California's stat mandate that 60% of electricity come from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2045, recently left millions of perspiring Californians powerless during a multi-state heat wave. Adding tens of thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) that people will want to charge on windless, sunless nights, perhaps once a week, will not help.
Banning gasoline vehicles is going to cost California lots of gas tax funding needed for roads and public works, including the state’s bullet train to nowhere. The state currently collects about $8 billion in fuel taxes and $3 billion in cap-and trade revenues annually.
Getting to 100% electric by 2035 will require a lot more money for subsidies to pay for those cars, and an enormous expansion of the CA vehicle-charging network. EV sales last year were 6.2% last year, and EVs are only about 1.7% of the entire CA vehicle fleet. .
About 80 percent of all U.S. energy (always measured in BTUs) comes from fossil sources, with another 8.6 percent contributed by nuclear. Of that total U.S. energy amount, solar and wind combined presently contribute barely over three percent, with solar contributing less than 0.1 percent. Even the best wind power and sunlight systems produce energy averaged over the year at 25%-30% of the time or less. By comparison, conventional natural gas plants have very high availability in the 80%-95% range, and often higher.
Wind and solar energy require an equal amount of “spinning reserve” power typically provided my natural gas turbines that must be throttled up and down like a car driving in stop-and-go traffic to balance the energy grid.
On producing those EV batteries: China controls about 70% of the world’s lithium supply, and 83% of the anodes to make them. One U.S. lithium project seeking approval to mine the material in a Nevada desert, has been blocked for more than a decade by environmental groups, such as the Center for Biological Diversity.
Mark Mills, at the Manhattan Institute, reports that building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, and batteries to fuel electric vehicles, require, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building equivalent systems using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy.
A single 100-MW gas-fired turbine is about the size of a typical residential house. You can replace it with at least 20 wind turbines, each about the size of the Washington Monument, and covering about 10 square miles of land. Wind and solar power also require long transmission lines to deliver electricity from remote wind farm and solar farm sites to high power demand metropolitan centers. Those long-distance transmission lines cause significant transmission losses.
The wind alternative would consume about 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades. A solar plant with the same output — enough power to supply about 75,000 homes — would require 50 percent more tonnage in cement, steel and glass.
It requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of storage batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent to that in one pound of hydrocarbons.
The physics are why wind power and solar power are losers.