Transitioning to Renewables Will Not Create Energy Scarcity
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"Berman concludes: “I favor a future society that is based largely on renewable energy. That society will look very different that [sic] what we know today. Substituting renewables for fossil fuels is not a solution without greatly curtailing our total energy consumption. That’s what the physics indicates will happen in a renewable future. I suggest that we stop trying to make renewables look like something that are not and cannot be, and just learn to live with them as they are.”
I completely agree with Berman that future societies based on renewables will indeed look very different. And given that renewables produce electricity without up to 70% waste heat losses associated with converting primary energy from fossil fuels into useful energy, they will certainly entail a dramatic reduction in total primary energy consumption. That's why I argue that those who believe we need a dramatic downsizing of our energy consumption should be cheering on the renewable energy transformation, because that is precisely what it entails.
Yet that need not result in final energy scarcity, given that the system can be designed to produce considerable excess electricity virtually for free.
This is a phase-transition representing the emergence of a completely new energy system with novel properties and dynamics totally unlike incumbent fossil fuel energy systems. The emerging energy system will, therefore, have a number of really interesting features that are quite different to the incumbent system, and which cannot easily be captured in conventional EROI calculations designed to understand fossil fuels:
Once built, a solar, wind and battery system will produce energy continuously at zero marginal costs. Unlike a fossil fuel plant, once built it will not, for the most part, require continued material or energy inputs to maintain the energy output. In effect, after the start of operations, renewables will generate energy continuously without limits virtually for free.
The time period over which a renewable energy unit will generate zero marginal cost energy will be several decades. In fact, it is likely to extend well over 30 years. A five year study by the US Department of Energy’s Sandia Labs of 13 out of 23 tested solar PV module types found that they have effective lifetimes exceeding 30 years because they will still operate at 80% efficiency after those three decades. Robust modelling shows that the optimal design of renewable energy systems will be capable of generating as much as three to five times more energy than existing demand. As I’ve shown elsewhere, supersizing generating capacity in this way need pose no problems with respect to materials.
This excess electricity will be crucial because we will need it to help electrify industries – including mining, manufacturing and recycling for to build new renewable energy technologies. We can also use that excess to generate clean e-fuels (viable pilot projects have now proven how this can work; and recent innovations on track to become commercially viable around 2026).
The necessity of a viable circular economy in which raw materials and minerals are stringently recycled in this system is clear because despite the longer lifetimes of these new energy systems, they will still ultimately need to be replaced. A significant portion of the excess energy generated by solar, wind and battery systems will therefore need to be devoted to both the circular economy and the manufacturing of new energy units. In an optimally designed system, this looks entirely feasible.
The entire energy system will move from one based on centralised control to distributed generating capacity. While incumbent forces of centralisation will attempt to slow this down, the new system will work better as a decentralised network. Society will move from a division between energy producers and consumers, to energy consumers also becoming producers; and indeed, the largest energy consumers will be incentivised to reduce their costs by investing in becoming energy producers. This will not only drive the transformation of electricity grids, but also drive a wider transformation of the economy as the traditional divisions between labour and capital, producers and consumers, become blurred.
So there are good reasons to conclude that the energy produced in a global renewable system, if we build it out fast enough, will allow us to avoid a net energy cliff from the declining EROI of fossil fuels, and will be enough to sustain a thriving high-technology civilisation within planetary boundaries. But this is a big if - and, I should add, if we fail, that certainly doesn't rule out a 'great simplification' scenario.
Either way, this will not be the same system that exists today. It will have very different dynamics, and at every step of the way societies will need to make the right decisions to maximise and distribute its benefits. It will immediately lead to a reduction in material flows, and it will require those flows to become circular and regenerative in a way that has never been achieved before. The system will need to be managed in a way that is participatory, distributed and networked, with energy flowing and being shared across localities, regions and borders. It will need to be designed to respect planetary boundaries, requiring earth-centric values that recognise the embeddedness of the entire economy and energy system in the natural world.
In some ways, this debate serves as a distraction. The clean energy disruption is underway. The fossil fuel system is in decline. We need to figure out how to best optimise the emerging system, and how best to organise our societies around it. And given the speed with which the fossil fuel system is moving into economic obsolescence as dangerous climate change intensifies, we need to accelerate the deployment of the new energy system as fast as possible to mitigate the damage while avoiding the risk of breakdown and collapse.
But this need not be such a polarised debate. We can’t sit back and let technology ‘do all the work’ to save us. Tools are only as good as their makers. The way in which we deployed industrial-era technologies in such a way as to destroy our very planetary life-support systems shows that as we deploy these new tools, we need new and better ways of not only making tools, but deploying them in the world. That requires rethinking our values, our commitments, and our understanding of the world in a way that transcends the conventional obsessions of today's homo-economicus. To the extent that these debates get us to that point, they are valuable."