Why solar + wind undermines EVs

To electrify transportation, we need affordable and stable electricity 24/7/365

Sep 16, 2024

Supporters of the Green energy transition typically support massive increases in production of the following technologies:

Solar power, whether in the form of rooftop photovoltaic or utility-scale
Wind power, whether onshore or offshore
Electric vehicles (EV)

In the minds of Greens and most others on the ideological Left, those three technologies are Best Friends Forever. As they see it, Solar and Wind are key to producing carbon-free electricity, while Electric Vehicles are key to applying that carbon-free electricity to the transportation sector.

But what if I told you that these three favorites do not play nice together? What if I told you that to a large extent, Greens must choose between solar/wind and electric vehicles?

The reality is that:

Solar and wind are only cost-effective in certain regions. The Eastern half of the US, for example, where 80% of Americans live has few solar and wind resources (other than very expensive offshore wind).
Electric vehicles require a massive amount of electricity to fully recharge them. Both wind and solar are very diffuse at any given moment so they must have massive over-capacity to recharge an EV alone. And the bigger the EV battery, the bigger the problem.
Most people recharge during the night when they do not need to drive. This makes solar power irrelevant for most electric vehicle owners
Charging at night also has the advantage of using cheaper electricity and smoothing out the demand curve, so it is something that utilities should encourage.
Electrical grids with significant amounts of solar and wind have far higher electricity prices than other grids, undermining one of the key advantages of EVs to owners (saved gas cost).
A fully electrified transportation system is terribly vulnerable to blackouts, which are far more likely in grids with substantial penetration by solar and wind. One 24-hour blackout would cripple a local economy and may take days to recover from. One long blackout in a major transportation hub could disrupt the entire natural economy.

The reality is that Electric Vehicles are far more viable when paired with an electrical grid based on a blend of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. The more solar and wind penetrate the market, the greater the disadvantages of electric vehicles become apparent.

Given the very high carbon dioxide emissions of coal, it makes sense for Greens to embrace the Third Energy transition + Electric Vehicles rather than Wind + Solar + Electric Vehicles. This means replacing coal with a blend of natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric. The exact blend of the above would be based on geography and local cost structure. In the United States, natural gas has a huge price advantage due to the Shale Gas revolution.

Solar and wind can play a supplementary role in certain geographies, but natural gas, nuclear, and hydro-electric need to do the heavy lifting.

Most of the following is an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order my e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.

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

See also my other posts on Energy:

A huge weakness of the Green energy policy is that it makes an abundant, affordable, and secure electrical grid impossible with current technology. This in turn makes it far more difficult to expand the Third Energy Transition into the transportation sector.

Many advocates of renewable energy also support widespread electrification within the transportation, commercial, residential, and industrial sectors. Unfortunately, the more the energy sector is based on electricity, the worse the intermittency issues become.

Scaling up wind, solar, and other renewables to generate 100% of electricity would make our electrical grid very unstable. Wind, in particular, generates radically shifting amounts of electricity. And solar generates no electricity at night when consumers typically want to charge their electric vehicles. Adding on the demands of the entire transportation sector will make the situation even worse.

We are already seeing this happen. As I write this book, Switzerland is seriously considering outlawing consumers from recharging their electric cars during the winter of 2022-23 for fear that it will bring down the grid. During the summer of 2022, California asked electric car owners not to charge after 4 PM during summer heat waves. Given that neither Switzerland nor California is very far down the Green energy transition, this is probably just a hint of what is to come.

Widespread electrification of transportation is dependent upon a stable, affordable electrical grid. Only fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydropower can deliver that. That is one of the many reasons why environmentalists should favor these energy sources, not oppose them.

In order to electrify the transportation sector, consumers and corporations are going to have to see very clear economic benefits for doing so. An affordable and stable electrical grid significantly lowers the long-term operating costs of electric vehicles. An expensive and unstable electrical grid pushes consumers and corporations away from investing in electric vehicles.

Transportation makes up about one-third of the energy sector and that proportion increases as a nation experiences progress. In the United States, for example, the transportation sector made up 37% of CO2 emissions from energy consumption in 2021 (EIA). This is significantly greater than the amount of carbon emissions that come from electricity. Failing to fully electrify the transportation system fully guarantees that the Greens will fail to achieve their goals.

Just imagine a nation with an electrical grid based entirely on solar and wind and a transportation sector based on electricity: all cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. The typical usage pattern for electrical transportation is to drive during the day and then charge during the night.

We know that solar power will be useless for recharging transportation devices during the night, so now we are entirely dependent upon wind. What if there is little to no wind in any particular night? The entire transportation grid temporarily collapses!

People cannot drive to work or do food shopping;
buses do not work;
trains do not work,
entire supply chains are disrupted for the day.
At the same time, home electricity, appliances, heating/cooling, and industrial production temporarily shut down.

We already experienced something like that during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Now electricity lockdowns could be a common occurrence, although hopefully far shorter in duration than Covid lockdowns.

But what about batteries? We could vastly over-build our solar and wind production and then store the rest in batteries. And then each night we just transfer the energy into the batteries in electric vehicles. That might work, but as we will see, batteries are highly expensive, their production emits large amounts of carbon, and each transfer leads to losses of electricity.

To make people want to switch from ICE to electric cars, we need three things:

Very cheap electricity to make up for the high initial cost of the battery.
An extremely stable grid that guarantees that vehicles can recharge every night.
Ever-declining cost, size, weight, and increasing longevity of electric batteries.

The third is occurring due to rapid technological innovation in the private sector along with government subsidies to guarantee a market (see graphic below). The first and the second items, however, cannot be achieved with Green energy policies. Rather than making electricity abundant, affordable and secure, Green energy policies make electricity expensive, unstable and constrained. This is the opposite of what we need.

Utility-scale Batteries Are Not A Solution

Some advocates of renewable energy maintain that widespread usage of energy storage will overcome the intermittency disadvantage of renewable energy. They claim that, with widespread installation of utility-scale batteries, we can store electricity when we produce too much and save it for a time when we do not need it.

Battery storage is one of the key technologies that we need to improve over the next century. Innovation in this domain has been one of the most exciting developments over the last few decades. Every few years, new battery chemistries are invented and production costs keep dropping.

Despite this very positive trend, the cost of storing electricity is still very expensive compared to storing fossil fuels. Storing one barrel of oil costs around $1. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil in Tesla batteries, however, costs a whopping $200. This cost means that the widespread deployment of utility-scale batteries would dramatically increase the costs of our electrical grid (FEE).

To give one example, to store just 3 days of global electrical usage using Tesla megapacks would cost $590 trillion, or six times the world GDP. And if we tried to do so within just a few decades, it would cost significantly more. Worse 3 days of storage is far less than is needed to maintain a stable grid throughout the entire year (Epstein).

Even today, batteries make up about one-quarter of the cost of an electric car. If you do not believe me, look at the cost of electrical cars compared to identical ICE models. Electric cars typically cost one-third more than their ICE version. That is why the federal government believes that it is necessary to give a $7,500 tax rebate for purchasing an electric car. Now apply those additional costs to our electrical grid, which powers over 300 million people, and you can see the cost issue.

Advocates of battery storage also neglect the fact that battery production involves large amounts of carbon emissions. The mining of raw materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese is typically done in developing nations with very lax environmental standards. Transportation and manufacturing of batteries are typically powered by coal. So, to cut carbon emissions, we must produce carbon emissions.

Getting exact carbon emissions is very complicated, but one estimate for the Tesla Model 3 ranges between 3,120 and 15,680 kg of carbon. A good ballpark estimate is that the batteries roughly double the carbon emitted during the production process of cars. In other words, the production of electric vehicles emits roughly double the carbon emissions of a traditional ICE vehicle. And a traditional ICE vehicle is one of the most carbon-intensive products on the market (MIT).

Using the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia, the largest utility-scale battery storage in the world, as a model, one author computed that wind plus battery power emits only one-third the amount of carbon that coal does. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the author of this study neglected to mention that this is almost exactly the savings provided by the most energy-efficient gas turbines. And the gas turbines are much cheaper, so why bother building wind-plus-batteries in the first place (Forbes)?

Advocates of utility-scale batteries also seriously underestimate the scale necessary to keep the electrical grid stable. My guess is that many of them deliberately underestimate the scale, so as not to undermine their cause. In most of the studies that I have seen, they look at the cost of installing only a few hours worth of battery storage.

A few hours’ worth of energy storage would work fine on most summer days when solar power is reasonably efficient due to geography. One only needs a few hours of electricity to get through each night. But when there is a cloudy day, suddenly you need more storage. And wind power is far more erratic than solar power.

Moreover, battery storage needs ramp up enormously when one factors in declining solar power capacity factors outside of the summer. Solar power generates far less electricity during the winter. Solar is also very inefficient during the early spring and late fall.

Wind power can pick up some of the slack, but wind is inherently less predictable. So the actual amount of electricity that would need to be stored must be measured in months, not hours.

In addition to daily and seasonal variations, there are also very sizable annual variations. An entire winter with slow wind production and very low solar production is not at all uncommon. To mitigate the damage to the economy, one would need to store weeks’, or some regions months,’ worth of electricity, not hours.

While it is conceivable that we could produce that many utility-scale batteries, this would be a massive ramp-up in world battery production. Very little of this capacity consists of utility-scale batteries. To produce enough batteries for the world’s electrical grid, production would have to scale up something on the order of 100-fold. That is just not realistic to expect.

Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory, the largest battery factory in the world, can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electrical demand. To increase that time to just 2 days, far less than is needed, would require 1000 years of full-scale production at that plant (FEE).

And remember that we also already need to radically increase battery production to electrify transportation. So realistically materials needed for utility-scale batteries will compete with car batteries. I believe that electrifying transportation should take priority over utility-scale batteries because CCGT can better fill the gap.

Nor are batteries a one-time purchase. Current batteries wear out after 7-15 years and degrade in capacity during that time, so those batteries will need to be replaced periodically. And all of this leads to massive carbon emissions to manufacture the batteries.

For the foreseeable future, utility-scale batteries produced in enough volume to make a 100% renewable electrical grid are just not viable from an economic or environmental perspective. Only nations with widespread hydroelectric or geothermal resources can hope to achieve that goal within one to three decades.

Utility-scale batteries are still necessary

Don’t get me wrong. I think that mass deployment of utility-scale batteries is absolutely essential to maintain the stability of our electric grid. They will likely soon become more cost-effective that Simple Cycle Gas Turbines that function as “peakers” to adjust to rapid changes in demand vs. supply. They are useful regardless of the method for producing electricity.

But scaling up utility-scale batteries to function as peakers for an electrical grid that functions on coal, gas, nuclear and hydro will only require perhaps 1-3 hours worth of battery capacity. Scaling up utility-scale batteries to function as peakers for an electrical grid that functions on solar and wind will only require weeks worth of storage to get through the dark half of the year. This is a minimum 100 times greater cost.

Norway’s Third Energy Transition in Transportation

Norway is a great example of what is needed for zero-carbon electricity to support widespread electric vehicle adoption. Norway is the first nation to push the Third Energy Transition into the transportation sector. With a combination of subsidies, discounts, and mandates, sales of new electric vehicles in Norway have jumped from virtually zero in 2011 to 54% of sales in 2020. Most of the remainder of new cars purchased are either plug-in hybrids or hybrids. Greens have rightfully cheered this transition and claim that Norway is an example of a nation where their policies have succeeded.

But what made the rapid transition to electric vehicles possible is that the Norwegian electrical grid is 95.3% powered by hydroelectric dams, a power source that Greens oppose. An entire electrical grid based upon hydroelectric dams is a dream scenario. Hydroelectric dams can offer very cheap carbon-free base-load power and the ability to modulate with demand. No other power source offers this combination. Unfortunately, this is only possible in regions with extremely abundant hydro resources.

More to the point, Norway has been able to fund the transition to a large extent because it has a massive oil and gas industry. The Norwegian fossil fuels industry generates:

49% of all government revenue,
33% of the Norwegian economy and
64% of its exports (Norsk Petroleum).

Fossil fuel production makes Norway one of the few nations in the world with a higher per capita GDP than the United States. This huge economic boon, combined with an abundant, affordable, and stable electric grid powered by hydroelectric dams makes their electric vehicle policies economically sustainable.

Norway has been able to radically increase electric vehicle car sales, while the rest of Europe has not yet done so, precisely because Norway did not follow Green policies in the rest of their energy system. The Third Energy Transition enables the electrification of transportation, while Green energy policies do not.

The choice is yours

So for the foreseeable future Greens will need to choose among:

An electrical grid powered largely by fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro and the mass deployment of electric vehicles. Natural gas can substitute for coal. This option can be deployed to virtually every nation that can pay for a modern electrical grid.
An electrical grid powered largely by solar and wind and continuing widespread use of ICE cars. This option can only be deployed in regions with significant solar and/or wind resources.
Widespread use of coal, particularly in Asia where the majority of humanity lives. This make Netzero by 2050 impossible.

So which is it?

The above is an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase for full price on Amazon.