The Big Liberal Lie About Renewable Energy

One of the loonier ideas that Wonderboy rode into office last November was this myth of thousands of "green" jobs and a non-carbon-based US energy policy.

The March 5 edition of the Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece by Robert Bryce, managing editor of the Energy Tribune, entitled "Let's Get Real About Renewable Energy."

His point is summarized in this passage early in his editorial,

"By promising to double our supply of renewables, Mr. Obama is only trying to keep pace with his predecessor. Yes, that's right: From 2005 to 2007, the former Texas oil man oversaw a near-doubling of the electrical output from solar and wind power. And between 2007 and 2008, output from those sources grew by another 30%.

Mr. Bush's record aside, the key problem facing Mr. Obama, and anyone else advocating a rapid transition away from the hydrocarbons that have dominated the world's energy mix since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is the same issue that dogs every alternative energy idea: scale.

If Mr. Obama is only counting wind power and solar power as renewables, then his promise is clearly doable. But the unfortunate truth is that even if he matches Mr. Bush's effort by doubling wind and solar output by 2012, the contribution of those two sources to America's overall energy needs will still be almost inconsequential.

Here's why. The latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that total solar and wind output for 2008 will likely be about 45,493,000 megawatt-hours. That sounds significant until you consider this number: 4,118,198,000 megawatt-hours. That's the total amount of electricity generated during the rolling 12-month period that ended last November. Solar and wind, in other words, produce about 1.1% of America's total electricity consumption."

That's it in a nutshell. Mr. Bryce destroys this myth, now being spread in those stupid wind power commercials on cable television, that renewables are poised to take over the heavy lifting of electric power generation in America any day now.

Consider the following passages from Mr. Bryce's piece,

"And yet, while price reductions are important, the wind is intermittent, and so are sunny days. That means they cannot provide the baseload power, i.e., the amount of electricity required to meet minimum demand, that Americans want.

That issue aside, the scale problem persists. For the sake of convenience, let's convert the energy produced by U.S. wind and solar installations into oil equivalents.

The conversion of electricity into oil terms is straightforward: one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 1.64 megawatt-hours of electricity. Thus, 45,493,000 megawatt-hours divided by 1.64 megawatt-hours per barrel of oil equals 27.7 million barrels of oil equivalent from solar and wind for all of 2008.

Now divide that 27.7 million barrels by 365 days and you find that solar and wind sources are providing the equivalent of 76,000 barrels of oil per day. America's total primary energy use is about 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Of that 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent, oil itself has the biggest share -- we consume about 19 million barrels per day. Natural gas is the second-biggest contributor, supplying the equivalent of 11.9 million barrels of oil, while coal provides the equivalent of 11.5 million barrels of oil per day. The balance comes from nuclear power (about 3.8 million barrels per day), and hydropower (about 1.1 million barrels), with smaller contributions coming from wind, solar, geothermal, wood waste, and other sources.

Here's another way to consider the 76,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day that come from solar and wind: It's approximately equal to the raw energy output of one average-sized coal mine."

That's pretty stunning, isn't it? Putting current renewable energy production into terms that correctly scale it to a minuscule amount of US energy consumption. Stated that way, it's obvious that renewables are nowhere near the point of replacing any significant amount of US electrical power generation. And as they grow, renewables will certainly encounter new problems with scaling up to real, significant production levels.

Bryce concludes his impressive piece with these observations,

"Perhaps the president's omissions are understandable. America has an intense love-hate relationship with hydrocarbons in general, and with coal and oil in particular. And with increasing political pressure to cut carbon-dioxide emissions, that love-hate relationship has only gotten more complicated.

But the problem of scale means that these hydrocarbons just won't go away. Sure, Mr. Obama can double the output from solar and wind. And then double it again. And again. And again. But getting from 76,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to something close to the 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day needed to keep the U.S. economy running is going to take a long, long time. It would be refreshing if the president or perhaps a few of the Democrats on Capitol Hill would admit that fact."

Anyone familiar with exponential math understands Bryce's point. You'd have to double renewable production 9.28 times from its current level to reach 47.4 million barrels of daily oil equivalent production. Of course, doubling ever-larger production levels becomes impossible. So the decade implied by Bryce's math demonstrates just how long renewables will really take to accomplish Wonderboy's goal.

For those of you who are interested, a more realistic long term average growth rate of 15% per year in renewables results in a timeframe of 46 years before non-carbon energy sources can replace conventional, existing US electrical power production.