Climate Change/Alternative Energy Nonsense
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My cousin, God love him, has linked on his Facebook page to a series of YouTube ads from “wecansolveit.org”, which is a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection — an outfit that was founded and is chaired by Al Gore, that is funded chiefly from the proceeds of Gore’s climate-change alarmism, and that, despite its pretensions of non-partisanship, exists principally to inculcate people into the “we’re all gonna die unless we elect Democrats” theory of climate change as part of the ongoing effort to garb antediluvian leftist orthodoxy in environmentalist drag.
Normally I’d let this kind of thing slide on by. For one thing, I’ve been bombarded by these kinds of politically-correct, AdCouncil PSAs since time immemorial; aside from flashing some momentary annoyance that my tax dollars are probably funding a lot of them, I barely register them much anymore. For another thing, my cousin, as long as I can remember, has been something of an idealist (he was a dyed-in-the-wool McCainiac back in 2000, for example), and I understand that he either works for or donates his time to a company that’s trying to make a buck at alternative energy. Far be it from me to get all curmudgeonly about something he obviously feels strongly about (though now I’m thinking that I’ll buy him a copy of Ian Plimer’s book for Christmas).
But one of these ads, titled Special Interests, goes beyond the usual silliness and veers into black helicoptor territory. The ad’s thesis is that the principal reason the country hasn’t already migrated to “green” energy sources such as wind and solar is because of the nefarious influence of Big Oil and Big Coal. But for the bad-faith opposition of politicians bought and paid for with petrodollars, we’d be well on our way toward a clean energy revolution… or so the ad implies.
To borrow a phrase from Jonah Goldberg, there are many rooms in this mansion of nonsense. Let’s begin in the vestibule: You mean to say, Mr. Voiceover, that companies in the petroleum and coal industries actually hire lobbyists, who go to Washington and try to influence legislators to act in their clients’ interests? How horrifying! Clearly, this “freedom of speech” thing is a scourge on the nation. And of course, environmental groups, being the very definition of virtuous, would never, ever do such terrible things. Why, their influence on politics is self-evidently a function of their righteousness, not how they deploy briefcases full of cash.
But the real codswallop in this ad is that political influence is what’s keeping us all from a green utopia where the country runs on power generated by windmills and solar arrays rather than pollution-belching coal plants that slowly poison precious, tow-haired moppets while they’re playing with their blocks. Steven Den Beste covered this a while back: the basic impediment to alternative energy is physics, not politics. Every alternative to fossil fuels aside from hydro and nuclear — both of which the greens also hate — has problems of scalability, reliability, diffusion, efficiency, and/or cost that render it impractical as a significant source of American (never mind global) energy requirements.
Take solar. Photovoltaics, despite technological advances over the last several years, remain prohibitively expensive to deploy on a large enough scale where you could conceivably generate enough electricity for just a small community. Where it’s actually been done, it’s been as a publicity stunt or a heavily subsidized venture, not as a serious market-driven transition from coal or oil. That’s not because of anything the coal or oil companies are doing; it’s because solar energy is by nature diffuse. Radiant energy from the sun on a clear day is only around 100 Watts per square foot, of which the most efficient photovoltaics in the world, angled optimally, capture around 15%. And then you’ll lose around another 10% of everything you capture when you run in through the inverter that converts it from direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC). While you can mount a big enough PV array on the roof of a single-family home to supply all its power needs, when you start talking about the power needs of a whole community — never mind a state, or a country — the square footage requirements start to get very big very fast.
Additionally, PV has reliability issues. While you can always burn oil or coal to turn a turbine, a PV cell can only generate electricity when it’s exposed to sunlight. Thus, the power generated by a PV system depends on the prevailing weather and the length of the day where the system is situated. A cell generates less electricity in lousy weather, but more on clear days; less electricity in winter when days are shorter, but more in summer when days are longer. On average, a PV cell in the United States will generate electricity between 4 and 6 hours a day.
Add this together and you have an energy-generating technology that has a manufactured cost of around $3 or $4 per watt (though press releases from trailblazers in the industry claim to have gotten that down to $1 per watt by leveraging green corporate welfare). Fossil fuels? 65 to 70 cents per watt. In other words, fossil fuels cost about a third less per watt than the bleeding edge of solar, and more than four times less per watt than state of the art solar. And that’s just manufactured cost: when you tack on the per-watt costs of actually installing the PV arrays and infrastructure, solar’s an even bigger loser. Throw in non-trivial operating costs (photovoltaics are somewhat fragile, and because they require sunlight to do their thing they need to be outdoors, and exposed to the elements, to be useful), and this starts to look a lot more like an academic exercise than something that’s going to be economically competitive with oil or coal anytime soon — what technology people often refer to as a solution in search of a problem.
These are hard, hard engineering problems, and there is no easy way around them. Photovoltaics will become sturdier and less expensive as the technology matures, but maturing technology isn’t going to suddenly or even gradually make radiant energy from the sun less diffuse here on Earth, nor is it going to substantially increase the efficiency with which we can convert that radiant energy to electricity. These are basic limitations of solar that simply come with the territory, and constrain its viability as a serious alternative to oil or coal. And it shows. People in the solar energy industry are optimistically estimating that global solar power output will reach 25 or so gigawatts, average by 2025. That sounds pretty good until you realize that, today, power usage in the United States alone is about 3.6 terawatts, average. In other words, solarphiles hope that they’ll be able to produce, globally, about 0.7% of current U.S. power requirements… in another fifteen years. And who knows by how much U.S. power requirements will have increased, by then? If large-scale solar was a feasible, profitable alternative to petroleum or coal in the absence of corporate welfare (what, you don’t think that’s what those federal “green” subsidies are?), people would have been falling all over themselves to invest in it beginning decades ago, regardless of whatever influence Big Oil and Big Coal have on our politics. Instead, it’s a niche market.
Basic physical limitations are stubborn things, and are not solved merely by wishing them away, by throwing money at them, or by pretending that they’re the product of villainy. Alternative energy is not going to magically become viable simply by fervently chanting the “hopenchange” mantra, nor will it magically become viable by pretending the whole situation is some kind of morality play, in which the valiant greens are on the side of good and a Dark Conspiracy™ of politicians in thrall to “special interest” oil and coal companies is on the side of evil. Heck, the existence of measures like Waxman-Markey — essentially, imposing a massive regressive tax on carbon so that alternative energy looks halfway to decent by way of comparison — is a tacit admission that alternative energy can’t succeed on its own. If you want me to support the development of green energy sources, Mr. Voiceover, make an engineering argument, not a religious one.
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