Conversion to Renewable Energy is Going Too Slow to Avoid Catastrophe
By John Lawrence – This is the sixth and final part of this series. Part 5 can be found here.
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, debunks the idea that all we have to do is to cooperate with the extractive industries and urge them to get greener. We do not have to go to extremes, but can phase in renewable sources of energy gradually. The gradualist approach is the essence of green capitalism. This will not work Klein says:
[The] bottom line is … our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
The gradualists are the ones that insist that our response to global warming can be painless, that we don’t need a “war on carbon”, that we can coexist and cooperate with the fossil fuel extractive industries, that we can gradually phase out fossil fuels and phase in renewables in such a way that job creation remains constant in the switchover and ExxonMobil’s and Koch Industry’s stock values need not plummet.
This is from Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality by Michael Hoexter:
The carbon gradualist ideal contained within the idea of carbon pricing as the leading edge of energy transformation is not simply born out of too studious acceptance of neoclassical economics’ worldview but also out of the fantasy of a non-disruptive, non-wrenching transition from a fossil fuel run economy to one that is run entirely on renewable energy and perhaps some as yet undiscovered nuclear energy. Politicians and political actors are not eager to join the fight against the fossil fuel industry as well as confronting our societies’ fossil fuel and “cheap” energy addiction overall. The notion that there must exist a gradual transition away from fossil fuels is preferable to a sharp turning away from them because of the consequence that political leaders would have to stage a bitter fight with fossil fuel interests, and would need to fight to assume, in most cases, complete regulatory control over the fossil fuel industry.
There is no gradual way to change over from fossil fuels to renewables without experiencing the disastrous effects of extreme weather events, droughts, food and water shortages and all the rest. The changeover must be abrupt and disruptive in order to forestall the worse effects of global warming.
It’s not going to be easy to get Americans in particular to renounce a way of life that goes back to the founding of the United States at least. As recently as 2007, Americans, when asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, ranked climate change last. They are more concerned about having good paying jobs which the extractive industries in a steady march of TV ads keep promising if only the American people will get behind them.
Additionally, the promise of US energy independence from foreign oil if only we continue fracking, mining and drilling is an enticement that appeals to our sense of patriotism, and one that Americans have only recently started to relish. Now in order to combat global warming, Americans are being asked to give up jobs, energy independence and a whole way of life, really, in order to leave untapped wealth in the ground. Many are not buying it, and the extractive industries are going all out in order to insure that the American people will not buy it.
Climate Change Deniers Not Ready to Give Up on Capitalism
The Heartland Institute is one of the institutions devoted to climate change denial. They fear that what is necessary in the war on carbon that environmentalists are advocating is a back door to socialism.
The call for mass transit and high density affordable housing near transit terminals is the antithesis of the free market alternatives they advocate. And forget about subsidizing poor countries in their efforts to create a middle class without polluting the planet in the process.
Conservatives will fight efforts to combat global warming because those efforts presuppose lifestyles that they are ideologically opposed to, namely, lifestyles not dependent on greed as a motivator and competition as an economic stimulus or even a market based economy in which GDP growth is the sine qua non of American government policy.
A return to local economies, cooperative endeavors and self-subsistence is a reversal, a regression, if you will, to an economy that existed 100 years ago and gradually disappeared with the urbanization of the middle class.
Heartland regular James Delingpole has said, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.”
Heartland president Joseph Bast is even more blunt: “Climate change is the perfect thing … It’s the reason we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”
They can’t fathom the enormity of abandoning the American way of life in order to pursue what they consider a will-o’-the-wisp because the implications of that reality are just plain unthinkable for them.
The network of climate change deniers is fueled by millions of dollars from US billionaires. A February 2013 report in the Guardian revealed that they had donated $120 million to “groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change … the ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama’s environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.”
From The Age of Disbelief in National Geographic:
Last fall the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which consists of hundreds of scientists operating under the auspices of the United Nations, released its fifth report in the past 25 years. This one repeated louder and clearer than ever the consensus of the world’s scientists: The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the warming since the mid-20th century.
Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most powerful Republican voices on environmental matters, has long declared global warming a hoax.
The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.
Some Environmental Organizations Not So Green After All
In the old days (in the 1800s) as many as a million Attwater’s prairie chickens made their homes along the Texas and Louisiana coast. But as “progress” ensued and the oil and gas industry took over those areas, Attwater’s prairie chickens started to vanish. A major environmental group, The Nature Conservancy, the richest environmental organization in the world, sought to do something about Attwater’s poor, endangered prairie chicken.
As luck would have it, in 1995 Mobil Oil announced that it was donating land where the Attwater’s chicken nested to The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
For all appearances this was a successful cooperative effort between a major oil company and a major environmental group, and hopes for Attwater’s chicken ran extremely high. It was going to be a “top priority” to keep them from going extinct.
Then in 1999, The Nature Conservancy did something that was a major disconnect for nature lovers in general and for fans of Attwater’s prairie chicken in particular. They commissioned an oil and gas operator to drill a new gas well inside the preserve, the rationale being that with the money so gained from the project, they would be able to do even more good work to save the environment although Attwater’s prairie chickens would be given short shrift in the process.
They had done the very thing that its supporters and members thought they were there to prevent. They started making money by extracting fossil fuels from the preserve. The spot where they authorized drilling turned out to be very close to where the endangered birds nested.
In 2002 the LA Times exposed the drilling. For traditional conservationists this was a little like finding out that the ACLU had sponsored the building of a new prison complex. “They’re exploiting the Attwater’s prairie chiken to make money,” exclaimed Clait E Braun, a leading expert on prairie chickens.
Of course The Nature Conservancy maintained that they could do their drilling without harming in any way the Attwater’s chicken. They managed to sound like any other fossil fuel extracting company. While claiming to protect the environment, they ended up exploiting it to make money.
Although TNC is a non-profit, that doesn’t mean that its management and officers aren’t profiting handsomely in terms of their salaries. It just means that at the end of the year, there’s no money left over that the government might consider to be profits.
TNC, seeing the error of its ways, announced that they wouldn’t do any new drilling, but that did not mean that they wouldn’t continue to extract gas and make a profit on the gas well it had already drilled in the Texas nature reserve. To this day they are still doing it even after the story broke that caused considerable outrage much to the detriment of the beleaguered Attwater’s prairie chicken.
The Demise of Attwater’s Prairie Chicken
And then the unthinkable happened. In November 2012 the Attwater’s prairie chicken went extinct. The whole purpose of the Texas City Prairie Preserve was to prevent that from happening, but under TNC’s watch it did happen, while they profited from millions of dollars in revenues from drilling and pumping gas and oil.
Under TNC stewardship, the largest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world – boasting over one million members, with assets of over $6 billion and operating in 35 countries – had completely wiped out an endangered species.
In a strange disconnect from reality, TNC’s website continues to boast that the “land management techniques the conservancy utilizes at the preserve are best practices that we export to other preserves.” All I can say is God help the other preserves.
The denouement of this whole situation is that the environmental movement has failed catastrophically to battle the interests behind soaring carbon emissions. Instead they have become part and parcel of them. And TNC is not the only one to have formed such partnerships.
Conservation International and the Conservation Fund have received donations from Shell and BP. The World Wildlife Fund has a long relationship with Shell as does the World Resources Institute. Conservation International also has partnerships with Walmart, Monsanto, BHP Billiton (a major extractor of coal), Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and McDonald’s.
Not only that but some of these major conservation groups have invested in coal, gas and oil companies further entangling themselves and doing business with the major corporations responsible for the global warming crisis.
As many of their supporters have recently found out, the organizations they thought were fighting the polluters are instead in bed with them, and I’m sure their executives, managers and officers are making out very well pretending to help the environment while profiting handsomely behind the mask of a non-profit organization.
There are other organizations, however, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which never took a donation from an oil or gas company and who never invested in one. They have track records of going head-to-head with Big Oil and Coal.
Rainforest Action Network has been at the forefront of the international campaign against Chevron for the disaster left behind after the profits had been extracted from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Food & Water Watch has helped to get big victories against the fracking industry. 350.org launched the fossil fuel divestment movement, and has been at the forefront of the national mobilization against the Keystone pipeline.
All this is to say that “market-based” solutions to the global warming crisis have done nothing more than to aid and abet the fossil fuel industry itself.
The continual purring in TV ads about how “green” the oil and gas industry has become and how many jobs they’ve created and will create is doing less than nothing to combat global warming. In fact they’re helping to perpetuate it. As Naomi Klein says, “[Large foundations and green organizations] succeeded in taking what began as a straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through a jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue came to seem too complex and arcane for non-experts to understand, seriously undercutting the potential to build a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters.”
In other words the powerful coal, gas and fracking industries, fossil fuel extractors all, have succeeded in buying off many but not all organizations claiming to be protecting the environment. They have become in cahoots with those whose activities are increasing global warming and the climate change situation so that well meaning people who want to do something to help negate global warming are confused into thinking they are helping the movement when in fact they are working against it.
What is required is intervention in the market mechanism not how to develop complex financial mechanisms to help the market fix the problem.
Large fossil fuel extractors will continue to suggest a gradualist approach to the amelioration of global warming. Basically they are trying to slow down the movement to replace fossil fuels with renewables because their profit margins depend on the continued use of fossil fuels. They will co-opt as many conservation organizations as they can and schmooze viewing audiences with their TV ads in which they portray themselves as concerned good guys who are only trying to help.
Their approach is completely self serving, however, and will do little if anything to change the dynamics of increasing greenhouse gases. What is required instead is a repudiation of the fossil fuel industries and a realization that market approaches will not work. Increasing GDP at all costs will only make climate remediation a secondary concern.
This will not be sufficient to keep the planet from warming more than 2 degrees C which is the limit beyond which human civilization will be severely challenged.
Green Capitalism: The God That Failed
In a great article by that name Richard Smith summarizes the situation succinctly:
As soaring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions drove global CO2 concentrations past 400 parts per million in May 2013, shell-shocked climate scientists warned that unless we urgently adopt “radical” measures to suppress GHG emissions (50 percent cuts in emissions by 2020, 90 percent by 2050) we’re headed for an average temperature rise of 3 degrees or 4 degrees Celsius before the end of the century. Four degrees might not seem like much, but make no mistake: Such an increase will be catastrophic for our species and most others. Humans have never experienced a rise of 4 degrees in average temperatures.
But our ancestors experienced a four-degree cooler world. That was during the last ice age, the Wisconsin Stage (26,000 to 13,300 years ago). At that time, there were two miles of ice on top of where I’m sitting right now in New York City. In a four-degree warmer world “Heat waves of undreamt-of-ferocity will scorch the Earth’s surface as the climate becomes hotter than anything humans have ever experienced. … There will be “no ice at either pole.” “Global warming of this magnitude would leave the whole planet without ice for the first time in nearly 40 million years.” Sea levels will rise 25 meters – submerging Florida, Bangladesh, New York, Washington DC, London, Shanghai, the coastlines and cities where nearly half the world’s people presently live.
Freshwater aquifiers will dry up; snow caps and glaciers will evaporate – and with them, the rivers that feed the billions of Asia, South America and California. The “wholesale destruction of ecosystems” will bring on the collapse of agriculture around much of the world. “Russia’s harsh cold will be a distant memory” as “temperatures in Europe will resemble the Middle East. … The Sahara will have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and be working its way north into the heart of Spain and Portugal. … With food supplies crashing, humanity’s grip on its future will become ever more tentative.” Yet long before the temperature increase hits four degrees, the melting will have begun thawing the permafrost of the Arctic, releasing vast quantities of methane buried under the Arctic seas and the Siberian and North American tundra, accelerating GHG concentrations beyond any human power to stop runaway warming and sealing our fate as a species.
Smith goes on to say that most climate scientists and activists have not come to terms with the implications of what must be done to prevent a catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperatures. It would mean a contraction in economic activity, a lowering of GDP, for the entire world. It would mean huge job cuts in advanced economies.
CEOs and corporate boards are not beholden to society; they are beholden to the bottom line. Profits are their be all and end all even if it means the ending of all the earth. They are interested in the short term not the long term. Wall Street demands it. No corporation will give up its competitive advantage in the market place for the sake of saving the earth.
Smith states: “I claim that profit-maximization is an iron rule of capitalism, a rule that trumps all else, and this sets the limits to ecological reform – not the other way around, as green capitalism theorists had supposed.”
But then is socialism or communism any better? China, despite being an allegedly communist nation, has as much of a growth imperative as the capitalist west. The world’s largest gas and oil corporation – even larger than ExxonMobil – is the China National Petroleum Corporation with 1,668,072 employees.
In fact the world’s largest corporations in terms of employment are oil and gas corporations and gas guzzling automobile manufacturers.
Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Saudi Aramco and Volkswagon are in the top ten of the world’s largest employers. The top twenty includes Total, Toyota, Chevron and Phillips 66. These are all oil and gas corporations or automobile manufacturers. The top 30 includes four more oil and gas corporations and three more automotive corporations.
The world economic situation is fragile enough without causing a major disruption and depression that global warming mitigation would entail. Any cutbacks we have to make to save the human species in the decades and centuries to come can come only at the expense of massive layoffs for the humans in the here and now.
As is almost certain, given the choice, humans will not sacrifice the quality of their present lives in order to preserve the quality of life for unborn generations. They will not give up a definite in the present tense to support an indefinite in the vague distant future.
As Smith contends, “Given capitalism, they have little choice but to focus on the short term, to prioritize saving their jobs in the here and now to feed their kids today – and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.”
John Lawrence
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Thank you, as always, for writing this article, John. I think your analysis is spot on. Capitalism is incompatible with life on this planet.
I know I’m the resident radical, but I’d go so far to say civilization – defined simply as humans living more or less permanently in one place in populations large enough to require the importation of food and other necessities of life – is incompatible with life on this planet.
There is an elephant in the room and it has a name: overpopulation.
No doubt, Paul. There are lots of elephants in the room only this time they affect the whole world and not just a little part of it. We’ve had thousands of years to get our act together as the human species without making much progress in the fields that really count. What was that song … We don’t need another mountain. Well we don’t need another smartphone, or another technological gimmick. We need progress in saving our climate, our oceans, our food and water (unpolluted by herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and preservatives).
Without intending to, San Diego is forcing its residents to scale down. Housing has become so costly its inner city has become attractive to younger families who can avoid the overheating freeways when possible. Smaller, more fuel efficient cars make sense for the city and have themselves become more valuable. (Ever try to buy a running ’96 Honda in good shape for less than $2700?). Typically, there are more bungalows and ranchitas measuring 1000 sq.ft., which makes them easier to heat (and COOL!) than middle class McMansions 20 miles from city center; the popularity of smaller itself has become expensive. (Ever try to buy a bungalow in near North Park for less than $500,000?) The bicycle can become a form of transportation and is no longer limited to weekend entertainment. Two people are living in spaces formerly dedicated to one, three where there were once two.
In some backdoor way, skillful, leaner living has become a necessity here. Yes, it’s too much to expect that simpler values and lowered consumption can significantly slow the decline, but the alternative has become disgusting for a growing number of people, and we can feel good about ourselves without showing off.
John,
Against such pessimism (which may be utterly true), what are we to do, today? Can you offer us a suggestion of a path we can take that will actually lead to a world all human beings seek?
Elect people who take the problem seriously at all levels.
Great article, John. Capitalism indeed is looking to short term profits so the shareholders and CEOs can make more money. It is totally at odds with saving our species {except for some enlightened individuals who see a way to make moneyAND try to save life on this earth. The general public cannot except global warming whole heartedly as the implications involving huge changes in the way we live are close to unbearable. So we are living the consequences…OUCH and shame on us all!
I’m afraid that based on the projections of a consensus of the scientific community, stemming global warming soon enough to avert disastrous consequences will take a lot more than electing reps & senators who take the problem seriously. There are more than a few there now who take the problem seriously, and we’re still moving way too slowly.
Jimmy Carter tried to warn the country 40 years ago with 55 mph speed limit laws after the first Arab oil embargo in the early 70’s, but was anyone listening?
There are too few there. It would take a majority of both Houses to do anything about anything. Short of that you have gridlock. But that may change if we start experiencing nonstop billion dollar tornado and hurricane damages.
I never thought I’d be wishing for more bad storms, but maybe that’s what it’ll take to wake this country up to the reality of climate change and its consequences!
Hi Paul, I know you didn’t ask me, but I couldn’t help but sense some despair in your words. There’s plenty to despair about, no doubt. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a mass movement to stop climate change. I don’t think we necessarily need one.
As John points out, we’re at war to save the planet. To win a war, we need to think strategically. Thinking strategically means identifying objectives and using proper tactics to achieve those objects. It also mean maximizing your effectiveness with the resources (human and others) you have.
This may sound simple but stopping the burning of fossil fuels means physically stopping the burning of fossil fuels. A good way to do that on a massive scale is to undermine fossil fuel carrying infrastructure. There are many examplez around the world of a handful of committed resisters shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure. This can range from soft blockades to more aggressive tactics. The Unist’ot’en Camp in British Columbia, for example, is asserting indigenous sovereignty and blocking 3 imminent pipeline projects by building big, physical structures like mental health clinics, bunkhouses, and cabin directly on the GPS coordinates of the pipeline routes. In a more serious example, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta (MEND) has cut oil out-put in Nigeria by 40% through physical acts of sabotage and other tactics including kidnapping and ransoming Shell employees.
Time is short, and we need to adjust our tactics accordingly.
If I recall, 4 oil workers (not sure if Shell employees) were killed in a piracy hijack. I am sketchy on the details.
Thanks Will for expressing your thoughts on this. I do think the cause will need a public uprising at some point. The civil disobedience you are describing might bring about the uprising I’m talking about, which might eventually result in a unified effort to change how civilizations operate.
Meanwhile I heard just yesterday that Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaruagua, one of the poorest counties in this hemisphere, is pushing to build another canal across central America connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic, which will only increase global warming even more. It’s disheartening to realize that ostensibly one of the most progressive of political leaders in the world thinks that doubling his country’s GDP will actually help…while it may make his country more prosperous financially, it may also contribute to the worsening of storms that may in turn drown his country as a result. Wouldn’t that be a sad irony?
Do you understand my pessimism? I feel at this point the old addage, “what you sow you will reep” has bearing. We will just have to suffer the consequences of our own actions and hope for the best. Ultimately the world’s population will have to make a major downward adjustment (somehow) for lasting peace and stability to emerge.
That is really sad, Paul. I think the case in Nicaragua demonstrates that many of us are often very complicit in our own destruction. I think it also shows that even the most progressive leaders participate in the destruction of the planet because our current global economic system requires exploitation of natural communities.
I don’t want to seem like I’m blaming the oppressed, though. I prefer to point out how colonization has decimated Nicaragua and if it wasn’t for this colonization indigenous Nicaraguans would most likely still be living in balance with their land base like they did for millenia pre-contact. I don’t mean to romanticize indigenous Nicaraguans, either. I know they had their problems, but total environmental collapse wasn’t one of them.
What does this mean for us? I think we must undermine colonial processes at work here at the heart of empire. Following the lead of indigenous sovereignty movements right here in North America is often a good place to start.
I agree. There are profound lessons to be learned from indigenous cultures. Let’s hope Mr. Ortega will take a lesson from the indigenous peoples of his own country and find a better strategy to pull his country out of poverty. Here, I think we can do a lot better than giving the Native Americans casino licenses!
Speaking of using Ortega’s using GDP as a measure of his country’s success, I’m intrigued with one small Asian nation, Bhutan, which measures how well it is doing by something the Bhutanese call their Gross National Happiness. Look it up. It’s a great way to measure societal success!
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when a key measure of societal progress (GDP) leads to the destruction of the natural ecological balance and the planetary correction that will inevitably ensue. There will indeed be a price to be paid for the exploitation of the earth’s resources that has been going on for the last 100 years followed by more people needing resources than the earth can easily sustain. If we don’t learn in a hurry how to live in balance, we may be our own undoing. But I have faith that the earth itself will adjust and survive us humans and our ways. (I’m less sure about the survival of western civilization as we know it however!) Cliched as they may be, there is truth in the old aphorisms like “you reap what you sow” and “what goes around comes around”. All things are indeed interconnected. Nothing exists in complete isolation. So, every time we exploit something or someone, sooner or later there will be payback in one form or another.
We are indeed in a divided, apathetic state-of-mind about climate change – gambling on a superior skepticism of the scientific realities of what we are dangerously doing to imbalance earth’s natural biodiversity. We Americans apparently must be ‘blown away’ by the next environmental disaster of all disasters to WAKE UP to the fact we are a major contributing causal factor … although, admittedly, that awareness may be a posthumous happening!
However, with the thousands of small and big steps persistently being undertaken by some countries to reverse the path of environmental self-destruction, we may still timely master our prejudices and apathy and do the right things in cooperation with others to avert an irreversible planetary breakdown.
This is less about a WAR against CAPITALISM than a WAR against OURSELVES and the excesses of capitalism for which we are responsible! When the local and global environmental costs of fossil fuels from exploding CO2 emissions and related climate chaos are acknowledged – to extent Germany and Denmark have confronted this reality- it’s clear we have a COMMON STAKE in cooperating closely at community and state levels to change how U.S. energy is used for electricity (39%), transportation (28%), Industrial (22%), Residential and Commercial (11%).
In some regions, impressive progress is being made with variable renewable resources which are proving to be fundamentally competitive as penetration increases. In this regard, the power generator sector is being actively transformed. But there’s a long way to go to spread the deployment of green electricity and significantly transform other energy use sectors, e.g., Transportation and Industrial, to a fully integrated sustainable energy system.
Annual average GDP growth rates of +-4% are a thing of the past. They cannot continue. Something has to break … given earth’s limited natural resources and a 7.2 billion population rising to 9.2 billion in 2050 with industrialization and commercialization levels now at a baby-cradle stage of development in undeveloped countries, notably in China and India. These two countries alone constitute 38% of the world’s population and are already producing 32% of global CO2 emissions (vs. U.S. 15% and Germany 2%).
In 1975, industrial countries (U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, New Zealand) produced 76% of global CO2 emissions or 12.2 billion tons and rest of world 24% or 3.9 billion tons. As of 2013, global emissions by industrial countries at least stabilized at 38% or 12.9 billion tons with rest of world producing a gigantic 62% or 21.1 billion tons (of which China’s share was 41% or 8.7 billion tons and India’s 11% or 2.3 billion tons). These two countries have an enormous impact on polluting the earth’s atmosphere.
Scandinavia, Germany and California are each in their own way teaching everyone a valuable lesson on how to transition steadily and effectively to 70% sustainable energy sources and lifestyles by 2050 – WITHOUT creating ‘massive’ net job losses and/or ‘stagnating’ GDP growth. In 2014, wind power produced 39% of Denmark’s total electricity consumption while wind, solar, and biomass produced on average 33% of Germany’s electricity (up to 70% at times). Net renewable energy job additions are 6,000/7,000 annually for Denmark and cumulatively have reached +-400,000 for Germany.
Both countries use biomass supplemented by an array of actions ensuring significant energy savings and energy efficiency. They can also link to Norway and Sweden’s considerable hydropower resources when wind or solar power drops. Denmark is examining heat pumps for storage so that extra electricity can be stored in the form of heat and later used to heat homes and businesses. A ban has been introduced on fossil fuel heating.
The cost of renewables has PLUNGED in recent years. Denmark’s new onshore wind plants will cost HALF the price of coal and natural gas plants. The National Energy Agency says Danish new wind energy electricity will cost Euro .04 cents or USD .05 cents per kWh. Here are Germany’s electricity costs per kWh from its new power plants in 2014:
WIND: Euro .05-.09 cents per kWh
SOLAR: Euro .10-.11 cents per kWh
NAT. GAS: Euro .11-.13 cents per kWh
LIGNITE: Euro .13-.14 cents per kWh
COAL: Euro .15-.17 cents per kWh
NUCLEAR: Euro .19-.50 cents per kWh
Source: Foes .de, DW – Media Center, “Green Power Takes on Fossil Fuels”
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in Abu Dhabe comes to similar conclusions in a recent study, “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2014”. Middle East operations of solar parks or photovoltaic power stations are generating electricity for USD .05 cents per kWh. IRENA reports that reductions for small residential solar PV between Q2 2008 and Q2 2014 were 64% for Germany, 62% for France, 42% for California, 51% for US non-California, 42% Japan, etc. Globally, renewable power technologies are more and more competing directly with fossil fuels, without or with very little financial support. In brief, perceptions that renewable power generation is non-competitive or expensive are simply false. Solar PV, wind, and concentrated solar parks (CSP) are the technologies that still hold the greatest cost-reduction possibilities.
It comes down to well-managed policies around a VARIED MIX of renewables, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, and demand reduction through effective energy savings and efficiency actions. It’s also about sharing/exchanging technology innovations and improvements on a global basis.
There’s no one “Holy Grail” formula for achieving a 70% green sustainable energy lifestyle with a huge 70% increase in energy demand by 2050. Even France realizes this with its new policy of diversifying its energy sources and reduce its dependence on nuclear. Scandinavia, Germany and California and a few other nations are setting the standard. China and India are going all out to speedily expand deployment of onshore/offshore wind, solar, CSP and a rapid ‘high priority’ development of extremely promising Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology.
While much must be done to release the potential of variable renewables and new sustainable energy sources, some hopeful signs are emerging as awareness sinks in there are no insurmountable technical, transmission, storage, or competitive barriers … only a lack of forward-looking policies and a ‘Can Do’ commitment.