Posted by What’s with lefties nowadays and their tipping points? A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Rolling Stone conveniently predicted not one but two tipping points for 2017 in making the assertion that this year was going to be worse than 2016. First, Rolling Stone stated that atmospheric carbon levels exceeded 400ppm which (according to them) is the tipping point where scientists have long believed that the effects of climate change are irreversible. Second, they reported that 2017 will be a tipping point in antibiotic resistance meaning people are going to start dying from common illnesses like strep throat and pneumonia. You can read about what I think of Rolling Stone’s predictions here:
Today we have Jonathan Dogterom writing in the Globe and Mail under that title “Number’s don’t lie: We’ve reached a tipping point for renewable energy.” Oh God, not another tipping point. You’re right Jon, numbers don’t lie, the people who use them do. Of course Jon will only tell you the facts and complete truth because he isn’t biased or has an agenda. He’s only a managing director and practice lead (whatever that means) at Cleantech Venture Services at MaRS which, despite poor disclosure, seems to be heavily subsidised by government money despite billing itself as a public-private venture. The MaRS Discovery District, via the Ontario Public Sector sunshine salary list pegs Jon’s compensation in 2014 at over $200k which puts him in the top 15% of salaries at MaRS. So he has absolutely no vested interest in pushing “clean and green” renewable energy other than his whole career depends on it along with the other green that he derives from feasting at the taxpayer’s government-subsidised trough. Why am I being so mean to Jon? I mean, I don’t even know the guy and never even heard of him until today. Simply because he wrote:
Gwyn Morgan, a former energy company CEO, called the plan’s carbon pricing proposals “economic suicide.”.. Arguments like these are constructed from selective data and blindness to the historic shifts that are under way in the energy market.
In other words, he tries to discredit others by pointing out that they are biased due to their own historic vested interest in traditional energy. So, if he can do it, so can I. (Full disclosure, my first job out of university was with Mobil Oil and I am heavily invested in oil and gas and am very biased to my vested interests). Let’s get on to the meat of what Jon has to say:
The ink is barely dry on Canada’s new national climate change strategy but critics are already trying to bury it under a mound of half-truths about clean energy.
Well half-truths are better than complete lies Jon, and I’ll give you credit for pointing out that there is at least some truth in the counter argument but keep going. Oooops, sorry, my ADD causes me to digress occasionally… Now let’s get into the meat of what Jon has to say:
The simple reality is this: We’ve reached a tipping point for renewable energy. It’s no longer fervent environmentalism driving the transition to clean energy – it’s economics… Over the past decade, the cost of renewable electricity has tumbled. The U.S. Department of Energy puts the drop at 64 per cent for utility-scale solar power and 41 per cent for land-based wind since 2008. At these levels renewables are competitive with coal and natural gas, and they will get even cheaper.
I’m not going to bother checking the numbers. I know that the cost for solar and wind, especially the large-scale commercial kind, has declined dramatically in the past decade as economies of scale have kicked in. However, given that Jon likes to talk about half-truths, how about his statement that renewables are competitive with coal and gas and will get even cheaper. If that’s true, then there’s no need for your $200k public sector salary or the government Jon. You may hate us evil planet-destroying capitalists but if there’s one thing that we don’t miss is a chance to make money. If indeed your renewables are already competitive, why do we need a strategic policy or government subsidies? All of us businessmen would just build renewables because not only are they competitive today, according to you they will become even cheaper in the future which means that we will make even more money. So if your assertions are true, you don’t need to carbon tax us. You don’t need to legislate to shut the coal fired electricity plant down. You don’t need to pump billions of tax payers’ money into subsidising renewable energy projects. We’ll do it ourselves just to make more money and then we could also stop lying about our profession at Toronto cocktail parties because we could proudly say we also saved the planet while eating our pretentious overpriced canapes.
Or… could your statement itself be a half-truth Jon and renewables are not nearly as economic and competitive as you want us to believe?
Jon then goes on to wax eloquently about Hydrostor (no conflict of interest here… oh wait, Hydrostor is a MaRS venture that he helped fund), a Toronto clean energy company that has pioneered the world’s first underwater compressed air electricity storage system. I admit my inner geek was fascinated and interested by this because it was the first time I have heard about it (mainly because I could care less about what is happening in Toronto… unless it involves Drake). Essentially (and ironically), Hydrostor uses oilfield pioneered technology to horizontally drill pipes into Lake Ontario to which it attaches large marine salvage lift bags 60 meters underwater. The theory is to store off-peak electricity (ideally generated by renewable sources) by using it to compress air that fills the balloons which stay pressurized due to the weight of the water around it. You then release the pressurized air from the balloon to run a generator to convert back to electricity when you need it (ie, during peak electricity hours).
Hydrostor claims it is more than 60% efficient which is amazing because from previous experience I know that photovoltaic (ie, solar) cells are only about 15% efficient and even recent advances puts them at 25-35% efficiency. Founded in 2010, Hydrostor has installed less than 2MW of capacity which is more or less what their test project in Toronto is although they have signed a project in Aruba for 10MW. While claiming to be cheaper than everyone else and far more efficient than using batteries, I’m going to say the verdict is still out on Hydrostor but it is a very interesting, if low tech, storage solution. Anyway’s back to Jon:
It is vital that we continue to support creation and adoption of new clean technologies in Canada, or we risk losing our competitive edge to countries that are fully committed to a low-carbon economy…
Finally Jon gets to what he really wants to get across: Support creation and adoption of new clean technologies in Canada; or we risk losing our competitive edge. This is clever eco-hippie speak for keep giving me your billions in taxpayers money couched behind some vague argument about losing competitive edge. Competitive edge in what? You don’t think China is capable of making balloons cheaper than you? It wasn’t enough that the green energy business used scare tactics to convince everyone that their government needs to give away billions in subsidies or we’re all going to die from climate change. Now you want to convince us if we don’t keep giving you billions, we’re going to lose our jobs too because we won’t have a competitive edge? And Jon, how exactly does asking for continued government support and subsidies square with your earlier assertion that renewables are already competitive and will get even cheaper?
No doubt, challenges remain. Globally, roughly 20 per cent of electricity demand is supplied by renewable sources. When hydroelectricity is excluded, this figure falls to 4 per cent. Renewables form an even smaller part of the energy used for heating and transportation… China, already the world’s largest producer of solar power, has announced plans to invest 1.7 trillion yuan ($324-billion) in wind and solar projects over the next five years.
When Jon says renewable, I’m pretty sure he is not including nuclear even though it is “emission-free” and virtually unlimited in supply. Greenies always hate nuclear… raises all sorts of red flags like Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island. Even the Japanese, long nuclear proponents (so much so that they even commissioned the Astro-Boy cartoons to indoctrinate the population into believing nuclear power is good in the 1950s) are having a rethink following Fukushima. Only France still loves nuclear power given that it accounts for 3/4 of all electrical generation. In America and the UK nuclear accounts for just under 20% of total power generation and in Canada its 16.6% (all but one of which is in Ontario where nuclear accounts for 60% of all power generated… but then you knew that already if you’ve read my earlier missives). Despite all the nuclear power plants that they have built, nuclear accounts for just 3% of China’s power output.
Greenies kind of like hydropower (unless its killing salmon), solar (unless its frying birds like a KFC), wind (unless its making too much noise, unsightly along the coast and killing birds as well) and geothermal (well nobody cares about that except Iceland). They don’t like biomass either even though that’s technically renewable but burning trees, cow dung and garbage doesn’t fit the liberal’s definition of clean and green.
China has long been vilified as the biggest contributor to global CO2 emissions owing to its rapid industrialisation and emphasis on coal. It is now being repackaged as being the greatest hope for climate activists following Trump’s election and its own internal focus to become a clean energy superpower. A decade ago, I wrote that China’s best chance of weaning itself off of coal was to go nuclear in a big way like France. It seems like I was wrong and right because while China didn’t go all in for nuclear coal still accounts for about 2/3 of China’s power production today.
Hydropower is the leading renewable source for electricity generation globally, supplying 71% of all renewable electricity. Reaching 1,064 GW of installed capacity in 2016, it generated 16.4% of the world’s electricity from all sources. Although it leads the world in hydropower today, this trend has pretty much reached its peak in the Middle Kingdom. Most possible sites and rivers that could be dammed already have been. I toured the Three Gorges project along with the CEO over a decade ago and got a guided tour of the inside including the massive generators. It was a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. The Three Gorges Dam is a colossus that is as big as the Hoover Dam and six times wider. It also flooded large tracts of the historical Three Gorges (Qutang, Wu Xia, and Xiling) resulting in the relocation of over 1.3 million people. Its installed capacity of 22,500 MW is monumental but still a fraction of the 320 GW of installed hydropower for China as a whole which provides about 20% of China’s electricity needs. To put this into perspective, the entire installed hydropower capacity in Canada which is the third largest in the world behind China and Brazil is 76,000 MW. Originally, it was envisioned that the Three Gorges Dam would supply 10% of China’s power needs; by 2016 it accounted for less than 2%.
Therein lies a nasty little fact that most westerners don’t really understand about China; everything is huge when multiplied by 1.4 billion people. China needs to build new power plants to fuel its continued industrialisation. It is leading the world in alternative energy having installed 32.5GW of wind power and 18.3GW of solar power in 2015 alone (with a goal to be producing 210GW of wind power and 110GW of solar power by 2020) but renewables account for only 5% of the total although this is more than nuclear power which provided 3%. The difference is that China is not going around closing perfectly good coal fired plants and replacing them with expensive solar and wind farms; its building new facilities to accommodate what seems like an almost insatiable demand for energy. Despite its late start, China is leap-frogging the rest of the world because its infrastructure spending is still high and it can take advantage of new technology. China didn’t spend a lot of money installing twisted-pair copper cables for land-line phones (coincidentally both were invented by Alexander Graham Bell) because it could and did go straight to mobile telephones. China’s internet infrastructure is more advanced because they installed fibre optic cables from the beginning and didn’t have to deal with the legacy infrastructure of coaxial cable (those fat wires for cable TV) that form the backbone for the high-speed internet in most of North America. Now its doing the same thing with clean energy.
China says it will invest 2.5 trillion yuan ($361 billion) into renewable power (China’s definition includes nuclear) generation by 2020 and that half of new electricity generation by 2020 will be from renewables. Even if successful, it means that half of new generation capacity will still be thermal generation which, in China, means coal for the most part. Nonetheless, the amount of money and the scale of China’s investment in renewable energy is staggering. It is against this backdrop that Jon’s assertions about Canada’s competitive advantage is laughable. China can and is basically kicking our butts when it comes to renewable energy. When Jon waxes eloquently that the cost of solar and wind has dropped dramatically in the past decade, he neglects to mention that the decline it is primarily because China has put so much money (i.e. subsidies) into developing the technology and manufacturing capacity in wind and solar power.
Ontario continues to hemorrhage money due to high power costs stemming from an ill conceived liberal green energy policy that not only sucked up subsidies like crazy but costs a fortune to do stupid things like close perfectly good existing power plants. While Torontonians like to turn a blind eye to their huge nuclear industry like the drunk uncle at Christmas that everyone has to tolerate; Nuclear power has already done most of the heavy lifting to make Ontario emissions free. Jon believes that we should continue to pump billions of dollars into renewables to pay his rather decent salary and subsidise his pet green projects. I wonder how many of his underwater balloons we would have to sell to China to justify the 60,000 people in Ontario who had their power cut last year or all the people who have to make a choice between paying rent or paying the nuclear… I mean hydro bill each month?