The Truth about Renewable Energy

The Truth about Renewable Energy

To address the complex issue of energy consumption and therefore the sustainability or otherwise of the sources, it is necessary that all public opinion is strongly involved in an information process without which there is no future as the Western world conceives it.
Clearly the political role and commitment on the issue can no longer be the superficial and unprofessional ones it is today.
Around the energy question there is not only the problem of supply (and therefore the dispute over non-renewable renewables) but above all a different social and urban planning structure, without which every energy program or project will be a failure.
Let us remember that today 80% of the European population resides in large cities, while 20% in rural areas. This leads us to a major reflection if we consider that large inhabited centers are highly energy-intensive due to the necessary infrastructures, the lengths of transport distances and food and energy supplies, etc.
Without an urban planning, production and distribution remodulation of the energy production/consumption combination, no debate on energy makes sense. It is a pure exercise in political demagogy and partisan opposition.
“The human population – the demographer Joel Cohen of Columbia University reminds us – is growing between 75 and 80 million people a year. It’s as if another Bangladesh were added to our planet every two years.” Furthermore, as a result of economic development, explains energy expert Daniel Yergin, “over the next twenty years two billion people will go from a per capita income of ten thousand dollars a year to one between ten and thirty thousand dollars”. Consequence: by 2030, global electricity consumption will have doubled.
Building the power plants needed to meet this demand will cost 14 trillion dollars. But the costs to the environment will be immensely higher. If our current dependence on fossil energy remains unchanged, which is around 80%, according to OECD projections, CO2 emissions will increase by 50% in forty years. Not to mention the pollution levels, which will be well beyond any bearable threshold for human health. The conclusion is inevitable: the survival of humanity depends on renewable energy. But a “linear” development of clean sources will not be enough.
A “normal” growth of solar, wind and hydroelectric energy, at the rates of recent years, would barely be sufficient for all renewables to maintain their share of the total. Therefore we would remain within the OECD scenario: mainly dependent on fossil energy which will lead us to disaster.
How to make the “big leap” to renewables? We need to get rid of some illusions: the shortcut to efficiency, the technological one, and the romantic one. A party of optimists points the finger at the extraordinary efficiency gains of recent decades: the United States, despite being the most “energy-intensive” economy on the planet in proportion to the population, today consumes only half the energy they used in the years Seventy for every additional dollar of GDP. But this “relative saving” for each unit of product is only partly the result of technological progress and new production methods: it was largely obtained instead by relocating energy-intensive industries to emerging nations. The technological illusion is one that tends to attribute miraculous effects to every innovation: the electric car, for example, is truly making giant strides. However, we tend to forget that the environmental impact of the electric car depends largely on the type of power plants installed “upstream”, those that generate the electricity to recharge the batteries: if they are coal power plants, we are back to the beginning. (Then there is an additional complication for the “rare earths” used in the production of batteries.) The “romantic” vision sees a future all sun and wind but tends to underestimate the overall costs of renewables, and therefore the social and political resistance they will encounter, if their use were to be extended to the extent that is truly necessary. Cambridge scientist David MacKay, author of “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” goes back to 1600 to find an era in which “Europe lived exclusively on energy renewables: wood, wind and water mills”. That model was sustainable thanks to two factors: the population, which was a fraction of the current one, and the very modest standard of living of the pre-industrial era. It is enough to change one or the other to realize that the numbers don’t add up. “Today, even if we returned to the consumption levels of four centuries ago, with the current population it would not be enough to allocate the entire surface of England to forests, to be self-sufficient in renewable energy”. The numerical equations are merciless, but we must start from there so as not to make unrealistic lucubrations. At the end of the next twenty years of development of emerging nations, even if the planet “stops” at Hong Kong’s level of energy consumption which is 3.3 kilowatts per inhabitant – Hong Kong is rich compared to Asia but has a per capita consumption that is just a third of the United States and just over half the European average – all the renewable sources currently available would not be able to cover half of the needs. MacKay’s studies are particularly useful in illuminating our future because this physical scientist also undertook the responsibility of consultant to the English government. He has developed feasibility plans, which can easily be extrapolated from the British case to all the developed nations of Europe and North America. In his scientific reports for the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London from 2009 to today, MacKay has tried to make a future of only renewable energy “possible”: concretely examining all its implications, the investments that it would require. Among his conclusions, some are very uncomfortable, for public opinion and also for environmentalists. For example, among the various alternative scenarios, based on different hypotheses, almost none can do without nuclear power within the range of alternatives to fossil energy. Another indigestible conclusion: it is impossible to free ourselves from fossil energy without accepting invasive wind turbines on the territory and in the seas. As for solar, for it to fill its role as a consistent alternative, a country like Great Britain will need to dedicate at least 5% of its surface area to it. 5% of the surface may not seem like much? But our countries are so densely urbanized that much smaller “changes of destination” are highly controversial. Even assuming that our public opinions renounce the “Nimby” attitude – “not in my backyard” – and that is, accept invasive upheavals of their territory, not even this will be enough. After having examined all the options, MacKay advances another conclusion: to make things right on a global level, it will be necessary to import electricity generated by solar power plants “delocalized” in deserts. The United States, if it has the political will, can find all the necessary deserts within its borders. But Europe, Japan, certain emerging countries with high population density, will have to import “solar electricity” from states such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Sudan, Kazakhstan. That is, coincidentally, the same ones where a significant share of oil production is concentrated today. These are areas on which our excessive dependence has created a geostrategic risk and political-military conflict. Are we ready to face a “sustainable” future for Italy which will require us to dedicate an area as large as Tuscany to solar panels and wind turbines? Are we equipped to become customers of solar generated in Tripoli, Ryiad, Algiers, falling back into the same fragility in which we have lived up until now in the petrocentric era? An optimistic message concerns the effectiveness of price leverage. The high cost of petrol works, you just need to see how quickly the American motorist, who is the most energy intensive in the world, is changing his habits and is now increasingly converting to hybrid cars, public transport, “car-pooling” i.e. aggregation of four neighbors in a single car to go to the office. It would work even better with the adoption of an adequate global carbon tax, which makes all industrial sectors pay the true environmental costs of their activities. Among these costs, we cannot ignore the transport of food products which has a frightening impact on the energy sector. A system of proximity between production and consumption is the only viable option as it would reduce 90% of the sector’s energy consumption.
But the real revolution must be created in production models and lifestyles (per capita energy consumption) and therefore in a new holistic approach to the antiquated capitalist/consumerist theorem.
Thinking of development according to the industrialized Western model is pure madness, just as hypothesizing free markets for the transport of masses between countries that produce the same good only serves large multinationals in the various sectors. It is therefore necessary to place the population in a phase of discouraging the use of traditional sources (including fiscal ones), the use of public transport, zero-mile consumption (in spatial proximity between production and consumption) and a reform of national accounting, abandoning the obsolete use of GDP in favor of PINE (Ecological Net Domestic Product).
However, above all, a political conscientious objection is necessary which is freed from the pressures of multinational interests which go in a completely opposite direction to what has been said so far.
If Politics does not deal with these issues without a new humanistic approach, we will determine the end of a Civilization of the Impossible because it is not on a planetary scale and therefore on a human scale.

Guido Bissanti