Renewable Replacement Reality

When the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) proposes a 1.5-degree cap on global temperature increase by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 by simply substituting renewable energy sources for the dominant hydrocarbon ones, it's time for a reality check (Bill Gates warns do the math).

To show the extent hydrocarbon energy from fossil fuel dominates the global energy mix, consider the reality presented by the Manhattan Institute in a comprehensive March 2019 article.

What does the world consumption of fossil energy look like?  If the world consumption of coal and oil were measured in only barrels of oil, then the barrels would line-up from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, and a stack of barrels equivalent in height to Washington Monument would be consumed every week.

To transition our world civilization dependent on fossil energy to something else like wind and solar, consider these inescapable realities between renewables and hydrocarbon energy.

• Private vehicle replacement: A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace only five percent of global oil demand.
• The cost of transition to renewables: A small  2% decline in hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of global energy.
• The rate of fossil fuel replacement: Global petroleum production grew ten-fold in five decades, renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. 
• Energy poverty increases energy demand: When the world’s poorest 4 billion people increase their energy use to just 15% of the per-capita level of developed economies, global energy consumption will rise by the equivalent of adding an entire United States’ worth of demand.
• Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: due to improving energy efficiency since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33 percent, the economy grew 80 percent and global energy use is up 40 percent.
• To make enough batteries to store two day's worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Tesla Gigafactory.
  
• It costs less than $0.50 to store the energy in a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy in batteries.
• About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
• No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech: Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33 percent of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26 percent.

The realities are that both hydrocarbon energy and renewable sources contribute to climate disruption over their life-cycle of discovery, extraction, processing, consumption, waste.  Renewables suffer a cost penalty due their low energy density compared to fossil fuels. Presently no other energy source is remarkable as hydrocarbons in terms of the combination of low-cost, high-energy density, stability, safety, and portability.

A sustainable policy based on these choices faces drawbacks in execution, but there is a third choice. Complete Streets Policy is a demand-side mobility policy consistent with lowering the carbon footprint in our transportation sector by enabling low-carbon transportation modes.

For a comprehensive review of many more energy transition realities, see the article by Manhattan Institute "The 'New Energy Economy': an exercise in Magical Thinking".  ( Manhattan Institute)

-LS