Why Progress supporters should embrace natural gas

It makes sense for both the economy and the natural environment

Dec 03, 2024

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I have been an enthusiastic member of the Progress Studies community (or some call it the Abundance movement) for about 5 years. The goals of the Progress studies movement as I see it are to:

Promote an awareness and understanding of progress.
Understand the origins and causes of progress.
Apply that knowledge to develop policies and practices that promote future progress.
Build a coalition to implement those policies in the real world.

I am happy to say that the movement is starting to gain some traction. Two recent conferences on opposite coasts got some media and social media attention:

Abundance 2024 in DC
Progress Conference in Berkeley, CA

The “Solar vs Nuclear” debate

Though I have published two books on the subject and posted almost 400 articles over the last year-and-a-half, I was not deemed worthy of an invite, so I was not able to attend. Fortunately, a number of the participants published Substack articles about the conference. A number of them mentioned that the “solar vs. nuclear” debate was a key source of contention within the conferences.

I was not there to hear the arguments of the participants, but I presume the argument was really about the best method to radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades. This seems like an odd discussion to have in a conference designed to promote material progress and abundance.

If one focuses on energy technology revolutions of the 21st Century, the Shale revolution dwarfs the Green Energy Transition, at least in North America where the Progress movement is primarily located. In sharp contrast to Green energy, the Shale revolution required virtually no government subsidies or mandates. And this Shale Revolution can be extended to much of the rest of the world with much faster and cheaper results than the Green Energy Transition. This will mainly be determined by the extent to which governments allow exploration, drilling, production, and distribution of natural gas.

Hidden assumptions

I am sure that the reason why the energy debate was restricted to only those two energy sources is that the debaters assumed that only zero-carbon energy sources are acceptable. This is an example of smuggling in assumptions based on prior ideological convictions that have nothing to do with the goal of promoting human material progress.

I believe this reflects a widespread problem: a refusal to acknowledge the very clear trade-offs between two conflicting goals:

Promoting an affordable, abundant, and secure energy system as a key foundation for future material progress.
The goal of NetZero carbon emissions by 2050 (or something a little more moderate along those lines.

I have written many articles on the contradiction between these two goals, so if you are skeptical, I will refer you to the list below.

Recently, I published an article about why the Progress movement should make promoting long-term economic growth their #1 priority. Here I want to explain why natural gas is far better than either solar or nuclear in achieving that goal.

See also my other posts on Green energy policies:

You should also check out my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:

What should be the goal of energy policy?

This Substack and my From Poverty to Progress book series book series are based on the progress-based perspective. Promoting long-term increases in the material standard-of-living of as many people as possible should be fundamental goal.

Any energy policy that embraces the concept of human material progress should include the following goals:

Create an energy system that is abundant, affordable, and secure. This will keep human material progress going. This should include both wealthy and developing nations.
Mitigate the negative side-effects of that progress on the natural environment. This includes carbon emissions, air pollution, water pollution, wild habitat destruction, extinctions, and human health concerns.

Let me be perfectly clear: I believe that the first goal is far more important than the second. Promoting human material progress is my primary goal, and I reject anyone’s claim that it should not be the prime goal of public policy.

The Greens are right about one thing. There is a very real trade-off between protecting the natural environment and promoting long-term economic growth. It is just not the extreme binary choice that Green marketing presents.

Fortunately, I believe that it is possible to do both as long as we adopt the right policies. Indeed, economic growth gives us the resources for making progress on the second goal. A stagnant economy and developing nations trapped in poverty will only increase environmental destruction.

This is why restricting our energy choices exclusively to zero-carbon technologies, namely solar and nuclear, is a big mistake. Progress supporters also need to understand the benefits of natural gas and oil to wealthy Western nations and coal to developing nations.

In this article, I will focus on the benefits of natural gas to wealthy Western nations, particularly in North America.

Why natural gas?

Natural gas has an extraordinary number of advantages over other energy sources, particularly in North America where the Progress movement is primarily located:

Increased natural gas production requires no change in public policy or subsidies. It is already happening. All the government has to do is get out of the way, and even if the government stays in the way, natural gas production will likely still keep increasing.
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) are extremely fuel efficient, they emit far less carbon per unit of energy and virtually no pollution. A new CCGT plant emits one-third of the carbon per unit of energy (752.3 pounds per MWH) compared to an existing coal plant (2162.6 per MWH) (Frank).
Better yet, the efficiency of CCGT technology keeps improving. The most recent versions of General Electric H-class CCGT plants convert energy with 64+% efficiency.
Even more impressive, H-class plants can start up in less than 30 minutes, so they can modulate with customer demand. This makes CCGT far more useful for generating electricity than coal, oil, solar, wind, or biomass.
New natural gas plants have the lowest construction costs and the quickest time to deploy (per unit of energy) of any electrical generator.
Gas-powered electrical plants can be run constantly to produce base load electrical power, and they can also be rapidly cycled to produce peak electricity. With the exception of hydroelectric dams and some nuclear plants, no other energy source can do this (Smil 2015).
Natural gas is the cheapest form of electricity (along with coal) and introduces no system costs like solar and wind (more on system costs below).
New CCGT plants are so small that they can literally be dropped within the footprint of existing coal plants, so they require no permitting or integration with the grid.
We are not going to run out of natural gas within the next few decades, and production will likely increase more than demand so prices will be stable or declining. Because of constant technological innovations in exploration and drilling, proven natural gas reserves in the United States and the rest of the world keep growing despite constant extraction.
The world has 188 trillion cubic meters of proven natural gas reserves, while the United States alone has 12.6 trillion (Our World in Data). The known shale deposits are already greater than all conventional deposits in Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. Given past results, it is extremely likely that actual recovery will be far beyond those amounts.
Natural gas is by far the biggest electricity producer, and it is the biggest reason why the USA has retired so many coal plants since 2000. Solar and wind gets the publicity, but natural gas delivers the results.
Shale gas production is expanding rapidly and projected to keep increasing.
Shale fields (called “plays”) are distributed across North America and the rest of the world.
Exploration of shale gas fields outside of the US has just gotten started, so this is probably just the beginning of the proven reserves.
Shale gas is a revolutionary energy source because it is so widespread globally. Substantial shale gas fields are located in every region, and in seven of the ten most populous nations:
- India (the largest population in the world)
- China (second most populous)
- USA (third most populous)
- Indonesia (fourth most populous)
- Pakistan (fifth)
- Russia (ninth)
- Mexico (tenth)
In addition to the above, substantial shale gas fields are located in the following economically important nations:
- In Europe, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine.
- Australia
- Canada
- South Africa
- Argentina
American natural gas is affordable, and, thanks to the Shale Revolution, has had stable and low prices since 2008. The only real price spike was due to Europe desperately needing LNG after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. As of 2024, Henry Hub prices are now lower than ever.
Natural gas can be used in every sector of the economy: electricity, industry, commercial and home appliances. While 78% of petroleum is used for the transportation sector, and 90% of coal is used for electricity, gas is far more flexible. Gas is commonly used in residences for heating, air conditioning, heating water, cooking, and refrigeration. Only within the transportation sector is natural gas less than ideal due to its gaseous form (EIA 2021).
Natural gas is the only energy source that can cost-effectively replace coal in industrial uses, for example in metal production (EIA 2021).
Natural gas is the only energy source that can cost-effectively replace crude oil in the production of petroleum byproducts (Zeihan 2016).
Natural gas emits much less carbon and dramatically less pollutants than coal (Smil 2015).
Whether burned directly or consumed via electricity, natural gas is constantly available and easily modulated with little human labor.
Natural gas is extremely convenient and clean to use both at home, at commercial sites, and within industry.
Though pipelines occasionally explode due to poor maintenance, natural gas is extremely safe (Smil 2015).
Modern gas turbines offer the most energy-efficient means of converting chemical energy into electricity (EIA).
Natural gas drilling and combustion sites use very little land, although pipelines are fairly land-intensive (Zeihan 2016).
Natural gas is cost-effective to store and transport via pipelines. It is, however, much more difficult to transport over deep waters (Smil 2015).
Natural gas pipelines can transport far greater volumes of energy (10-25 GW) than electric lines (2-3 GW). Energy losses during transmission are also far lower than for electricity (Smil 2015).
American natural gas production is so abundant that it is now the largest exporter of natural gas
The United States is also the leading exporter of Liquefied Natural Gas.
To a large extent due to the Shale oil and gas industry, the American energy industry is a key driver of overall productivity gains. Increasing productivity is a key component in economic growth.

For all the reasons listed above, natural gas is an irreplaceable energy source given the current technology. No other energy source comes even close to all the advantages that natural gas possesses. Particularly if you are concerned about lowering global carbon emissions while maintaining economic growth, natural gas is a no-brainer.

Despite the enormous subsidies for solar and wind, natural gas is far more widely used. Natural gas made up 24.4% of global energy usage in 2021. In Europe, gas made up 33.6% of total energy usage, while in North America it made up 32.8%. The continent with the lowest natural gas usage is Asia, with 18.4% (Our World In Data).

Both alternatives to gas will drive up electricity prices

In the short run, neither nuclear nor solar makes sense if your primary goal is to promote long-term economic growth (which is what Progress supporters should believe)

Nuclear is prohibitively expensive because of construction costs and delays. Even with massive regulatory reform, these disadvantages are likely true for at least one decade and probably many decades.
Solar is prohibitively expensive because of systems costs imposed on the rest of the electrical grid. I explain these system costs later in this article. Even with massive price declines in the future, these very high system costs are likely to remain for at least one decade and probably many decades.

Natural gas has neither of those problems, plus it is a proven energy source. There is no need to hope that future costs will be reduced. It has already been achieved.

Since 2005 natural gas enabled major cuts in carbon emissions and pollution while keeping electricity affordable and secure. Natural gas is about as close to a “no-brainer” in North American as you can get. Even if natural gas is only a short-term solution for the 2020s and 2030s, it still makes both financial and environmental sense.

Cheap electricity requires maintaining existing power plants

A key fact that supporters of wind and solar power ignore is that new power plants are almost always more expensive than existing power plants that have already paid off a portion or all of their capital costs. So while I can support increased wind and solar power in regions where that form of energy is naturally abundant, I am opposed to taking existing power plants offline (as Greens propose).

In other words, solar and wind can supplement existing fossil fuel energy sources in certain geographies, but they cannot replace them without imposing very significant costs in the form of taxes and increased electricity prices.

We should not decommission existing natural gas, nuclear, or hydroelectric plants. They are essential for our energy system. And we should only replace coal with another fuel source that can replace it as a base-load electricity generator. If costs matter to you (and it should to all Progress supporters), then natural gas is the only viable alternative in North America.

The Green strategy is to replace existing fossil fuel energy sources. It is unclear to me whether the solar supporters within the Progress movement intend to replace existing plants or just supplement them, but it appears replacement is at least a partial goal. The two goals are very different, and it important to make your goals transparent. Same goes for nuclear supporters among the Progress movement.

Fortunately, natural gas already provides a cost-effective alternative to both.

Let Germany be a warning

All we have to do is look at the poster child of the Green Energy Transition: Germany. Once a world-class manufacturing nation, its industry is now in a downward spiral that it may never come out of.

German Green energy policies is destroying a world-class manufacturing nation Source

And this outcome is directly related to German energy prices.

Cheap natural gas powers manufacturing

Expanded natural gas production is a key foundation for high-value manufacturing. Energy costs, whether in the form of electricity or direct combustion, is a key input in this sector.

While solar, wind, and nuclear will drive up energy prices, natural gas will drive it down. And it can be done in as short as 5 years. Solar and wind impose too many system costs, while nuclear is too expensive and time-consuming to construct.Viable manufacturing in wealthy industrialized nations requires abundant, affordable, and secure energy systems. Seen from a high-level perspective, a nation can choose one of two paths to becoming a manufacturing power. For low-value-added manufacturing, a nation needs cheap labor and the necessary skills to run factories.

For high-value-added manufacturing, a nation needs skilled labor plus abundant, affordable, and secure energy. Wealthy nations do not have local supplies of cheap labor, so they must substitute cheap energy and sophisticated technology to dominate high-value-added manufacturing. Otherwise, they risk having little domestic manufacturing. Energy is what powers all the technology that allows for highly-paid workers to compete with cheap labor.

Germany tried to combine expensive energy with high-value added manufacturing, and this was the result.

Further proof that expensive energy is the main cause is the fact that energy-intensive manufacturing has done far worse than other sectors.

And this is not a short-term impact from Covid or the Russian invasion of Ukraine (although they both played a role). German industrial production was already topping out in 2007, roughly when the Green Energy Transition started to gain strength. German industrial production peaked in 2017 and has been in decline since.

China, India, Mexico, and Southeast Asia have the cheap labor required to manufacture low-value-added goods. These nations are seeking to gradually work their way up the value-added chain to reach more profitable types of manufacturing. The higher they go, the more important abundant, affordable, and secure energy becomes.

Wealthy nations, such as the United States, Europe, and Japan, simply do not have the vast amounts of cheap labor to compete in low-value-added sectors of manufacturing. These nations desperately need abundant, affordable, and secure energy systems so they can manufacture high-value-added products. This generates wealth that can then be used to purchase imported cheap goods from poorer nations.

Green policies that drive up energy costs, make the grid less stable, and lower energy use seriously hamper the ability of wealthy nations to compete in manufacturing. A shift to natural gas will enable wealthy nations to rebuild their manufacturing sectors.

Reshoring American Industry

The Shale oil and gas revolution gives the United States a chance to revive its domestic manufacturing base. There is no way that Green energy policies, based on either solar, wind, or (in the short term) nuclear, can do the same. Green energy policies in Germany are a foreshadowing of what can happen in the United States if we follow their path.

Over the last few generations, American manufacturing dominance has been eroded. During the 1980s and 90s, new manufacturing plants were more often located in Japan, Germany, Taiwan, or South Korea. Since 2000, China has become the dominant manufacturing power in the world.

Just a few years ago China seemed unrivaled as a low-value-added manufacturer and was rapidly moving up the value chain into high-value-added manufacturing. With the disruption of global supply chains by Covid lockdowns, tensions with the United States, more expensive labor, technology theft, and slowing economic growth, American companies are increasingly looking to relocate out of China.

At the same time, European and particularly German manufacturing are being undermined by Green energy policies. It is unclear if European manufacturing will be able to compete globally any longer. Now manufacturers in both China and Europe are looking for another region to which to relocate.

While low-value-added manufacturing will probably relocate to Southeast Asia, South Asia, or Mexico, the United States has a real chance to become a high-value-added manufacturing power once again. The key to doing so is affordable, abundant, and secure energy. Fully exploiting shale oil and gas is by far the best means to rebuild the American manufacturing base.

But what about carbon emissions?

Since coal still makes up a significant portion of electrical generation in almost all regions, increasing natural gas is the most cost-effective means to reduce carbon emissions in North America. We could replace all existing coal plants in the United States with energy-efficient Combined Cycle Gas Turbines within 5 years for only $148 billion. This is less than 30% of the cost of the recent Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which has likely replaced zero coal plants and raised electricity costs. The costs would be even less in Europe or Australia.

For every existing coal plant replaced by CCGT, this reduces carbon emissions by two-thirds. Neither solar nor wind can replace coal-burning power plants at scale.

Natural gas can do that, particularly in North America. No other energy source can compete. Plus natural gas is also extremely low in pollutants (unlike coal) and uses very little land (unlike solar).

Since my primary goal is to create an energy system that is abundant, affordable, and secure to keep human material progress going, I have no problem endorsing a low-carbon energy source over a zero-carbon energy source.

The secondary goal should be mitigating the negative side-effects of that progress on the natural environment. More specifically, our goal should be to gradually reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a cost-effective manner while also keeping material progress going.

Replacing the worst offender, coal, is the low-hanging fruit for accomplishing these two goals. No other energy source can do this quickly and in a cost-effective manner.

But what about methane emissions?

And the downsides of methane are greatly exaggerated by Greens. Burning natural gas does not release methane (CH4). Natural gas is methane. When natural gas is combusted, it becomes one atom of Carbon (much less than the number of atoms of carbon for wood, coal, or petroleum) and four atoms of Hydrogen. Since natural gas is a valuable product, the industry has a strong incentive to not lose it in distribution and storage.

The vast majority of what the media calls “natural gas leakage” is actually deliberate venting and flaring at Shale oil drill sites. The drillers are extracting oil from shale deposits, and the natural gas accidentally comes along with the oil. This is literally free energy.

The reason why the shale industry vents and flares this free energy is because of a lack of natural gas pipelines to the drill site. Constructing natural gas pipelines from the drill site to the rest of the natural gas grid is essential for both economic and environmental reasons. Unfortunately, the Greens oppose it, even though it would eliminate the venting and flaring that they say is such a terrible problem.

Now on to the supposed alternatives.

Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive

The field of nuclear energy seems to lurch wildly between the irrational exuberance. of Techno-Optimism to the dark despair of Techno-Hating. Indeed, there may not be another sector that has experienced so much of each over the span of decades.

I believe that nuclear energy is neither a threat to human existence nor a shortcut to Energy Abundance. It is just one energy source with advantages and disadvantages, and those advantages and disadvantages vary greatly by geography.

Nuclear power has many advantages. It is easy to understand why it has something like a cult following. It would have been far better if nuclear plants had been scaled up in the 1970s and 1980s instead of coal-burning plants.

Unfortunately, nuclear power has one huge drawback: construction cost.

If one ignores “system costs,” which I explain later, nuclear power plants have the most expensive construction costs in the world. For example, the most recently constructed nuclear power plant in the United States (Vogtle Unit 3 and Unit 4 in Georgia) cost an estimated $36.8 billion!

Nuclear power is also very slow to deploy. A new nuclear power station takes roughly 5-10 years to construct, even if there are no significant regulatory hurdles (which there almost always are in the West). For example, Southern Nuclear started the process to construct Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in August 2006. After they finally got all the necessary permits, construction began in March and November 2013. The two units were finally commissioned in July 2023 and April 2024. That is close to 20 years from start to finish.

Meanwhile, you could construct two Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants (CCGT) for a rough $722 million each, and construction could be completed in one year. Because CCGT plants are very compact, they can easily be dropped within the footprint of an existing coal station, so permitting is very rapid. And thanks to the Shale gas revolution, natural gas in North America is very cheap.

So in the United States based on the most recent data, nuclear power plants cost 23X the price and takes almost 20X as long to get completed as CCGT. Anyone who is concerned about promoting material progress must seriously care about both price and construction time. Nuclear fails miserably at both.

It is absolutely true that an important reason for these high costs is that government regulation in the 1970s knee-capped the entire industry in the West. It is also true that this means that Greens bear a significant moral burden for having increased coal emissions in the 1970s and 1980s due to the anti-nuclear activism (and anti-gas and anti-hydro).

It is also true that South Korea and China have been able to construct nuclear power plants for about one-quarter the costs of the West, largely because they lack the government regulations and construct them at enough scale to lower costs. But even South Korean and Chinese nuclear power plants are significantly more expensive than natural gas plants in North America.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) have promise as a means to radically scale up manufacturing volumes and reduce the cost of nuclear per MWh, but the idea has not proven cost-effective. A recent article by Robert Bryce (who you should subscribe to) entitled “Seven Reasons To Be Skeptical About SMRs” explains why SMRs may be just another example of Techno-Optimism in the energy sector (of which solar is likely another example… and so is wind).

It is a good sign that many nations and Center-Left parties who were once almost fanatically anti-nuclear are finally taking a second look at nuclear power. This is largely due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine cutting off natural gas imports and the limitations of solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels at scale. It is also quite possible that we will see a significant rolling back of anti-nuclear regulations, particularly by the Trump administration.

But the world needs energy now. It is likely going to be ten years before a new nuclear power plant comes online in the West. By that time, we could easily:

Increase electricity production to meet demand for new data centers with Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power plants.
Replace all existing coal plants in the United States with energy-efficient Combined Cycle Gas Turbines within 5 years for only $148 billion. This is less than 30% of the cost of the recent Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which has likely replaced zero coal plants and raised electricity costs. The costs would be even less in Europe or Australia.
Lower electricity prices while doing both of the above.

There is no way any other energy source, including solar or nuclear, can even come close to accomplishing all three of the above goals.

For the record, I have no problem with nuclear advocates who argue for a focus on natural gas now until we can radically lower nuclear costs. I can support:

> Natural gas > Nuclear? (if nuclear becomes cost-competitive with gas), or

> Natural gas > Nuclear Fission? (if fission becomes cost-competitive with gas) > Nuclear Fusion? (ditto)

If nuclear ever becomes price competitive with natural gas, I would happily support funding nuclear power exclusively going forward. But it could take us decades to get there, and nuclear power may never achieve price parity with natural gas in North America.

The nuclear energy industry must prove that it can meet the cost challenge before we support it with vast amounts of money. We should not assume that the nuclear industry will succeed. No amount of marketing and deregulation can substitute for expensive energy. Only results matter.

Progress supporters should be Techno-Realists, not Techno-Optimists, particularly in a sector as essential to future material progress as energy. This should apply to both solar and nuclear.

Overcoming intermittency is prohibitively expensive

Now, let me shift to the disadvantages of solar. I have already written an extensive article on the topic, so I will only hit the highlights here. If you are still skeptical of my claims about the significant disadvantages of solar, I recommend you read the linked article. As with nuclear, the disadvantage is mainly financial cost.

The financial disadvantage of nuclear is obvious, but they are much more complicated for solar, which supporters claim is “cheaper than fossil fuels.” Supporters of solar seriously underestimate the “system costs” of overcoming intermittency. All options dramatically increase the total cost of deploying solar power (these system costs completely invalidate the claim that “solar power is cheaper than fossil fuels”):

The system costs of both solar and wind dramatically increase the final cost

Below are five strategies to pay for the system costs of solar power

Overbuilding + curtailment (i.e. build far more solar plants than you need for peak summer afternoons so you have enough electricity for winter days and then “turn off” what you do not need).
At the very least, this triples or quadruples the necessary construction cost of solar plants to produce electricity through the Temperate winter, but that still does not deal with no sun at nights (50% of the time). So this option is really only viable in tropical latitudes with high solar radiance and few forests.
Utility-scale batteries are extremely expensive. I just published an extensive article on this subject, so I will keep it short here. Costs are the same order of magnitude as nuclear reactors, but batteries do not even generate electricity.
If we assume that we want to replace just one 1000 MW coal power plant with 12 hours of battery storage (enough for a solar plant to produce enough electricity to get through the night) then that would require 12,000 MWh of utility-scale batteries. Using Tesla’s advertised prices for Megapack, which cost $5,055,940 for a mere 19.3 MWh, then that would cost a whopping $3.1 billion. And this is just one power plant!
In 2023, total global electricity generation was close to 30,000 TWh. And realistically, you have to have battery storage with enough capacity to run the entire electrical grid for days or weeks during the Temperate winter. The days are just too short and cloudy. Even one week’s storage increases the price of storage to $210 trillion or roughly three times the world’s GDP.
Rely on some blend of coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro for half the year and nights. So now you have essentially two different energy systems. This is probably the most realistic option, but it is hardly the energy transformation that solar advocates are looking for.
A blend of both Options 1 and 2. This is still more expensive than Option 3

Solar power is highly constrained by geography

Solar power is highly constrained by geography (this fact is almost always ignored in these utopian projections of the future). You can see a solar radiance map of the US below and then a global map further down the page.

This is particularly a problem for the 80% of the American people who live east of the Mississippi river and the Pacific Northwest. Yes, you can build solar power plants, but they do not generate that much electricity, particularly for 50% of the year.

Coal power plants are overwhelmingly located in regions with low levels of solar radiance. One can see this from this US map. That is why only natural gas can replace coal at scale.

Notice that virtually all coal plants that have been replaced or converted are east of the Mississippi where solar radiance is low.

Just so that I am clear about the regions that potentially have cost-effective solar at scale, here is a list:

The American Southwest (which is the region that solar aficionados focus on)
Parts of Mediterranean Europe
Mexico
Northern Africa and the Middle East
Australia
The Andes mountains
Southwest Africa
The Himalayas and the Gobi desert

The following regions are very unlikely to see cost-effective solar at scale anytime soon (and maybe never):

The Eastern half of the United States, where 80% of the US population lives.
Almost all of Europe (with a population of roughly 700 million)
Almost all of South American and Central America (with a population of roughly 400 million)
South Asia (with a population of roughly 2 billion)
East Asia, except for the Gobi desert (with a population of roughly 1.6 billion)
Southeast Asia (with a population of roughly 700 million and a high likelihood of future rapid economic growth)
Russia
Canada

The total population in this second group of regions is approximately 5.8 billion or roughly 70% of the total global population. So solar aficionados have no solution for most of humanity.

So for all the reasons that I listed above, solar is going to remain a niche energy source for the vast majority of the world’s population for the foreseeable future (and so will wind). Just like all other energy sources, solar power makes economic sense for some uses but not for others.

Renewables Need Natural Gas

The most cost-effective means to implement widespread solar adoption is to combine them with natural gas.

The second type of natural gas power plant is a conventional power station. Rather than going through two separate electricity-generating steps, conventional stations only burn natural gas to spin a steam turbine. Unfortunately, this type of power plant is far less energy-efficient than CCGT: only about 30-40% of the energy in natural gas is converted into electricity.

If it were not for Green energy policies, conventional gas power stations would largely have been phased out in favor of more energy-efficient CCGT plants. Conventional natural gas plants are very important because they take much less time to warm up and operate at peak efficiency. This makes them excellent “peakers.” Peakers generate electricity for very short periods to even out short-term variations in electricity production and consumption. Because natural gas peakers are less efficient than CCGT, they burn more gas, cost much more to run, and emit more carbon.

Natural gas peakers play a crucial role in supplementing intermittent solar and wind power. Without natural gas peakers, short-term variations in wind and solar power would constantly collapse the electrical grid. So Green energy policies that force utilities to use solar and wind unintentionally also force utilities to construct and run less energy-efficient natural gas peakers. This makes no sense from an environmental or economic perspective.

Fortunately, as I mentioned above, the start-ups time for new CCGT plants has dropped so low that they can replace many conventional gas power station. In temperate regions of high solar radiance, CCGT makes a perfect complement to solar power. The CCGT plants can be run:

During the night for much cheaper costs than 12 hours’ worth of utility-scale batteries.
During the winter, early spring, and late fall when the days are short and the sun is low on the horizon.

So natural gas is not the enemy of solar, it is the perfect complement making a partial-solar future far more cost-effective.

Two Separate Energy Infrastructures

The need to use natural gas peakers or CCGT alongside solar and wind means that Green policies require us to build two separate energy infrastructures: solar/wind plus a completely redundant natural gas peaker infrastructure. Since there are times when neither wind nor solar is available, the second natural gas peaker infrastructure must be able to generate as much power as solar and wind combined. Virtually all the cuts to carbon emission from running solar and wind are being made up by running carbon-producing gas peakers.

This leads to a fact that Green activists cannot seem to grasp. Solar and wind require additional usage of natural gas. That is one of the many reasons why solar and wind can supplement fossil fuels, but they cannot replace them, as is their stated goal. Note that biomass or batteries can also perform this peaking role, but as we will later see, those energy sources are definitely not Green.

A far better option would be to eliminate subsidies and mandates for renewable energy sources and let utilities phase out natural gas peakers in favor of CCGT. If done in combination with a phase-out of coal plants, this would reduce electricity costs and lower carbon emissions and pollution.

So for all of the above reasons, why don’t Progress supporters promote natural gas?

Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:

From Poverty to Progress