Tag Archives: green
Examining Thoughts On Germany’s Clean Energy Push
by Breakthrough Institute Germany’s renewable energy transition, the “Energiewende,” has long been a subject of scorn among conservatives, who have argued that it is a massive ratepayer-subsidized boondoggle that has harmed Germany’s economy and imposed significant regressive costs on poor and working class energy consumers. But the last several months have seen growing skepticism about the Energiewende from the center-left as well. Both Der Spiegel and Slate have published lengthy investigative pieces raising troubling questions about the costs and the environmental benefits of Germany’s headlong pursuit of an all-renewable energy future. Salon recently published an article criticizing Germany’s transition from nuclear to coal. Even left-leaning Dissent Magazine recently published a long expose about the failure of the Energiewende to reduce carbon emissions, concluding that Germany’s enormous investments in renewables, together with plans to phase out its nuclear fleet, would cost the nation a generation in the fight against global warming. At stake are not simply public perceptions of the Energiewende, but the future of efforts to rapidly expand deployment of wind and solar power elsewhere. Environmentalists and renewables advocates have long held up Germany’s example as one that the United States and other nations ought to emulate. To the degree to which the Energiewende is instead perceived as a cautionary tale, efforts elsewhere to expand subsidies and deployment mandates for renewable energy, and to dismantle the present day utility sector in favor of a much more decentralized electrical sector are clearly at risk. It is a measure of just how serious the new center-left criticisms of the Energiewende have been, and how threatening they are to the long-standing green climate and energy agenda, that prominent clean-tech thought leader Hal Harvey, long a powerful behind-the-scenes player in efforts to expand deployment subsidies for wind and solar power and transform the utility sector, has stepped out publicly and issued an extended defense of the Energiewende against its growing chorus of environmentally minded critics. image via Shutterstock As the head of the Energy Foundation and Climate Works and the director of the Hewlett Foundation’s climate and energy programs, Harvey aggregated and spent more money on climate and clean energy policy development and advocacy than any other philanthropic institution over the last two decades – between 2008 and 2010 alone, Climate Works and affiliated philanthropic institutions spent over a half billion dollars on climate and energy policy and advocacy according to one recent study. America’s overlapping mash of renewables subsidies, deployment mandates, and regional cap and trade programs is arguably as much Harvey’s legacy as anyone else’s. For this reason, Harvey’s defense of the Energiewende is revealing, both for what it acknowledges about the real costs and slow progress and for what it attempts to deny and downplay. Harvey acknowledges the enormous costs at which renewables innovation has been achieved in Germany, writing that escalating costs of the Energiewende “need to be controlled” and that Germany’s large direct subsidies for renewables represent only a portion of their total cost. “One still has to pay for transmission and distribution, for taxes, and for system resources to balance the variability of solar output,” he notes. And he recognizes the enormous challenges that still must be overcome in order for a transition from fossil energy to renewables to begin in earnest. “There is no doubt that the accelerated phase-out of nuclear power combined with the strong carbon targets for the utility sector make for a complex transition,” he concludes. “Germany will have to reinvent power markets, build more transmission lines, and think deeply about a new business model for its utilities.” But he also obfuscates many inconvenient facts, particularly those that suggest that current problems facing the Energiewende represent more than temporary setbacks, associated with a cold winter, rising natural gas prices, and the nation’s decision to accelerate the phase out of it’s aging nuclear fleet, and rather are likely to represent endemic and persistent problems associated with efforts to achieve high penetrations of intermittent renewable energy sources given present day technologies in Germany and beyond. A basic reality check on Harvey’s claim follows: Harvey claims that most of the impressive sounding 24 percent share of electricity that Germany generates from renewables comes from wind and solar. But in fact only about half does. The rest comes from hydropower, biomass, and trash incinerators. As The Economist recently reported , “the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.” Biomass has proven to be an increasingly dubious source of carbon-free energy before even considering the broader environmental implications for forests and habitat of returning to burning wood for energy at significant scale. The situation in Germany is not as bad as in some other European nations. But like the rest of Europe, Germany has relied heavily upon burning trees and trash in order to meet its renewables targets, a fact that is rarely mentioned by Energiewende boosters. Harvey is no exception in this regard. Of Harvey’s 24 percent, wind and solar represent about 5 and 7 percentage points, respectively, leaving less popular forms of renewable power to carry fully half the lift of the Energiewende. Harvey claims repeatedly that Germany has successfully decarbonized its electricity sector through the Energiewende. In fact, the carbon intensity of Germany’s economy has seen little change since 2000, when the nation embarked on the Energiewende. More recently, emissions have been rising. As the latest numbers from Germany’s BdeW utility consortium show, Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.6 percent in 2012, the increase mostly coming from carbon dioxide emissions by coal-burning power plants. Anthracite coal carbon emissions rose 3.4 percent, while emissions from lignite rose 5.1 percent. Emissions are projected to rise again in 2013 . Harvey claims that Germany’s nuclear phase-out has not resulted in increased coal burning, but the evidence he cites contradict the claim. To support his claim, Harvey argues that no new coal plants have been approved since Germany announced plans to accelerate its nuclear phase-out after the Fukushima accident. Harvey is correct when he states that Germany’s current coal building binge has been long planned. But so has its nuclear phase-out, which was initiated over a decade ago. One can reasonably surmise that the long planned expansion of coal facilities has been, at least in some part, in anticipation of the long planned phase-out of aging nuclear facilities. Harvey chooses not to entertain this possibility. Harvey claims that recent increases in emissions from coal plants are temporary phenomena, relying entirely on analysis lifted whole cloth from a recent blog post by Amory Lovins to suggest that rising emissions were the product of a cold winter and rising natural gas prices. In fact, they are in significant part a direct result of renewables policies. German policy mandates that the grid take renewable energy first and fossil energy second. This results in what is known as the merit order effect. As more intermittent renewable energy enters the grid, it displaces the most costly type of fossil power generation, natural gas. As a result, natural gas generation decreased last year while coal’s share of electricity rose from 43.1 percent to 44.7 percent. And lignite – the dirtiest form of coal – increased from 24.6 percent to 25.6 percent. Moreover, as the Energiewende continues, carbon emissions from coal will likely continue to rise. The confluence of a priority grid access for renewables and a low European carbon price have squeezed flexible natural gas out of the market, adding to the gains coal has taken from nuclear power. In 2012 Germany commissioned 2.9 GW of new coal-fired power capacity. According to BdeW , Germany will add another 4.6 GW of coal power in 2013. Of a planned 42.5 GW of major power plants to be built by 2020, two thirds will be new coal and gas generators. Harvey claims that Germany’s low wholesale electricity prices, due to increasing competition from renewables, cancel out much of the cost of the renewable energy surcharge that retail customers pay to underwrite Germany’s feed in tariffs. Yet his own numbers belie this claim. Harvey acknowledges that the renewable energy surcharge constitutes one sixth of the retail electricity rate, adding approximately five cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of retail electricity. He then cites German government estimates that higher renewables penetrations have driven wholesale electricity prices down one cent per kilo-watt hour, saving ratepayers about $5 billion Euro per year. At best, then, lower wholesale prices mitigate less than a quarter the cost of the renewables surcharge. While lower wholesale rates will save ratepayers about $5 billion in 2013, Financial Times reported recently that in 2013 the feed-in tariffs will cost ratepayers €20.4 billion ($27 billion). Continue reading
Why The Advanced Biofuel Industry Is Struggling
By Robert Rapier | Fri, 13 September 2013 Last week, The Economist posed the following question: “What happened to biofuels?” The biofuels in question are so-called second generation biofuels that are produced from trees, grasses, algae, — in general, feedstocks that don’t also have a use as food. The appeal is obvious to anyone concerned about the world’s dependence on petroleum, and further worried that a major shift to biofuels will cause food prices to rise. So let’s address that question. Entrepreneurs Revive a Century-Old Idea About a decade ago, a number of entrepreneurs began to use their political influence to convince the US government that the only things keeping the US from running our cars on advanced biofuels was lack of government support, and interference from oil companies. These advocates eventually won over enough political support that state and federal governments began to funnel large amounts of taxpayer dollars into advanced biofuel ventures. President Bush spoke of running cars on switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union address. The federal government sought to deal with supposed oil company intransigence with a mandate requiring gasoline blends to contain growing volumes of corn ethanol initially, but starting in 2010 advanced biofuels as well. The federal government mandated that by the year 2022 the fuel supply had to use 36 billion gallons of biofuels, with 21 billion gallons coming from advanced biofuels. But the history of cellulosic fuels goes back much further than many of those entrepreneurs realized, and many set out to reinvent the wheel with tax dollars. It was nearly 200 years ago, in 1819, when French chemist Henri Braconnot discovered how to break cellulose down into component sugars, which can then be fermented to ethanol. The Germans first commercialized cellulosic ethanol production from wood in 1898, and the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in the US was built in 1910 to convert lumber mill waste into ethanol. Nevertheless, many budding biofuel entrepreneurs insisted that this was a field in its infancy, and therefore required generous government support until it could stand on its own. Some attempted to produce fuel from wood via a different route. Wood (or natural gas or coal) can be partially burned to produce synthesis gas (syngas), which consists of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That syngas can be converted into diesel (among other fuels) using the same process that Germany used to produce fuel in World War II. The problem is that this is a terribly expensive process, and so there are only a handful of commercial plants around the world that use either natural gas or coal (South Africa, which had its roots in their inability to secure petroleum because of sanctions resulting from their apartheid policies). We do have a small trickle of advanced biofuels that are beginning to collect EPA credits. In other words, for the first time the EPA is officially approving batches of these fuels for sale into the market. This first took place last year with a batch of 20,069 gallons from a company that subsequently went bankrupt. And therein lies the challenge. Of course this stuff can be produced. But can it be produced economically? The answer to that is no, the approaches that have been taken to date are nowhere near that point regardless of the hype to the contrary. Moore’s Law to the Rescue? The high costs have never been a deterrent for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who wielded Moore’s Law as the solution to every problem. In their minds, the advanced biofuel industry would mimic the process by which computer chips continually became faster and cheaper over time. But advanced biofuels amounted to a fundamentally different industrial process that was already over 100 years old. A decade into this experiment it is clear that Moore’s Law isn’t solving the cost problem. In an interview with Wired Magazine in 2006 called My Big Bet on Biofuels , Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders and the first CEO of Sun Microsystems, described his investment in Kergy (which later became Range Fuels). He wrote that to his knowledge, they had invented “the first anaerobic thermal conversion machine.” In fact at that time there were hundreds if not thousands of these gasifiers around the world, mostly used to produce power (a much lower cost proposition than biofuel production). My experience touches on all of these areas: biomass conversion, gasification, and production of liquid fuels — and I wrote a number of articles critical of the claims coming from the Range Fuels/Khosla camp. Some referred to me as “Range Fuels’ Number 1 Critic.” But the mainstream press couldn’t say enough great things about the company, right up until they declared bankruptcy in 2011. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer and investor dollars had been wasted, and the company never produced a drop of qualifying renewable fuel. Now some might say that failure is just a part of doing business and trying new things. That’s true, and I would never have criticized these companies and their promoters except they were influencing energy policy on the basis of inflated claims and collecting tax dollars as a result. If entrepreneurs try and fail on their own dime, then that’s their business. (I work for an energy entrepreneur). But if they take tax dollars, it’s my business as a taxpayer. And if they take investment dollars, it may become my business if I am advising investors. Epic Analyst Fail In fact I did give a fair bit of investment advice as some of the advanced biofuel firms began to take their companies public. Amyris (NSDQ: AMRS), Gevo (NSDQ: GEVO), and KiOR (NSDQ: KIOR) were three Vinod Khosla-backed companies that went public, and the value of his stakes has reportedly declined more than a billion dollars since (nearly a billion dollars at the time of that article, but the shares of all those companies continued to decline). I have been asked by investors about the prospects for each of these three companies (among others) since their IPOs, and every time I warned people away. That has proven to be good advice, because since their respective IPOs Amyris is down 85 percent, Gevo has fallen 89 percent, and KiOR is down 88 percent. Yet one analyst after another recommended these firms to clients, and then continued to reiterate those recommendations. Take KiOR, for example. KiOR uses a process in which they rapidly heat up wood chips to form a bio-oil, which can then be upgraded with hydrogen in pretty standard refining equipment to produce diesel and gasoline. KiOR has their own spin on the process, but the basic process has been around for a long time. The problem has always been cost. After the IPO, the market promptly bid KiOR’s value up to $2 billion. In response, I wrote an article arguing that KiOR was grossly overvalued. (I explained my decision not to short the company even though I felt they were grossly overvalued, but some investors contacted me to tell me they did short the company on the basis of my recommendations). But analysts remained undeterred. After KiOR announced a net loss of $31.3 million for the first quarter of this year, several analysts reiterated ratings of “Overweight” or “Outperform” on the company. For instance, Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James reiterated the “Outperform” rating that he first made on August 15, 2011 when shares were at $11. When second quarter results came in far below projections, Molchanov reiterated the Outperform rating and $9 price target. Shares are now down under $2, a drop of more than 50 percent just since the Q2 results were released. The point here is that this was totally predictable from the chemistry and low energy density of biomass, and of the science involved in trying to economically turn that into a low margin commodity like fuel. There is no magic catalyst or magic process that can overcome that. No matter how I sliced the numbers, I couldn’t see how any of these biomass to fuel companies were going to make any money other than through government largesse. (I am not saying that no scheme will ever work economically, but many in these space don’t understand the challenges and thus they fail by over-promising and under-delivering). So I advised investors to stay away, even as the analysts continued to believe the hype that many of these companies put out. No Funeral Just Yet KiOR isn’t dead yet though. In fact, I talked to a reporter on Monday, and advised that they would probably bounce off the bottom soon. There is probably one or two cycles of more positive news ahead, and they may very well get additional injections of cash from Mr. Khosla. As if on queue, shares were up 25% in trading on Tuesday. But even though the share price may see sharp gains at times, the road ahead will be very challenging for them, and the risk of bankruptcy is high in the long-term. So I would continue to avoid most companies in this space, unless you simply want to put some money down in lieu of a trip to Vegas. I don’t feel the same way about the entire renewable energy space. Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, for instance, benefit from Moore’s Law effects, but their manufacture is very different than the production of biofuels from biomass. And in fact, we are seeing not only exponential growth in the installation of solar PV panels, we see costs dropping exponentially. I have been reiterating my view for more than six years that I think the future belongs to solar power. The mistake from biofuel entrepreneurs, politicians, and investors in that space was that this is how things would play out for biofuels. By. Robert Rapier Continue reading
Renewables Industry Calls For 2030 EU Renewable Target
19th September 2013 Representatives of over 60 British and European renewable energy companies and associations, have written to the European Parliament President Martin Schulz, EU Energy Ministers and the EU Energy and Climate Commissioners to call for a legally binding 2030 target for renewable energy as part of what they describe as a “a strong and ambitious regulatory framework for the years to come. The letter, organised by the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) and signed by the UK’s Renewable Energy Association and more than 60 others, notes the success of the existing 20-20-20 framework in setting “a clear direction” for industry, together with what it claims is the urgent need for a 2030 framework “given the long investment cycles in the energy sector”. The letter claims that “Such a framework bears the opportunity to reduce the current costs of uncertainty, mobilise the needed funding, help to protect the environment, decrease the costs of decarbonisation, facilitate the creation of new jobs and enhance the EU’s technology leadership.” The 20-20-20 framework requires a 20% increase in energy efficiency, 20% reduction of CO2 emissions, and 20% renewables by 2020. It is claimed it has been the fundamental driver of national level policies to expand the renewables industry, especially the 2020 renewable energy targets which are devolved to member states. The REA claims that jobs in the UK renewables’ sector could grow from 110,000 in 2012 to 400,000 in 2020 as the industry expands to reach the 2020 UK’s targets of 15% renewable energy and 10% renewable transport. EREC also manages the ‘Keep on Track!’ project, which monitors member states’ progress towards their targets and seeks to identify and overcome barriers to expansion. The REA is the official UK partner for the project, which published its first EU Tracking Roadmap in June, alongside a report on barriers to expansion and a set of policy recommendations. The UK was the only country in the project to miss its interim 2011/12 renewables target – albeit by a narrow margin. REA Chief Executive Dr Nina Skorupska says, “The UK remains in the bottom three of the EU renewables league table with only 4% renewables while Sweden tops the table with almost 50%. The UK has only scratched the surface so far in terms of the opportunities for growth, innovation, jobs and exports that renewables can bring to UK plc. “But Government has learned a lot from working within this 20-20-20 framework, and it makes sense to go for a similar framework for 2030, including a binding renewables target. This will enable Government to build on those lessons, reassure investors, scale up the industry, boost our energy security, reduce our emissions and grow our budding green economy.” Continue reading
