by Mark P. Mills
March 26, 2019
Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he co-directs an Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation.
... Mills is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and is author of Work in the Age of Robots (2018). He is also coauthor of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005). His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Real Clear. Mills has appeared as a guest on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
In 2016, Mills was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. ... He holds a degree in physics from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
This excellent report
is easiest to read
using my summary:
There is also
a 24-page pdf,
consisting of
an 18-page report,
plus 6 additional pages
of charts and endnotes:
Also available on
a conventional
website page:
This Mark P. Mills report
( partial CV above ),
is summarized here,
using direct quotes
( in blue )
when they are relatively
easy to understand,
which is often, because
Mills is a good writer:
which is often, because
Mills is a good writer:
"There are two core flaws
with the thesis that the world
can soon abandon hydrocarbons."
"The first:
Physics realities
do not allow
energy domains
to undergo the kind of
revolutionary change
experienced on the
digital frontiers."
"The second:
No fundamentally
new energy technology
has been discovered
or invented in
nearly a century
—certainly,
nothing analogous
to the invention
of the transistor
or the Internet."
Last paragraph,
from page 18:
"Hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—are the world’s principal energy resource today and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. Wind turbines, solar arrays, and batteries, meanwhile, constitute a small source of energy, and physics dictates that they will remain so. Meanwhile, there is simply no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term transition to a “new energy economy.”"
"Today’s reality:
hydrocarbons
—oil, natural gas, and coal—
supply 84% of global energy,
a share that has decreased
only modestly from 87%
two decades ago."
"The small percentage-point
decline in the hydrocarbon share
of world energy use required
over $2 trillion in cumulative
global spending on alternatives
over that period."
"Over those two decades,
total world energy use
rose by 50%, an amount equal
to adding two entire
United States’ worth of demand."
Hydrocarbons (fossil fuels)
supply 84% of the world’s energy.
A movement to replace them
started with the fear of running out
of oil, which was wrong, but then
morphed into the fear of global
warming, which is also wrong !
Wind, solar, and batteries provide
only 2% of the world’s energy
and 3% of America’s energy.
"To completely replace hydrocarbons
over the next 20 years, global renewable
energy production would have to increase
by at least 90-fold. "
John W. Day et al.,
“The Energy Pillars of Society:
Perverse Interactions of Human Resource Use,
the Economy, and Environmental Degradation,”
BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality 3, no. 1
(March 2018): 1–16.
"For context:
It took a half-century for
global oil and gas production
to expand by 10-fold. "
John W. Day et al., (see above)
"It is a fantasy to think, costs aside,
that any new form of energy
infrastructure could now expand
nine times more than that
in under half the time".
Some people claim we must rapidly
replace fossil fuels, and create a
“new energy economy”.
( the core of the Green New Deal ).
The Green New Deal is based
on wishful thinking that wind
and solar power, and batteries,
are undergoing rapid cost and
efficiency improvements,
similar to those experienced
in computing and communications.
This wishful thinking ignores large
differences, based on physics.
"This paper highlights
the physics of energy
to illustrate why
there is no possibility that
the world is undergoing
— or can undergo—
a near-term transition to
a “new energy economy.”
Among the reasons:
Fossil fuels are low cost,
high density energy sources:
"With today’s technology,
$1 million worth of utility-scale
solar panels will produce about
40 million kilowatt-hours (kWh)
over a 30-year operating period"
"A similar metric is true for wind:
$1 million worth of a modern
wind turbine produces 55 million kWh
over the same 30 years.1"
"Meanwhile, $1 million worth
of hardware for a shale rig
will produce enough natural gas
over 30 years to generate
over 300 million kWh."
That's about 600% more electricity
for the same capital investment.
"This calculation includes a production decline curve.
Capital cost and total recovery/production data
are from Gulfport Energy, Credit Suisse Energy Summit, 2019;
and Cabot Oil & Gas, Heikkinen Energy Conference, 2018."
"The physics boundary for
silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells,
the Shockley-Queisser Limit,
is a maximum conversion of
34% of photons into electrons;
the best commercial PV
technology today exceeds 26%."
"The physics boundary for
a wind turbine, the Betz Limit,
is a maximum capture of 60%
of kinetic energy in moving air;
commercial turbines today
exceed 40%."
"The annual output
of Tesla’s Gigafactory,
the world’s largest battery factory,
could store three minutes’ worth
of annual U.S. electricity demand."
"It would require 1,000 years
of production to make enough
batteries for two days’ worth
of U.S. electricity demand.
Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds
of materials are mined, moved,
and processed for every pound
of battery produced."
This report is filled with a large
number of interesting facts and
figures, that I've tried to summarize
above.
Here are additional quotes,
for details I found most interesting,
and the pdf page they were from:
( see report for footnotes ):
I've used yellow highlighting
if you want to skim the paragraphs
rather than reading every word:
Page 8, of 24-page pdf:
"As a matter of geophysics, both wind-powered and sunlight-energized machines produce energy, averaged over a year, about 25%–30% of the time, often less.24 Conventional power plants, however, have very high “availability,” in the 80%–95% range, and often higher".25
"This means, on average, that a pure wind/solar system would necessarily have to be about threefold the capacity of a hydrocarbon grid: i.e., one needs to build 3 kW of wind/solar equipment for every 1 kW of combustion equipment eliminated. That directly translates into a threefold cost disadvantage, even if the per-kW costs were all the same".26
Page 9, of 24-page pdf:
"U.S. wind-farm capacity factors have been getting better but at a slow rate of about 0.7% per year over the past two decades.34 Notably, this gain was achieved mainly by reducing the number of turbines per acre trying to scavenge moving air—resulting in average land used per unit of wind energy increasing by some 50%."
Page 11, of 24-page pdf:
"Then, if the share of episodic power becomes significant, the potential rises for complete system blackouts. That has happened twice after the wind died down unexpectedly (with some customers out for days in some areas) in the state of South Australia, which derives over 40% of its electricity from wind."44
"After a total system outage in South Australia in 2018, Tesla, with much media fanfare, installed the world’s single largest lithium battery “farm” on that grid.45 For context, to keep South Australia lit for one half-day of no wind would require 80 such “world’s biggest” Tesla battery farms, and that’s on a grid that serves just 2.5 million people".
"But in the universe that we live in, the cost to store energy in grid-scale batteries is, as earlier noted, about 200-fold more than the cost to store natural gas to generate electricity when it’s needed.48 That’s why we store, at any given time, months’ worth of national energy supply in the form of natural gas or oil."
"Battery storage is quite another matter. Consider Tesla, the world’s best-known battery maker: $200,000 worth of Tesla batteries, which collectively weigh over 20,000 pounds, are needed to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil.49 A barrel of oil, meanwhile, weighs 300 pounds and can be stored in a $20 tank. Those are the realities of today’s lithium batteries. Even a 200% improvement in underlying battery economics and technology won’t close such a gap".
Page 12, of 24-page pdf:
"So how many batteries would be needed to store, say, not two months’ but two days’ worth of the nation’s electricity? The $5 billion Tesla “Gigafactory” in Nevada is currently the world’s biggest battery manufacturing facility.52 Its total annual production could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. Thus, in order to fabricate a quantity of batteries to store two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of Gigafactory production".
"Even without a new energy economy, the mining required to make batteries will soon dominate the production of many minerals. Lithium battery production today already accounts for about 40% and 25%, respectively, of all lithium and cobalt mining.58 In an all-battery future, global mining would have to expand by more than 200% for copper, by at least 500% for minerals like lithium, graphite, and rare earths, and far more than that for cobalt."59
"Then there are the hydrocarbons and electricity needed to undertake all the mining activities and to fabricate the batteries themselves. In rough terms, it requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy."60
Page 14, of 24-page pdf:
"Forecasts for a continual rapid decline in costs for wind/solar/batteries are inspired by the gains that those technologies have already experienced. The first two decades of commercialization, after the 1980s, saw a 10-fold reduction in costs. But the path for improvements now follows what mathematicians call an asymptote; or, put in economic terms, improvements are subject to a law of diminishing returns where every incremental gain yields less progress than in the past."
Page 15, of 24-page pdf:
"For wind, the boundary is called the Betz Limit, which dictates how much of the kinetic energy in air a blade can capture; that limit is about 60%.75 Capturing all the kinetic energy would mean, by definition, no air movement and thus nothing to capture. There needs to be wind for the turbine to turn. Modern turbines already exceed 45% conversion.76 That leaves some real gains to be made but, as with combustion engines, nothing revolutionary.77 Another 10-fold improvement is not possible".
"For silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells, the physics boundary is called the Shockley-Queisser Limit: a maximum of about 33% of incoming photons are converted into electrons.
State-of-the-art commercial PVs achieve just over 26% conversion efficiency—in other words, near the boundary. While researchers keep unearthing new non-silicon options that offer tantalizing performance improvements, all have similar physics boundaries, and none is remotely close to manufacturability at all—never mind at low costs.78 There are no 10-fold gains left".79
Page 16, of 24-page pdf:
"As for modern batteries, there are still promising options for significant improvements in their underlying physical chemistry. New non-lithium materials in research labs offer as much as a 200% and even 300% gain in inherent performance.80 Such gains nevertheless don’t constitute the kinds of 10-fold or hundredfold advances in the early days of combustion chemistry.81 Prospective improvements will still leave batteries miles away from the real competition: petroleum".
"There are no subsidies and no engineering from Silicon Valley or elsewhere that can close the physics-centric gap in energy densities between batteries and oil. The energy stored per pound is the critical metric for vehicles and, especially, aircraft. The maximum potential energy contained in oil molecules is about 1,500% greater, pound for pound, than the maximum in lithium chemistry.82 That’s why the aircraft and rockets are powered by hydrocarbons. And that’s why a 20% improvement in oil propulsion (eminently feasible) is more valuable than a 200% improvement in batteries (still difficult)."
Page 18, of 24-page pdf:
"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.92 In the face of such projections, there are proposals that governments should constrain demand, and even ban certain energy-consuming behaviors".
"More than a decade ago, Google focused its vaunted engineering talent on a project called “RE<C,” seeking to develop renewable energy cheaper than coal. After the project was canceled in 2014, Google’s lead engineers wrote: “Incremental improvements to existing [energy] technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive. ... We don’t have the answers.”97 Those engineers rediscovered the kinds of physics and scale realities highlighted in this paper."