If you pay attention to too much of the mass media, you might think that renewable energy is a pipe dream proposed to solve a nonexistent problem. After all, the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump, sat down with the editorial board of the Washington Post back in March and told them, “If you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming” (Leber & Aldern 2016, web). Trump has even gone so far as to blame the Chinese for setting up the hoax of global warming (Leber & Aldern 2016, web). Of course, he’s not the only politician to talk like this about the planet. Back in 2012, that same Republican Party nominated Mitt Romney, and he was all set to stop the tax credits for wind energy that had been in place for two decades and to shut off loan guarantees for solar energy projects (Goodstein 2013). In the UK, some pundits argue that the country is going down a Trump-like path after the vote to depart the EU, but the EU Renewable Energy Directive, which stipulated that member countries produce 20% or more of their total energy from renewable sources by 2020, is something that the UK can do quite realistically.
One of the more well-known types of renewable energy is solar power. The International Energy Agency has said that solar power will take its place as a viable alternative to the fossil fuels by 2024, but there are signs that it is already taking shape more quickly. The agency also predicted that the world will get more of its energy from solar power than any other source by 2050 (Rodgers 2014). Obviously, this will require a huge economic investment, even as the prices for different types of solar panels come down, and it will also require infrastructure assistance from government agencies in the forms of tax credits and interest-free or low-interest loans, but the potential is there. The IEA projects that this will lead to $44 trillion in new investment, which is a huge increase from the $900 billion in investments that go into the fossil fuels industry each year (Rodgers 2014). One factor that the IEA includes in its projections is that the costs of solar photovoltaic cells is expected to drop by 60 percent more for domestic use and 70 percent more for utility companies. The vast increases in efficiency for these panels will also add to the amount of energy that the panels contribute. The simple fact that solar has dropped from costing $4 per watt in 2008 to 80 cents in 2014 and should plunge further will be augmented by the fact that fossil fuel will start going back up (Rodgers 2014). The cheap fuel that comes from fracking will start to run out – and more and more countries will follow the lead of Germany and Scotland and ban fracking as a practice within their territories. As more and more information comes out about the damage that fracking causes to the environment, it will become less and less credible as a power source.
Another viable source of renewable energy comes from wind farms. If you take a drive from San Diego to Palm Springs in southern California, you will see vast wind farms in the breeze-swept desert, with countless turbines churning to provide energy to the U.S. electric grid. Since 2009, worldwide, wind turbine power capacity has roughly doubled (Sandor 2014). The major issue with the wind turbine power system is a question of developing infrastructure and coming up with a way to store the power. In a case like the giant farm in southern California, a public-private partnership was necessary to establish the connections between the turbine network and the power grid. It takes less energy to build a wind turbine than it does to build a set of solar panels that creates the same amount of energy for the grid over time, so there are a number of reasons to incorporate multiple renewable energy sources. After all, there are many part of the world (particularly in the UK) where wind is a more reliable form of energy than the sun. As far north on the planet as the UK is, there will be substantial times of the year when solar power will not generate as much – although during the summer months it should contribute a significant amount to the grid. Another consideration, of course, is that solar panels do not make as much of an eyesore as wind turbines do. You can put an array up on your roof, and the neighbors are not likely to notice much. In fact, we are not that far away from turning windows into solar panels, thanks to a recent breakthrough that has made the first transparent solar cells (Olewitz 2015). Wind turbines are fine for isolated places, such as that southern California desert, but people really don’t want them towering them over their homes, parks or places where people spend a great deal of time. So the challenge will basically involve finding places to install the turbines that get enough wind without being eyesores. Of course, there will come a time when people will prefer this relative inconvenience over the environmental effects of fracking, greenhouse gases and the other ills that fossil fuel consumption wreaks on the environment, and indeed there are already places where people have come to that conclusion.
One of those places is Germany, where renewables not only provide at least 20% of the power needs of the nation, but on a Sunday a few weeks ago, they provided virtually all of the power needs that the country had. At 2:00pm local time on May 15, 2016, the combination of hydroelectric, biomass, solar and wind power were generating a combined 45.5 gigawatts for the nation’s power grid. At that same time, the demand was 45.8 gigawatts (Shankleman 2016). Indeed, things got so busy that there was a time when power prices were negative because of the impact of the renewables, hitting -50 euros per megawatt-hour (Shankleman 2016). One additional factor helping countries decide to invest in renewable energy sources is supply security. It has been four decades since the energy crisis of the 1970s, but matters in the Middle East are no less difficult than they were then, and the spectre of ISIS means that chaos can break out at any time, and no one wants to be at the mercy of supply lines to the Middle East. A similar situation took place in the UK on May 10, when the country had a stretch of about four hours when the coal-fired power stations were not necessary to meet electrical demand (Shankleman 2016). This highlights the necessity for developing better energy storage technology so that utilities can conserve the energy generated from renewables so that they can use increasingly lower amounts of fossil fuels when the renewable sources are running so well. Germany was able to export 7.7 gigawatts of supply from its conventional power plants back on May 15, but it sent the energy overseas. Without that capacity, that renewable energy simply would go to waste (Shankleman 2016).
Of course, the sun is not always shining in Germany, and the wind is not always blowing fast enough for renewables to carry the entire load. However, renewables do provide 27 percent of German electricity (Kunzig 2015), an increase from 9 percent in 2005. The German government made a decision to shut down all of its nuclear reactors (of which there are 17) by 2022 in the wake of the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan back in 2011 (Kunzig 2015). The German government has already switched nine of those plants off, so they are more than halfway to their goal. Germany represents the fourth largest economy in the world, and they have made some of the most aggressive commitments as far as reducing fossil fuel emissions – 80 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050 (Kunzig 2015). It will take significantly more advances for the country to hit those reduction levels, but if they can get to 27 percent of electricity from 9 percent in a decade, then the British can get to 20 percent by 2020.
The news in the UK supports these findings. As of 2013, 15 percent of the electricity generated in Britain came from renewable sources (Harvey 2015). The fact that the British have turned to coal-fired power stations as of late comes from the rock-bottom cost for carbon dioxide emissions with the carbon trading scheme that the EU set up. There is a drive to prioritize using gas to power heating, and gas suppliers tout its cleaner burning than fossil fuels. The government that will emerge in the wake of the Brexit scandal will largely determine what happens as far as renewables, depending on which power source(s) they prioritize with incentives, but it would be remiss to suggest that technological limitations will keep the UK from meeting renewable targets.
References
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Kunzig R, 2015. Germany could be a model for how we’ll get power in the future.
National Geographic 15 October 2015. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/climate-change/germany-renewable-energy-revolution-text
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