Green Tyranny by Rupert Darwall

Author:Rupert Darwall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594039362
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2017-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind.17

What might now seem plainly obvious wasn’t to early backers of intermittent renewables. In a 1991 paper, Cambridge University’s Michael Grubb acknowledged that “renewable sources would be virtually ruled out if extensive storage really were an essential component.”18 Grubb demonstrated mathematically that large amounts of renewable capacity could be integrated without significant penalty. Subsequent experience refuted Grubbs’s math. Twenty years later, the CEO of National Grid was saying that people in Britain would have to get used to having power only when it is available. “We are going to change our behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply,” National Grid’s Steve Holliday said, anticipating a Great Leap Backward with diesel generators in every back yard to keep the lights on.19

Hermann Scheer was closer to the mark than the Cambridge professor. While biomass energy carriers could substitute a large share of fossil energy resources, a basic disadvantage of other “solar energy carriers” (i.e., wind and solar) was that they did not produce any fuels directly. Scheer’s solution was similar to the one Hermann Honnef and Franz Lawaczeck pressed the Nazis to adopt in the 1930s. Solar hydrogen production was a must-have, Scheer wrote in A Solar Manifesto. There would be periods when there is “the risk of downtimes” or when not enough solar energy was being produced. Hydrogen could then be used as “stored sun.” Especially in summer, there would be other times when too much is being produced.20 Scheer admitted there was a difficulty. “The introduction of solar hydrogen is faced with the particular problem that the technologies for both hydrogen conversion and hydrogen utilization still need to mature to the volume production stage.”21

Without viable hydrogen technology to siphon off excess wind and solar power, the influx of random amounts of heavily subsidized, zero-marginal-cost electricity onto the grid plays havoc with the wholesale market. Wind and solar have high capital costs but negligible variable costs because their energy inputs are free. In favorable weather conditions, they push dispatchable generators up the merit curve because they pay for their fuel. Feed-in tariffs mean wind and solar investors receive a guaranteed price and are insulated from the effect of their output on depressing the wholesale price. In the United States, wind investors hoover up a $23 production tax credit per MWh of electricity, so they can make money even if the wholesale price falls below zero. During periods of low demand, Denmark, Canada, and California as well Germany have experienced periods when excess renewable outputs push wholesale prices to less than zero. As with garbage, there is a collection cost, and battery-stored electricity is still more expensive than firing up a gas turbine. “These

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