Warming Thoughts© #5--- Conceptualizing the Five Main Elements Required to Stop Global Warming: A--Primary Energy Supply
By: James F. Lavin, CEO Electron Storage, Inc.
I have recently reorganized my thinking about how to clarify and quantify the immense task of tackling global warming. I’ve broken it down into five main elements. The first is the task of creating the supply of clean primary energy. The second task is creating the required infrastructure to move this energy. The third task is changing the end use of energy. The fourth task is the energy intensive process of CO2 removal from the environment. The fifth is reducing the emissions of other greenhouse gases, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. There is a necessary sixth, enhancing earth’s reflectivity and other geoengineering, but it is a necessary stopgap, not a solution. As I’ve discussed in a previous essay, as we work on these tasks, we must keep fossil fuels flowing so we don’t kill ourselves.
A---Clean Primary Energy—the most difficult and critical task:
First, we need immense new supplies of clean primary energy. Primary energy means everything we use for heating and cooking, i.e., wood, dung, other biofuels, gas, oil, coal, plus everything we use to produce electricity; hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, and fossil fuels. Over 80% of all the primary energy used globally comes from fossil fuels. Use is split approximately in half between fuel used to create electricity and fuel used for transport and heating. The basic mantra of cutting emissions is to create carbon free electricity and electrify everything (possible).
Without enough clean energy, we can’t succeed at the other tasks without creating lots of new emissions, so it always comes first in priority. If we have enough clean energy, we can do just about anything, direct air capture of CO2, making fuels from air, desalination, indoor farming, clean steel, etc., etc. But it is a huge if.
The scale is absolutely staggering. Primary energy is measured in Exajoules, and the world’s human population currently uses around 600 Exajoules of energy, with approximately 500 exajoules coming from fossil fuels. Think about that for a moment, we are trying to replace around 5/6ths of the total energy we use with energy derived from the sun (wind and solar), geothermal, and nuclear.
The 500 Exajoules of fossil fuel energy is equal to around 140 million Gigawatt hours/yr, a slightly more familiar term. Divided by the hours in a year, this still equals a staggering 16,000 GW every hour. A typical coal powered generator plant is around ½ a gigawatt in output capacity, a nuclear plant, around a gigawatt in max capacity, so we need the energy equivalent of 16,000 new large nuclear plants at an absolute minimum---fast! With intermittent power sources we actually need 2-4X more, which is an unfathomable amount of new clean primary energy generation capacity.
To put this in perspective, the US has total generation capacity equal to around 1,200 gigwatt scale plants. We must double this output to 2,400 GW to provide the energy to create heat and transportation energy, and synthetic fuels. To repeat, we need to replace 80% of existing electrical production (in the US, because nuclear provides 20%, and hydro, solar and wind contribute, we “only” need to replace 60% of existing electrical production, but because of age we will soon have to replace all the nuclear plants as well, so it is still 80% of existing capacity). Then, we have to double the amount of energy production. It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this task and the required resources in materials, craftsman, and engineering, and in smart pro-active regulation.
Trying to put a more optimistic face on the problem, there is no chance we could create this much clean power in the next few decades if we had to build 16,000 traditional nuclear power plants on site. The globe simply doesn’t have the welders and pipe and wiring experts to do this. We must scale solar and wind, and potentially small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) with some minor contributions from geothermal and tidal/wave power. (Fusion is likely to happen within this decade, but it is hard to imagine the technology becoming simple enough to produce thousands of fusion power plants in the next 30-40 years).
Fortunately, solar and wind turbines are produced in factories and are subject to mass production economies of scale and learning curves. Batteries to store the intermittent energy of solar and wind are also mass produced. Most SMR reactors designs are planned around factory built nuclear cores capable of being truck transported to the power plant site. These technologies therefore have the potential for rapid deployment into the field. It may take a long time for the interconnect switchgear into the grid and for the relevant transmission lines to be built, but the actual installation of even a very large solar field is quick.
Wind, due to its low power density of around 2w/sq M, (each turbine interferes with the downstream wind so they need to be widely spaced) and climate impacts as taking power from the winds does slow down winds and raise local temperatures, will be a minor contributor compared to solar. However, it too can be erected far more quickly than a conventional power plant. The world needs baseload reliable power, and it would be great if we could build conventional nuclear plants as quickly as we did in the 60’s and 70’s, but we have essentially lost the knowledge on how to build them, and they remain under 5% of global electrical grid supply.
Another way to conceptualize the scale of what must take place is to look at capital costs, not cost/MWH or levelized cost of ownership which spreads the costs over the life of a project, but the actual up-front costs since for solar, wind and nuclear, costs are primarily capital. Let’s imagine an energy mix with 10% on-shore wind, 20% off-shore wind, 20% nuclear, and 50% solar. On shore wind is currently around $1.7 MM/MW face plate capacity, off-shore based on current UK projects, around $3.3 MM/MW, Nuclear $10 MM/MW (highly uncertain), and solar $1 MM/MW. Solar and wind have capacity factors significantly less than 50% (the sun only shines half the day) but off-shore wind helps, and we have nuclear in the mix, so optimistically we will assume we only have to overbuild wind and solar by 2X. To reach 16,000 GW of actual capacity will cost around $74 Trillion dollars, close to current world annual GDP. Most projections rely on assuming a continual cost decline for solar and wind technologies and therefore assume a lower transition cost. I am more skeptical as 1) the best locations get taken early and are not infinite; 2) solar panels and wind turbines take a lot of energy to produce, and so do the control elements, interconnects and storage necessary to make them work at scale, and energy costs are going to go up as a result of decarbonizing; and 3) even with continual innovation and material substitutions, the quantities of input materials are so vast, it is hard to see how prices drop significantly as mines are also getting harder and harder to open.
Battery material constraints are well known, but so are constraints on rare earth metals for the generator motors, the dopants in the solar panels, copper for the windings, and for SMR reactors, both highly enriched uranium nuclear fuel and the specialized metals for the pipe containing the high temperature molten salts. But $74 trillion dollars opens up a lot of supply, if environmentalists don’t stop them in a misguided attempt to deny that there are always tradeoffs and we are in a triage situation.
Addendum:
This year the International Energy Agency released a scenario Net Zero by 2050, purporting to show that it was possible to achieve an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 with the remainder offset by negative emissions technologies including direct air capture. Buried at page 56 is the heroic assumption that despite adding 3 billion people since 2010, and world GDP projected to be three times larger (despite energy being more expensive!) world energy consumption will be around 550 exajoules, down from today and around the same as 2010.
This assumption is not without some basis. Energy use has peaked in the US and Europe and is unlikely to grow due to slow population growth, increasing energy efficiency, and shifts to the use of electricity from fossil fuels. The clearest example is electric cars. A Tesla Model S with a 100 KWH battery weights about as much as my Mazda CX-9 with its 19.5-gallon gas tank, carries about as much and goes as almost as far. The gasoline in my tank has an energy equal to 33.7 KWH/gallon x 19.5 gallons = 657 KWH, 6.5x as much as the Tesla’s battery capacity. Yes, electric cars really are that much more efficient. Yes, yes, I know, there are losses in transmission and distribution and around 10% in charging and discharging a battery, but still electric cars are a much more efficient user of primary energy
Similarly, while modern gas or oil furnaces can be more than 90% efficient, a heat pump used for heating and hot water can be three or more times as efficient as the raw energy input due to extracting the heat from the air. On the other, hand production of hydrogen and synthetic fuels is very energy inefficient and battery production takes a great deal of energy. The assumption that the world has reached peak energy consumption seems to me to condemn billions of people to remain in poverty and relies on heroic and never seen changes in energy to GDP efficiency.