Enough with “renewables!”
The American Nuclear Society posted an article entitled How a nuclear victory at COP27 started with a teen and a text reporting on the wonderful story of Ia Aanstoot. This is the 17-year old Swedish highschool student who effectively saved the day for nuclear at COP27 by alerting a WhatsApp chat group with the right people in it, that the final language being used by the COP27 negotiating team for its agreement used the term “renewables” rather than “clean energy” and so excluded consideration of nuclear.
Through a chain of texts and resulting prompt action by senior US officials which were relayed back to the negotiating room, a potential clean energy disaster was averted. Given that there was a quick fix, it seems that the whole threatened exclusion problem arose less because of some deliberately nefarious effort by negotiators to exclude nuclear but rather was due to misguided if casual usage of the word “renewables.” The good news is that, as far as COP27 showed, nuclear energy is sitting at the clean energy table again.
The bad news is that many people, including top negotiators, don’t think about the implications of their use of the this word. If nothing else, this story highlights the confusion and potential pitfalls caused by using “renewable,” which is a form of jargon, rather than what is really meant. Some folks use this particular term to cause confusion and some use it because they are confused. In the COP27 case, the use appears to have been inadvertent. Still it seems wise to point out how use of this particular word causes confusion, problems and contributes to our inability to make good climate decisions.
We need “Clean” energy to address Climate Change
When it comes to choosing which types of energy technology to prioritize and build in order to address climate, we need to stay focused on low-carbon sources, or what we now call “clean” energy. Many people may not realize that all of what is “renewable” is not “clean.”
Renewable energy is defined to focus on types of energy that come from “sources that cannot be depleted or which naturally replenish,” an appealing concept but actually a red herring with respect to carbon emissions. Clearly, some types of renewables are low and non-carbon-emitting energy sources, such as wind and solar. But some renewables are highly emitting sources of energy, namely bioenergy, which includes burning ancient forests, also called biomass energy.
Technically, under the proper conditions and given hundreds of years, forests will grow back. But this is not going to happen in the timeframe which matters to humanity. We have an urgent problem and need to halve global emissions by 2030 and eliminate emissions entirely by 2050. We can’t afford to either lose more forests or wait for trees to grow. Thus, what really matters is knowing whether or not there are carbon emissions that come a source of energy and not whether it might eventually be replenished, even if too late to matter.
We can get this information by looking at the carbon-intensity of energy. We consider low-carbon-intensity “clean” and high-carbon-intensity “dirty.” Unfortunately, many simply assume that all renewables are “clean” but that’s not the case. Bioenergy emits as much carbon as fossil fuels. People applaud our progress when they hear that the percentage of renewables is growing. Yet, according to Bioenergy International, bioenergy produced more than 2/3rds of the energy labelled “renewable.” And that generates high levels of emissions, so this is actually not progress towards emissions reductions.
Lately, the large and growing bioenergy industry has been seen as contributing massively to deforestation. Yet, bioenergy has the burnish of appearing to be “green” because it’s made the political cut and is included as “renewable.” This means that companies cutting down trees have benefitted from the subsidies and incentives intended to increase clean energy. Fortunately, many are starting to be more discerning and are specifically excluding ecologically-damaging types of bioenergy as unsustainable and not worthy of prioritization with climate-focused subsidies.
Politics, lobbying and powerful ideologic preferences are what have brought the term “renewable” into vogue in the first place. This also means that what’s included as renewable differs from place to place. California specifically excludes large hydro power but includes small hydropower stations. Not because large hydro emits more carbon or doesn’t rely on the renewing resource of rain but rather because California policymakers decided dams posed too great an ecologic impact and didn’t want to prioritize building more large dams. In other places, renewables includes large hydro. The fact that the definition of what’s renewable varies from place to place, contributes to confusion and lack of clarity. When folks in California hear that there are Canadian provinces running almost entirely on renewable energy, they may think that means they’ve succeeded in building out lots of wind and solar. In fact, it’s predominantly large hydro—which isn’t counted as “renewable” in California.
Nuclear’s Contributions to Clean Energy are Sidelined
The biggest problem by far with using the term renewable, however, is that it is invariably defined to exclude nuclear power. This causes the entire nuclear industry—which for decades has produced more clean energy than all other low-carbon sources combined—to be discounted and even sometimes excluded. Not surprising since nuclear has long been maligned and even demonized. Even so, the omission of nuclear as a renewable energy source, whether intentional or not, causes significant problems for those trying to use good data to address climate change.
We cannot make good decisions about how to invest in new energy generation if we don’t get good information about where our clean energy is coming from. Most energy agencies now include reports on levels of Renewables, because they are politically potent. They don’t create reports based on carbon intensity (such as by grouping the low-carbon energy technologies and the high-carbon energy technologies). Thus, people are not shown that their nuclear power plants are contributing to the clean energy being produced. This may induce them to think that nuclear is carbon-emitting—which it isn’t. They will think biofuels are a good thing for the climate—they aren’t. They will also think we have less clean energy than we actually do and agree to pay for more renewables. In certain areas, nuclear power plants are not even credited with producing carbon-free energy that counts towards the region’s clean energy goals! Which explains why folks (like in Downstate New York) are willing to allow craven politicians (like former Governor Cuomo) to shut down perfectly good nuclear power plants (like Indian Point). In short, the focus on “renewables” also produces misleading data.
New York is a perfect example. New York’s Independent System Operator, NYISO (whose stated vision is “Working together with stakeholders to build the cleanest, most reliable electric system in the nation”) provides stakeholders with two types of pie charts on its Real-Time Energy Dashboard: “All Fuels” and “Renewables.” You can see all of the types of energy that contribute to the fuel mix powering the state in the sample chart on the left but the chart doesn’t reflect carbon intensity, so you won’t be able to see which types of energy are contributing to climate change and which aren’t. (Click charts to enlarge.)
NYISO’s second chart, Renewables, also doesn’t show carbon intensity or provide information about what’s “clean” or not. This subset includes hydro, wind and “other renewables” (shown to include solar, methane, refuse and wood). In this example, hydro appears to be the largest source of clean energy for the state. Anyone could easily interpret these two charts to think that the first shows all types of energy and second shows those that are “green” (i.e. “clean”‘.) This of course is wrong and misleading. All the types of energy shown in the green color are not “green,” low-carbon sources. Additionally, the second chart omits showing the largest source of New York’s clean energy generation. Shame on you, NYISO. Rate-payers deserve to be shown all of New York’s low-carbon energy. Your job is to deliver less jargon and more facts! Such a chart would make it very clear that nuclear energy was producing the majority of New York’s clean energy, like the below mock up created by the Climate Coalition (and explored in an article called “NYISO’s Deceptive Reports“):
New York is not alone in producing deceptive reports that mislead viewers and also serve to undermine support for nuclear energy. Most state system operators follow this same pattern. These professionals are all aware of the climate crisis and the importance of educating people about sources of clean energy—but they are under political constraints. It seems oblivious, if your goal is “building the cleanest and most reliable grids” then what people need are reports which show “Emitting/DIrty” energy vs “Non-Emitting/Clean” energy types. These agencies know that Petroleum, Natural Gas, Coal and Bioenergy (biofuels/biowaste/biomass, etc) emit carbon at very high levels. They also know that Nuclear, Large Hydro, Small Hydro, Wind, Solar and Geothermal have significantly lower emissions attributed to them and so do not substantially contribute to climate change, regardless of your politics. Yet even the US Energy Information Agency fails to provide data in a useful format that avoids jargon and provides an accurate picture of how well we are doing addressing climate change. Take this chart for example:
The EIA helpfully groups Fossil Fuels and Renewables together but doesn’t show what’s actually clean energy, so we know how well we are doing reducing emissions. Again, a more useful presentation would be one centered around carbon emissions rather than jargon. Here’s the same exact data organized by Nucleation Capital in a way that reflects CO2 emissions. It’s much easier to see the decarbonization achieved in these 12 years:
When I contacted the EIA and asked whether they had any reports that just show energy generation based upon relative impact on climate, I was told “we do not categorize energy sources subjectively as clean or dirty.” Hmm, why not?
This problem reflects persistant nuclear prejudice and the political popularity of renewables, despite their increasingly obvious poor performance at reducing emissions. This was the gist of a study that was published by Atte Harjanne and Janne M. Korhonen in 2018 entitled “Abandoning the concept of renewable energy.” They write: “In politics, business and academica, renewable energy is often framed as the key solution to the global climate challenge. We, however, argue that the concept of renewable energy is problematic and should be abandoned in favor of more unambiguous conceptualization . . . [as] the key problems the concept of renewable energy has in terms of sustainability, incoherence, policy impacts, bait-and-switch tactics and generally misleading nature.”
Again, it is important to distinguish between those who don’t like the types of energy labelled as “renewable,” and what we are suggesting here. We find that use of the term “renewable” is misleading with respect to the metrics that matter the most to the public and policymakers. The debate about whether or not we should be using solar, wind or biofuels is not what we are concerned with here. Those are worthy debates which endeavor to look at whether or not the amount of land, mined materials, manufacturing, installation, ecosystem impacts, and all-in firming and transmission costs are worthwhile investments achieving both our decarbonization and grid reliability goals. We are not even questioning the merit of considering certain technologies as “renewable” when forests are being cut down with no guarantees of being replanted. We are only questioning the merit of grouping a limited set of technologies into a catch-all term that is used as a proxy for “clean energy,” when it’s not. Confusing jargon that elevates some technologies, excludes others without true reference to emissions is not helping us make good decisions towards our carbon-reduction goals.
We need clear and accurate information on climate impacts as we make increasingly large investments in transitioning our energy systems, commiting us to energy projects that will have 20, 30, 50-year and longer life-spans. For this, we definitely should avoid anything that hints at ambiguity and stick with what we mean: clean energy. So, in 2023, let’s work to reject use of the word “renewable” and demand that we focus on the distinction that does matter: carbon intensity. Without clear language and understanding, neither the public nor those negotiating our future world agreements can be expected to make good decisions.
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Citations
1. “How a Nuclear Victory at COP27 Started with a Teen and a Text,” by Amelia Tiemann, published by NuclearNewswire, December 15. 2022.
2. “Renewable Energy Explained: Overview and Types” by EnergySage.
3. “Drax: UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada” by Joe Crowley and Tim Robinson, published in BBC News, October 3, 2022
4. “Under dinosaurs reign, bioenergy the largest renewable energy source,” by Bioenergy International, December 10, 2020.
5. “Australia rejects forest biomass in first blow to wood pellet industry,” by Justin Catanoso, published by Mongabay, December 21, 2022.
6. New York Independent System Operator “Real-Time Dashboard.”
7. ResearchGate: “Abandoning the concept of renewable energy”, by Atte Harjanne and Janne M. Korhonen, December 2018.
https://www.electricitymaps.com/
Gives the CO2 per kWh for the electricity in the regions they can get data.
Then if you click on the region you get how much comes from various sources.
Any discussion of how to reduce CO2 emissions should link to it.
Both the EIA and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have become less transparent in the statistics that they publish.
Fifteen years ago, the websites of these organizations were my go-to source for analyzing, understanding, and explaining how energy is generated and used in the US and throughout the world. Since then, their websites have become more convoluted and difficult to navigate. Instead of providing easy options to access the actual data, they tend to steer the user to their reports, which more and more read like a sales pitch or political propaganda than an honest assessment that allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
You can still find the actual numbers, if you work hard enough, but it has become much more difficult than it used to be. This is what happens when energy becomes more and more politicized and special interests become more powerful.
I disagree, Brian. Perhaps you can find EIA’s actual numbers, but I sure can’t. And believe me, I’ve tried. .
Started with an attempt to compare EIA’s Levelized Cost of Energy values with those from other sources. No joy.
First, what is LCOE?
NREL knows what LCOE is, and gives a formula.
Lazard knows what LCOE is, and gives a slightly different (equally justifiable) formula.
EIA claims to know what LCOE is: it’s buried deep within their NEMS model.
NREL even has an online LCOE calculator. NREL can’t tell you what to put into it, but if you happen to know, they will cheerfully compute you an LCOE. So will your pocket calculator.
At this point I bit the bullet, swallowed my pride, and began looking into Lazard. In addition to an actual formula, Lazard also tabulated reasonably current inputs. Applied unequally in their tabulated results of course, but at least one can see what they are doing.
That was all eighteen months ago. I hope to revisit that LCOE morass someday and finish my article.
But wait! There’s more!!
Last night when I should have had better things to do, I came across an early (first?) Robert Bryce subredit Siemens Power CEO Confirms the Iron Law of Power Density. There Mr. Bryce provides a “Tons of material per TWh” graphic, with values taken from Table 10.4 (page 390) of EIA’s Quadrennial Technology Review 2015.
Fascinating metric, “Tons of material per TWh”. One supposes that if one could estimate tons of steel and concrete per MW installed capacity, and could estimate a plant’s capacity factor, and it’s projected lifetime, then one could indeed ballpark “Tons of material per TWh”. And if one were suitably intrigued, one could go to EIA’s reference 52 to look for them.
Of course, EIA’s reference 52 is to yet another of their black-box modelling programs, this time GREET — The Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies Model — with no further explanation whatsoever about what GREET does or how it was used to address this particular problem.
Sigh. Well, I might not be Engineer-Poet. But I’m still not totally berift of resources:
<a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/519e/a5c55a312f3f45ccfcc4a093a941366c6658.pdf"
Metal And Concrete Inputs For Several Nuclear Power Plants, Peterson et al. 2005.
Concrete Towers for Onshore and Offshore Wind Farms, Gifford, The Concrete Center, 2012.
Then from Peterson’s paper I’d estimate 204,500 m^3 concrete and 70,900 MT (metric tons) steel for an EPR. Using concrete density 2.4 MT/m^3, 90% Cf, and 60 year plant life I’d get 650 MT concrete and 94 MT steel per TWh for EPR, or 744 total “Tonnes of material per TWh” or 818 “Tons material per TWh”.
EIA GREET claims 920 tons material per TWh for nuclear, only 12% high. But they don’t show their work.
Similarly for wind, using Gifford’s 2012 values for 2.5 MW onshore wind turbine of 460 tons metal and 3100 tons concrete, and assuming 25 yr plant life and 40% capacity factor, then including stem and nacelle one finds 2100 tons metal and 14,155 tons concrete per TWh, or 16,255 total tons material per TWh.
EIA GREET claims 1800 tons steel and 8,000 tons concrete per TWH for “Wind”, or 9,800 total tons material per TWh. But they don’t say which wind, where, its alleged capacity factor, or assumed plant lifetime and whatever recycling. They don’t say.
They don’t show their work.
I didn’t say you could find ALL the numbers.I was complaining that it’s difficult to find even the basic numbers these days.
I have never found any mention anywhere on EIA or NREL indicating the fact that Wind turbines use ten to fifteen percent of “generated power,” annually, taken from a source other than the Output of the generator to maintain the WT in a state of readiness to generate power. They ignore this power consumption as it is indicated on a different power meter. Thus, all of their “calculations” do not consider this in their glowing reports of the “efficiency” of these power hogs. When 15% of the annual generated power is put on a separate accounting sheet for a device that only has a 30 to 50% annual Capacity factor that means they are actually only achieving a 15 to 35 % capacity factor.
Even a search for “How much power does a wind turbine use.” mostly finds answers of how much it Generates.
Here are a few things to consider: [Note: this is not a complete list.]
yaw mechanism (to keep the blade assembly perpendicular to the wind; — the nacelle (turbine housing) and blades together weigh 92 tons on a GE 1.5-MW turbine
blade-pitch control (to keep the rotors spinning at a regular rate)
Charge batteries needed to meet OSHA & FAA regulations and critical control equipment..
Power for lights, FAA Lighting, controllers, communication, sensors, metering, data collection, communications of the data to the Dispatcher and all of the control mechanisms, etc.
heating. defrosting and deicing the blades — this may require 10%-20% of the turbine’s nominal (rated) power
heating, cooling, and dehumidifying the nacelle
oil heater, pump, cooler, and filtering system in gearbox
hydraulic brake (to lock the blades in very high wind)
thyristors (to graduate the connection and disconnection between generator and grid) — 1%-2% of the energy passing through is lost
magnetizing the stator — the stator may use power equal to 10% of the turbine’s rated capacity, in slower winds possibly much more
using the generator as a motor (to help the blades start to turn when the wind speed is low)
The use of this power generates heat which adds to the required cooling for the nacelle in the summer months.
Thank you Valerie for bringing up the detailed and compelling
article on the ubiquitous abuse of terms like “shift to renewables”
in energy policy misinformation.
Thanks also to James Baerg and Brian Mays for their comments
about CO2 per kWh and data transparency to restore the focus
on the data most relevant to climate change analysis.
Actually, I’m not a fan of the use of loaded, ambiguous terms like
“clean” and “green” as adjectives applied to the noun “energy”
either. I think it would be far better to use “carbon-free” to describe
energy production methods free of atmospheric carbon pollution.
“carbon-free” gets right to the point of carbon reduction in the fight
against climate change, whereas “clean” and “green” obscure it.
Exactly what do we mean if we say that “nuclear is clean energy”?
People will come back with “What about the waste”? At which point,
we are off the road to fight climate change and into the weeds of
mostly unrelated pro/anti nuclear arguments.
Thanks Chris. I agree with the need to avoid the word “green.” People tend to use it interchangeably with “renewables,” so its meaning is vague. I’d argue that nuclear energy is “green” but some people use it to exclude nuclear.
On the other hand, I think “clean” is typically used to mean low or no-carbon energy generation, although there is confusion there as well. Some might think it implies zero or low toxic emissions, like NOx and SOx, rather than CO2. To be completely clear, saying “clean, low-carbon emissions” would be the best but it’s tedious to repeat.
Thanks Valerie, I have to concede that “green” and “clean” are really in
different categories of linguistic abuse, possibly because “green” has
its own political parties and environmental factions. I also now better
appreciate that “clean” is thought by some to also denote absence of
toxic emissions like oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, though that doesn’t
seem to be helping nuclear energy’s public understanding enough.
Perhaps not coincidentally, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur are both
produced by chemical combustion of coal, and not by nuclear fission.
Perhaps humanity would be better off if chemical combustion was
subjected to the same levels of scrutiny as nuclear fission and
radioactive decay.
I still hope that someday science education will inspire more people to
understand the differences between the world of electron shells and
the world of atomic nuclei.
“Fossil” and “nonfossil” are the two adjectives needed now and into the future as the increasingly dominant concern of the audience becomes achieving net zero emissions. That term too, needs tidying up. There is no “net” value if there are negligible negative emissions. And we are not concerned about emissions from recycled carbon or hydrogen. So the term should be “zero fossil emissions”.
Categorising wind and solar as “nonfossil energy” would serve the climate movement and international obligations to protect the climate. It would be resisted by those who believe that the world’s problems arise because non-renewable mineral resources are running out, but they, like the Club of Rome, are vanishing into the past. It would also be resisted by those who believe that the term “renewables” explicitly excludes nuclear. They could be placated by the nuclear community changing its own adjective.
Categorising fission energy as “nonfossil energy” would similarly serve the climate movement and obligations. There would be a similar minority who actually like the panache of the word “nuclear”, with its historical associations with nuclear weaponry and military power. However, I would like to think that our industry would settle for being called “fission power” and being categorised with solar and wind in the term, “nonfossil energy”.
“Fossil” of course applies to coal, oil and gas and their derivative products. “Fossil” can also label hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, even though its marketing propaganda would promote it as carbon-free. “Fossil-free” then applies to hydrogen, synthetic fuel, aluminium, iron, cement and plastics made with nonfossil power and recycled carbon.
The common category of “nonfossil energy” should be used when collecting and publishing statistics, and then subsequently be used in legislation explicitly. Benefits such as carbon tax and climate subsidies would then be shared between solar, wind, hydro, fission and fusion according to their various capacities to provide fossil-free power to the world.
Renewables people are masters in marketing.
Unreliable intermittent generators whose output is all over the place, and usually badly correlated with demand, is called “variable”.
Reliable, 24/7 baseload nuclear plants are “inflexible”.
Objectively rubbish; wind and sunshine can’t be turned on when needed, making them much more inflexible than nuclear, the latter operating at baseload mode because its fuel costs are low so it makes sense for it to run full out whenever possible. But very clever marketing wise: turning a negative (intermittency) into a neutral term (variable) while turning a positive (reliable 24/7 power output) into a supposed negative (inflexible). Lies, but really clever lies.
The nuclear industry is not capable of such clever lies. It only deals in stupid lies, such as nuclear accidents being really bad but unlikely to occur, when neither are true, and indeed, demonstrably false.