The cockeyed optimists of the energy transition say "the tide of cheap, clean electricity is unstoppable."

In the space of a few weeks, we get three concurring views that should give doomers and pessimists hope.

In Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, Mitzi Gaynor sings:

I have heard people rant and rave and bellow

That we’re done and we might as well be dead—

But I’m only a cockeyed optimist,

And I can’t get it into my head.

When it comes to climate and the “energy transition” to renewables, there are a lot of cockeyed optimists around these days. First, there is Michael Liebreich, Senior Contributor, BloombergNEF, writing The Pragmatic Climate Reset – Part II: A Provocation. He is critical of people like me who have preached the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle; 1.5 degrees is dead anyway, and people aren’t interested.

Stop talking down to people. Stop trying to make them feel guilty. Stop using implausible scenarios to scare them. Stop disrupting their commutes….

When someone says they think climate change is happening but it’s natural, or that there’s nothing we can do about it, or that whatever we could do would cost too much, or that only some imagined technology holds the answer, don’t misread them. Chances are, what they are really saying is that they fear the current approach will lead to an increased cost of living, expansion of the state and the empowerment of unelected elites, and yet most likely still fail to solve the problem.

To win the politics, stop taking the knee to Greta Thunberg and start worrying about energy bills.

In a world where we should be using less stuff, we are using "more and more and more."

So, where I just a few weeks ago wrote about the failure of the energy transition in a post complaining that we are burning more coal and wood than ever, Liebreich claims that the transition is happening now, and faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. The cost of solar panels and battery storage have dropped precipitously, to where is is now the cheapest source of electricity. Importantly, it works everywhere, including developing countries that will not be beholden to fossil fuel suppliers. He notes also that we don’t need fancy new technologies, hydrogen, or direct air capture.

“We already know how to electrify huge additional swathes of the economy at modest or no cost: Land transport, domestic and commercial heating, low- to mid-temperature industrial heat, and those thermal processes that can switch to electrochemistry.”

Liebreich invokes Voltaire on the perfect being the enemy of the good, noting that we can do the easy part and get most of the way there. He even accepts a bit of flexible gas capacity for those peak times. He could have also invoked the Pareto Principle; the first 80% is easier than the last 20%. Nobody, even Greta, would complain if we got to 80%. And it’s coming, no matter what Danielle Smith in Alberta or others think:

“This tide of cheap clean electricity is unstoppable. In the 11th century, after his failed attempt to stop the waters, King Canute declared that “all the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial.” President Trump his Energy Secretary Chris Wright should take note.”

Next up in the cockeyed optimist lineup is an amazing slide deck being given away by Ember Futures, led by the wonderfully named Kingsmill Bond, titled The Electrotech Revolution. Their pitch:

Humanity is graduating from burning fossil commodities to mastering manufactured technologies—from hunting scarce fossils to farming the inexhaustible sun, from consuming Earth’s resources to merely borrowing them.

This isn’t a marginal climate substitution. It’s an energy revolution.

The magnetic centre is the electron: we are revolutionising how we generate, use, and shift electrons. Solar and wind are conquering electricity supply. EVs, heat pumps, and AI are electrifying major new uses. Batteries and digitalisation are connecting supply and demand.

Three reinforcing shifts. One energy revolution. The electrotech revolution.

To understand why the electrotechnical revolution will happen, you have to understand the primary energy fallacy, where we are told that we cannot possibly replace all the energy we get from coal or oil.

In fact, we don’t have to; we just have to replace the useful energy. Heat engines cannot be very efficient, as proven by Sadi Carnot; Electric motors can approach 100%. The pie charts I made here use the data for the USA from the Livermore Sankey charts of energy consumption for the end use of power; if we electrify everything, the pie is much smaller since far less is rejected as heat. The total decreases from 74.7 quads to 32.38 quads, which is less than half of what we are currently consuming. It is a far easier reach to crank up our zero-carbon power to 32 quads than it is to 74. A year ago, I thought it was a very big stretch, but we only need 16 quad, and China alone is installing five quad per year.

The energy efficiency of gas-powered cars is worse than we thought

Ember shows an electric car being two to four times as efficient as an internal combustion engine-powered car, but as I noted in a recent post, cars are even worse than they show, barely more than 15%.

This is why they say the transition is unstoppable; the generation and storage of electricity gets better and cheaper every day, and you pretty much only pay for it once.

One also quickly sees why the United States is trying so hard to stop the growth of renewables around the world; as Ember notes, the geopolitical implications are significant.

“80% of the world lives in fossil fuel importing countries, with over 50 countries importing more than half their primary energy as fossil fuels. In contrast, 92% of countries have renewables potential over ten times their current demand. Replacing imported fossil fuels using three key levers—EVs, heat pumps and renewables—can cut net fossil fuel imports by 70%, saving $1.3 trillion globally each year. Once electrotech is bought, it lasts for decades, providing insulation from the vagaries of global pricing. When fossil flows stop, the economy stops. When electrotech flows stop, only growth is at risk.”

Ember concludes that 75% of the world’s energy demand can be electrified, and likely will be whether the US and Saudi governments like it or not. “Further innovation is chipping away at the final 25% in shipping, aviation and high temperature heat.”

Finally, we have the economist Noah Smith writing that China is quietly saving the world from climate change. He notes that China is the biggest polluter of CO2, mercury, nitrous oxide and a host of other environmental ills, and has no intention of slowing down its economic growth to save the climate.

In fact, the same is true of the developing world. India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America aren’t going to impoverish themselves in order to save the climate. The only way for these countries to grow their economies without roasting the planet is to replace coal and oil with solar and batteries — or to grow rich using solar and batteries in the first place, skipping the fossil fuel stage entirely.

The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.

Poor Greta, both Michael Liebreich and Noah Smith are calling her out. But they both make the same point, as does Ember: the economics of solar and batteries will decarbonize the world.

“What this means is that China is executing the strategy I’ve long advocated for saving the world from climate change. While U.S. energy policy dithers and shoots itself in the foot over ridiculous culture wars, China’s dogged industrial policy and peerless manufacturing prowess has made green energy so cheap that simple economics are going to take over from here.”

Smith concludes that China’s success in battling climate change should “provide various doomers and pessimists with a reason for hope.” Perhaps we should all be singing along with Mitzi and turn into cockeyed optimists. As a sometime doomer and pessimist, I must say that I am impressed that within a few weeks, we get three concurring views of how the world will do the energy transition to renewables, whether Donald Trump or Danielle Smith likes it or not. That does give me reason for hope.

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What is the true energy fallacy?

I discussed the primary energy fallacy last year, and looking back on the post, some of my thinking is a bit muddled. I concluded that we should and could electrify everything, but we still needed to think about sufficiency:

“We could make our electric cars part of the system and use them to store power; we could interconnect the world with High Voltage Direct Current cables and heat Maine in winter with solar power from Arizona or Morocco. Or we could super-insulate our homes and buildings and turn them into thermal batteries, with the utility controlling our heat pumps and dialling them back when loads must be reduced. This is where efficiency matters.

Then there is sufficiency. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the upfront carbon of making all of the electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Those are included in the industrial emissions that eat up a quarter of the quads and are difficult to decarbonize.

This is where I disagree with the Electrify Everything gang that says, “Same–sized homes. Same–sized cars. Same levels of comfort. Just electric.” I keep remembering our mantra: Use less stuff.”

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