'Planet of the Humans" review

SUBHEAD: The calls into question the solutions proposed by so-called renewable technologies.

By Edwardo Sasso 0n 7 May 2020 for Resilience - 
(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-05-07/planet-of-the-humans-reviewing-the-film-and-its-reviews/)


Image above: This immense photovoltaic power plant is operated by an Italian company in the desert near Villanueva, Mexico. From (https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/supersized-solar-farms-are-sprouting-around-world-maybe-space-too-ncna901666).

[IB Publisher's comment: In our experience in Hawaii solar-electricity generation does not necessarily require the use of large quantities of cement and steel. The panels themselves often have aluminum frames. In Hawaii we have a corrugated metal roof. Our solar panels have aluminum frames bolted to 2"x4" wood frames that are bolted to the metal roofing. Small scale individual residential and commercial solar systems don't need high voltage distribution towers or heavy duty foundations and framing. We worry about hurricane damage... but that's likely to take the whole roof off.]

If you haven’t seen the latest (and arguably the most contentious) documentary on renewable energy, be prepared for an aftertaste of mixed feelings.

Joining hands with the controversial Michael Moore, environmentalist and filmmaker Jeff Gibbs has sent an eerie message that is now somewhat dividing the climate movement—in many ways for the worse, but, in a few others, for the better.

So, at least, one could argue is the case of Planet of the Humans. After engaging briefly with some of the well-deserved criticisms the film has received thus far, there are nevertheless some important aspects brought to our attention by the movie.

Specifically, at one point in the documentary, Gibbs touches upon the religious and existential dimensions underlying our ecological hot waters—aspects that, for what it seems, many of his critics have left unaddressed. Hence the focus towards the end of this review will fall on the cosmic role of religion (or cosmology, if we will) in helping us engage with “the great scheme of things”, to use the phrase of one of the scholars interviewed in the documentary.

But first a sketch of the film and its criticism.

What is the Central Claim of Planet of the Humans?

Drawing implicitly on the legacy of renowned environmentalist Rachel Carson, in essence, Planet of the Humans calls into question the solutions proposed by so-called renewable technologies.

Such solutions, Gibbs argues, are to a degree or another an extension-in-disguise of the same problems created by our technological society. For one, solar panels and wind towers still burn fuels to be produced; for another, they rely on copious amounts of minerals and rare earth metals.

More worryingly, what Gibbs calls “the narrow solution of green technology” keeps feeding the pockets of a smaller few at the expense of the greater rest, leaving underlying societal problems unattended.

Overall, the documentary thus aims to show how the creation of these panels and towers, as well as the burning of biofuels and biomass, are also problematic, albeit in different ways if compared with the fossil fuels they aim to displace. Old wine in new wineskins, in short.

“Is it possible” thus asks Gibbs, “for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” (17:10)

Even if he argues for an unnerving “no”, some of the film’s reviewers are ready to claim the opposite.

(Well-Deserved) Hot-Blooded Reactions

To begin with, Gibbs’s critics are quick to signal how the film’s downplaying of renewables is outdated. The dismissal of solar panels (14:45, a scene whose panels arguably date from 2008), for instance, is done on the ground of their inefficiency.

However, as leading environmental activist Bill McKibben answers back, engineers have done their job since in vastly improving this technology, making solar the cheapest way of generating energy today.

According to McKibben, since a panel now lasts (up to) three decades—taking four years to compensate for the energy it took to build it—90 percent of the power it then produces is carbon-emissions-free.

Moreover, others point out how the overall impacts across the lifecycle (to mine materials, build, transport, install, and uninstall) both solar PVs and wind towers is between 3 and 28 times lower than using, say, liquified natural gas for electricity production (natural gas is one of the less polluting forms of fossil fuels).

The Guardian, too, implicitly takes sides with furious scientists calling to take down the movie—not least because fact-checks are revealing the film’s slim evidence to back up some claims.

Getting Rid of the Mud-water, but Keeping the Baby

Besides valid reasons like the above, what struck me as most troubling was the grim and rather accusatory tone of the documentary. It’s also (to a considerable extent) polarizing, at times dismissing perhaps too easily the honest intentions of some well-meaning folk. (Sad but true; especially in an age of ecological breakdown when we need to unite despite our differences.)

Still, could the film’s field-splitting call to choose sides, be the method to its madness? Could its polarizing stance somehow serve Gibb’s insistence to untangle the ecological cause from the story of unceasing economic growth—even of so-called ‘green’ economic growth—that continues to dictate the north of our industrialized societies?

Senior Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute and author of Afterburn: Societies Beyond Fossil Fuels, Richard Heinberg, agrees with the filmmakers in admitting how the belief that with ‘green’ investments and political will we’ll ultimately be able to build a green future is “an illusion that deserves shattering.”

According to Heinberg,

“The only realistic way to make the transition in industrial countries like the US is to begin reducing overall energy usage substantially [solar-/wind-powered or otherwise], eventually running the economy on a quarter, a fifth, or maybe even a tenth of current energy.” 

Read: Renewables? To an extent, yes; but far beyond: lifestyle change, and cutbacks—something that some environmentalists shy away from championing, admittedly for the tactical communication purpose of not losing their audience.

And yet, as Heinberg notes, “it’s a mistake to let marketing consultants sort truth from fiction for us”—a chief reason why Planet of the Humans doesn’t have space for such bargaining.

Just Give Me (One More) Fact

On a similar vein, world-renowned Professor Emeritus of Community Planning at the University of British Columbia, William Rees, has recently shown the limitations of renewables and remains a pessimist facing what he labels as a “superficial support for the notion that green tech is our savior.”

To back his claim, Rees points out how building just one typical wind turbine requires 817 energy-intensive tonnes of steel, 2,270 tonnes of concrete, and 41 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic.

In turn, solar power also demands large quantities of cement, steel, and glass—let alone rare earth metals. Aside from their compromised mining and refining processes, world demand for such metals of so-called renewable energy would rise 300 percent to 1,000 percent by 2050 just to meet the Paris goals.

“Ironically,” Rees remarks, “the mining, transportation, refining and manufacturing of material inputs to the green energy solution would be powered mainly by fossil fuels.”

For all we’d like them to, towers and panels don’t simply drop from heaven. So, too, more or less argues the film.

Fact-checking and physical limitations aside, a deeper and more fundamental issue that Planet of the Humans unveils is that of the societal story that we continue to tell ourselves, in one shape or another—be it green, orange, right, left, or center.

And it’s the 300-year-old, now-taken-for-granted story of our increasingly urbanized, Techno-Industrial Age: namely, that we are the captains of our souls and the masters of our fates, and that we attain that fate through technology, production, and consumption.

In short, this societal narrative (including many ‘green’ versions of such narrative) has made us believe that we are above, front-and-center, while everything else is below, in the backstage.

Under this worldview, ‘nature’ is not a ‘Home’ but a ‘resource’; we are not earthly humans but technological ‘citizens’ (and now virtual ‘Internauts’); countries are not made of communities of earth-dwellers but of abstract ‘markets’ of X or Y number of ‘consumers’. And thus our very language betrays us.

Scholars call this ‘anthropocentrism’ blended with ‘economism’. Others label it ‘speciesism’ and ‘technopoly’, even as one corporation praised it by making us sing “You got the whole world in your hands, with Mastercard at your command.”

As materialist historian Yuval Noah Harari has shown in the sixteenth chapter of Sapiens, this story championed by today’s economic system has become so pervasive that it now has all the elements of religion—however secular its scope.

It tells us what to believe (economic growth will lead to the benefit of all), how to behave (rational and disciplined at the workplace, unrestrained and narcissistic at the shopping mall), and what to value (“Life is Now”, as Visa trumpeted rather conveniently, and dogmatically).

Hence to culture and religion we now turn—and to their characteristic interest in “the great scheme of things”.

Remixed Echoes of an Even-Older Story

In one of the most existential sections of the documentary (49:04), the director asks whether our inability to come to terms with our mortality misinforms most of our societal decisions. He also asks rhetorically whether his side (the environmental side) has an unspoken religion, even as the Right has Christianity and a belief in infinite fossil fuels.

I would nuance this second claim—at least pertaining to the so-called religion of (many) of the Right. And that because such a belief system is often in fact Deist. (Deism is a modern distortion of ancient Christianity, presenting us with a deity that’s detached from the world, which is then purportedly left for us to control as we discover and master its immutable laws.)

It is not my aim here to make a case for believing in a transcendental Agent, but simply to acknowledge how director Jeff Gibbs might be unknowingly inviting us to shed the same tears of the God testified to and experienced by the descendants of the ancient Hebrews.

In contrast to the absent deity of Deism, the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis, for instance, speaks of the Most High becoming “regretful” considering the evil doings of humankind—something that “grieved God to his heart”.

According to the Book of Jeremiah, the Eternal One recoiled and was immersed in swirls of grief as people became strangers in their own land. In fact, in and through the cry of that young Hebrew prophet, God wept (Jer 14).

A Prophet in the Making?

haps, one of the film’s greatest contributions: its invitation to mourn, to leave us with discomfort towards superficial solutions, to invite us to feel and experience grief? However somberly and imperfectly, Gibbs may as well be helping us to traverse an unavoidable but ultimately necessary dark valley—one where we are reminded of how, before any blink of light, we must first confess and turn away from our pathological complicity with the decimation of our sacred Home. Genuine tears are the only cradle of authentic beginnings.

Even if commonly dismissed by large strands of the scientific and humanist communities in our scientific age, here lays one of the fundamental insights of what we call ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’; namely, their ability to disclose the ultimate horizons that should inform and inspire our lives.

Such horizons have been barred by the smokescreens created by the Industrial Revolution, tempting us not to see anywhere beyond. (Who needs to pray for rain for crops when one is a click away from a Caesar’s salad or a Papa John’s pizza?)

For numerous reasons, for the past three centuries we’ve increasingly come to believe that there’s no ultimate purpose or ‘goal’ to life. Instead, all we’ve been left with is an unrestrained desire to impose our will upon others and upon the living world, as it’s now tragically evident. When ultimate purposes vanish out of sight, we strive to become gods.

Recovering Forgotten Horizon

Intentionally or not, the film’s sorrowful approach begins to dismantle this very ‘scheme of things’; one that has made us believe that we are alone, at the center, in control of an inert universe without ultimate meaning.

In contrast, the forgotten grand-view cracked open by ancient spiritual traditions summon us to acknowledge ourselves as guests in a world that precedes us and that is not our own. The spotlight falls elsewhere.

At least according to the Judeo-Christian tradition that now unspokenly undergirds pretty much all of today’s secularized Western cultures, we are mortal tenants and fragile earthlings; accountable, dependent, small. We are animated by sacred breath, even as we are made from the very dust to which we will return.

But, precisely as such, we are nevertheless invited into an extravagant feast hosted by the Ultimate Source of completeness, gladness, and joy—the very Source who also cries and grieves.

Is such plenitude the hidden treasure that we are most searching for today—left, right, or center? Far beyond any technical glitch that we can muster, isn’t such plenitude the very ‘something’ which we know in our bones to be ultimately missing?

Those, of course, are questions for another occasion. And they may seem trivial should we continue to dismiss the divine and the transcendental as sheer social constructions that our human ancestors invented back in yesteryear to soothe our consciousness.

But then we must ask, how far will the dogmas of Materialism continue to take us? As posed by one of the film’s social scientists: “If we’re to make progress (whatever that word means). . . we’re going to radically overhaul our basic conception of who and what we are and what it is that we value.”

Or to borrow the words from Albert Einstein:

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Not unlike Einstein’s summons, Planet of the Humans is at least spot on about the need to turn away from our technocentric story and all its delusions that have claimed to give us full control. Then, and only then, will any light shine like the dawn. And perhaps then, and only then, will we humans realize ourselves as transient guests on a planet that is certainly not of our own making.

Our tears will not be in vain.
.

Some of the Lights On

SUBHEAD: We should be redefining Energy Security as keeping at least "Some of the Lights On".

By Kris De Decker on 10 December 2018 for Low-Tech Magazine -
(https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-lights-on-redefining-energy-security.html)


Image above: Keeping some of the lightbulbs on is better than all or nothing. From (http://www.womeninaction.co.za/be-different-to-make-a-difference/).

What is Energy Security?
What does it mean for a society to have “energy security”? Although there are more than forty different definitions of the concept, they all share the fundamental idea that energy supply should always meet energy demand. This also implies that energy supply needs to be constant – there can be no interruptions in the service. [1-4]

For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) defines energy security as “the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price”, the US Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) defines the concept as meaning that “the risks of interruption to energy supply are low”, and the EU defines it as a “stable and abundant supply of energy”. [5-7]

Historically, energy security was achieved by securing access to forests or peat bogs for thermal energy, and to human, animal, wind or water power sources for mechanical energy. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, energy security came to depend on the supply of fossil fuels.

As a theoretical concept, energy security is most closely related to the oil crises from the 1970s, when embargoes and price manipulations limited oil supply to Western nations.

As a result, most industrialised societies still stockpile oil reserves that are equivalent to several months of consumption.

Although oil remains as vital to industrial economies as it was in the 1970s, mainly for transportation and agriculture, it’s now recognised that energy security in modern societies also depends on other infrastructures, such as those supplying gas, electricity, and even data.

Furthermore, these infrastructures increasingly interconnect and depend on each other.

For example, gas is an important fuel for power production, while the power grid is now required to operate gas pipelines. Power grids are needed to run data networks, and data networks are now needed to run power grids.

This article investigates the concept of energy security by focusing on the power grid, which has become just as vital to industrial societies as oil. Moreover, electrification is seen as a way to decrease dependency on fossil fuels – think electric vehicles, heat pumps, and wind turbines.

The “security” or “reliability” of a power grid can be measured precisely by indicators of continuity such as the “Loss-of-Load Probability” (LOLP), and the “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Using these indicators, one can only conclude that power grids in industrial societies are very secure.

For example, in Germany, power is available for 99.996% of the time, which corresponds to an interruption in service of less than half an hour per customer per year. [8]

Even the worst performing countries in Europe (Latvia, Poland, Lithuania) have supply shortages of only eight hours per customer per year, which corresponds to a reliability of 99.90%. [8]

The US power grid is in between these values, with supply interruptions of less than four hours per customer per year (99.96% reliability). [9]

How Secure is a Renewable Power Grid?
In the current operation of infrastructures, the paradigm is that consumers could and should have access to as much electricity, gas, oil, data or water as they want, anytime they want it, for as long as they want it.

The only requirement is that they pay the bill. Looking at the power sector, this vision of energy security is quite problematic, for several reasons.

First of all, most energy sources from which electricity is made are finite – and maintaining a steady supply of something that’s finite is of course impossible. In the long run, the strategy to maintain energy security is certainly doomed to fail. In the shorter term, it may disrupt the climate and provoke armed conflicts.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), which was set up following the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, encourages the use of renewable energy sources in order to diversify the energy supply and improve energy security in the long term.

A renewable power system is not dependent on foreign energy imports nor vulnerable to fuel price manipulations – which are the main worries in an energy infrastructure that is largely based on fossil fuels.

Of course, solar panels and wind turbines have limited lifetimes and need to be manufactured, which also requires resources that could come from abroad or which can become depleted. But, once they are installed, renewable power systems are “secure” in a way and for a period of time that fossil fuels (and atomic energy) are not.

Furthermore, solar and wind power provide more security concerning physical failure or sabotage, even more so when renewable power production is decentralised. Renewable power plants also have lower CO2-emissions, and the extreme weather events caused by climate change are a risk to energy security as well.

However, in spite of all these advantages, renewable energy sources pose fundamental challenges to the current understanding of energy security.

Most importantly, the renewable energy sources with the largest potential – sun and wind – are only intermittently available, depending on the weather and the seasons.

This means that solar and wind power don’t match the criterium that all definitions of energy security consider to be essential: the need for an uninterrupted, unlimited supply of power.

The reliability of a power grid with a high share of solar and wind power would be significantly below today’s standards for continuity of service. [10-14]

In such a renewable power grid, a 24/7 power supply can only be maintained at very high costs, because it requires an extensive infrastructure for energy storage, power transmission, and excess generation capacity.

This additional infrastructure risks making a renewable power grid unsustainable, because above a certain threshold, the fossil fuel energy used for building, installing and maintaining this infrastructure becomes higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels and the wind turbines.

Intermittency is not the only disadvantage of renewable energy sources. Although many media and environmental organisations have painted a picture of solar and wind power as abundant sources of energy (“The sun delivers more energy to Earth in an hour than the world consumes in a year”), reality is more complex.

The “raw” supply of solar (and wind) energy is enormous indeed.

However, because of their very low power density, to convert this energy supply into a useful form solar panels and wind turbines require magnitudes of order more space and materials compared to thermal power plants – even if the mining and distribution of fuels is included. [15]

Therefore, a renewable power grid cannot guarantee that consumers have access to as much electricity as they want, even if the weather conditions are optimal.


How Secure is an Off-the-Grid Power System?
Today’s energy policies related to electricity try to reconcile three aims: an uninterrupted and limitless supply of power, affordability of electricity prices, and environmental sustainability.

A power grid that is mainly based on fossil fuels and atomic energy cannot achieve the aim of environmental sustainability, and it can only achieve the other goals as long as foreign suppliers do not cut off supplies or raise energy prices (or as long as national or international reserves are not depleted).

However, a renewable power grid cannot reconcile these three goals either. To achieve an unlimited 24/7 supply of power, the infrastructure needs to be oversized, which makes it expensive and unsustainable.

Without that infrastructure, a renewable power grid could be affordable and sustainable, but it could never offer an unlimited 24/7 supply of power.

Consequently, if we want a power infrastructure that is affordable and sustainable, we need to redefine the concept of energy security – and question the criterium of an unlimited and uninterrupted power supply.

If we look beyond the typical large-scale central infrastructures in industrial societies, it becomes clear that not all provisioning systems offer a limitless supply of resources.

Off-the-Grid microgeneration – the local production and storage of electricity using batteries and solar PV panels or wind turbines – is one example.

In principle, off-the-grid systems can be sized in such a way that they are “always on”. This can be done by following the “worst-month method”, which oversizes generation and storage capacity so that supply can meet demand even during the shortest and darkest days of the year.

However, just like in an imaginary large-scale renewable power grid, matching supply to demand at all times makes an off-the-grid system very costly and unsustainable, especially in high seasonality climates. [16-18]

Therefore, most off-the-grid systems are sized according to a method that aims for a compromise between reliability, economic cost and sustainability. The “loss-of-load probability sizing method” specifies a number of days per year that supply does not match demand. [19-21]

n other words, the system is sized, not only according to a projected energy demand, but also according to the available budget and/or the available space.

Sizing an off-the-grid power system in this way generates significant cost reductions, even if “reliability” is reduced just a little bit.

For example, a calculation for an off-the-grid house in Spain shows that decreasing the reliability from 99.75% to 99.00% produces a 60% cost reduction, with similar benefits for sustainability. Supply would be interrupted for 87.6 hours per year, compared to 22 hours in the higher reliability system. [16]

According to the current understanding of energy security, off-the-grid power systems that are sized in this way are a failure: energy supply doesn’t always meet energy demand.

However, off-gridders don’t seem to complain about a lack of energy security, on the contrary. There’s a simple reason for this: they adapt their energy demand to a limited and intermittent power supply.

In their 2015 book Off-the-Grid: Re-Assembling Domestic Life, Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart document their travels across Canada to interview about 100 off-the-grid households. [22]

Among their most important observations is that voluntary off-gridders use less electricity overall and routinely adapt their energy demand to the weather and the seasons.

For example, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, power tools, toasters or videogame consoles are not used at all, or they are only used during periods of abundant energy, when batteries can accommodate no further charge.

If the sky is overcast, off-gridders act differently to draw less power and have some more left over for the day after.

Vannini and Taggart also observe that voluntary off-gridders seem to feel perfectly happy with levels of lighting or heating that are different from the standards that many in the western world have come to expect. Often, this shows itself in concentrating activities around more localised sources of heat and light. [22]

Similar observations can be made in places where people – involuntarily – depend on infrastructures that are not always on.

If centralised water, electricity and data networks are present in less industrialised countries, they are often characterised by regular and irregular interruptions in the supply. [23-25]

However, in spite of the very low reliability of these infrastructures – according to common indicators of continuity – life goes on.

Daily household routines are shaped around disruptions of supply systems, which are viewed as normal and a largely accepted part of life.

For example, if electricity, water or Internet are only available during certain times of the day, household tasks or other activities are planned accordingly. People also use less energy overall: the infrastructure simply doesn’t allow for a resource-intensive lifestyle. [23]
 
More Reliable, Less Secure?
The very high “reliability” of power grids in industrial societies is justified by calculating the “value of lost load” (VOLL), which compares the financial loss due to power shortages to the extra investment costs to avoid these shortages. [1][10] [26-29]

However, the value of lost load is highly dependent on how society is organised. The more it depends on electricity, the higher the financial losses due to power shortages will be.

Current definitions of energy security consider supply and demand to be unrelated, and focus almost entirely on securing energy supply.

However, alternative forms of power infrastructures like those described above show that people adapt and match their expectations to a power supply that is limited and not always on. In other words, energy security can be improved, not just by increasing reliability, but also by reducing dependency on energy.

Demand and supply are also interlinked, and mutually influence each other, in 24/7 power systems – but with the opposite effect. Just like “unreliable” off-the-grid power infrastructures foster lifestyles that are less dependent on electricity, “reliable” infrastructures foster lifestyles that are increasingly dependent on electricity.

In their 2018 book Infrastructures and Practices: the Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies, Olivier Coutard and Elizabeth Shove argue that an unlimited and uninterrupted power supply has enabled people in industrial societies to adopt a multitude of power dependent technologies – such as washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, automatic doors, or 24/7 mobile internet access – which become “normal” and central to everyday life.

At the same time, alternative ways of doing things – such as washing clothes by hand, storing food without electricity, keeping cool without air-conditioning, or navigating and communicating without mobile phones – have withered away, or are withering away. [30]

As a result, energy security is in fact higher in off-the-grid power systems and “unreliable” central power infrastructures, while industrial societies are the weakest and most fragile in the face of supply interruptions.

What is generally assumed to be a proof of energy security – an unlimited and uninterrupted power supply – is actually making industrial societies ever more vulnerable to supply interruptions: people increasingly lack the skills and the technology to function without a continuous power supply.

Redefining Energy Security
To arrive to a more accurate definition of energy security requires the concept to be defined, not in terms of commodities like kilowatt-hours of electricity, but in terms of energy services, social practices, or basic needs. [1]

People don’t need electricity in itself. What they need, is to store food, wash clothes, open and close doors, communicate with each other, move from one place to another, see in the dark, and so on.

All these things can be achieved either with or without electricity, and in the first case, with more or less electricity.

Defined in this way, energy security is not just about securing the supply of electricity, but also about improving the resilience of the society, so that it becomes less dependent on a continuous supply of power.

This includes the resilience of people (do they have the skills to do things without electricity?), the resilience of devices and technological systems (can they handle an intermittent power supply?), and the resilience of institutions (is it legal to operate a power grid that is not always on?).

Depending on the resilience of the society, a disruption of the power supply may or may not lead to a disruption of energy services or social practices.

For example, although our food distribution system is dependent on a cold chain that requires a continuous power supply, there are many alternatives.

We could adapt refrigerators to an irregular power supply by insulating them much better, we could reintroduce cold cellars (which keep food fresh without electricity), or we could relearn older methods of food storage, like fermentation.

We could also improve people’s skills in terms of fresh cooking, switch to diets based on ingredients that don’t need cold storage, and encourage local daily shopping over weekly trips to large supermarkets.

If we look at energy security in a more holistic way, taking into account both supply and demand, it quickly becomes clear that energy security in industrial societies continues to deteriorate. We keep delegating more and more tasks to machines, computers and large-scale infrastructures, thus increasing our dependency on electricity.

Furthermore, the Internet is becoming just as essential as the power grid, and trends like cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and self-driving cars are all based on several interconnected layers of continuously operating infrastructures.


Because demand and supply influence each other, we come to a counter-intuitive conclusion: to improve energy security, we need to make the power grid less reliable. This would encourage resilience and substitution, and thus make industrial societies less vulnerable to supply interruptions.

Coutard and Shove argue that “it would make sense to pay more attention to opportunities for innovation that are opened when large network systems are weakened and abandoned, or when they become less reliable”. They add that the experiences of voluntary off-gridders “provide some insights into the types of configuration at stake”. [30]

Arguing for a less reliable power supply is sure to be controversial. In fact, “Keeping the lights on” is a phrase that is often used to justify energy reforms such as building more atomic plants, or keeping them in operation past their planned lifetimes.

To achieve real energy security, “keeping the lights on” should be replaced by phrases like “keeping some of the lights on”, “which lights should we turn off next?”, or “what’s wrong with a bit more dark?”. [31]

Obviously, a less reliable energy supply would bring fundamental changes to routines and technologies, whether it is in households, factories, transport systems, or communications networks – but that’s exactly the point. Present ways of life in industrial societies are simply not sustainable.

Sources
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[2] Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Ishani Mukherjee. "Conceptualizing and measuring energy security: A synthesized approach." Energy 36.8 (2011): 5343-5355. https://relooney.com/NS4053-Energy/00-Energy-Security_1.pdf

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[7] Strambo, Claudia, Måns Nilsson, and André Månsson. "Coherent or inconsistent? Assessing energy security and climate policy interaction within the European Union." Energy Research & Social Science 8 (2015): 1-12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961500047X

[8] CEER Benchmarking Report 6.1 on the Continuity of Electricity and Gas Supply. Data update 2015/2016. Ref: C18-EQS-86-03. 26-July-2018. Council of European Energy Regulators. https://www.ceer.eu/documents/104400/-/-/963153e6-2f42-78eb-22a4-06f1552dd34c

[9] Average frequency and duration of electric distribution outages vary by states. U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). April 5, 2018. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35652


[10] Röpke, Luise. "The development of renewable energies and supply security: a trade-off analysis." Energy policy 61 (2013): 1011-1021. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/73854/1/IfoWorkingPaper-151.pdf

[11] "Evolutions in energy conservation policies in the time of renewables", Nicola Lablanca, Isabella Maschio, Paolo Bertoldi, ECEEE 2015 Summer Study -- First Fuel Now. https://www.eceee.org/library/conference_proceedings/eceee_Summer_Studies/2015/9-dynamics-of-consumption/evolutions-in-energy-conservation-policies-in-the-time-of-renewables/

[12] “How not to run a modern society on solar and wind power alone”, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, September 2017.

[13] Nedic, Dusko, et al. Security assessment of future UK electricity scenarios. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.461.4834&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[14] Zhou, P., R. Y. Jin, and L. W. Fan. "Reliability and economic evaluation of power system with renewables: A review." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 58 (2016): 537-547. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211501727X

[15] Smil, Vaclav. Power density: a key to understanding energy sources and uses. MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/power-density

[16] Landeira, Cristina Cabo, Ángeles López-Agüera, and Fernando Núñez Sánchez. "Loss of Load Probability method applicability limits as function of consumption types and climate conditions in stand-alone PV systems." (2018). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cristina_Cabo2/publication/324080184_Loss_of_Load_Probability_method_applicability_limits_as_function_of_consumption_types_and_climate_conditions_in_stand-alone_PV_systems/links/5abca9fa45851584fa6e1efd/Loss-of-Load-Probability-method-applicability-limits-as-function-of-consumption-types-and-climate-conditions-in-stand-alone-PV-systems.pdf

[17] Singh, S. Sanajaoba, and Eugene Fernandez. "Method for evaluating battery size based on loss of load probability concept for a remote PV system." Power India International Conference (PIICON), 2014 6th IEEE. IEEE, 2014. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7117729

[18] How sustainanle is stored sunlight? Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine.

[19] Chapman, R. N. "Sizing Handbook for Stand-Alone Photovoltaic." Storage Systems, Sandia Report, SAND87-1087, Albuquerque (1987). https://prod.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1987/871087.pdf

[20] Posadillo, R., and R. López Luque. "A sizing method for stand-alone PV installations with variable demand." Renewable Energy33.5 (2008): 1049-1055. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014810700184X

[21] Khatib, Tamer, Ibrahim A. Ibrahim, and Azah Mohamed. "A review on sizing methodologies of photovoltaic array and storage battery in a standalone photovoltaic system." Energy Conversion and Management 120 (2016): 430-448. https://staff.najah.edu/media/published_research/2017/01/19/A_review_on_sizing_methodologies_of_photovoltaic_array_and_storage_battery_in_a_standalone_photovoltaic_system.pdf

[22] Vannini, Phillip, and Jonathan Taggart. Off the grid: re-assembling domestic life. Routledge, 2014. http://lifeoffgrid.ca/off-grid-living-the-book/

[23] "Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices: insights for securing supply systems", Yolande Strengers, Cecily Maller, in "Global Environmental Change 22 (2012), pp. 754-763. http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit%3A17990/n2006038376.pdf

[24] Pillai, N. "Loss of Load Probability of a Power System." (2008). https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6953/1/MPRA_paper_6953.pdf

[25] Al-Rubaye, Mohannad Jabbar Mnati, and Alex Van den Bossche. "Decades without a real grid: a living experience in Iraq." International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environment Sensing (SEES 2018). 2018. https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8566224

[26] Telson, Michael L. "The economics of alternative levels of reliability for electric power generation systems." The Bell Journal of Economics (1975): 679-694. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3003250

[27] Schröder, Thomas, and Wilhelm Kuckshinrichs. "Value of lost load: an efficient economic indicator for power supply security? A literature review." Frontiers in energy research 3 (2015): 55. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2015.00055/full

[28] Ratha, Anubhav, Emil Iggland, and Goran Andersson. "Value of Lost Load: How much is supply security worth?." Power and Energy Society General Meeting (PES), 2013 IEEE. IEEE, 2013. https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/itet/institute-eeh/power-systems-dam/documents/SAMA/2012/Ratha-SA-2012.pdf

[29] De Nooij, Michiel, Carl Koopmans, and Carlijn Bijvoet. "The value of supply security: The costs of power interruptions: Economic input for damage reduction and investment in networks." Energy Economics 29.2 (2007): 277-295.

[30] Coutard, Olivier, and Elizabeth Shove. "Infrastructures, practices and the dynamics of demand." Infrastructures in Practice. Routledge, 2018. 10-22. https://www.routledge.com/Infrastructures-in-Practice-The-Dynamics-of-Demand-in-Networked-Societies/Shove-Trentmann/p/book/9781138476165

[31] Demand Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, seventeenth edition. Jenny Rinkinen, Elizabeth Shove, Greg Marsden, The Demand Centre, 2018. http://www.demand.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Demand-Dictionary.pdf


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Our troubled energy transition

SUBHEAD: Too little, too late. No longer are we faced with prevention so much as mitigation and management.

By Kurt Cob  on 18 March 2018 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-03-18/troubling-realities-original article.


Image above: In original article. Cartoon by Gerhard Mester (2013)  showing a race between renewable energy and fossil fuels. Speach bubble translation from German says "You are cheating by using an energy storage device". As if coal were not just a dirtier battery. From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiewende-Rallye-Stromspeicher-Gerhard-Mester.gif).

I recently asked a group gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world’s energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.

Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.

The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide.

The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.

I hadn’t included hydroelectricity in my list, I told the group, which would add another 2.5 percent to the renewable energy category. But hydro, I explained, would be growing only very slowly since most of the world’s best dam sites have been taken.

The category “Biofuels and waste,” which makes up 9.7 percent of the world total, includes small slivers of what we Americans call biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), I said, but mostly represents the deforestation of the planet through the use of wood for daily fuel in many poor countries, hardly a sustainable practice that warrants vast expansion.

This percentage has been roughly the same since 1973 though the absolute consumption has more than doubled as population has climbed sharply.

The burden for renewable energy expansion, I concluded, would therefore remain on the six categories I mentioned at the outset of my presentation.

As if to underline this worrisome state of affairs, the MIT Technology Review just days later published a piece with a rather longish title: “At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system.”

In my presentation I had explained to my listeners that renewable energy is not currently displacing fossil fuel capacity, but rather supplementing it.

In fact, I related, the U.S. government’s own Department of Energy with no sense of alarm whatsoever projects that world fossil fuel consumption will actually rise through 2050. This would represent a climate catastrophe, I told my audience, and cannot be allowed to happen.

And yet, the MIT piece affirms that this is our destination on our current trajectory. The author writes that “even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem.”

All this merely serves to elicit the question: What would it take to do what scientists think we need to do to reduce greenhouse gases?

The MIT piece suggests that a total mobilization of society akin to what happened in World War II would have to occur and be maintained for decades to accomplish the energy transition we need to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Few people alive today were alive back then.

A somewhat larger group has parents who lived through World War II and so have some inkling of what such a mobilization would involve.

It’s hard enough to imagine this group agreeing that their household consumption should be curtailed significantly for decades (through taxes, higher prices and perhaps even rationing) to make way for huge societal investments in vast new wind and solar deployments; electricity storage for all that renewable electricity; mass transit; deep energy retrofits for buildings; energy-efficient vehicles; and even revised diets that are less meat-intensive and thereby less energy-intensive.

Even harder to image is the much larger group with a more tenuous or nonexistent connection to the World War II experience embracing such a path.

The trouble with waiting, of course, is that climate change does not wait for us, and also that it shows up with multi-decadal lags. The effects of greenhouse gases emitted decades ago are only now registering on the world’s thermometers.

That means that when climate conditions finally become so destructive as to move the public and the politicians to do something big enough to make a difference, it will likely be too late to avoid catastrophic climate change.

One scientist cited by the MIT piece believes that a rise of more than 2 degrees C in global temperature is all but inevitable and that human society would be “lucky” to avoid a rise of 4 degrees by 2100.

But since each increment of temperature rise will inflict more damage, the scientist says, we would be wise to seek to limit temperature rise as much as we are able (even though the odds are now overwhelmingly against staying below a 2 degree rise).

No longer are we faced with prevention so much as mitigation and management. That’s still something, and it provides a way forward that doesn’t rely on an increasingly unrealistic goal.

Image: Cartoon showing a race between renewable energy and fossil fuels. Text is in German. Gerhard Mester (2013). “Karikatur von Gerhard Mester zum Thema Energiespeicher und Konkurrenzbedingungen Erneuerbarer Energien.”  Via Wikimedia Commons.

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Run the Economy on the Weather

SUBHEAD: Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic.

By Kris De Decker on 21 September 2017 for Low Tech Magazine -
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-the-economy-on-the-weather.html)


Image above: Detail from painting "Stoneferry" by John Ward in 1835. This painting depicts a scene on the River Hull near to the oilseed-crushing mills at Stoneferry in Hull England. From original article.

Before the Industrial Revolution, people adjusted their energy demand to a variable energy supply. Our global trade and transport system -- which relied on sail boats -- operated only when the wind blew, as did the mills that supplied our food and powered many manufacturing processes.

The same approach could be very useful today, especially when improved by modern technology. In particular, factories and cargo transportation -- such as ships and even trains -- could be operated only when renewable energy is available.

Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic than it is today.

Renewable Energy in Pre-Industrial Times
Before the Industrial Revolution, both industry and transportation were largely dependent on intermittent renewable energy sources. Water mills, windmills and sailing boats have been in use since Antiquity, but the Europeans brought these technologies to full development from the 1400s onwards.

At their peak, right before the Industrial Revolution took off, there were an estimated 200,000 wind powered mills and 500,000 water powered mills in Europe. Initially, water mills and windmills were mainly used for grinding grain, a laborious task that had been done by hand for many centuries, first with the aid of stones and later with a rotary hand mill.

However, soon water and wind powered mills were adapted to industrial processes like sawing wood, polishing glass, making paper, boring pipes, cutting marble, slitting metal, sharpening knives, crushing chalk, grinding mortar, making gunpowder, minting coins, and so on. [1-3]

Wind- and water mills also processed a host of agricultural products. They were pressing olives, hulling barley and rice, grinding spices and tobacco, and crushing linseed, rapeseed and hempseed for cooking and lighting.

So-called 'industrial water mills' had been used in Antiquity and were widely adopted in Europe by the fifteenth century, but 'industrial windmills' appeared only in the 1600s in the Netherlands, a country that took wind power to the extreme.

The Dutch even applied wind power to reclaim land from the sea, and the whole country was kept dry by intermittently operating wind mills until 1850. [1-3]

The use of wind power for transportation – in the form of the sailboat – also boomed from the 1500s onward, when Europeans 'discovered' new lands.

Wind powered transportation supported a robust, diverse and ever expanding international trading system in both bulk goods (such as grain, wine, wood, metals, ceramics, and preserved fish), luxury items (such as precious metals, furs, spices, ivory, silks, and medicine) and human slaves. [4]

Even though it relied on intermittent wind sources, international trade was crucial to many European economies. For example, the Dutch shipbuilding industry, which was centred around some 450 wind-powered saw mills, imported virtually all its naval stores from the Baltic: wood, tar, iron, hemp and flax.

Even the food supply could depend on wind-powered transportation. Towards the end of the 1500s, the Dutch imported two thousand shiploads of grain per year from Gdansk. [4] Sailboats were also important for fishing.

Dealing with Intermittency in Pre-Industrial Times
Although variable renewable energy sources were critical to European society for some 500 years before fossil fuels took over, there were no chemical batteries, no electric transmission lines, and no balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants to deal with the variable energy output of wind and water power. So, how did our ancestors deal with the large variability of renewable power sources?

To some extent, they were counting on technological solutions to match energy supply to energy demand, just as we do today. The water level in a river depends on the weather and the seasons. Boat mills and bridge mills were among the earliest technological fixes to this problem.

They went up and down with the water level, which allowed them to maintain a more predictable operating regime. [1-2]

However, water power could also be stored for later use. Starting in the middle ages, dams were built to create mill ponds, a form of energy storage that's similar to today's hydropower reservoirs. The storage reservoirs evened out the flow of streams and insured that water was available when it was needed. [2] [5]


Image above: "The Horse Mill" is a painting by English animal painter James Herring circa 1850 depicting a milling of grain by animal power. From original article.

But rivers could still dry out or freeze over for prolonged periods, rendering dams and adjustable water wheels useless. Furthermore, when one counted on windmills, no such technological fixes were available. [3] [6-7]

A technological solution to the intermittency of both water and wind power was the 'beast mill' or 'horse mill'. [8] In contrast to wind and water power, horses, donkeys or oxen could be counted on to supply power whenever it was required.

However, beast mills were expensive and energy inefficient to operate: feeding a horse required a land area capable of feeding eight humans. [9] Consequently, the use of animal power in large-scale manufacturing processes was rare.

Beast mills were mostly used for the milling of grain or as a power source in small workshop settings, using draft animals. [1]

Obviously, beast mills were not a viable backup power source for sailing ships either. In principle, sailing boats could revert to human power when wind was not available. However, a sufficiently large rowing crew needed extra water and food, which would have limited the range of the ship, or its cargo capacity.

Therefore, rowing was mainly restricted to battleships and smaller boats.

Adjusting Demand to Supply: Factories
Because of their limited technological options for dealing with the variability of renewable energy sources, our ancestors mainly resorted to a strategy that we have largely forgotten about: they adapted their energy demand to the variable energy supply.

In other words, they accepted that renewable energy was not always available and acted accordingly. For example, windmills and sailboats were simply not operated when there was no wind.

In industrial windmills, work was done whenever the wind blew, even if that meant that the miller had to work night and day, taking only short naps.

For example, a document reveals that at the Union Mill in Cranbrook, England, the miller once had only three hours sleep during a windy period lasting 60 hours. [3] A 1957 book about windmills, partly based on interviews with the last surviving millers, reveals the urgency of using wind when it was available:

Often enough when the wind blew in autumn, the miller would work from Sunday midnight to Tuesday evening, Wednesday morning to Thursday night, and Friday morning to Saturday midnight, taking only a few snatches of sleep; and a good windmiller always woke up in bed when the wind rose, getting up in the middle of the night to set the mill going, because the wind was his taskmaster and must be taken advantage of whenever it blew.

Many a village has at times gone short of wheaten bread because the local mill was becalmed in a waterless district before the invention of the steam engine; and barley-meal bread or even potato bread had to suffice in the crisis of a windless autumn. [10]

In earlier, more conservative times, the miller was punished for working on Sunday, but he didn't always care. When a protest against Sunday work was made to Mr. Wade of Wicklewood towermill, Norfolk, he retorted: "If the Lord is good enough to send me wind on a Sunday, I'm going to use it". [11]

On the other hand, when there was no wind, millers did other work, like maintaining their machinery, or took time off. Noah Edwards, the last miller of Arkley tower mill, Hertfordshire, would “sit on the fan stage of a fine evening and play his fiddle”. [11]

Adjusting Demand to Supply: Sailboats
A similar approach existed for overseas travel, using sail boats. When there was no wind, sailors stayed ashore, maintained and repaired their ships, or did other things.

They planned their trips according to the seasons, making use of favourable seasonal winds and currents. Winds at sea are not only much stronger than those over land, but also more predictable.

Sailors planned their trips according to the seasons, making use of favourable seasonal winds and currents.

The lower atmosphere of the planet is encircled by six major wind belts, three in each hemisphere. From Equator to poles these 'prevailing winds' are the trade winds, the westerlies, and the easterlies. The six wind belts move north in the northern summer and south in the northern winter. Five major sea current gyres are correlated with the dominant wind flows.

Gradually, European sailors deciphered the global pattern of winds and currents and took full advantage of them to establish new sea routes all over the world.

By the 1500s, Christopher Columbus had figured out that the combination of trade winds and westerlies enabled a round-trip route for sailing ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The trade winds reach their northernmost latitude at or after the end of the northern summer, bringing them in reach of Spain and Portugal. These summer trade winds made it easy to sail from Southern Europe to the Caribbean and South America, because the wind was blowing in that direction along the route.

Taking the same route back would be nearly impossible. However, Iberian sailors first sailed north to catch the westerlies, which reach their southernmost location at or after the end of winter and carried the sailors straight back to Southern Europe. In the 1560s, Basque explorer Andrés de Urdaneta discovered a similar round-trip route in the Pacific Ocean. [12]

The use of favourable winds made travel times of sailboats relatively reliable. The fastest Atlantic crossing was 21 days, the slowest 29 days.

The use of favourable winds made the travel times of sailboats relatively predictable. Ocean Passages for the World mentions that typical passage times from New York to the English Channel for a mid-19th to early 20th century sailing vessel was 25 to 30 days. From 1818 to 1832, the fastest crossing was 21 days, the slowest 29 days. [13]

The journey from the English Channel to New York took 35-40 days in winter and 40-50 days in summer. To Cape Town, Melbourne, and Calcutta took 50-60 days, 80-90 days, and 100-120 days, respectively. [13] These travel times are double to triple those of today's container ships, which vary their speed based on oil prices and economic demand.

Old Approach, New Technology
As a strategy to deal with variable energy sources, adjusting energy demand to renewable energy supply is just as valuable a solution today as it was in pre-industrial times. However, this does not mean that we need to go back to pre-industrial means.

We have better technology available, which makes it much easier to synchronise the economic demands with the vagaries of the weather.

In the following paragraphs, I investigate in more detail how industry and transportation could be operated on variable energy sources alone, and demonstrate how new technologies open new possibilities. I then conclude by analysing the effects on consumers, workers, and economic growth.

Industrial Manufacturing
On a global scale, industrial manufacturing accounts for nearly half of all energy end use. Many mechanical processes that were run by windmills are still important today, such as sawing, cutting, boring, drilling, crushing, hammering, sharpening, polishing, milling, turning, and so on.

All these production processes can be run with an intermittent power supply.

The same goes for food production processes (mincing, grinding or hulling grains, pressing olives and seeds), mining and excavation (picking and shovelling, rock and ore crushing), or textile production (fulling cloth, preparing fibres, knitting and weaving). In all these examples, intermittent energy input does not affect the quality of the production process, only the production speed.

Many production processes are not strongly disadvantaged by an intermittent power supply.

Running these processes on variable power sources has become a lot easier than it was in earlier times. For one thing, wind power plants are now completely automated, while the traditional windmill required constant attention. [14]

However, not only are wind turbines (and water turbines) more practical and powerful than in earlier times, we can now make use of solar energy to produce mechanical energy. This is usually done with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which convert sunlight into electricity to run an electric motor.

Consequently, a factory that requires mechanical energy can be run on a combination of wind and solar power, which increases the chances that there's sufficient energy to run its machinery.

The ability to harvest solar energy is important because it's by far the most widely available renewable power source. Most of the potential capacity for water power is already taken. [15]

Thermal Energy
Another crucial difference with pre-industrial times is that we can apply the same strategy to basic industrial processes that require thermal energy instead of mechanical energy. Heat dominates industrial energy use, for instance, in the making of chemicals or microchips, or in the smelting of metals.

In pre-industrial times, manufacturing processes that required thermal energy were powered by the burning of biomass, peat and/or coal. The use of these energy sources caused grave problems, such as large-scale deforestation, loss of land, and air pollution.

Although solar energy was used in earlier times, for instance, to evaporate salt along seashores, to dry crops for preservation, or to sunbake clay bricks, its use was limited to processes that required relatively low temperatures.

We can apply the same strategy to basic industrial processes that require thermal energy instead of mechanical energy, which was not possible before the Industrial Revolution.

Today, renewable energy other than biomass can be used to produce thermal energy in two ways. First, we can use wind turbines, water turbines or solar PV panels to produce electricity, which can then be used to produce heat by electrical resistance. This was not possible in pre-industrial times, because there was no electricity.

Second, we can apply solar heat directly, using water-based flat plate collectors or evacuated tube collectors, which collect solar radiation from all directions and can reach temperatures of 120 degrees celsius.

We also have solar concentrator collectors, which track the sun, concentrate its radiation, and can generate temperatures high enough to melt metals or produce microchips and solar cells. These solar technologies only became available in the late 19th century, following advances in the manufacturing of glass and mirrors.

Limited Energy Storage
Running factories on variable power sources doesn't exclude the use of energy storage or a backup of dispatchable power plants. Adjusting demand to supply should take priority, but other strategies can play a supportive role.

First, energy storage or backup power generation capacity could be useful for critical production processes that can't be halted for prolonged periods, such as food production.

Second, short-term energy storage is also useful to run production processes that are disadvantaged by an intermittent power supply. [16] Third, short-term energy storage is crucial for computer-controlled manufacturing processes, allowing these to continue operating during short interruptions in the power supply, and to shut down safely in case of longer power cuts. [17]

Compared to pre-industrial times, we now have more and better energy storage options available. For example, we can use biomass as a backup power source for mechanical energy production, something pre-industrial millers could not do – before the arrival of the steam engine, there was no way of converting biomass into mechanical energy.

Before the arrival of the steam engine, there was no way of converting biomass into mechanical energy.

We also have chemical batteries, and we have low-tech systems like flywheels, compressed air storage, hydraulic accumulators, and pumped storage plants.

Heat energy can be stored in well-insulated water reservoirs (up to 100 degrees) or in salt, oil or ceramics (for much higher temperatures).

All these storage solutions would fail for some reason or another if they were tasked with storing a large share of renewable energy production. However, they can be very useful on a smaller scale in support of demand adjustment.

The New Age of Sail
Cargo transportation is another candidate for using renewable power when it's available. This is most obvious for shipping. Ships still carry about 90 percent of the world's trade, and although shipping is the most energy efficient way of transportation per tonne-kilometre, total energy use is high and today's oil powered vessels are extremely polluting.

A common high-tech idea is to install wind turbines off-shore, convert the electricity they generate into hydrogen, and then use that hydrogen to power seagoing vessels.

However, it's much more practical and energy efficient to use wind to power ships directly, like we have done for thousands of years.

Furthermore, oil powered cargo ships often float idle for days or even weeks before they can enter a port or leave it, which makes the relative unpredictability of sailboats less problematic.

It's much more practical and energy efficient to use wind to power ships directly.

As with industrial manufacturing, we now have much better technology and knowledge available to base a worldwide shipping industry on wind power alone.

We have new materials to build better and longer-lasting ships and sails, we have more accurate navigation and communication instruments, we have more predictable weather forecasts, we can make use of solar panels for backup engine power, and we have more detailed knowledge about winds and currents.

In fact, the global wind and current patterns were only fully understood when the age of sail was almost over. Between 1842 and 1861, American navigator Matthew Fontaine Maury collected an extensive array of ship logs which enabled him to chart prevailing winds and sea currents, as well as their seasonal variations. [18]

Maury's work enabled seafarers to shorten sailing time considerably, by simply taking better advantage of prevailing winds and sea currents. For instance, a journey from New York to Rio de Janeiro was reduced from 55 to 23 days, while the duration of a trip from Melbourne to Liverpool was halved, from 126 to 63 days. [18]

More recently, yacht racing has generated many innovations that have never been applied to commercial shipping. For example, in the 2017 America's Cup, the Emirates Team New Zealand introduced stationary bikes instead of hand cranks to power the hydraulic system that steers the boat.

Because our legs are stronger than our arms, pedal powered 'grinding' allows for quicker tacking and gybing in a race, but it could also be useful to reduce the required manpower for commercial sailing ships. [19]

Speed sailing records are also telling. The fastest sailboat in 1972 did not even reach 50 km/h, while the current record holder -- the Vestas Sailrocket 2 -- sailed at 121 km/h in 2012. While these types of ships are not practical to carry cargo, they could inspire other designs that are.

Wind & Solar Powered Trains
We could follow a similar approach for land-based transportation, in the form of wind and solar powered trains.

Like sailing boats, trains could be running whenever there is renewable energy available. Not by putting sails on trains, of course, but by running them on electricity made by solar PV panels or wind turbines along the tracks.

This would be an entirely new application of a centuries-old strategy to deal with variable energy sources, only made possible by the invention of electricity

Wind and solar powered trains would be an entirely new application of a centuries-old strategy to deal with variable energy sources.

Running cargo trains on renewable energy is a great use of intermittent wind power because they are usually operated at night, when wind power is often at its best and energy demand is at its lowest.

Furthermore, just like cargo ships, cargo trains already have unreliable schedules because they often sit stationary in train-yards for days, waiting to become fully loaded.

Even the speed of the trains could be regulated by the amount of renewable energy that is available, just as the wind speed determines the speed of a sailing ship. A similar approach could also work with other electrical transportation systems, such as trolleytrucks, trolleyboats or aerial ropeways.

Combining solar and wind powered cargo trains with solar and wind powered factories creates extra possibilities. For example, at first sight, solar or wind powered passenger trains appear to be impossible, because people are less flexible than goods.

If a solar powered train is not running or is running too slow, an appointment may have to be rescheduled at the last minute. Likewise, on cloudy days, few people would make it to the office.

However, this could be solved by using the same renewable power sources for factories and passenger trains. Solar panels along the railway lines could be sized for cloudy days, and thus guarantee a minimum level of energy for a minimum service of passenger trains (but no industrial production).

During sunny days, the extra solar power could be used to run the factories along the railway line, or to run extra passenger (or cargo) trains.

Consequences for Society: Consumption & Production
As we've seen, if industrial production and cargo transportation became dependent on the availability of renewable energy, we would still be able to produce a diverse range of consumer goods, and transport them all over the globe.

However, not all products would be available all the time. If I want to buy new shoes, I might have to wait for the right season to get them manufactured and delivered.

Production and consumption would depend on the weather and the seasons. Solar powered factories would have higher production rates in the summer months, while wind powered factories would have higher production rates in the winter months. Sailing seasons also need to be taken into account.

If I want to buy new shoes, I might have to wait for the right season to get them manufactured and delivered.

But running an economy on the rhythms of the weather doesn't necessarily mean that production and consumption rates would go down. If factories and cargo transportation adjust their energy use to the weather, they can use the full annual power production of wind turbines and solar panels.

Manufacturers could counter seasonal production shortages by producing items 'in season' and then stocking it close to consumers for sale during low energy periods.

In fact, the products themselves would become 'energy storage' in this scenario. Instead of storing energy to manufacture products in the future, we would manufacture products whenever there is energy available, and store the products for later sale instead.

However, seasonal production may well lead to lower production and consumption rates. Overproducing in high energy times requires large production facilities and warehouses, which would be underused for the rest of the year.

To produce cost-efficiently, manufacturers will need to make compromises. From time to time, these compromises will lead to product shortages, which in turn could encourage people to consider other solutions, such as repair and re-use of existing products, crafted products, DIY, or exchanging and sharing goods.

Consequences for the Workforce
Adjusting energy demand to energy supply also implies that the workforce adapts to the weather. If a factory runs on solar power, then the availability of power corresponds very well with human rhythms. The only downside is that workers would be free from work especially in winter and on cloudy days.

However, if a factory or a cargo train runs on wind power, then people will also have to work during the night, which is considered unhealthy. The upside is that they would have holidays in summer and on good weather days.

If a factory or a transportation system is operated by wind or solar energy alone, workers would also have to deal with uncertainty about their work schedules. Although we have much better weather forecasts than in pre-industrial times, it remains difficult to make accurate predictions more than a few days ahead.

However, it is not only renewable power plants that are now completely automated. The same goes for factories. The last century has seen increasing automation of production processes, based on computers and robots.

So-called “dark factories” are already completely automated (they need no lights because there is nobody there).

It's not only renewable power plants that are now completely automated. The same goes for factories.

If a factory has no workers, it doesn't matter when it's running. Furthermore, many factories already run for 24 hours per day, partly operated by millions of night shift workers. In these cases, night work would actually decrease because these factories will only run through the night if it's windy.

Finally, we could also limit the main share of industrial manufacturing and railway transportation to normal working hours, and curtail the oversupply during the night. In this scenario, we would simply have less material goods and more holidays.

On the other hand, there would be an increased need for other types of jobs, like craftsmanship and sailing.

What About the Internet?
In conclusion, industrial manufacturing and cargo transportation -- both over land and over sea -- could be run almost entirely on variable renewable power sources, with little need for energy storage, transmission networks, balancing capacity or overbuilding renewable power plants.

In contrast, the modern high-tech approach of matching energy supply to energy demand at all times requires a lot of extra infrastructure which makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking.

Adjusting energy demand to supply would make switching to renewable energy much more realistic than it is today. There would be no curtailment of energy, and no storage and transmission losses. All the energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines would be used on the spot and nothing would go to waste.

Admittedly, adjusting energy demand to energy supply can be less straightforward in other sectors. Although the internet could be entirely operated on variable power sources -- using asynchronous networks and delay-tolerant software -- many newer internet applications would then disappear.

At home, we probably can’t expect people to sit in the dark or not to cook meals when there is no renewable energy. Likewise, people will not come to hospitals only on sunny days. In such instances, there is a larger need for energy storage or other measures to counter an intermittent power supply.

That's for a next post.

Sources:
[1] Lucas, Adam. Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology. Vol. 8. Brill, 2006.

[2] Reynolds, Terry S. Stronger than a hundred men: a history of the vertical water wheel. Vol. 7. JHU Press, 2002.

[3] Hills, Richard Leslie. Power from wind: a history of windmill technology. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[4] Paine, Lincoln. The sea and civilization: a maritime history of the world. Atlantic Books Ltd, 2014.

[5] One of the earliest large hydropower dams was the Cento dam in Italy (1450), which was 71 m long and almost 6 m high. By the 18th century, the largest dams were up to 260 m long and 25 m high, with power canals leading to dozens of water wheels. [2]

[6] Although windmills had all kinds of internal mechanisms to adapt to sudden changes in wind speed and wind direction, wind power had no counterpart for the dam in water power.

[7] This explains why windmills became especially important in regions with dry climates, in flat countries, or in very cold areas, where water power was not available. In countries with good water resources, windmills only appeared when the increased demand for power created a crisis because the best waterpower sites were already occupied.

[8] Tide mills were technically similar to water mills, but they were more reliable because the sea is less prone to dry out, freeze over, or change its water level than a river.

[9] Sieferle, Rolf Peter, and Michael P. Osman. The subterranean forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001.

[10] Freese, Stanley. Windmills and millwrighting. Cambridge University Press, 1957

[11] Wailes, Rex. The English windmill. London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1954

[12] The global wind pattern is complemented by regional wind patterns, such as land and sea breezes. The Northern Indian Ocean has semi-annually reversing Monsoon winds. These blow from the southwest from June to November, and from the northeast from December to May. Maritime trade in the Indian Ocean started earlier than in other seas, and the established trade routes were entirely dependent on the season.

[13] Jenkins, H. L. C. "Ocean passages for the world." The Royal Navy, Somerset (1973).

[14] Windmillers had to be alert to keep the gap between the stones constant however choppy the wind, and before the days of the centrifugal governor this was done by hand. The miller had to watch the power of the wind, to judge how much sail cloth to spread, and to be prepared to stop the mill under sail and either take in or let out more cloth, for there were no patent sails. And before the fantail came into use, he had to watch the direction of the wind as well and keep the sails square into the wind's eye. [11]

[15] Apart from electricity, the Industrial Revolution also brought us compressed air, water under pressure, and improved mechanical power transmission, which can all be valuable alternatives for electricity in certain applications.

[16] A similar distinction was made in the old days. For example, when spinning cloth, a constant speed was required to avoid gearwheels hunting and causing the machines to deliver thick and thin parts in rovings or yarns. [3] That's why spinning was only mechanised using water power, which could be stored to guarantee a more regular power supply, and not wind power. Wind power was also unsuited for processes like papermaking, mine haulage, or operating blast furnace bellows in ironworks.

[17] Very short-term energy storage is required for many mechanical production processes running on variable power sources, in order to smooth out small and sudden variations in energy supply. Such mechanical systems were already used in pre-industrial windmills.

[18] Leighly, J. (ed) (1963) The Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology by Matthew Fontaine Maury, 8th Edition, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Cited by Knowles, R.D. (2006) "Transport shaping space: the differential collapse of time/space", Journal of Transport Geography, 14(6), pp. 407-425.

[19] Rival teams rejected pedal power because they feared radical change, says Team New Zealand designer. The Telegraph, May 24, 2017.

.

How (not) to run on renewables

SUBHEAD: How will we be able to rely on renewable solar and wind power to run our society.

By Kris De Decker on 15 September 2017 for Low Tech Magazine -
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-powe.html)

[IB Publisher's note: There are graphs and other images in the original article that are not reproduced in this posting]


Image above: Windmill in Moulbaix, Belgium, 17th/18th century. Photo by Jean-Pol GrandMont. From original article.

While the potential of wind and solar energy is more than sufficient to supply the electricity demand of industrial societies, these resources are only available intermittently.

To ensure that supply always meets demand, a renewable power grid needs an oversized power generation and transmission capacity of up to ten times the peak demand. It also requires a balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants, or its equivalent in energy storage.

Consequently, matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking.

Yet, if we would adjust energy demand to the variable supply of solar and wind energy, a renewable power grid could be much more advantageous. Using wind and solar energy only when they're available is a traditional concept that modern technology can improve upon significantly.

100% Renewable Energy
It is widely believed that in the future, renewable energy production will allow modern societies to become independent from fossil fuels, with wind and solar energy having the largest potential.

An oft-stated fact is that there's enough wind and solar power available to meet the energy needs of modern civilisation many times over.

For instance, in Europe, the practical wind energy potential for electricity production on- and off-shore is estimated to be at least 30,000 TWh per year, or ten times the annual electricity demand. [1] In the USA, the technical solar power potential is estimated to be 400,000 TWh, or 100 times the annual electricity demand. [2]

Such statements, although theoretically correct, are highly problematic in practice. This is because they are based on annual averages of renewable energy production, and do not address the highly variable and uncertain character of wind and solar energy.

Annual averages of renewable energy production do not address the highly variable and uncertain character of wind and solar energy

Demand and supply of electricity need to be matched at all times, which is relatively easy to achieve with power plants that can be turned on and off at will. However, the output of wind turbines and solar panels is totally dependent on the whims of the weather.

Therefore, to find out if and how we can run a modern society on solar and wind power alone, we need to compare time-synchronised electricity demand with time-synchronised solar or wind power availability. [3][4] [5] In doing so, it becomes clear that supply correlates poorly with demand.

The Intermittency of Solar Energy
Solar power is characterised by both predictable and unpredictable variations. There is a predictable diurnal and seasonal pattern, where peak output occurs in the middle of the day and in the summer, depending on the apparent motion of the sun in the sky. [6] [7]

When the sun is lower in the sky, its rays have to travel through a larger air mass, which reduces their strength because they are absorbed by particles in the atmosphere. The sun's rays are also spread out over a larger horizontal surface, decreasing the energy transfer per unit of horizontal surface area.

When the sun is 60° above the horizon, the sun's intensity is still 87% of its maximum when it reaches a horizontal surface. However, at lower angles, the sun's intensity quickly decreases. At a solar angle of 15°, the radiation that strikes a horizontal surface is only 25% of its maximum.

On a seasonal scale, the solar elevation angle also correlates with the number of daylight hours, which reduces the amount of solar energy received over the course of a day at times of the year when the sun is already lower in the sky. And, last but not least, there's no solar energy available at night.

Likewise, the presence of clouds adds unpredictable variations to the solar energy supply. Clouds scatter and absorb solar radiation, reducing the amount of insolation that reaches the ground below. Solar output is roughly 80% of its maximum with a light cloud cover, but only 15% of its maximum on a heavy overcast day. [8][9][10]

Due to a lack of thermal or mechanical inertia in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, the changes due to clouds can be dramatic.

For example, under fluctuating cloud cover, the output of multi-megawatt PV power plants in the Southwest USA was reported to have variations of roughly 50% in a 30 to 90 second timeframe and around 70% in a timeframe of 5 to 10 minutes. [6]

In London, a solar panel produces 65 times less energy on a heavy overcast day in December at 10 am than on a sunny day in June at noon.

The combination of these predictable and unpredictable variations in solar power makes it clear that the output of a solar power plant can vary enormously throughout time.

In Phoenix, Arizona, the sunniest place in the USA, a solar panel produces on average 2.7 times less energy in December than in June. Comparing a sunny day at midday in June with a heavy overcast day at 10 am in December, the difference in solar output is almost twentyfold. [11]

In London, UK, which is a moderately suitable location for solar power, a solar panel produces on average 10 times less energy in December than in June. Comparing a sunny day in June at noon with a heavy overcast day in December at 10 am, the solar output differs by a factor of 65. [8][9]

The Intermittency of Wind Energy
Compared to solar energy, the variability of the wind is even more volatile. On the one hand, wind energy can be harvested both day and night, while on the other hand, it's less predictable and less reliable than solar energy.

During daylight hours, there's always a minimum amount of solar power available, but this is not the case for wind, which can be absent or too weak for days or even weeks at a time. There can also be too much wind, and wind turbines then have to be shut down in order to avoid damage.

On average throughout the year, and depending on location, modern wind farms produce 10-45% of their rated maximum power capacity, roughly double the annual capacity factor of the average solar PV installation (5-30%). [6] [12][13][14] In practice, however, wind turbines can operate between 0 and 100% of their maximum power at any moment.

For many locations, only average wind speed data is available. However, the chart above shows the daily and hourly wind power output on 29 different days at a wind farm in California.

At any given hour of the day and any given day of the month, wind power production can vary between zero and 600 megawatt, which is the maximum power production of the wind farm. [6]

Even relatively small changes in wind speed have a large effect on wind power production: if the wind speed decreases by half, power production decreases by a factor of eight. [15] Wind resources also vary throughout the years. Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark show a wind speed inter-annual variability of up to 30%. [1] Yearly differences in solar power can also be significant. [16] [17]

How to Match Supply with Demand?
To some extent, wind and solar energy can compensate for each other. For example, wind is usually twice as strong during the winter months, when there is less sun. [18] However, this concerns average values again.

At any particular moment of the year, wind and solar energy may be weak or absent simultaneously, leaving us with little or no electricity at all.

Electricity demand also varies throughout the day and the seasons, but these changes are more predictable and much less extreme. Demand peaks in the morning and in the evening, and is at its lowest during the night. However, even at night, electricity use is still close to 60% of the maximum.

At any particular moment of the year, wind and solar energy may be weak or absent simultaneously, leaving us with little or no electricity at all.

Consequently, if renewable power capacity is calculated based on the annual averages of solar and wind energy production and in tune with the average power demand, there would be huge electricity shortages for most of the time. To ensure that electricity supply always meets electricity demand, additional measures need to be taken.

First, we could count on a backup infrastructure of dispatchable fossil fuel power plants to supply electricity when there's not enough renewable energy available.

Second, we could oversize the renewable generation capacity, adjusting it to the worst case scenario.

Third, we could connect geographically dispersed renewable energy sources to smooth out variations in power production. Fourth, we could store surplus electricity for use in times when solar and/or wind resources are low or absent.

As we shall see, all of these strategies are self-defeating on a large enough scale, even when they're combined. If the energy used for building and maintaining the extra infrastructure is accounted for in a life cycle analysis of a renewable power grid, it would be just as CO2-intensive as the present-day power grid. ]

Strategy 1: Backup Power Plants
Up to now, the relatively small share of renewable power sources added to the grid has been balanced by dispatchable forms of electricity, mainly rapidly deployable gas power plants.

Although this approach completely "solves" the problem of intermittency, it results in a paradox because the whole point of switching to renewable energy is to become independent of fossil fuels, including gas. [19]

Most scientific research focuses on Europe, which has the most ambitious plans for renewable power.

For a power grid based on 100% solar and wind power, with no energy storage and assuming interconnection at the national European level only, the balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants needs to be just as large as peak electricity demand. [12] In other words, there would be just as many non-renewable power plants as there are today.

Such a hybrid infrastructure would lower the use of carbon fuels for the generation of electricity, because renewable energy can replace them if there is sufficient sun or wind available.

However, lots of energy and materials need to be invested into what is essentially a double infrastructure. The energy that's saved on fuel is spent on the manufacturing, installation and interconnection of millions of solar panels and wind turbines.

Although the balancing of renewable power sources with fossil fuels is widely regarded as a temporary fix that's not suited for larger shares of renewable energy, most other technological strategies (described below) can only partially reduce the need for balancing capacity.

Strategy 2: Oversizing Renewable Power ProductionAnother way to avoid energy shortages is to install more solar panels and wind turbines. If solar power capacity is tailored to match demand during even the shortest and darkest winter days, and wind power capacity is matched to the lowest wind speeds, the risk of electricity shortages could be reduced significantly.

However, the obvious disadvantage of this approach is an oversupply of renewable energy for most of the year.

During periods of oversupply, the energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines is curtailed in order to avoid grid overloading.

Problematically, curtailment has a detrimental effect on the sustainability of a renewable power grid. It reduces the electricity that a solar panel or wind turbine produces over its lifetime, while the energy required to manufacture, install, connect and maintain it remains the same.

Consequently, the capacity factor and the energy returned for the energy invested in wind turbines and solar panels decrease. [20]

Installing more solar panels and wind turbines reduces the risk of shortages, but it produces an oversupply of electricity for most of the year.

Curtailment rates increase spectacularly as wind and solar comprise a larger fraction of the generation mix, because the overproduction's dependence on the share of renewables is exponential.

Scientists calculated that a European grid comprised of 60% solar and wind power would require a generation capacity that's double the peak load, resulting in 300 TWh of excess electricity every year (roughly 10% of the current annual electricity consumption in Europe).

In the case of a grid with 80% renewables, the generation capacity needs to be six times larger than the peak load, while the excess electricity would be equal to 60% of the EU's current annual electricity consumption. Lastly, in a grid with 100% renewable power production, the generation capacity would need to be ten times larger than the peak load, and excess electricity would surpass the EU annual electricity consumption. [21] [22] [23]

This means that up to ten times more solar panels and wind turbines need to be manufactured. The energy that's needed to create this infrastructure would make the switch to renewable energy self-defeating, because the energy payback times of solar panels and wind turbines would increase six- or ten-fold.

For solar panels, the energy payback would only occur in 12-24 years in a power grid with 80% renewables, and in 20-40 years in a power grid with 100% renewables.

Because the life expectancy of a solar panel is roughly 30 years, a solar panel may never produce the energy that was needed to manufacture it. Wind turbines would remain net energy producers because they have shorter energy payback times, but their advantage compared to fossil fuels would decrease. [24]

Strategy 3: Connect Grids with Supergrids
The variability of solar and wind power can also be reduced by interconnecting renewable power plants over a wider geographical region. For example, electricity can be overproduced where the wind is blowing but transmitted to meet demand in becalmed locations. [19]

Interconnection also allows the combination of technologies that utilise different variable power resources, such as wave and tidal energy. [3] Furthermore, connecting power grids over large geographical areas allows a wider sharing of backup fossil fuel power plants.

Although today's power systems in Europe and the USA stretch out over a large enough area, these grids are currently not strong enough to allow interconnection of renewable energy sources.

This can be solved with a powerful overlay high-voltage DC transmission grid. Such "supergrids" form the core of many ambitious plans for 100% renewable power production, especially in Europe. [25]

The problem with this strategy is that transmission capacity needs to be overbuilt, over very long distances. [19]

For a European grid with a share of 60% renewable power (an optimal mix of wind and solar), grid capacity would need to be increased at least sevenfold.

If individual European countries would disregard national concerns about security of supply, and backup balancing capacity would be optimally distributed throughout the continent, the necessary grid capacity extensions can be limited to about triple the existing European high-voltage grid.

For a European power grid with a share of 100% renewables, grid capacity would need to be up to twelve times larger than it is today. [21] [26][27]

Even in the UK, which has one of the best renewable energy sources in the world, combining wind, sun, wave and tidal power would still generate electricity shortages for 65 days per year.

The problems with such grid extensions are threefold. Firstly, building infrastructure such as transmission towers and their foundations, power lines, substations, and so on, requires a significant amount of energy and other resources.

This will need to be taken into account when making a life cycle analysis of a renewable power grid. As with oversizing renewable power generation, most of the oversized transmission infrastructure will not be used for most of the time, driving down the transmission capacity factor substantially.

Secondly, a supergrid involves transmission losses, which means that more wind turbines and solar panels will need to be installed to compensate for this loss.

Thirdly, the acceptance of and building process for new transmission lines can take up to ten years. [20][25]

This is not just bureaucratic hassle: transmission lines have a high impact on the land and often face local opposition, which makes them one of the main obstacles for the growth of renewable power production.

Even with a supergrid, low power days remain a possibility over areas as large as Europe. With a share of 100% renewable energy sources and 12 times the current grid capacity, the balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants can be reduced to 15% of the total annual electricity consumption, which represents the maximum possible benefit of transmission for Europe. [28]

Even in the UK, which has one of the best renewable energy sources in the world, interconnecting wind, sun, wave and tidal power would still generate electricity shortages for 18% of the time (roughly 65 days per year). [29] [30][31]


Image above: One hundred year old brig "Eye of the Wind" is still sailing commercially. From original article.

Strategy 4: Energy Storage
A final strategy to match supply to demand is to store an oversupply of electricity for use when there is not enough renewable energy available. Energy storage avoids curtailment and it's the only supply-side strategy that can make a balancing capacity of fossil fuel plants redundant, at least in theory. In practice, the storage of renewable energy runs into several problems.

First of all, while there's no need to build and maintain a backup infrastructure of fossil fuel power plants, this advantage is negated by the need to build and maintain an energy storage infrastructure.

Second, all storage technologies have charging and discharging losses, which results in the need for extra solar panels and wind turbines to compensate for this loss.

The energy required to build and maintain the storage infrastructure and the extra renewable power plants need to be taken into account when conducting a life cycle analysis of a renewable power grid.

In fact, research has shown that it can be more energy efficient to curtail renewable power from wind turbines than to store it, because the energy needed to manufacture storage and operate it (which involves charge-discharge losses) surpasses the energy that is lost through curtailment. [23]

If we count on electric cars to store the surplus of renewable electricity, their batteries would need to be 60 times larger than they are today

It has been calculated that for a European power grid with 100% renewable power plants (670 GW wind power capacity and 810 GW solar power capacity) and no balancing capacity, the energy storage capacity needs to be 1.5 times the average monthly load and amounts to 400 TWh, not including charging and discharging losses. [32] [33] [34]

To give an idea of what this means: the most optimistic estimation of Europe's total potential for pumped hydro-power energy storage is 80 TWh [35], while converting all 250 million passenger cars in Europe to electric drives with a 30 kWh battery would result in a total energy storage of 7.5 TWh.

In other words, if we count on electric cars to store the surplus of renewable electricity, their batteries would need to be 60 times larger than they are today (and that's without allowing for the fact that electric cars will substantially increase power consumption).

Taking into account a charging/discharging efficiency of 85%, manufacturing 460 TWh of lithium-ion batteries would require 644 million Terajoule of primary energy, which is equal to 15 times the annual primary energy use in Europe. [36]

This energy investment would be required at minimum every twenty years, which is the most optimistic life expectancy of lithium-ion batteries. There are many other technologies for storing excess electricity from renewable power plants, but all have unique disadvantages that make them unattractive on a large scale. [37] [38]

Matching Supply to Demand Overbuilds the Infrastructure
In conclusion, calculating only the energy payback times of individual solar panels or wind turbines greatly overestimates the sustainability of a renewable power grid.

If we want to match supply to demand at all times, we also need to factor in the energy use for overbuilding the power generation and transmission capacity, and the energy use for building the backup generation capacity and/or the energy storage.

The need to overbuild the system also increases the costs and the time required to switch to renewable energy.

Calculating only the energy payback times of individual solar panels or wind turbines greatly overestimates the sustainability of a renewable power grid.

Combining different strategies is a more synergistic approach which improves the sustainability of a renewable power grid, but these advantages are not large enough to provide a fundamental solution. [33] [39] [40]

Building solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines, balancing capacity and energy storage using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels doesn't solve the problem either, because it also assumes an overbuilding of the infrastructure: we would need to build an extra renewable energy infrastructure to build the renewable energy infrastructure.

Strategy 5: Adjusting Demand to Supply
However, this doesn't mean that a sustainable renewable power grid is impossible. There's a fifth strategy, which does not try to match supply to demand, but instead aims to match demand to supply. In this scenario, renewable energy would ideally be used only when it's available.

If we could manage to adjust all energy demand to variable solar and wind resources, there would be no need for grid extensions, balancing capacity or overbuilding renewable power plants.

Likewise, all the energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines would be utilised, with no transmission losses and no need for curtailment or energy storage.

Of course, adjusting energy demand to energy supply at all times is impossible, because not all energy using activities can be postponed. However, the adjustment of energy demand to supply should take priority, while the other strategies should play a supportive role.

If we let go of the need to match energy demand for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, a renewable power grid could be built much faster and at a lower cost, making it more sustainable overall.

If we could manage to adjust all energy demand to variable solar and wind resources, there would no need for energy storage, grid extensions, balancing capacity or overbuilding renewable power plants.

With regards to this adjustment, even small compromises yield very beneficial results. For example, if the UK would accept electricity shortages for 65 days a year, it could be powered by a 100% renewable power grid (solar, wind, wave & tidal power) without the need for energy storage, a backup capacity of fossil fuel power plants, or a large overcapacity of power generators. [29]

If demand management is discussed at all these days, it's usually limited to so-called 'smart' household devices, like washing machines or dishwashers that automatically turn on when renewable energy supply is plentiful. However, these ideas are only scratching the surface of what's possible.

Before the Industrial Revolution, both industry and transportation were largely dependent on intermittent renewable energy sources. The variability in the supply was almost entirely solved by adjusting energy demand.

For example, windmills and sailing boats only operated when the wind was blowing. In the next article, I will explain how this historical approach could be successfully applied to modern industry and cargo transportation.

Sources:
[1] Swart, R. J., et al. Europe's onshore and offshore wind energy potential, an assessment of environmental and economic constraints. No. 6/2009. European Environment Agency, 2009.

[2] Lopez, Anthony, et al. US renewable energy technical potentials: a GIS-based analysis. NREL, 2012. See also Here's how much of the world would need to be covered in solar panels to power Earth, Business Insider, October 2015.

[3] Hart, Elaine K., Eric D. Stoutenburg, and Mark Z. Jacobson. "The potential of intermittent renewables to meet electric power demand: current methods and emerging analytical techniques." Proceedings of the IEEE 100.2 (2012): 322-334.

[4] Ambec, Stefan, and Claude Crampes. Electricity production with intermittent sources of energy. No. 10.07. 313. LERNA, University of Toulouse, 2010.

[5] Mulder, F. M. "Implications of diurnal and seasonal variations in renewable energy generation for large scale energy storage." Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy 6.3 (2014): 033105.

[6] INITIATIVE, MIT ENERGY. "Managing large-scale penetration of intermittent renewables." (2012).

[7] Richard Perez, Mathieu David, Thomas E. Hoff, Mohammad Jamaly, Sergey Kivalov, Jan Kleissl, Philippe Lauret and Marc Perez (2016), "Spatial and temporal variability of solar energy", Foundations and Trends in Renewable Energy: Vol. 1: No. 1, pp 1-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/2700000006

[8] Sun Angle and Insolation. FTExploring.

[9] Sun position calculator, Sun Earth Tools.

[10] Burgess, Paul. " Variation in light intensity at different latitudes and seasons effects of cloud cover, and the amounts of direct and diffused light." Forres, UK: Continuous Cover Forestry Group. Available online at http://www. ccfg. org. uk/conferences/downloads/P_Burgess. pdf. 2009.

[11] Solar output can be increased, especially in winter, by tilting solar panels so that they make a 90 degree angle with the sun's rays. However, this only addresses the spreading out of solar irradiation and has no effect on the energy lost because of the greater air mass, nor on the amount of daylight hours. Furthermore, tilting the panels is always a compromise. A panel that's ideally tilted for the winter sun will be less efficient in the summer sun, and the other way around.

[12] Schaber, Katrin, Florian Steinke, and Thomas Hamacher. "Transmission grid extensions for the integration of variable renewable energies in europe: who benefits where?." Energy Policy 43 (2012): 123-135.

[13] German offshore wind capacity factors, Energy Numbers, July 2017

[14] What are the capacity factors of America's wind farms? Carbon Counter, 24 July 2015.

[15] Sorensen, Bent. Renewable Energy: physics, engineering, environmental impacts, economics & planning; Fourth Edition. Elsevier Ltd, 2010.

[16] Jerez, S., et al. "The Impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation on Renewable Energy Resources in Southwestern Europe." Journal of applied meteorology and climatology 52.10 (2013): 2204-2225.

[17] Eerme, Kalju. "Interannual and intraseasonal variations of the available solar radiation." Solar Radiation. InTech, 2012.

[18] Archer, Cristina L., and Mark Z. Jacobson. "Geographical and seasonal variability of the global practical wind resources." Applied Geography 45 (2013): 119-130.

[19] Rugolo, Jason, and Michael J. Aziz. "Electricity storage for intermittent renewable sources." Energy & Environmental Science 5.5 (2012): 7151-7160.

[20] Even at today's relatively low shares of renewables, curtailment is already happening, caused by either transmission congestion, insufficient transmission availability, or minimal operating levels on thermal generators (coal and atomic power plants are designed to operate continuously). See: “Wind and solar curtailment”, Debra Lew et al., National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2013. For example, in China, now the world's top wind power producer, nearly one-fifth of total wind power is curtailed. See: Chinese wind earnings under pressure with fifth of farms idle, Sue-Lin Wong & Charlie Zhu, Reuters, May 17, 2015.

[21] Barnhart, Charles J., et al. "The energetic implications of curtailing versus storing solar- and wind-generated electricity." Energy & Environmental Science 6.10 (2013): 2804-2810.

[22] Schaber, Katrin, et al. "Parametric study of variable renewable energy integration in europe: advantages and costs of transmission grid extensions." Energy Policy 42 (2012): 498-508.

[23] Schaber, Katrin, Florian Steinke, and Thomas Hamacher. "Managing temporary oversupply from renewables efficiently: electricity storage versus energy sector coupling in Germany." International Energy Workshop, Paris. 2013.

[24] Underground cables can partly overcome this problem, but they are about 6 times more expensive than overhead lines.

[25] Szarka, Joseph, et al., eds. Learning from wind power: governance, societal and policy perspectives on sustainable energy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

[26] Rodriguez, Rolando A., et al. "Transmission needs across a fully renewable european storage system." Renewable Energy 63 (2014): 467-476.

[27] Furthermore, new transmission capacity is often required to connect renewable power plants to the rest of the grid in the first place -- solar and wind farms must be co-located with the resource itself, and often these locations are far from the place where the power will be used.

[28] Becker, Sarah, et al. "Transmission grid extensions during the build-up of a fully renewable pan-European electricity supply." Energy 64 (2014): 404-418.

[29] Zero Carbon britain: Rethinking the Future, Paul Allen et al., Centre for Alternative Technology, 2013

[30] Wave energy often correlates with wind power: if there's no wind, there's usually no waves.

[31] Building even larger supergrids to take advantage of even wider geographical regions, or even the whole planet, could make the need for balancing capacity largely redundant. However, this could only be done at very high costs and increased transmission losses. The transmission costs increase faster than linear with distance traveled since also the amount of peak power to be transported will grow with the surface area that is connected. [5] Practical obstacles also abound. For example, supergrids assume peace and good understanding between and within countries, as well as equal interests, while in reality some benefit much more from interconnection than others. [22]

[32] Heide, Dominik, et al. "Seasonal optimal mix of wind and solar power in a future, highly renewable Europe." Renewable Energy 35.11 (2010): 2483-2489.

[33] Rasmussen, Morten Grud, Gorm Bruun Andresen, and Martin Greiner. "Storage and balancing synergies in a fully or highly renewable pan-european system." Energy Policy 51 (2012): 642-651.

[34] Weitemeyer, Stefan, et al. "Integration of renewable energy sources in future power systems: the role of storage." Renewable Energy 75 (2015): 14-20.

[35] Assessment of the European potential for pumped hydropower energy storage, Marcos Gimeno-Gutiérrez et al., European Commission, 2013

[36] The calculation is based on the data in this article: How sustainable is stored sunlight? Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, 2015.

[37] Evans, Annette, Vladimir Strezov, and Tim J. Evans. "Assessment of utility energy storage options for increased renewable energy penetration." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16.6 (2012): 4141-4147.

[38] Zakeri, Behnam, and Sanna Syri. "Electrical energy storage systems: A comparative life cycle cost analysis." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 42 (2015): 569-596.

[39] Steinke, Florian, Philipp Wolfrum, and Clemens Hoffmann. "Grid vs. storage in a 100% renewable Europe." Renewable Energy 50 (2013): 826-832.

[40] Heide, Dominik, et al. "Reduced storage and balancing needs in a fully renewable European power system with excess wind and solar power generation." Renewable Energy 36.9 (2011): 2515-2523.

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