Our Renewable Future by Richard Heinberg

Author:Richard Heinberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

Building Solar and Wind with Solar and Wind

The rapid build-out of renewables constitutes an enormous infrastructure project that will itself consume significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy (fig. 6.1). While it is possible to imagine a solar panel or wind turbine factory operating solely on electricity supplied by renewable electricity, it is much harder to envision entire supply chains—from the mining of ores to the final delivery and installation of panels and turbines—functioning without fossil energy, at least in the early stages of the transition.

As we saw in chapter 4, fossil fuels are currently used for mining raw materials, constructing roads and factory buildings, and transporting raw materials and finished products. Theoretically solar and wind technologies could supply the energy for these processes, using electric mining, manufacturing, and hauling equipment (perhaps, for example, electricity could be produced on-site and transmitted via cables to mining equipment). Fossil fuels are also used to supply high levels of heat for extruding aluminum, making copper wire and plate, and producing iron and cement.13 Solar and wind electricity can in principle produce high heat for these purposes. However, as discussed in chapter 5, it would be much more expensive to generate the temperatures needed with electricity from solar panels or wind turbines than from burning fossil fuels. This would add to the cost of renewable energy technologies. To the authors’ knowledge, no real-world pilot projects exist in which all the industrial processes involved in making renewable energy technologies are powered by renewable energy.14

A bootstrap transition scenario (in which renewables provide the energy needed to build more renewables, while still supplying much of the rest of the energy that society needs) seems daunting in principle. Where will the energy for the transition come from, then? Realistically, most of it will have to come from fossil fuels—at least in the early-to-middle stages of the process. And we will be using fossil fuels whose economic efficiency is declining due to the ongoing depletion of existing stocks of high-quality oil, gas, and coal. Again, this implies higher overall costs. But using only renewable energy to build renewables would be slower and even more expensive.

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