Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

I used to believe innovation could reduce the massive ecological impacts of solar & wind farms

Then I realized that we can't make the sun/wind more energy-dense, or reliable

Thus, I can no longer support them

My newest essay is 20+ years in the making

goo.gl/wgZ5UK

1. When I was a boy, my parents would sometimes take my sister and me camping in the desert.

A lot of people think deserts are empty, but my parents taught us to see the wildlife all around us, including hawks, eagles, and tortoises.

2. After college, I moved to California to work on environmental campaigns. I helped save the state’s last, unprotected ancient redwood forest, and blocked a proposed radioactive waste repository set for the desert.

3. In 2002, shortly after I turned 30, I decided I wanted to dedicate myself to addressing climate change.

I was worried that global warming would end up destroying many of the natural environments that people had worked so hard to protect.

4. I thought the solutions were pretty straightforward: solar panels on every roof, electric cars in every driveway, etc. The main obstacles, I believed, were political. And so I helped organize a coalition of America’s largest labor unions and environmental groups.

5. Our proposal was for a $300 billion dollar investment in renewables. We would not only prevent climate change but also create millions of new jobs in a fast-growing high-tech sector.

It was the real world predecessor to @AOC "Green New Deal."

@AOC 6. Our efforts paid off in 2007 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama embraced our vision.

Between 2009–15, the U.S. invested $150 billion dollars in renewables and other forms of clean tech.

But right away we ran into trouble.

@AOC 7. The first was around land use. Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land.

@AOC 8. That, along with the fact that solar and wind farms require long new transmissions lines, threatened local communities, and conservationists trying to preserve wildlife, particularly birds.

@AOC 9. Another challenge was the intermittent nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.

@AOC 10. Happily, there were a lot of people working on solutions. One solution was to convert California’s dams into big batteries.

@AOC 11. The idea was that, when the sun was shining and the wind was blowing, you could pump water uphill, store it for later, and then run it over the turbines to make electricity when you needed it.

@AOC 12. Other problems didn’t seem like such a big deal, on closer examination. For example, after I learned that house cats kill billions of birds every year it put into perspective the nearly one million birds killed by wind turbines.

@AOC 13. It seemed to me that most, if not all, of the problems from scaling up solar and wind energies could be solved through more technological innovation.

But, as the years went by, the problems persisted and in some cases grew worse.

@AOC 14. For example, California is a world leader when it comes to renewables but we haven’t converted our dams into batteries, partly for geographic reasons. You need the right kind of dam and reservoirs, and even then it’s an expensive retrofit.

@AOC 15. A bigger problem is that there are many other uses for the water that accumulates behind dams, namely irrigation and cities. And because the water in our rivers and reservoirs is scarce & unreliable, the water from dams for those other purposes is becoming ever-more precious

@AOC 16. Without large-scale ways to back-up solar energy California has had to block electricity coming from solar farms when it’s extremely sunny, or pay neighboring states to take it from us so we can avoid blowing-out our grid.

@AOC 17. Despite what you’ve heard, there is no “battery revolution” on the way, for well-understood technical and economic reasons.

@AOC 18. As for house cats, they don’t kill big, rare, threatened birds. What house cats kill are small, common birds, like sparrows, robins and jays

What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines

@AOC 19. In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.

@AOC 20. Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.

@AOC 21. In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.

@AOC 22. As we were learning of these impacts, it gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.

@AOC 23. You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably.

I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy.

@AOC 24. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

@AOC 25. Dealing with energy sources that are inherently unreliable, and require large amounts of land, comes at a high economic cost.

@AOC 26. There’s been a lot of publicity about how solar panels and wind turbines have come down in cost.

But those one-time cost savings from making them in big Chinese factories have been outweighed by the high cost of dealing with their unreliability.

@AOC 27. Consider California. Between 2011–17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet our electricity prices rose five times more than they did in the rest of the U.S.

@AOC 28. It’s the same story in Germany, the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices increased 50 percent between 2006–17, as it scaled up renewables.

@AOC 29. I used to think that dealing with climate change was going to be expensive. But I could no longer believe this after looking at Germany and France.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 30. Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid, and a 50 percent rise in its electricity prices.

@AOC 31. Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.

@AOC 32. Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billion on renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 33. What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear & cheap solar-wind?

They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that ~70% of costs of nuclear are up-front solar-wind costs don’t include transmission lines, storage & grid management

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 34. It’s reasonable to ask whether nuclear power is safe, and what happens with its waste.

It turns out that scientists have studied the health and safety of different energy sources since the 1960s.

@AOC 35. Every major study, including this recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity.

@AOC 36. Strange as it sounds, nuclear power plants are so safe for the same reason nuclear weapons are so dangerous

The uranium used as fuel in power plants, and material for bombs, can create one million times more heat per its mass than its fossil fuel and gunpowder equivalents

@AOC 37. It’s not so much about the fuel as the process. We release more energy breaking atoms than breaking chemical bonds. What’s special about uranium atoms is that they are easy to split.

@AOC 38. Because nuclear plants produce heat without fire, they emit no air pollution in the form of smoke. By contrast, the smoke from burning fossil fuels and biomass results in the premature deaths of seven million people per year, according to the World Health Organization.

@AOC 39. Even during the worst accidents, nuclear plants release small amounts of radioactive particulate matter from the tiny quantities of uranium atoms split apart to make heat.

@AOC 40. Over an 80-year lifespan, fewer than 200 people will die from the radiation from the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, and zero will die from the small amounts of radiant particulate matter that escaped from Fukushima.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 41. The climate scientist James Hanson and a colleague found that nuclear plants have actually saved nearly two million lives to date that would have been lost to air pollution.

@AOC 42. Thanks to its energy density, nuclear plants require far less land than renewables.

Even in sunny California, a solar farm requires 450 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear plant.

@AOC 43. Energy-dense nuclear requires far less in the way of materials, and produces far less in the way of waste, compared to energy-dilute solar & wind

A single Coke can of uranium provides all of the energy that the most gluttonous American or Australian lifestyle requires

@AOC 44. At the end of the process, the high-level radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce is the very same Coke can of (used) uranium fuel

The reason nuclear is the best energy environmentally is because it produces so little waste and none enters the environment as pollution

@AOC 45. All of the used fuel ("nuclear waste") from 45 years of the Swiss nuclear program fits, in canisters, on a basketball court-like warehouse, where like all used nuclear fuel, it has never hurt a fly.

@AOC 46. We tend to think of solar panels as clean, but the truth is that there is no plan anywhere to deal with solar panels at the end of their 20 to 25 year lifespan.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 47. Experts fear solar panels will be shipped with other electronic waste to be disassembled — often, smashed with hammers — by poor communities in Africa & Asia, whose residents will be exposed to the dust from toxic metals like lead, cadmium, chromium

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

@AOC 48. Whenever I travel I ask ordinary people what they think about nuclear & renewables.

After saying they know little, they say nuclear is strong & renewables are weak. Their intuitions are correct.

What we wrongly think —understandably — is that weak energies are safer

@AOC 48. But aren’t renewables safer? The answer is no. Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.

@AOC 49. In other words, *the energy density of the fuel determines its environmental and health impacts.*

Spreading more mines and more equipment over larger areas of land is going to have larger environmental and human safety impacts, for inherently physical reasons.

@AOC 50. It’s true that you can stand next to a solar panel without much harm while if you stand next to a nuclear reactor at full power you’ll die.

@AOC 51. But when it comes to generating power for billions of people, it turns out that producing solar and wind collectors, and spreading them over large areas, has vastly worse impacts on humans and wildlife alike.

@AOC 52. Our intuitive sense that sunlight is dilute sometimes shows up in films. That’s why nobody was shocked when the recent sequel to “Blade Runner” opened with a dystopian scene of California’s deserts paved with solar farms identical to the one that decimated desert tortoises

@AOC 53. Over the last several hundred years, humans have been moving away from what "matter-dense" fuels towards "energy-dense" ones.

First we move from renewables like wood, dung, & windmills to fossil fuels — from coal to oil to natural gas — and eventually to uranium.

@AOC 54. Energy progress is overwhelmingly positive for people and nature. As we stop using wood for fuel we allow grasslands and forests to grow back, and the wildlife to return.

ecomodernism.org

@AOC 55. As we stop burning wood and dung in our homes, we no longer must breathe toxic indoor smoke. And as we move from fossil fuels to uranium we clear the outdoor air of pollution, and reduce how much we’ll heat up the planet.

@AOC 56. Nuclear plants are thus a revolutionary technology—a grand historical break from fossil fuels as significant as the industrial transition from wood to fossil fuels before it.

@AOC 57. The problem with nuclear is that it is unpopular, a victim of a 50 year-long concerted effort by fossil fuel, renewable energy, anti-nuclear weapons campaigners, and misanthropic environmentalists to ban the technology.

environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuc…

58. In response, the nuclear industry suffers battered wife syndrome, and constantly apologizes for its best attributes, from its waste to its safety.

59. Lately, the nuclear industry has promoted the idea that, in order to deal with climate change, “we need a mix of clean energy sources,” including solar, wind and nuclear.

world-nuclear.org/our-associatio…

60. It was something I used to believe, and say, in part because it’s what people want to hear.

cc.com/video-clips/qd…

61. The problem is that it’s not true.

France shows that moving from mostly nuclear electricity to a mix of nuclear and renewables results in more carbon emissions, due to using more natural gas, and higher prices, to the unreliability of solar and wind.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

62. Oil & gas firms know this, which is why they made an alliance with solar-wind companies & are spending millions on advertising promoting solar, and funneling millions of dollars to anti-nuclear environmental groups, to provide public relations cover

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

63. What is to be done? The most important thing is for scientists and conservationists to start telling the truth about renewables and nuclear, and the relationship between energy density and environmental impact.

64. Bat scientists recently warned that wind turbines are on the verge of making one species, the Hoary bat, a migratory species, go extinct.

65. A scientist who helped build that massive solar farm said, “Everybody knows that translocation of desert tortoises doesn’t work. When you’re walking in front of a bulldozer, crying, & moving animals & cacti out of the way it’s hard to think that the project is a good idea”

66. I think it’s natural that those of us who became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

67. Collectively, we have all been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy — a marketing gimmick, really — no different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket labeled “all natural.”

67. It’s time that those of us who appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the science & start questioning the impacts of our actions

Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?

/END