The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [160]
The world economy needs plentiful joules of energy if it is not to run on slaves, and at the moment by far the cheapest source of those joules is the burning of hydrocarbons. About 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide are emitted per thousand dollars of economic activity. No country ‘is remotely on a path’ towards cutting that number substantially, says the physicist David MacKay. It could be done, but only at vast cost. The cost would be environmental as well as financial. Take Britain, an ‘average rich’ country. Burning hydrocarbon still provides 106 of the 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person of work that give Britons their standard of living. How could Britain power itself without fossil fuels? Suppose that an aggressive and expensive plan of pumped heat, waste incineration and loft insulation knocks twenty-five of that demand off, leaving 100kWh per day to find. Divide that 100 in four and ask for twenty-five from nuclear, twenty-five from wind, twenty-five from solar and five each from biofuel, wood, wave, tide and hydro. What would the country look like?
There would be sixty nuclear power stations around the coasts, wind farms would cover 10 per cent of the entire land (or a big part of the sea), there would be solar panels covering an area the size of Lincolnshire, eighteen Greater Londons growing bio-fuels, forty-seven New Forests growing fast-rotation harvested timber, hundreds of miles of wave machines off the coast, huge tidal barrages in the Severn estuary and Strangford Lough, and twenty-five times as many hydro dams on rivers as there are today. The prospect is unappetising: the entire country would look like a power station, pylons would march across the uplands and convoys of trucks would cart timber along the roads. Power cuts would be frequent – imagine a still, cold foggy day in January when the slack tide in the Severn estuary coincides with peak demand, when the solar panels are dead and the wind turbines still. Wildlife would suffer from the loss of estuaries, free-flowing rivers and open country. Powering the world with such renewables now is the surest way to spoil the environment. (Of course, coal mining and oil drilling can and do spoil the environment, too, but compared with most renewables their footprints are surprisingly small for the energy they yield.)
Besides, there is just no sign of most renewables getting cheaper. The cost of wind power has been stuck at three times the cost of coal power for many years. To get a toehold in the electricity market at all, wind power requires a regressive transfer from ordinary working people to rent-seeking rich landowners and businesses: as a rule of thumb, a wind turbine generates more value in subsidy than it does in electricity. Even in 6,000-turbine Denmark, not a single emission has been saved because intermittent wind requires fossil-fuel back-up (Denmark’s wind power is exported to Sweden and Norway, which can turn their hydro plants back on quickly when the Danish wind drops). Meanwhile a Spanish study confirms that wind power subsidies destroy jobs: for each worker who moves from conventional electricity generation to renewable electricity generation, ‘two jobs at a similar rate of pay must be forgone elsewhere in the economy, otherwise the funds to pay for the excess costs of renewable generation cannot be provided.’ Although green campaigners are wont to argue that raising the cost of energy is a good thing, by definition it destroys jobs by reducing investment in other sectors. ‘The suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd,’ writes Peter Huber.
But that’s today. Tomorrow, there may well be carbon-free energy sources that do not have these disadvantages. It is possible, though unlikely, that these will include hot, dry geothermal power, offshore wind, wave and tide, or even ocean