Debate is essential

Those of you who follow this newsletter from the beginning must have by now formed an idea that I don’t embrace the green transition narrative that seems to be everywhere these days, touted as the ultimate solution to humanity’s every serious problem from poverty and famine to unemployment and environmental protection.

However, a recent chat I had with Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale, besides the embarrassment of me having quoted him in a story and then completely forgetting about it, made me realise something I may have failed to make clear. Challenging dominant narratives is important because a narrative unchallenged quickly becomes dogma. But the reason this challenge is necessary is not to overturn the narrative. The reason is that challenging a narrative stimulates debate and debate is essential for finding actual working solutions to problems.

I live in one of the most polluted cities in Europe. My daughter and I started wearing face masks a year before Covid-19 because of the particulate matter pollution in Sofia, most of it coming from an excess of cars plus a lot of households using wood for heating purposes during the winter. I suspect I’ve acquired a certain anti-EV, anti-renewables reputation in certain circles but as you will see, it is not really earned.

You see, I have first-hand experience with pollution. I used to dream of someone getting elected mayor of the city and hitting drivers with every imaginable tax to make them leave their cars at home and use the bus. Then I grew up and realised this won’t work just as forcing people to buy EVs won’t work. First, because forcing people to do anything is an approach that as often as not produces mixed results and second, and most important, because I am far from convinced EVs are all that much better for the environment.

This is why debate is important. Because the dominant narrative in energy gives us one side of the story. To continue with the EV example, the bulk of media coverage on the topic is about governments voting on bans for ICE cars in favour of EVs, investment plans for charging infrastructure, and the latest research that calculates whether on a lifetime basis EVs are indeed greener than ICE cars (they are, of course, they don’t emit exhaust fumes).

What we are only told reluctantly and very occasionally are things such as the link between grid reliability and the addition of a million electric vehicles to its list of sucklings, cybersecurity risks, and battery recycling. Range anxiety is in fact a minor concern because as someone told me, most people don’t drive 200 miles every day to worry about range. Fire anxiety, on the other hand, could be a potentially major cause for concern. To me, the biggest problem is grid reliability, meaning the reliability of electricity supply for everyone.

Back in the 1980s, many Bulgarians had the dubious pleasure of getting familiar with planned blackouts. So did many if not all Romanians for an even longer time. The reason: electricity exports in exchange for hard currency, vital for the totalitarian regimes of the two countries. Romania also went further, squeezing its citizens in order to be able to pay off all of its WW2 reparations without going into debt.

I was quite young during the “power regime” as it was called but I do remember how my mother rushed to have dinner cooked before lights went out and how I strained my eyes to read in candle light. That was in the 80s and we were a lot less dependent on electronics. Now, a blackout would be much more dramatic and it already is, as seen in California and Texas.

The reason I’m talking about blackouts is the same reason I am, as a citizen of an EU member, seriously concerned about the EU’s Green Deal. The deal is focusing exclusively on the expansion of renewable energy generation capacity as well as hydrogen production. Nuclear is not a priority — on the contrary, Germany is closing its nuclear power plants — and gas is being targeted as a temporary and resented solution to energy demand problems, accepted only grudgingly.

For all the lofty goals of the Green Deal, its success rests on two things that renewables and green hydrogen are not known for: reliability of supply, on the one hand, and affordability, on the other. The dominant narrative has dug a rut in many people’s minds about how affordable solar and wind energy are because solar panels and turbines have been getting cheaper. Yet it’s not just solar panels and turbines that are necessary for the generation of energy from the sun or the wind. There’s massive infrastructure involved and then there is the whole intermittency issue.

Then there’s green hydrogen, which we are being told will do miracles for our energy security as soon as its production costs come down and they are coming down, definitely, any day now. Yet, again, things are not so simple. The production of green hydrogen requires not just solar or wind power and water. It requires a lot of water and it needs to be distilled water. According to a chemistry professor friend of mine, the filters used to distill the water do not come cheaply.

It is these issues that need to be the topic of debate instead of every decision-maker shying away from discussing them and, in the case of the EU office for the Green Deal, not returning requests for comments. As for all the new jobs governments promise in the new low-carbon economy, I, for one, want to know what exactly these jobs would be, because after a solar farm or a wind farm is built, it requires only maintenance and this maintenance does not need to be performed by a thousand people on a daily basis, to put it mildly.

Examples of the topics and aspects of the green transition that need to be discussed without holding back information that is uncomfortable for those spinning the dominant narrative abound, from specific issues such as the UK’s idea of switching from gas heating to heat pumps to the possibly biggest elephant in a room quite generously populated by the pachyderms: we will need to consume less energy if the energy transition is to be successful.

So far, I have only come across one report that dares to spell it out. The report, by the UK’s FIRES, a research program involving scientists from several universities and businesses from resource-intensive sectors, put it bluntly, with the note that it outlined a scenario for an absolute-zero, rather than a net-zero, future. The message is as simple as they come: We need to significantly reduce our energy consumption. I am fairly certain we would need to do that in a net-zero scenario too, simply because — another well-built elephant — energy will become a lot more expensive than it is now.

Having said all this, I’m always open to a debate on whether my certainty could be misplaced. I would love to hear from experts, in detail, how wind and solar can become cost-competitive with gas-fired generation but not on a levelised cost of energy basis. I want to know how they compare on an absolute basis. I want to know how solar can become as reliable as coal without costs soaring sky-high because of battery storage. I also want to know why people in the EU countries with the most renewable power generation capacity and presumably production pay the most expensive electricity.

P. S. On a selfish note, I really wouldn’t want the fields I see from my balcony to be covered in solar panels. I also wouldn’t want them covered with oil rigs, but the chances of that are about zero.