You’re In A New Paradigm! Behave Like It!

Almost every day, I come across a number of articles that claim we can’t address climate change without adding nuclear power plants — or even gas plants. I also come to articles that say we have plenty of renewable energy under development, but we need new transmission lines to get all the electricity they will generate to market; the result is that renewable energy is not being added fast enough. I still come across articles that claim renewable energy is too expensive. I even come across articles saying “the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t often blow.”

Clearly (to me), the problem we have, and it may be holding up our dealing with climate change, is that the world has too much drivel in it and not enough real thought.

The problem with renewable energy is not that it is intermittent or variable. Those characteristics are just the flip side of the baseload power coin. Solar and wind generators require some sort of backup. But baseload power will nearly never meet demand without a lot of backup of its own. And baseload’s backup is very expensive, compared to batteries.

Think. Why is baseload power called “baseload?” The answer to this is that it is there to generate the base load. If you might look this up, you could find that the base load is the smallest load required during a period of time. Why would baseload power be intended to cover the smallest load? Because if you know the amount of power needed in advance, generating that amount is really cheap. How do you get the rest of what you need? With various kinds of backup, which is usually dreadfully expensive.

Solar and wind are indeed variable, so they need backup. But the biggest part of the difference is that the backup is dreadfully cheap. Batteries deliver electricity at low cost, while backup plants on the old baseload system deliver it for high cost.

The old paradigm used what are now expensive means of production, meaning coal, gas, and nuclear. It needed expensive backup, meaning load-following and peaker plants. So it’s expensive unless it comes from old facilities that have been paid down. Since solar and wind are cheap and so are batteries, its electricity is cheap, even if it comes from new plants.

The old paradigm produced electricity of lower quality. I know, I have to explain what that means. In the old days, the guy who watched a dial at the grid operator’s workshop would notice that demand was rising. He would place a call to another guy, who ran the load-following plant, and tell him to increase output. With any luck, the increased output would not be too far from demand for a quarter hour or more. With luck. Without luck, it would mean that power outage would be so bad that it could burn out motors.

The new paradigm produces electricity at higher quality. When demand increases beyond what can be produced, a computer tells a battery to allow more electricity onto the grid. The change takes a few seconds. When demand falls, the battery stops supplying and switches to recharging. If needed, solar and wind units can be curtailed. This is not just high quality. It’s cheap. (Unless you own the wind turbine that’s being curtailed.)

In the old days, coal and nuclear plants were built a distance from where the demand was centered, just to keep things safe. Coal produced a lot of toxic materials that were emitted into the air (which was why King Edward I banned its use in 1272). This was the “pea soup” smog that killed people by the thousands in London during the 1940s and 1950s. Natural gas has similar issues. Though, they are not as bad for a host city.

Nuclear power has its own threat. With something over 20,000 reactor-years of nuclear production so far, worldwide, we should have expected one “core-damage event,” or possibly two, at reactors putting electricity onto a grid. Instead, we have had eleven, that we know of. The old-time planners, however, were wise enough to put nuclear reactors at a distance from the cities they supplied with power.

We should contrast these with generating facilities of the current paradigm – solar and wind. Since neither of these produces pollution, they can be safely sited near, or even within, cities. (I will argue about wind-turbine syndrome some other time. For now, suffice it to say that prevailing scientific evidence shows that wind turbines don’t produce it.)

This brings us up to locating generating capacity at a distance. I have seen a number of articles about transmission of electricity from such a place as Nebraska to a distant state like Florida. This is economically feasible, but it is not a good idea, because it holds up development of renewable energy.

It takes time and effort to get permits for long transmission lines. It can take years, in fact. And sadly, that is possibly one of the biggest things holding up our transition to renewable electricity.

If we thought about all these things properly, we would recognize that the old rules of the old paradigm are holding us back. We should not be hoping for development of new electric capacity at a distance. We should be developing it as near home as possible. This means wind turbines as near home as possible and solar capacity in our backyards. Such an approach is not more expensive. In fact, it eliminates much of the problem of transmission lines. So it brings the cost of renewable electricity even lower.

In my opinion, we should be developing generating capacity in our own backyards and on our rooftops, or as nearby as possible, to feed it into our own batteries. And that will save money and add resilience and security.

Featured image: Lost dinosaur. (Huang Yingone, via Unsplash, cropped)