Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Unreliables

Solar’s dirty secrets: How solar power hurts people and the planet

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By Brian Gitt

Brian’s an energy entrepreneur, investor, and writer. He’s been pursuing truth in energy for over two decades. First, as executive director of a green building trade association. Then as CEO of an energy consulting firm (acquired by Frontier Energy) specializing in the commercialization of technology in buildings, vehicles, and power plants. And more recently he founded UtilityScore, a software startup, that estimated utility costs and savings for 100M+ homes and led business development at Reach Labs developing wireless power. Follow him on Twitter and check out his website.

False beliefs about renewable energy are harming the environment. I say this as someone who championed renewable energy for over two decades—first as executive director of a green building non-profit, then as CEO of a consulting firm specializing in clean energy, and most recently as founder of a cleantech startup. I thought my efforts were helping to protect the environment. But I was wrong.

Like many people, I believed the worst harm to the environment came from fossil fuels—and greedy companies exploiting the land, polluting the air, and destroying ecosystems to get them. It took me many years to realize that this viewpoint is distorted and to admit that many of my beliefs about renewable energy were false. And now I’m ready to talk about what we really need to do to save the environment.

The Truth about Energy

The truth is this: every source of energy has costs and benefits that have to be carefully weighed. Wind and solar are no different. Most people are familiar with the benefits of wind and solar: reduced air pollution, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced reliance on fossil fuels. But not as many recognize the costs of wind and solar or understand how those costs hurt both the environment and people—especially people with lower incomes.

Looking at Life Cycles

To fully evaluate how solar and wind energy hurt people and the environment, we must consider the lifecycle of renewable energy systems. Every artifact has a lifecycle that includes manufacture, installation, operation, maintenance, and disposal. Every stage in that lifecycle requires energy and materials, so we need to tally up the energy and materials used at every stage of the cycle to fully understand the environmental impact of an object.

Think of a car. To understand its full impact on the environment, we must consider more than simply how many miles it gets per gallon of gas. Gas consumption measures only the cost of operating the car, but it doesn’t measure all the energy and materials that go into manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and ultimately disposing of the car. Tally up the costs at each stage of the car’s lifecycle to get a more complete picture of its environmental impact.

The same is true of solar panels. To fully understand the environmental impact of solar panels, we need to consider more than simply how much energy and emissions the panels produce during operation. We also need to tally up the expenditure of energy and materials that go into manufacturing, transporting, installing, maintaining, and ultimately disposing of the panels. Once we tally up those costs, we see that solar power leaves a larger ecological footprint than advocates like to admit.

The Environmental Costs of Manufacturing and Installing Solar

Solar advocates often gloss over the solar-panel manufacturing process. They just say, “We turn sand, glass, and metal into solar panels.” This oversimplification masks the real environmental costs of the manufacturing process.

Solar panels are manufactured using minerals, toxic chemicals, and fossil fuels. In fact, solar panels require 10 times the minerals to deliver the same quantity of energy as a natural gas plant.[1]Quartz, copper, silver, zinc, aluminum, and other rare earth minerals are mined with heavy diesel-powered machinery. In fact, 38% of the world’s industrial energy and 11% of total energy currently go into mining operations.[2]

Once the materials are mined, the quartz and other materials get melted down in electric-arc furnaces at temperatures over 3,450°F (1,900°C) to make silicon—the key ingredient in solar cells. The furnaces take an enormous amount of energy to operate, and that energy typically comes from fossil fuels.[3] Nearly 80% of solar cells are manufactured in China, for instance, where weak environmental regulations prevail and lower production costs are fueled by coal.[4]

There are also environmental costs to installing the panels. Solar panels are primarily installed in two ways: in solar farms and on rooftops. Most U.S. solar farms are sited in the southwestern U.S. where sunshine is abundant. The now-canceled Mormon Mesa project, for instance, was proposed for a site about 70 miles northeast of Las Vegas. It was slated to cover 14 square miles (the equivalent of 7,000 football fields) with upwards of a million solar panels, each 10-20 feet tall. It would have involved bulldozing plants and wildlife habitat on a massive scale to replace them with concrete and steel. Environmentalists and local community groups opposed the project because it threatened views of the landscape and endangered species like the desert tortoise, and the proposed project was eventually withdrawn.[5]

Placing massive solar farms far from populated areas presents additional challenges as their remote locations require new power lines to carry energy to people who use it. Environmentalists and local community groups often fiercely oppose the construction of ugly power lines, which also have to get approval from multiple regulatory agencies. Those factors make it almost impossible to build new transmission lines in the U.S.[6] If approval is granted, installing those lines takes a further toll on the environment.

In addition, the farther the electricity has to travel, the more energy is lost as heat in the transmission process. The cost-effective limit for electricity transmission is roughly 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers.) So you can’t power New York or Chicago from solar energy farms in Arizona.

Limitations to Rooftop Solar

Rooftop solar installations could sidestep some of the problems of solar farms, but they have problems of their own.

First, many buildings are not suitable for rooftop solar panels. Rooftop installations are typically exposed to less direct sunlight due to local weather patterns, shade from surrounding trees, the orientation of a building (which are often not angled toward the sun), or the pitch of the roof.

Second, the average cost to buy and install rooftop solar panels on a home as of July 2021 is $20,474.[7] This makes rooftop installations cost-prohibitive—especially for lower-income families.

Finally, even if we installed solar panels on all suitable buildings in the U.S. we could generate only 39% of the electricity the country needs according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.[8]

Solar panels also have a shorter lifespan[9] than other power sources (about half as long as natural gas[10] and nuclear plants[11]), and they’re difficult and expensive to recycle because they’re made with toxic chemicals. When solar panels reach the end of their usable life, their fate will most likely be the same as most of our toxic electronic waste: They will be dumped in poorer nations.  It is estimated that global solar panel waste will reach around 78 million metric tons by 2050[12]–the equivalent of throwing away nearly 60 million Honda Civic cars.[13]

The Human Costs of Solar

Solar harms more than the environment; it hurts people—especially the economically disadvantaged, who face a hard choice between paying high energy costs or suffering energy poverty.

Consider a family of four in California’s Central Valley. They currently pay one of the highest rates for electricity in the U.S.—80% more than the national average.[14] They may be forced to choose between paying for daycare or turning off their air conditioner in 100-degree heat. Families like this are not rare. The California Public Utilities Commission says 3.3 million residential customers have past-due utility bills. Taken together they owe $1.2 billion.[15]

Adding more renewable energy to the grid is not only expensive; it’s dangerous! The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a nonprofit organization that monitors the reliability, resilience, and security of the grid, says that the number-one risk to the electrical grid in America is adding more unreliable renewables.[16]

The reliability of a power source is measured by capacity factor. The capacity factor of a power plant tracks the time it’s producing maximum power throughout the year. When we compare the capacity factors of power plants, we see that solar is the least reliable energy source: natural gas is twice as reliable as solar, and nuclear energy is three times more reliable. 

Recent events in Texas and California highlight the risk of adding more unreliable power sources to the grid. The blackouts were caused by several interconnected factors. The Texas power blackout in February 2021 left 4.5 million homes and businesses without power (some for several days) and killed hundreds of people.[17] The immediate trigger of the Texas blackout was an extreme winter storm, but that storm had such a massive effect because of factors rooted in poorly designed economic incentives. Texas wind and solar projects collected $22 billion in Federal and State subsidies.[18] These subsidies distorted the price of power and hence compromised the reliability of the Texas grid. The electricity market is complex. And multiple factors converged to cause the blackout including a failure of government oversight and regulation. But if investments had flowed to natural gas and nuclear power plants instead of unreliable solar and wind, the blackout would likely have lasted minutes instead of days.

Unreliable solar and wind power were also among the three primary factors causing California’s rolling blackouts in August 2020, according to the State of California’s final report on the power outages.[19]

A year later, in July 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency and authorized the use of diesel generators to overcome energy shortfalls. And in August 2021, the state announced the emergency construction of five new gas-fueled generators to avoid future blackouts.[20]

Events in California and Texas highlight another unappreciated cost of solar and wind: Compensating for their unreliability requires the use of more reliable sources of power, namely fossil fuels. A study conducted across 26 countries over two decades by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded for every 1 megawatt of solar or wind power installed there need to be 1.12 megawatts of fossil fuels (usually natural gas) as backup capacity because solar and wind are unreliable.[21] Moreover, using backup diesel generators and ramping power plants up and down to meet energy shortfalls are two of the worst ways to use fossil fuels; they’re inefficient and cause unnecessary pollution.

A final point: solar and wind have low power densities. According to a facts guide on nuclear energy from the U.S. Department of Energy, a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. Solar farms, by contrast, need 75 times more land and wind farms need 360 times more land, to produce the same amount of electricity.[22]

Even if we could overcome all the practical constraints on storing, transmitting, and distributing solar power, supplying a country the size of the U.S. would require over 22,000 square miles of solar panels[23]—approximately the size of New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts combined.[24] And the unreliability of solar power means that even with that many solar panels, we would continue to need most of our existing power plants.

The Costs of Energy Poverty Worldwide

The less-measured costs of promoting renewable energy extend far beyond California and even the United States. Energy is the foundation of civilization. Access to it enables healthcare, education, and economic opportunity. It liberates men from dangerous jobs, women from domestic drudgery, children from forced labor, and animals from backbreaking work.

Energy poverty, by contrast, leads to malnutrition, preventable disease, lack of access to safe drinking water, and contributes to 10 million premature deaths per year.[25] Over 3 billion people—40% of the Earth’s population—live in energy poverty. Nearly one billion people don’t have access to electricity and use wood or animal dung for cooking and heating their homes.[26] Another billion only get enough electricity to power a light bulb for a few hours a day.[27] Women in energy poverty spend more than two hours a day gathering water[28]for drinking and wood for cooking.[29] And over 3.8 million people die every year[30] from breathing wood smoke while cooking—something which could be prevented by using stoves fueled with propane or butane.

You might think that wealthy nations with a commitment to human rights would take steps to alleviate energy poverty. But exactly the opposite is happening: Wealthy nations are pulling up the ladder behind them and subjecting the developing world to energy poverty.

In 2019, the European Investment Bank announced it would stop financing fossil fuel power plants in poor nations by 2021.[31] And the World Bank (the largest financier of developing nations) is developing a similar policy.[32] The hypocrisy is mind-boggling: wealthy nations get 80% of their energy from fossil fuels and reap the benefits of unprecedented prosperity due to the low-cost, reliable energy they provide.[33]

Weighing the Costs and Benefits

Evaluating the environmental impact of solar panels simply in terms of the CO2 emissions of operating solar panels is like evaluating the environmental impact of a car simply in terms of how many miles it can travel on a gallon of gas. It’s an overly simplistic view that fails to account for all the environmental costs of mining, manufacturing, installing, operating, and disposing of the solar panels.

Once we tally up all of solar’s lifecycle costs, it’s no longer obvious that solar is better for the environment than other sources of energy, including highly efficient natural gas. In fact, solar energy might be worse for the environment after we factor in its unreliability. California’s recent energy crisis illustrates that new solar installations need to be coupled with more reliable sources of power–like natural gas plants–to compensate for their unreliability.

That unreliability is not something that better technology can erase. It’s simply due to the very nature of solar power: the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day, so it’s impossible for solar panels to produce electricity 24 hours a day.

Some people theorize that we will eventually be able to store surplus solar energy in batteries, but the reality is batteries cost about 200 times more than the cost of natural gas to solve energy storage at scale.[34] In addition, batteries don’t have enough storage capacity to meet our energy needs. Currently, America has 1 gigawatt of large-scale battery storage that can deliver power for up to four hours without a recharge. A gigawatt is enough energy to power 750,000 homes, which is a small fraction of the amount of energy storage we would need for a grid powered mostly by renewables. It is, for instance, less than 1% of the 120 gigawatts of energy storage that would be needed for a grid powered 80% by renewables.[35]

Manufacturing batteries also takes a serious toll on the environment, as they require lots of mining, hydrocarbons, and electricity. According to analysis completed by the Manhattan Institute, it requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to make batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy. And between 50 to 100 pounds of various materials are mined, moved, and processed for one pound of battery produced. Enormous quantities of lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earth elements, and cobalt would need to be mined in China, Russia, Congo, Chile, and Argentina where weak environmental regulations and poor labor conditions prevail.[36]

The high cost and poor performance of batteries explain why there’s no market for long-duration (eight or more hours) battery storage. Existing battery technology is unlikely to overcome the limits of physics and chemistry in the next decade to come anywhere close to the levels of efficiency we need to store energy at scale.

So adding solar power to the grid will not eliminate the need for natural gas. And when you really examine the harm that solar installations do to the environment, solar begins to look worse for the environment on balance than efficient natural gas plants.

When we add the human costs to the tally, the case for solar looks even worse. Forcing low-income people to pay 80% more for electricity in places like California is ethically dubious and increases wealth inequality. And these are just the costs in developed countries. When we consider the human costs of energy poverty worldwide, using solar to decrease CO2 emissions subjects poor people to unnecessary suffering without substantially reducing climate risk.

Real Benefits of Solar

If you have read this far, you might believe I think solar energy is bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think solar is a great technology, but it just doesn’t scale well. When it’s limited to its original applications, it can be a game-changer for many people.  Think of African villages that get a lot of sun but are too remote to justify the cost for building new power lines. Equipping a school, community center, or individual homes with solar panels could be a game-changer and lift many people out of energy poverty.

These are the applications for solar that we should be looking into. But it is wrongheaded to see solar as a replacement for more reliable sources of energy in industrialized, power-hungry nations. That’s an illusion.

But that illusion does make people in developed countries feel good about themselves because it makes them feel less guilty about a lifestyle based on excessive energy consumption. They want to drive nice cars, live in big homes, vacation in exotic destinations, and enjoy all the conveniences of modern life–without worrying that they are hurting poor people and or the planet. 

I’m not pointing fingers. I put myself in this category. It took me years to see that my reasons for pushing solar and wind power were false. I liked seeing myself as a hero defending the environment against ruthless pillagers, and because I wanted other people to see me this way. My false ideas about fossil fuels and renewables were as bound up with my sense of identity and self-worth as they were with my lifestyle.

But I now understand that I was using those ideas as moral camouflage, and I was able to maintain them only by remaining ignorant about the real costs and benefits of different energy sources. That ignorance prevented me from making a real difference.

I’ve dedicated most of my life to protecting the environment. But for years, I was going about it in the wrong way. I thought I was acting morally and protecting the well-being of people and the planet. But in fact, I was harming both, and I see people making the same mistakes today. Governments, companies, and building owners around the world invested $2.7 trillion on renewable energy between 2010-2019, and they plan on investing an additional $1 trillion by 2030.[37] We can make better investment decisions to maximize human flourishing and minimize environmental harm.

What We Need To Do

My message probably stands in contrast to most of what you’ve been told about renewable energy. But I’m convinced that the stakes are too high for me to sit back and not to challenge the false beliefs that continue to fuel poor investments and bad policy decisions. It’s time to stop virtue signaling and take off our moral camouflage so we can meet the problems of climate change and energy poverty head-on.

If we’re serious about tackling climate change, protecting the environment, and helping impoverished people around the world, we need to stop chasing fantasies about solar and wind energy. We need to start weighing all the costs and benefits of all energy sources—wind, solar, natural gas, coal, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear.

Here are five steps we can begin to take towards making things better for both people and the planet:

  • End subsidies and incentives for solar and wind power;
  • Invest in research and development to advance new energy technologies;
  • Build new efficient natural gas power plants (and hydro and geothermal where possible);
  • Reform regulations and build nuclear power plants;
  • Retire the worst coal power plants (5% of power plants create 73% of carbon emissions from electricity generation)[38].

Every day we spend chasing fantasies causes unnecessary harm and suffering. Let’s pursue energy solutions that benefit people and also save the environment.

[1]U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Quadrennial Technology Review: An Assessment of Energy Technologies and Research Opportunities” September 2015, page 390https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-technology-review-2015

[2] J.J.S. Guilbaud, “Hybrid Renewable Power Systems for the Mining Industry: System Costs, Reliability Costs, and Portfolio Cost Risks” University College London, 2016, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1528681/

[3] Stephen Maldonado, “The Importance of New “Sand-to-Silicon” Processes for the Rapid Future Increase of Photovoltaics” October 2020, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.0c02100

[4] Kenneth Rapoza, “How China’s Solar Industry Is Set Up To Be The New Green OPEC” Forbes.com, March 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2021/03/14/how-chinas-solar-industry-is-set-up-to-be-the-new-green-opec/?sh=1355297a1446

[5] AP News, “Plans for largest US solar field north of Vegas scrapped” APnews.com, July 2021

https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-las-vegas-nevada-9bf3640dfefbc6f7f45a97c6810f5ff7

[6] Robinson Meyer, “Unfortunately, I Care About Power Lines Now” The Atlantic, July 2021,

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/america-is-bad-at-building-power-lines-lets-fix-that-transmission-climate/619591/

[7] Jacob Marsh, “The cost of solar panels in 2021: what price for solar can you expect?” EnergySage.com, July 2021, https://news.energysage.com/how-much-does-the-average-solar-panel-installation-cost-in-the-u-s/

[8] Pieter Gagnon, Robert Margolis, Jennifer Melius, Caleb Phillips, and Ryan Elmore, “Rooftop Solar Photovoltaic Technical Potential in the United States: A Detailed Assessment” National Renewable Energy Laboratory, January 2016, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf

[9] The Solar Technical Assistance Team (STAT), STAT FAQs Part 2: Lifetime of PV, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), April 2018, https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/blog/posts/stat-faqs-part2-lifetime-of-pv-panels.html

[10]S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Average age of US power plant fleet flat for 4th-straight year in 2018” January 2019 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/gfjqeFt8GTPYNK4WX57z9g2

[11] Energy.gov, Office of Nuclear Energy, “What’s the Lifespan for a Nuclear Reactor? Much Longer Than You Might Think” May 2021 https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think

[12] International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), “End-of-Life Management Solar Voltaic Panels” 2016 https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2016/IRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf

[13] “Honda Civic Features And Specs, Weight Information, 2021” CarandDriver.com, https://www.caranddriver.com/honda/civic/specs

[14]Laurence du Sault, “Here’s why your electricity prices are high and soaring” Calmatters.org, March 2021,  https://calmatters.org/california-divide/debt/2021/03/california-high-electricity-prices/

[15] California Public Utilities Commission, “Energy Customer Arrears 2020 Status Update and New Order Instituting Rulemaking, January 2021 https://www.scribd.com/document/495707616/Residential-Energy-Customer-2020-Arrears-Presentation-for-Voting-Meeting-Update-Jan-2021

[16] Reliability Issues Steering Committee, North American Electric Reliability Corporation, Ranking of Identified Risks, page 49, January 2021, https://www.nerc.com/comm/RISC/Agenda%20Highlights%20and%20Minutes/RISC_Meeting_Agenda_Package_Jan_28_2021_PUBLIC.pdf#search=reliability%20risk%20ran

[17]Peter Aldhous,  Stephanie M. Lee, Zahra Hirji, “The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says” BuzzFeed News, May 2021 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/texas-winter-storm-power-outage-death-toll

[18] Robert Bryce, “The Texas blackouts were caused by an epic government failure” The Dallas Morning News, August 2021, https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/08/01/the-texas-blackouts-were-caused-by-an-epic-government-failure/

[19] California ISO, “Final Root Cause Analysis Mid-August 2020 Extreme Heat Wave” January 2021 http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid-August-2020-Extreme-Heat-Wave.pdf

[20] Mark Chediak and Naureen S Malik, “California to Build Temporary Gas Plants to Avoid Blackouts” Bloomberg.com, August 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/california-to-build-temporary-gas-plants-to-avoid-blackouts

[21] Elena Verdolini, Francesco Vona, and David Popp, “Bridging the Gap: Do Fast Reacting Fossil Technologies Facilitate Renewable Energy Diffusion?” National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2016 https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22454/w22454.pdf

[22] Energy.gov, Office of Nuclear Energy, “The Ultimate Fast Facts Guide To Nuclear Energy” January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20Guide-PRINT.pdf

[23] Energy.gov, Solar Technologies Energy Office, “Solar Energy in the United States” September 2021, https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-energy-united-states

[24] StateSymbolsUSA.org, “States by Size in Square Miles” https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/national-us/uncategorized/states-size

[25] World Health Organization (WHO), “Health Topics” https://www.who.int/health-topics

[26] The World Bank, “Energy Overview” https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/energy/overview 

[27] Todd Moss, “Ending global energy poverty – how can we do better?” World Economic Forum, November 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/energy-poverty-africa-sdg7/

[28] “UNICEF: Collecting water is often a colossal waste of time for women and girls” Unicef.org, August 2016, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-collecting-water-often-colossal-waste-time-women-and-girls

[29]“ ENERGIA, World Bank—Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and UN

Women, United Nations, Policy Brief #12 Global Progress of SDG 7— Energy and Gender” 2018, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/17489PB12.pdf

[30] World Health Organization (WHO), “Household Air Pollution” 2021, https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_3

[31] BBC.com, “European Investment Bank drops fossil fuel funding” November 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50427873

[32] Bernice von Bronkhorst, “Transitions at the Heart of the Climate Challenge” The World Bank, May 2021, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/05/24/transitions-at-the-heart-of-the-climate-challenge

[33] Robert Rapier, “Fossil Fuels Still Supply 84 Percent Of World Energy — And Other Eye Openers From BP’s Annual Review” Forbes.com, June 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2020/06/20/bp-review-new-highs-in-global-energy-consumption-and-carbon-emissions-in-2019/?sh=1dbd154666a1

[34] Mark P. Mills, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking” Manhattan Institute, March 2019, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible

[35] National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), “Renewable Electricity Futures Study” 2012, https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html

[36] Mark P. Mills, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking” Manhattan Institute, March 2019, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible

[37] United Nations Environment Programme with Frankfurt School & Bloomberg NEF, “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2020”, Key Findings, 2020, https://www.fs-unep-centre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/GTR_2020.pdf 

[38] Alex Fox, “Just 5 Percent of Power Plants Release 73 Percent of Global Electricity Production Emissions” Smithsonian Magazine, August 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-percent-power-plants-release-73-percent-global-electricity-production-emissions-180978355/

Preliminary lessons available to be learned from Feb 2021 extended cold spell

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A large number of “hot takes” are appearing now that the cold wave that began arriving on Feb 11, 2021 has moved into areas where sub-freezing temperatures in Feb are normal.

If the politically charged nature of the takes could be harnessed, the energy released would be able to keep quite a few homes supplied with power. But, no one has found a way to capture and convert words and hot air into electricity – at least not yet.

That doesn’t stop writers from writing. I plead guilty to the charge of adding to the pile of non-electricity producing words.

It’s a necessary endeavor because so many of the hot takes have been produced by people whose agendas are different from mine.

Though no power source worked perfectly throughout the five day period when the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) declared the grid condition to be at Emergency Energy Alert 3 (EEA 3), some power sources worked better than others.

While almost every generating source in the system has room for improvement, some have limitations that cap their performance no matter how perfectly they live up to their maximum potential.

The storm revealed severe weaknesses in the current grid resource management model that are worth discussing in an informed, responsible way. Lessons learned discussions are just entering into the early stages, but with an open minded, questioning attitude, it’s not too early to produce some recommended short term actions.

Aside: The title of this piece is intended to indicate recognition that performing “lessons learned” analysis and creating action plans is no guarantee of better future performance if responsible people choose not to take recommended actions. End Aside.

Why did the grid get so stressed?

About a week before the cold weather arrived, it was evident to those who pay close attention to electricity grid supply and management issues that the ERCOT service territory was going to experience an extremely challenging period. Wholesale prices were going to increase by many multiples and would challenge the existing cap of $9,000/MWh (300 times the usual price of $30/MWh).

Every generator in the system would be motivated – incentivized by high prices – to produce as much electricity as it could possibly produce and even then, there probably would not be enough power available to serve every customer as much as they wanted or needed to buy.

Despite the very high prices, almost no help would be supplied from outside the ERCOT system. In order to maintain its fiercely protected independence from the Federal Energy Regulator Commission, ERCOT has kept connections to other US grids at a bare minimum. That ensures that its electricity falls outside of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause used to justify federal regulation. There are some significant cross-border connections into Mexico.

Few commercial or retail customers would know how much their power was costing at the time they decided to use it, so the system would not receive much help customers making informed choices about timing or limiting their use.

Most of those customers would not even receive a sharply higher bill at the end of the month, because their rates would be adjusted over time to repay the costs of a sustained period of high spot market prices.

That is how the system in place is designed to respond to severe weather or other stressed on the power system. ERCOT has chosen an “energy-only” resource management model where competing generators bid their capability into wholesale electricity markets that are settled and priced every 5 minutes. There is no other source of revenue.

Why choose an “energy-only” resource planning model?

An “energy-only” model keeps wholesale prices low during fair weather. Low prices encourage customers to add devices and equipment. On a larger, longer term scale, it encourages businesses and even residents to migrate to take advantage of having low cost electricity available.

But it doesn’t provide sufficient predictable revenue to encourage investment in durable generating sources or long term, guaranteed delivery fuel supply contracts.

Because all energy sources have different cost structures and different bidding strategies, wholesale prices have wide and rapid swings. By design, the system provides massive returns during periods where demand exceeds supply. This characteristic is supposed to provide all of the necessary incentives for generators to be ready at all times to provide their full capability.

But even with almost a week’s notice that an historic weather event was on its way, there were limited actions available for most generators to prepare to maximize their returns from the coming period of scarcity. If they did not already own reserve fuel tanks or winterized generator packages, it was too late to make arrangements for installation.

Some generators might have been able to get a rush liquid fuel shipment to top off any existing tanks – at an ever increasing price – or they might have been able to make careful inspections and fix obvious system weaknesses. If they discovered some missing insulation or a non functioning heat trace system, they might have had enough time to make repairs.

But most would have had to simply hope for the best and do whatever they could to keep producing power.

Most customers were blissfully unaware of the decisions that had created a system where participants depend on scarcity pricing to make a profit in the business of supplying electricity to the ERCOT market. They didn’t know that many of the generators in the market knew they would only be able to produce limited amounts of power, even with sustained prices at or near the cap of 300 times the usual grid price.

They didn’t know that most generators in the market would be richly rewarded even if they were only able to produce 10, 20, or 50% of their expected capacity during the several day-long deep freeze.

Few frozen wind turbines

The 2021 cold weather event began February 11, 2021 with freezing rain, one of the most impactful kinds of winter precipitation. The nation began paying attention to the incoming cold weather as a result of news reports of icing roads in the Dallas-For Worth area that led to a massive, 130 car pile up on I-35.

That wave of the storm did not actually produce massive quantities of ice; the slick road conditions resulted from less than a tenth of an inch of ice on a road where drivers didn’t exercise sufficient speed restraint.

While freezing rain can accumulate on almost any surface exposed to the weather, including aircraft wings and wind turbine blades, there is no available evidence suggesting that a major portion of Texas’s installed base of >30,000 MW of wind turbine generators experienced icing sufficient to have much impact on their generating ability.

There were some reports that claimed iced or frozen turbines were a significant cause of lost wind power generation, but the real culprit was a relatively common, and predicted winter storm weather pattern that included long periods where high pressure covered a huge land mass. When atmospheric pressure is the same over a large area, there is no driving force that creates wind.

Many people that strongly support the continued rapid development of wind and solar power generating systems declared that their favored power sources performed at or above their day-ahead predictions. They wrote lengthy defenses of wind generation and declared that the historical performance of turbines in areas that regularly experience colder weather than what Texas experienced in Feb 2021 proved that there was nothing inherent about wind that made it especially vulnerable to severe weather.

Midwestern utility company MidAmerican Energy Company has shown that wind energy is highly reliable, even in harsh Iowa conditions. In 2020, 80 percent of the utility’s electricity was generated by renewable energy — the majority of which comes from its 3,300 wind turbines, said Geoff Greenwood, a spokesperson for MidAmerican Energy.

“Wind turbines can handle the cold just fine. Just look at Iowa.” Vox Feb 19, 2021

From the wind and solar advocates’ point of view, better-than-expected performance means that wind and solar should bear little or no responsibility for low generation during an electricity supply shortage.

Even in a supply crunch severe enough to cause an Emergency Energy Alert stage 3 (EEA-3) – the highest available response level – there is nothing that wind and solar generators can do to make their systems supply power. They must wait until the wind starts blowing or the sun comes up. Low sunlight inevitably affects areas spanning more than half of the planet all the time. Wind is more localized, but there are times when entire continents can be still for many hours several days at a time.

Vast majority of wind and solar advocates are observant enough to know these facts. They even take offense when they are introduced into energy discussions. If challenged about the value of continued strong support and mandates for increasing wind and solar penetration, one of their arguments is that using the wind and the sun to supply energy when it is available allows fossil fuel generating sources to burn less fuel.

That would be a reasonable response if the only competitor to wind and solar was fossil fuel. It’s even a reasonable response in systems where large hydroelectric dams are part of the generating mix because it allows the water to remain behind the dam, ready to be used when wind and solar generation falls off.

But opportunistically displacing other sources of power can lead to unproductive consequences like eliminating enough revenue from nuclear plants to make them struggle financially. Right now, there are firm plans in place to close five operating nuclear plants in the US during 2021.

Though some industry leaders have vociferously denied that wind and solar power can be blamed for those closure decisions, the financial evidence is clear. Low grid prices and grid congestion fees in regions where there is abundant wind or solar power available create a “missing money” situation that stresses large steady-running generators that serve base load very well.

There is a correlation and a causation between the location of Exelon’s Byron and Dresden power plants in high wind areas and their financial performance. The same holds true for Diablo Canyon, but the culprit in California is a massive quantity of solar power generation that can create negative pricing during the middle of the day.

Large numbers of gas-fired generators could not produce power

One of the design features of the “energy-only” market model in Texas is that it rewards low capital cost equipment that can burn natural gas. For the past 13 years, natural gas has been abundantly available in many parts of the US, especially in Texas.

The Permian Basin, much of which is under Texas soil, is one of the world’s most prolific oil and gas reservoirs, but it isn’t the only major source of gas in the state. There are other shale formations and there are large gas reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico off of the Texas shore.

Natural gas, which is more accurately called methane, burns cleanly enough so that a stream of its combustion byproducts can be directly used to spin turbines in a Brayton cycle. Those machines are simple and cheap compared to the huge Rankine (steam) cycle plants that are needed to burn dirtier fuels like coal or lignite. Brayton cycles work well in combination with simple, relatively small steam plants to produce highly efficient Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) power plants.

The “energy-only” market structure has helped gas to push most coal and lignite off of the Texas grid, producing significant air pollution reduction and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Using more natural gas in power production has been beneficial to the Texas economy as well, since most of the gas burned in the state is extracted in the state.

But a known challenge related to natural gas is that it is more difficult to store materials that are vapors (gaseous) than it is to store solids or liquids. Gas can be compressed and it can be liquified by cooling it to extremely low temperatures, but both of those processes add costs and consume power.

Without any source of revenues for power generations other than selling electricity, there are no reasons why any generator would spend money to store fuel on site to use in the rare case where there are interruptions in the fuel supply.

Even in fair weather, only a portion of the methane that is extracted gets burned to produce electricity. Some of it gets used as a raw material for petrochemicals and plastics. Another portion gets used in cooking – both residential and commercial – while another is used in industrial process heat and to heat water in both homes and large buildings.

During cold weather events, heating buildings quickly grows and can become larger than all of the other uses combined. But natural gas production rarely increases when the weather gets cold. During the event that lasted from Feb 11-Feb 18 2021, daily gas extraction fell by nearly 20% due to various issues in the system.

The predictable, though not often publicly predicted, effect of a high dependence on natural gas to supply its usual amounts of electricity, to expand its production to make up for low wind and solar production, and to supply building heating systems is a system where some needs are not met.

Under the low cost, just-in-time, fuel supply model that is an inherent result of an “energy-only” market scheme, there is simply not enough fuel in the system to supply all demands all of the time. When the fuel that supplies the majority of the power generators in a system is stressed, all generators that burn that fuel can be affected.

In the lingo I learned as an operating power plant engineer and as a participant in a power plant design project, insufficient gas during a cold weather event is a predictable “common cause failure” for an electricity supply system.

As designed, the market uses pricing signals to balance demands with supply. But those price signals have to be dramatic to change behavior because both supply and demand have a large amount of inertia and cannot be easily changed.

When price signals aren’t sufficient to change behavior fast enough, the only option the grid operator has left is to balance demand with available supply by turning off the power to some customers.

What about the nuclear plants?

At 0537 on Monday, February 15 South Texas Project unit 1 tripped off line. (That link includes far more details about the event than can be fit into this post.) Other than that single event, all 93 of the 96 nuclear plants in the US that were operating before the cold weather event began continued producing as much power as they were asked to produce.

The only nuclear power station that did not produce as much power throughout the event as it possibly could have produced was Arkansas Nuclear One. For part of the week, the regional transmission operator asked the plant operators to supply less than their plant’s design power in order to keep the system in balance.

Here is a quote from an Entergy Arkansas spokesman explaining that period of less than 100% power.

Arkansas Nuclear One’s dual units continue to operate safely and securely throughout the weather event, with essential functions staffed by Entergy’s team members. Both units currently are operating at reduced power at the request of the independent grid operator.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator is an not-for-profit organization that works to ensure reliable power supplies in part of Canada and 15 U.S. states, including Entergy’s service territory in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and portions of Texas.

In doing so, MISO often asks generation facilities to change power levels during times of potential grid instability. Entergy’s regional generation facilities are coordinating closely with the grid operator, and power levels at our plants may continue to rise or fall as the dispatcher works to keep transmission functions stable.

Direct message from Entergy Arkansas (@EnteryArk)

Approximately 60 hours later, STP 1 returned to service and increased its output to its maximum capacity. That lengthy shut down exposes one of the reasons why there have been few new nuclear plants built in the US during the past 30 years.

The large, light water nuclear power plants that were selected to be built commercially in the 1960s-1990s work best if run steadily. If they are taken off line for any reason, power restoration can take many hours to several days. While it might be possible to improve that situation for existing reactors, it is best done via a meticulous, methodical, time consuming path.

Under our current construct as refined by many decades of continuous operational improvements, nuclear plant shutdowns and start ups are rare events. They happen less than once per year at each unit.

If the population size for nuclear reactors is restricted to the four units physically located in Texas, the operational score for nuclear during the 5 days of rotating outages turns out to be about 86%, which should be a solid B in most grading systems. (That is calculated on power produced compared to the power that could have been produced if all four units operated perfectly throughout the event.)

But given the widespread nature of cold fronts and the impacts of stresses in the nationwide natural gas delivery system, it might be fair to include the performance of a larger population of nuclear plants. 92 out of 96 operating at or near 100% produces an A in almost every known grading system.

On the scale of producing as much power as expected by grid planners, nuclear did about as well as it was expected to do. It’s not a perfect power source; there are numerous ways for systems to fail to produce at 100% of rated output 100% of the time. But nuclear met or exceeded some pretty high expectations.

It is important for systems planners or people who influence system planning actions to recognize that nuclear plants offer several important features. Among its strengths is its independence from the common cause failures of fuel supply constraints and direct dependence on wind and sun availability.

It is also a clean power source, with life cycle CO2 emissions that rival onshore wind and beat both offshore wind and most solar systems. It produces virtually zero air or water pollution. Its ‘waste’ heat could become a valuable resource if systems were properly designed to use it beneficially.

Were lessons available from the Texas cold weather event of 2011 (Super Freeze) actually learned?

It’s not accurate for people to claim that the freeze of 2021 was a complete surprise or had no precedent in history. Galveston Bay has frozen solid several times in the past 50 years. In 2011, there was a cold weather event that brought temperatures just as cold and just as widespread as those experienced this year, though that event was shorter.

Many of the recommendations from 2011 post event reports were not implemented. The state persisted in pursuing its fierce grid independence. A substantial increase in wind power generation was accompanied by a growing boom in solar energy and major new transmission lines to move their power. Natural gas dependence has increased by double digit portions.

As much as it pains me to admit this, if the nuclear plant construction plans that were announced in 2007-2009 had been pursued, they would not have helped avoid the issues that appeared.

It’s difficult to prove a counterfactual historical point, but it’s easy to point to the only US nuclear project that survived from that brief period of excitement about new nuclear power plant construction. Vogtle units 3 & 4 will not enter service until sometime in the next two years. They were the leader projects from the Nuclear Renaissance and they are still not complete.

The next time we revive the nuclear plant construction industry, we must do a better job. We must achieve better cost and schedule performance and we must make design choices that recognize the importance of flexibility and responsiveness. That might include implementing some of the speedy recovery capabilities that have long been a part of military nuclear power plant design and operations.

If society determines that it is unacceptable to have a power grid that cuts off customers for many hours at a time during a period when being without power can be deadly, it must accept the fact that markets cannot be the decision makers.

Cheapness on a short duration scale – like 5-minute settlement markets – cannot be the sole criteria for selecting power sources.

Why are many nuclear advocates turning against large scale wind and solar energy?

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