Review of "Where Will We Get Our Energy?"

Jon Boone sent me this review of my book Where Will We Get Our Energy? A Comprehensive Quantitative System Engineering Study of the Relationship between Climate, Science, and Technology. I reproduce it with his permission.

Thanks for recommending your book. Over the last month, I’ve read portions of it as I found time, assessing your content in terms of what I have learned over the last two decades. Bottom line: You produced a well documented, comprehensive, take down of the renewables ballyhoo (something I did nearly 20 years ago in my MDPSC wind testimony), eviscerating particularly the wind energy baby—along with its bathwater. Your prose style is both pithy and entertaining; your rhetoric, compelling; and your blend of rather abstruse mathematics with down home explanation is deftly informative. For example, I loved the way you described the development of the formula for converting wind energy into electricity, quickly getting to the fly in wind’s soup: V3!

In short, you showed that the renewables du jour are a dysfunctional, very costly, solution to a non-existent problem. At grid scale, wind can neither be a functional additive nor an alternative energy source. Rather, it’s a supplement that requires a great deal of supplementation for grid integration, in the process continually subverting its reason for being.

The climate change farrago is a super-charged proposition that mocks the scientific method, as you so correctly demonstrate. It’s full of definitional slips and slides and, as currently formulated, can never genuinely be falsified, even though it is false. Your narrative excursion about nuclear is up to date and informative.

I’ve recommended your book widely.

Although I agree with all your conclusions, I nonetheless want to provide some food for your thought on the wind menu, addressing (1) what I think of using the term, backup, for wind output; questioning (2) the rather blasé claim that wind provides a certain percentage of the overall delivery of electricity generation to any grid (as you have done); and, imploring you, because it’s clear you have the knowledge and skill to do so with authority, to investigate (3) the battery charge/discharge efficiency impact in service to balancing wind’s quotidian flux over, say, the course of a year, assuming a grid in which only wind, solar, and batteries supply demand. Given that wind generation changes its output hundreds of times daily and that the grid must match demand closely at all times, I would be thunderstruck if any present-day battery system would be able to survive the onslaught for any meaningful amount of time, no matter how high the cost.

On the backup issue, the notion that wind volatility is something in need of “backup” seems to be a minor wind howler. Yes, grid reliability and security demand that all generating plants have redundancy built in, hence the idea of backup as a conventional industry term of use. However, backup overwhelmingly means a reserve or substitute for the real thing, often in the form of an understudy or a computer file. Or it can mean support for a much larger object or activity. (Let’s avoid here the notion of backup as a clogged drain.) In the first case, the backup is sufficiently like the original (what is backed up) that performance should not be markedly corrupted. A second-string quarterback should in virtually all-important respects be able to do what the first-string quarterback does. Ditto for an understudy forced into mainline service because of illness to the diva.

In the second case, a backup buttress to an architectural feature plays a small role in the scheme of things, nice for security to be sure, but nonetheless, it is a minor part of the whole. Although it is a proactive measure in terms of ultimate security, it is mainly reactive in function.

The nature of wind variability, which routinely changes its output 5% or more at every five-minute interval and occasionally widely alters what it delivers in a very short time, means that wind is a wayward fish to conventional generation’s bicycle; it is a completely different creature both in degree and kind. Given that wind generates an average of only a fourth of its full capacity annually, nearly 75% of that capacity must therefore consist of conventional generation—in order to keep supply matched to demand. Given that 10-15% of the time it produces nothing, then 100% of its full capacity must be taken over by conventional machines. The truth is that wind can only be a minor ingredient in a much larger fuel mix—but much like a fly in soup, which provides, like wind, problematic nutritional value. You could eat it. But why would you want to?

Given the erratic, skittering nature of its delivery, wind cannot merely be “backed up” by a slightly corrupted version of itself. Quite the contrary. It is as if wind is the whacky substitute requiring the first team, the diva, to make it functional. In the best Orwellian newspeak fashion, it is the backup that does virtually all the important work—but in a much more inefficient fashion. How would the world’s best actor squelch, live onstage, a drunken understudy who continually spoke lines from another play?

Words are important if they are to impart accurate meaning. To say that wind requires backup is to pervert both language and meaning, despite its bellyfeel quality. Although language is slippery, it should not be that quicksilver. Wind machines must always be ENTANGLED with proactive but inefficiently operating conventional machines through the entire extent of any wind machine’s full capacity.

On the issue of wind providing a certain percentage of electricity to a grid system, there is implied in this idea that the grid is therefore using less conventional power plants, particularly fossil fired, because wind is displacing them. This is of course a reasonable conclusion. However, this is yet another of those situations where face value accurate facts don’t tell the larger context truth of things. As you surely know, there is a front and back end to wind generation. At the front end, wind energy must displace existing generation to keep the grid balanced. However, at the back end, wind’s continuous variability must be followed and balanced by conventional generation, typically fossil-fired. Thermal plants deployed as wind balancers are operating much more inefficiently in this role, consuming more fuel in the process than they otherwise would.

Here’s where the situation gets more than weird in terms of truth telling and it involves the use of imports (thanks for discussing them in your text). Let me urge you to read pages 6-13 of my paper, Overblown, where I discuss my findings about this regarding the grids in Texas and Colorado, examining claims by the wind industry that wind output had caused a reduction in overall conventional generation. Turns out that the amount of imported generation, which was not mentioned as being part of the total generation mix, more than compensated for the reductions in the grids’ conventional generation use. In the cases of both grids, there was actually a slight increase in the use of conventional generation overall, despite a lot of wind on the system.

In all my years of looking, I have not found—anywhere—that wind generation has caused any reductions in the use of conventional power plants and their fuels. In truth, the more wind, the greater demand for fossil fuels, all things considered.

No need to respond. I haven’t done much energy related work for some while. So good to see you doing such excellent work. Trust you’ll continue in the wake of Trump’s energy agenda, providing intellectual ballast in support until the wind mess withers away from its well-deserved fate: unbelief.

Many cheers! Jon