In a devastating critique, the PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Science] report warned; “Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that rely almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.” Experts Debunk 100% Renewables Decarbonization- Power Magazine
Engineers know that GIGO stands for “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. While the GIGO principle is usually applied to computer programming dilemmas, politicians and energy policy makers alike could benefit by applying this wise old adage to the ubiquitous “green transition”.
In 2023 GIGO could very well stand for “Green Investment Grant Opportunities”, or perhaps “Government Is Giving Out”. Again.
This summer of 2023 universities, entrepreneurs, and companies are lining up 40 green projects in 21 states to qualify for a slice of the latest $135 million green pie being dished out by the politically correct but scientifically inept Congress, all heartily endorsed by the uber-green Biden administration.
The only surprise here is that the latest green handout announced on June 15, 2023 will only cost US taxpayers mere millions and not the IRA or CARE Acts’ level of billions that are the usual standard for our porky, spendthrift, deficit-building federal government. Worse, would it have raised any eyebrows anywhere, had Biden’s move to “slash industrial emissions” actually did come with a $135 billion USD price tag?
Sadly, the alarm sounded by Power Magazine back in 2017 has gone unheeded. But the informative article by author Kennedy Maize still makes a solid case for the shaky GIGO conclusions embraced more than ever by climate-phobic professors and the green Google-washed masses.
Greenster leaders such as Stanford Professor Mark Jacobsen and his hyper-green minions exploit the big bad carbon demon that so many green energy profiteers have been promoting for decades, whether the actual energy demand numbers crunch or not.
The PNAS article epitomizes the problem of the bogus green paradigm we’ve been stuck with since the first green hipsters founded Earth Day back in the 1970s. PNAS lead author Christopher Clack of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, found that Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobsen’s work was typical of green theories and renewable energy studies that have serious GIGO deficiencies including:
- Invalid modeling tools (Garbage In)
- Modeling errors (Garbage In)
- Implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.(Garbage Out)
- Significant shortcomings in the analysis. (Garbage Out)
The PNAS team of authors was composed of an impressive panel of real-world energy authorities, including, among others, Jay Apt, an expert in the electric utility industry and Granger Morgan, both from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley were among the 21 expert panel members who debunked the green myths that Jacobsen had concocted with his “Solutions Project” website.
Wildly Unrealistic Green Expectations and Wasted Resources
Global reliance on “100% renewable energy by 2050” is the green myth that the PNAS team of 21 busted in their devastating critique back in 2017. It’s the “narrow energy portfolio” argument that strives to limit the world’s energy grid to wind, solar, and hydro-electric resources only.
Bad, real world experiences with over-reliance on narrow portfolio renewables like wind and solar have had zero effect on “green at all costs” policy leaders like Stanford’s Jacobsen and his ilk, even when we’ve already witnessed hyper green California go brown, triggering a mass exodus of industries tired of shutdowns and residents weary of sweating through brownouts in the dark as we reported back in February of 2022.
“To paraphrase one manufacturing CEO on his way out of California, we can’t just shut down production of essential minerals and materials every time there are cloudy windless days.”- Scoping Out the Industrial Green Giant in 2022
Some of the fiercest criticism of “The Solutions Project” was voiced, not surprisingly, by the team’s California-based members. In an interview with MIT Technology magazine, PNAS coauthor David Victor from the University of California San Diego, stated that the defective Jacobson analysis relies on “wildly unrealistic expectations” and “massive misallocation of resources.”
Victor warned, “That is both harmful to the economy and creates the seeds of a backlash.” Lead author Clack exposed the typical engineering ignorance running rampant when he remarked that Jacobson’s “analysis ignores transmission capacity expansion, power flow and the logistics of transmission constraints. Similarly, those authors do not account for operating reserves, a fundamental constraint necessary for the electric grid.”
Broad Portfolio Power to the People
The green transition is well underway, but Net Zero thinking has degenerated into all-or-nothing Zero Sum green thinking when it comes to a responsible, gradual, affordable advancement to clean energy in the 21st Century.
For Jacobsen and the green crowd, fossil fuels are out, and the nuclear card can’t be played at all in the misguided narrow portfolio energy strategies that are still the most popular thanks to decades of largely unsupported “greenhouse gas” propaganda.
At this point, 100% reliance on unreliable, weather-dependent solar and wind is analogous to a 19th Century society that shoots all the horses and burns all the wagons as soon as the first steam engine is invented, even before the first railroad track is laid.
But there is light at the end of the green transition tunnel, one which takes into consideration both affordability and reliability, even when Net Zero is the benchmark. It’s called the Broad Portfolio Approach, and it’s similar to the Fuel Agnostic approach that heavy industry is already deploying in combustion engine technology to ensure that the world’s essential mineral demands can be met reliably while reducing emissions.
The American Public Power Association and the All Options Solution
“A broad portfolio of clean energy technologies will be required to reach an affordable and reliable clean-energy transition, according to new research by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).”- Broad Portfolio Approach Needed to Reach Affordable , Reliable Clean Energy-Electric Power Research Institute
The All Options strategy uses a full portfolio of all available clean energy technologies. The revered but notoriously unreliable renewables such as inefficient wind and intermittent solar power are still part of the program but they are not the entire solution.
To ensure energy demands are met in a world where electric generating capacity will grow substantially, from 1,650 gigawatts (GW) to 4,860 GW, a 160 percent to 480 percent increase over current resources, nuclear, fossil and biofuels with carbon capture and storage, electricity storage, hydrogen and hydrogen-derived fuels, and biofuels are all part of a distributed energy resources vision to power strong communities.
Instead of enduring brownouts and shutdowns on cloudy windless days, capacity to balance the inevitable increase in those intermittent “green” resources also would grow by 1,140 GW to 1,446 GW.
That capacity to keep the world up and running can only be achieved by an equally growing “energy agnostic” grid that includes a redundant, reliable combination of natural gas, nuclear power, hydrogen, hydroelectric, geothermal, bioenergy, and advanced electric storage technologies.
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