Part 1: “Does EU Climate Policy Need Evolution or Revolution? What Should We Change in the Green Deal?” My critical remarks at “Energy Security in CEE Conference,” Warsaw

This is long, so posted in two parts. It ended up a sort of manifesto for radical reform of the EU Green Deal model. First, I explain key technological failings of the all-renewables model. Second, I stressed that political intransigence of the new Commission to reforming this model is weakening EU war-time energy security and driving industrial decline.

Dr. Leon Hartwell: Now, I’m going to now turn to you, Thomas, because you’ve written about everything from oil to nuclear energy, and I hope you’ll throw a few spanners in the wheel. So, to give us some food for thought. The title of our panel of course, Evolution or Revolution. What does the Green Deal need and why? What’s your take on this, Tom?

Dr. Tom O’Donnell: Thanks, Leon. Well, first off, I’m not going to say anything I haven’t said for 20 something years, I didn’t just write it for this panel.  I have also taught seminars critiquing the Green Transition Model, the German Model, over many years.

So, the question posed is: “Evolution or Revolution in the Green New Deal?” and the other iterations of it, “Fit for 55” and such?  I would say it would be nice to have evolution, but it’s not possible.

It’s a failure, a policy disaster, which is going to require radical action by Europe if you’re not going to deindustrialize, and also for security reasons. There are two aspects here to this failure.

First off, and I’ll maybe come back to this in another round, on the political front. The stance that the new Commission is taking, while focusing on energy and industrial policy, it is simply doubling down on old policies, wrong policies which are dangerous, so this is going to require a European political fight, a confrontation.

The Green Deal Model has failed to develop key technologies

Second,  There are technical, technological failures in the Green Deal model itself. If you look at the model it comes from, which originated in the USA and then especially Germany, going back 30 years, actually 40 years, several of the stated key technical requirements for the model to succeed have failed. And that’s what I mainly want to explain first.

History: Corporate targets

So, on the technical issue, perhaps everybody remembers this. There is a fellow named Amory Lovins in the United States, who in the 1970s wrote a book, Soft Energy Paths [Lovins, A. “Soft Energy Paths.” San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1977].  Later, in 2019, Dr. Lovins, an American physicist and futurist, was decorated by the German government, recognized as the father, in effect, of the plan that has become the German national energy transition policy.  He is also credited with coining the phrase “energy transition.”

This German green energy transition model, today’s Energiewende, in turn is the model for the European Green Deal. The idea of this plan was that you could get rid of all of what Lovins called “hard energy paths,” that is fossil fuels and nuclear, and replace this with so-called “soft energy paths,” which are renewables.

Meanwhile, the initial reason for advocating this soft-energy-paths transition had very little to do with climate change. Climate change was a minor issue  the time. Rather, it had to do with how, in order to use hard energy paths, you need big industrial facilities run by big corporations. So, it was said that to undermine these corporations’ power, we have to use only renewables.

And there was also, at that time in Germany, a movement against the arbitrariness of decisions by government and corporations as to what large projects would be built, and where, without any local consultations with citizens. The rapid post-war re-industrialization had sparked this backlash.  And here too, the objective was to defeat the power of corporations.  

Moreover, neo-Malthusian ideas, first popularized by the Club of Rome, had popularized specific predictions for extinction of each mineral resource, including oil and gas, and also asserted an overpopulation crisis was looming. [viz., Donella H. Meadows [and others]. “The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.” New York :Universe Books, 1972.} Again, these were all seen to be due to the corporate capitalist imperative to maximize profits and to grow the economy on a finite planet.

(Post-conference comment:. I should add that peak oil, peak gas and peak minerals are broadly no longer seen as fundamental problems. Indeed, careful academic researchers already had good refutations of these theories at the time, but these notions nonetheless became influential, populist themes, These were neo-Malthusian assessments that failed for reasons similar to why Malthus’ predictions of the mid-1800s were wrong. So too, overpopulation is no longer seen as a fundamental threat, one exacerbating peak resources. This was also wrong. However, anyone who lived through those years recalls how powerful those ideas were among significant sections of the population of developed states.)

These deep-seated concerns were the bases of what, in Germany in particular, coalesced into a new movement for replacing so-called “hard energy paths,” fossil fuels and nuclear power, as a path to preserving the environment and killing the economic and social dominance of large corporations.

In Germany, this all became a new hope for many activists who had participated in protest movements of the 1960s and early-1970s and who felt that the old-school socialist and new-left ideas of those movements had failed. They latched onto this new idea that by transforming the energy system one could transform, could deconstruct corporate-capitalist power, and around energy one could build participatory democratic communities.

Meanwhile, climate change, as an issue, as a driver of this all-renewables program, came along later, and the threat of climate change was a big boost to this anti-corporate, soft-energy-paths movement, but later.

So, to make the renewables transition possible, Lovins and then the German Greens said we can get the price of these renewables down, the prices of windmills and solar, if they’re subsidized by government for a time, till they ramp up to a large scale. I never had a problem with that claim. Windmills and solar panels were not new tech. I’m a physicist and I knew you could mass produce these as the tech already existed. However, the question is, what are you going to do with them after they are installed? What’s the system they’re going to be plugged into? 

Intermittency

From the beginning, the originators of this plan said that we will have a problem with intermittency.  By “intermittency” here is meant that the wind and sunshine powering renewables is not constant, but varies with the weather, and the electricity generated is “intermittent.”

I remember clearly, this problem was not denied. They admitted intermittency is a problem for an electrical system based on renewables.  However, they said this is actually a great opportunity for research, and that there are many good ideas, and surely solutions will be found if we massively invest in the necessary R&D.

Mini-Grids

One key element of adopting to this intermittency problem was to build small grids, “mini grids” as they called them, that are also “smart grids.”  These grids are where local democracy, participatory democracy will flourish, which was one of their central goals. Local cooperative energy communities will manage them.  Smart meters would tell people when not to do their laundry, and tell industries when they should avoid doing industrial processes. They said that, in this way we could limit the electrical demand on the mini-grid to match the weather-driven profile of the intermittent supply that’s available. Essentially, we can sync activity to the weather. But, they said, this won’t be enough, we’ll need grid storage.

I should note here that Greens don’t talk about mini grids anymore. Now, instead they want the largest grids possible, with inter-connections to surrounding countries, on the theory that if one averages over all local weather variations, somehow the grid-as-a-whole would approach a steady state, a stable average level of generation. Without getting diverted into the limits of this idea, notice that mini-grids, and smart-mini grids, not to mention local energy democracy, is now a failed goal of an all-renewables energy system.

Storage

It was also said, right from the beginning, that we will also need to have storage of electricity, storage on the scale of grids, to counter intermittency. And they said probably this will be batteries. Note, I’m talking about 40 and more years ago. There had already been intense research on batteries, and it still continues today.

Batteries

As you know, yes, the price of lithium batteries is down, they are very much cheaper than 20 years ago. However, on the grid they last about 40 minutes, perhaps an hour, Batteries to back up solar in the late couple hours of the day while sunshine dims and people come home from work, can improve a solar farm significantly within that window. They can also help with compensating for frequency lags on overstressed wind-supplied grids. However, we are talking about a need to compensate longer-term intermittency of renewable electricity generation.

Dunkelflaute

For example, if you look at the UK or Germany over the last week, there was almost no solar, almost zero on the grid.  There was also a quite calm winds for wind turbines. This weather was what the Germans call “Dunkelflaute,” much like it’s been here in Warsaw the last couple of days: low wind and grey skies.  There is no way batteries will take care of Dunkelflaute, and not much of what comes with much greater frequency, the middling average situation between Dunkelflaute days and windy-and-sunny days.  As it is, on-shore windmills in Germany produce, on average, only about 22% of their maximum rated capacities due to lack of wind, but also poorly matched designs and placements.

Pumped hydro

So, what has actually been done for storage? Today, 93% of what actually exists for grid-scale storage is pumped hydro. However for pumped hydro energy storage, you need a significant mountain, with a water reservoir or lake at the top, and the same at the bottom. Then, you install pipes and pumps to pump the water up using renewable electricity when there is too much, and then let it drain back down through turbine generators, like at at hydroelectric plant, when you want to produce backup electricity. This is indeed a long-term storage technology – if you have enough of it that you don’t use it up on short time scales, that you don’t cycle all the water on average days.

However, as you know, here in Europe, from roughly Paris to Moscow, or at least far into Poland and Belarus, is what the military people call “The Great Northern Plain.” It’s not going to happen, you’re not going to back up the vast western and northern European continental grid with pumped hydro. OK? So we have a crisis. That’s what 93% of the world’s grid-scale storage is after some 40 years of intensive research, except for some short-term large-scale battery installations.

Universal, long-term storage is still R&D

And the storage part of the model has failed. A long-term, universally applicable, affordable grid-scale storage tech is still a matter of R&D, and startups.

Natural gas is today’s de-facto grid-scale “storage” tech.

Look, in Germany, the home of “renewables fundamentalism” (as I have long termed it), look at the 8th Monitoring Report of the Energiewende, the report by a committee of independent experts appointed by the Bundestag to periodically review progress in the national energy transition program. In that report, the monitors wrote in the cover letter to the government, not in the report itself, when they submitted it to the last Merkel government, that Germany cannot produce sufficient renewables on its own territory to satisfy electrical demand. Therefore, they said, we must import renewable energy if we’re going to stick to our all-renewables transition. [Note: Die Zeit explaining the 8h report]

And so, they advocate importing renewable electricity directly from nearby countries, and from farther away, as green-hydrogen produced in places having, unlike Germany, optimal conditions for generating renewable energy.  Of course, there are no demonstration projects at scale, anywhere, using hydrogen, much less “green” hydrogen, at scale to produce electricity to backup the variations of a renewables-based grid, or any type of grid for that matter, and so there are numerous known and unknown technical and economic problems with this new techno-optimist “ambition”.

Most basic failure

However, before gong on, we should just note that this 8^th Monitors report marks the most fundamental failure for the all-renewables program, which promised abundant energy could be produced not only locally, but within the country, achieving energy independence. 

More windmills without storage make natural gas more geostrategic

So, there yet was another thing. Let me back up. I remember giving a talk in 2016 at the Hertie School of Governance, in Berlin to energy alumni, an elite German institution. I was talking about North Stream pipeline, and I made it a point to say that natural gas will get more geostrategically important, not less, as Germany installs more renewables. And at first they thought this strange.  But it’s because, as you install more windmills without full-backup grid scale storage the more you need natural gas,.  That is, natural gas today is the de facto grid scale storage.

Now, back to today.

German Green leader discovers need for massive natural gas generation

In Germany, when Robert Habeck, a leader of the Green Party, became the Super Minister for more than one ministry under Scholz, for both the Economy and Energy ministries, the first thing he did is he said to complete the green goal, we need 2% of the landmass of Germany covered with windmills. He knows there’s not enough space offshore to depend on offshore wind. That’s not going to work. He needs to radically expand wind on land, covering fully 2% to meet the country’s all-renewable transition goals. I won’t say it’s crazy. I don’t know what to say. But anyway, 2%. That’s a huge level of wind installations. Now what is he also doing?

It is reported that he has emergency approval the past year, from the coalition government, to pursue in parliament funding to install 25 gigawatts of new natural gas generation. But, he wants 36 or 39 gigawatts, I heard him say this. But, 25 gigawatts, that’s a  capacity roughly equal to 25 big coal plants or 25 big nuclear plants, actually more. Why is a leader of the Green Party, of all people, installing this huge amount of fossil gas generation capacity?

Because when you need a complete parallel system, if you don’t have coal and nuclear, that when the electricity goes off from renewables, you have to bring it on quickly. And this is the only thing you can ramp up and down so rapidly.  So that’s why. However, what does he tell the party?  I know he was afraid of a rank-and-file rebellion, throwing him out of the Green Party leadership for building all these fossil fuel plants. So, what he told them is this is all just temporary, and in roughly 10 years all this natural gas fueling these turbines will be replaced with green hydrogen, generated somehow from renewables and shipped, somehow, to Germany from North Africa, from the Gulf Region, from the rest of Africa, from Ukraine, Greece, Norway and such.

Merkel’s CDU began the (unscientific) “hydrogen strategy”

Just to be clear, this hydrogen import plan began with the Merkel government, with then-Energy-Minister Altmaier, of the CDU, back at the time the 8^th Monitors’ report was being formulated. They began saying Germany needs to convert natural gas to hydrogen. I remember reports that Altmaier had, for example, long talks with Alexi Miller, CEO of Gazprom to convince him to convert gas in the Nord Stream pipelines eventually into hydrogen, and he pestered the Ukrainians with similar demands, for hydrogen to come from windmills via their existing natural gas pipes, as an example of how they were going to bring in hydrogen from Russia and from many other countries.

Otherwise, the German government and all the main parties would have to admit that the all-renewables transition program is dead. Otherwise, they admit that there’s no way you can have 100% renewables without becoming dependent on natural gas, which of course is self-contradictory.

I will guarantee you, my opinion as a physicist who’s worked a bit with hydrogen, it’s not going to work. It’s technically flawed, at least at anywhere a price you would need for your industry to survive, not to be burned for grid electricity, and I can explain tech details if somebody wants to know.

Zero-Growth believers welcome the exit of energy-intensive industry from the EU

There’s are a lot of people, especially the zero-growth people, in German Green circles, and in particular in the relevant ministries that they control, saying this is exactly the transition we wanted, a different kind of society. Let the industry go somewhere else where it’s optimal for renewables, where there is plenty of wind and solar. And we’ll import what hydrogen we need from those places, to replace natural gas and to back up the grid, as our new solution to the lack of long-term, grid-scale storage.

I could talk about that, about the present hydrogen promise. It’s not working. The Norwegians canceled their hydrogen pipeline and Equinor is a firm that knows something about these things. They said there’s no customers in Europe for hydrogen. Then, Shell also said there’s no customers in Europe for hydrogen, and we cannot build huge pipelines and electrolyzes for a non-existent market. I was just at their big natural gas conference in Algeria, and they are also being pressed by the EU to sign big deals to supply hydrogen and build a big pipeline to Europe, but their experts also clearly see the huge costs and limitations of existing green-hydrogen tech and are clearly nervous how to proceed.  

Carbon Capture and Storage

The other solution is for carbon capture. This one goes way back. I know people who retired from working on this, who worked on carbon capture for 30-plus years, including on air capture and otherwise. In all these years, it’s not demonstrated at scale, especially not in any way that’s economically viable. The plan has failed, and I think we have to get out of this mindset.

All these things are ways to fix the model, to make it work without a massive nuclear base load.

France’s Messmer nuclear model

France had a completely different model, the Messmer model, as the Polish former-Prime Minister, Mr. Morawiecki called for in Poland in his speech earlier today, opening this conference. [See a Politico Op-Ed he recently wrote, calling for a Polish Messmer plan.]. It is well established that 80%, even 90% of a modern industrial energy grid, such as France had, can be supplied with nuclear power, without reinventing the whole grid or massive long-term grid-scale storage. 

Green Deal needs radical change

This Green New Deal and the German Energiewende it is based on for all renewables is, in contrast, not proven, and it has failed its plans. It should be radically changed, revoked and replaced.  

Leon: Thank you, Tom. … (Other speakers …)

Leon: So, I’m going to turn to Thomas again .

–> TO BE CONTINUED, Part 2 NEXT WEEK … Tom O’D