If it doesn't work, do more of it

An amazing thing happened this week. Actually, two amazing things happened this week. The first was evidence of critical thinking from one European Commissioner. The second was an official, very public report by Wood Mackenzie that effectively spit in the face of people like the IEA’s Fatih Birol that claimed renewable energy output had nothing to do with the current energy crunch if crunch is still the right word, which I doubt.

"If we had high winds or just reasonable winds over that period, we wouldn't have seen these price spikes," said Wood Mackenzie principal analyst Rory McCarthy, as quoted by Reuters.

In the world that energy transition fanatics inhabit this must sound like nothing short of blasphemy, to be promptly anathematised or, as a more subtle approach, completely ignored, which is what happened, except one utility chief from Norway took the opportunity to remind us all of the right energy narrative.

"The more renewable energy we can build, the more electricity will come from those sources and the less coal and gas is needed for electricity production.” These are the words of Christian Rynning-Toennesen, chief of Norway utility Statkraft, as shared with Reuters.

Norway, as we all well know, is one of the greenest countries not just in Europe but the world. The reason Norway is so green, however, is not wind power. It’s hydropower, which contributes a stunning 96% of the country’s power generation. In other words, it’s cost Mr. Rynning-Toennesen nothing to urge others to build more wind turbines.

In the context of the current crisis and the latest data released by Wood Mac, saying that the solution to this crisis is building more wind and solar is at best stupid and at worst offensive.

Among the data Reuters reported with the Wood Mac release is the fact that Europe’s largest wind power producers — the UK, Denmark, and Germany — used only 14% of their installed wind power capacity in the third quarter. But that’s far from all. Reuters added that this compared with an average utilisation rate of between 20% and 26% in previous years.

What this means is that between four-fifths and two-thirds of these three countries’ installed wind power capacity basically just sits there. And what this means, in turn, is that in order for brilliant net-zero plans to pan out, Europe will collectively need to build not just a lot more wind turbines. It would need to build a whole lot more wind turbines, and add massive amounts of solar, too. And then it has to keep its fingers crossed the wind blows and the sun shines enough to provide at least a 10% utilisation rate for both because let’s not forget that right now, during winter, Europe is not exactly generating massive solar energy.

The European Commission is on the brink of making this possible but thankfully for people such as myself who kind of like nature just the way it is, one commissioner has sounded an alarm. Valdis Dombrovskis, the executive vice-president of the EC, warned against the idea of setting a “golden rule” for renewable energy investments, deducting them from member states’ debt loads in assessments of compliance with the stability and growth pact.

Dombrovskis is not totally opposed to the idea itself and how could he when it is such a brilliant idea. He is, however, opposed to the idea being separated from a commitment from members to reduce their overall debt burden. That makes the hope that the EU will avoid a complete environmental catastrophe because of its green energy plans slim but present.

Try to imagine what happens in the hypothetical case of the EU approving the EC’s idea: member states will be free to spend billions on building solar farms and wind parks and have these billions deducted from their debts. I can’t speak for other countries but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that in Bulgaria we’ll very quickly lose half of our arable land or more, mountain tops will turn into turbine hedgehogs and we might even venture into green hydrogen although the local renewable industry appears to be a bit shy about it, perhaps because of the water issue.

But this is not the most bothersome part of the whole European energy situation, this idea of a golden rule about green energy investments and I use the word green with reservations because of things like recycling issues and mining issues. The most bothersome part is the utter stubbornness manifested by EU officials in their insistence that the only solution to the energy shortage caused in part by lower wind energy output and in another part by virtually non-existent solar power output at the moment is to build more wind and more solar power capacity.

The solution, in other words, is to do more of what clearly doesn’t work. I’m sure the argument in defence of this fascinating line of thought is that 20% of 1,000 TW of capacity is more than 20% of 1 TW of capacity. This is a fact and you can’t argue with facts because it’s stupid and a waste of time but of course there is a but, conveniently — and openly — ignored.

That 20% of however much renewable energy capacity is not equivalent to fossil fuel baseload. This 20% is the average output of wind parks in three countries over a number of years. And as this year’s figures have shown, it can quite easily drop to 14%. And while 14% of 1,000 TW of capacity is more than 14% of 1 TW of capacity, it is still less than 20% of either capacity.

Because I’m beginning to feel like an idiot simplifying already simple things let me just leave you with one last, and extremely upsetting, quote.

Commenting on the argument put forward that higher gas prices will motivate more renewable capacity additions, the chief executive of Norlys Energy Trading, Anders Bauditz, told Reuters the following (bolding mine):

"Hopefully, the politicians have seen these price extremes over the last few months and will do the tally and then realize that probably we need to push for even more green energy and then figure out how we solve the problem with the intermittency."

As I feel compelled to add one last “In other words”, I’ll do just that. What Mr. Bauditz is saying in a very honest, very candid way is “Let’s put the cart in front of the horse because it’s a green cart and we need this green cart to replace our gas guzzling tractor. And then we’ll figure out how to make the horse pull that cart.”

Photo credit: Ken Mull