note #2. Critique. See internal footnote # 22.7. Round to 160W-ac / m² for discussion & estimation.

Also see: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf

See page 12, Sec. 4.2.1: Evaluation of PV Packing Factors. Page 13, Figure 7, Capacity-weighted average packing factor for PV projects. Fixed (mount) column: 47% packing factor (PF). 1-axis (tracking) column: 34% packing factor (PF).

Average = 40.5%, round to 40%  for discussion & estimation.

Ibid. Chapter One End Note #1. Roadmap. See Table 2, row 9, column 4: 2,326,000e6 W.

2,326,000e6 W ÷ 160 W / m² ÷ 1e6 m2 / km² = 14.54e3 km² total PV panel area. Land area is PV panel area ÷ PF: 14.54e3 km² ÷ 0.40 = 36,300 km² total land area for utility-scale PV solar, per NREL-derived data.

Table 2, row 9, column 7:  0.18973% of 9.162e6 km² US total land area = 17,400 km² land area for utility PV solar, per Roadmap.

NREL total PV solar area ÷ Roadmap total  PV solar area: 36,300 km² ÷ 17,400 km²  = 2.1X factor of difference.

5. www.thesolutionsproject.org/resource/50-state-visions-infographics/

Step 1. Click to download 50states_PDFs_all. In the Downloads folder, unzip and open the folder named 50states_PDFs_all.

Step 2. Double-click the Adobe Acrobat PDF icons for the 11 “great plains” states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Upon viewing each state’s infographic, record on paper the state’s name and its percentage of Primary Energy to be provided by onshore wind. Do this on lined paper with seven drawn columns. Percent of PRI NRG from onshore wind goes in the column second from the left (column 2).

Step 3. Find each state’s Primary Energy consumption in the year 2013 by entering in your browser bar

https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/North-Dakota/Energy-consumption

Record the large-font number at upper-left, which is North Dakota’s PRI NRG in units of billions of BTUs. In your column 3, write about 4 significant digits.

On a calculator move the decimal point 6 places to the left to express in units of quadrillion BTUs, called Quads, unit-symbol Q. Do not write it on the paper. Multiply by the conversion factor 293 TWh /Q to convert to terawatt-hour units of Primary Energy. Record in column 4.

Repeat this process 10 more times by replacing North-Dakota with the other states’ names in the browser bar. South-Dakota is hyphenated.

Step 4. Multiply each state’s 2013 Primary Energy in column 4 by the following factors to obtain its estimated Primary Energy demand in year 2050, per the Roadmap’s expectation of energy reduction. Write all 11 of the factors into column 5 before starting. These factors were obtained from the Roadmap’s Table 1, column 8, “% change in end-use power”.

ND = 0.631; SD = 0.709; NE = 0.707; KS = 0.625; OK = 0.615; TX = 0.598; MN = 0.646; IA = 0.717; MO = 0.596; IL = 0.619; IN = 0.628.

Record the multiplication results in column 6.

Step 5. Multiply each state’s estimated PRI NRG in column 6 by its onshore wind percentage from column 2. Record the result in column 7. That gives each state’s onshore wind-supplied energy in year 2050, expressed in TWh units.

Step 6. Add all 11 states’ wind consumption to obtain 3038 TWh in year 2050.

Then divide 3038 TWh by 4309 TWh to obtain 0.705, rounded to 70%. This is the portion of the nation’s onshore wind that will be located on open flat ground.

The value 4309 TWh is obtained from the Roadmap’s Table 2, onshore wind row, 30.92% in column 3. Multiply 30.92% X 13,937 TWh to obtain 4309 TWh. The value 13,937 TWh /year is the Roadmap’s standard-demand load, namely 1591 GW, converted into annual TWh energy units by multiplying X 8760 hours /yr.

Step 7. With 70% of 2050’s onshore wind capacity located on flat land where the minimum land usage value 0.089 km² /MW pertains, that leaves 30% in harder locations where the NREL study’s 0.345 km² /MW pertains.

Calculate the weighted average of those two values as:

0.70 X 0.089 km² + 0.30 X 0.345 km² = 0.166 km² /MW. Round to 0.17 km² /MW as the best estimate and working figure for onshore wind discussion.

Comparison to the Roadmap’s simple optimism gives a discrepancy factor of about 2X. [0.17 km² ÷ 0.089 km² = 1.9]

6. Ibid. Chapter One End Note #1. Roadmap. See frame 8 of the pdf, journal page 2098. This is the Roadmap’s Table 2, row 9, which covers Solar PV utility plants:

2,326,000e6 Wp-ac ÷ 160 Wp-ac / m² [power rating of SunPower series E panel] = 14.5 billion m² for utility PV panels.

Table 2, row 7 covers residential roof PV: 379,500e6 Wp-dc ÷ 186 Wp-dc / m² [SunPower series E panel] = 2.0 billion m² for residential PV panels.

Table 2, row 8 covers commercial roof PV: 276,500e6 Wp-dc ÷ 186 Wp-dc / m² = 1.5 billion m² for commercial PV panels.

All three PV solar sytems: 14.5 + 2.0 + 1.5 = 18 billion m² of panel area.

7. Ibid. Refer to 14.5e9 m² of utility PV panels. Rooftop PV solar: 379,500e6 W-dc (residential) + 276,500e6 W-dc (commercial) = 656,000e6 W-dc combined.

Sunpower dc power density: 158 Wp-ac / m² ÷ 85% conversion eff. = 186 Wp-dc / m².

Rooftop panel area: 656,000e6 Wdc ÷ 186 W / m² = 3.5e9 m² of rooftop PV panels. Combined utility & rooftop: 14.5e9 m² + 3.5e9 m² = 18.0e9 m² total panel area.

Replaced over 40-year lifetime: 18.0e9 m² ÷ 40 yr ÷ 365 days = 1.23e6 m² per day.

8. Ibid. Chapter One End Note # 2. Critique. To determine the cost of the Roadmap, search in Critique for:

“Total W&S build-out cost”

“Money cost Utility PV Solar”

“Money cost Residential PV Solar”

“Money cost Commercial PV Solar”

“All three PV solar categories combined”

“Money cost Onshore Wind”

“Money cost Offshore Wind”

“Money cost CSP Solar”

9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEHf5K9AQjY at 44:55

10. Ibid. Chapter One End Note #1. Roadmap. See frame 7, journal p. 2097, bottom row, column 3:

a) 1591 GWavg total end-use power in 2050

b) 1591 GWavg X 4 hours = 6.36e12 W-hr of energy storage

Unit cost = $0.20 / W-hr

See also:

http://reneweconomy.com.au/pumped-hydro-the-forgotten-storage-solution-47248/

See the 7^th paragraph:

6.36e12 W-hr X $0.20 / W h-r = $1.27 trillion construction cost for PHES

$15.2 T (from End Note #3) + $1.27 T = $16.5 Trillion

$16.5 Trillion ÷ 35 years = $471 Billion / year

11. Ibid. Chapter One End Note # 2. Critique. See internal footnote No. 65.5:

a) Average cost of KEPCO-UAE project is $22.7 billion

b) $22.7 B ÷ 5600 MWp = $4.05 / Wp

c) $4.05 ÷ 92% CF = $4.41 / Wavg for KEPCO Gen 3+ APWRs

Cost of 1,515 GWavg APWR nuclear fleet: 1,515 GW X $4.41 / W = $6.7 trillion

12.

http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Advanced-Nuclear-Reactors-Cost-Study.pdf

Page 10, Figure 4. Capital Cost Results. Project the rightmost two bars (MSRs) to vertical axis, at about $2000 /kW = $2 /W.

13.

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/government/construction-of-uae-s-first-nuclear-reactor-complete-but-operation-delayed-to-2018-1.42360

14. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/ See:

Table 1: Supercritical coal (no Carbon Capture & Storage)

Table 2: Advanced Pulverized coal (no CCS)

15. Ibid. Chapter One End Note #1. Roadmap. Supplemental Information (SI) section

begins at Frame 28. See Table S14 on pages 66 & 67 of SI (Frames 93 & 94).

16. Ibid. Chapter One End Note #2. Critique. See internal footnote No. 66:

a) Near-term and future cost estimate of US Gen 3+ APWR = $5.53 / Wp

b) $5.53 ÷ 92% CF = $6.01 / Wavg

1,515 GWavg required APWR fleet X $6.01 / W = $9.1 trillion

17. https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea

18. Ibid. See Figure 10 in the section “South Korea Actually Lowered Costs.” Notice that overnight construction costs have declined since 1980.

19.

http://www.environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/13/why-its-big-bet-on- westinghouse-nuclear-bankrupted-toshiba

20. Ibid. Chapter One End Note #12. Compare the bar heights to $4 / MWp (shown as $4,000 / kW), the approximate KEPCO price for the U.A.E. project.

21. Ibid. End Note #12, Chapter One. See Page 10, Figure 4: “Capital Cost Results.” Project the top of the two rightmost vertical bars (one of them is the ThorCon MSR) to the vertical axis. They’re both at about $2000 / kW = $2 / Watt.

Of that $2000 / kW capital cost for complete installation, about $1000 to $1200 /kW ($1.00 to $1.20 /W) is for direct construction /manufacturing cost. That cost is shown by the red portion of the vertical bars.

https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/ARISThorCon9.pdf See page 21, sub-section “Low Costs.”

22. http://www.environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/12/atomic-humanism-as-radical-innovation-2017-keynote-address-to-the-american-nuclear-society

23. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/18/1503359/-Wind-and-Solar-s-Fukushima-The-Methane-Meltdown-at-Porter-Ranch.

See section titled “An Inconvenient Truth 2.0”